July 17: Bad Vibes in Bidenworld

Tech opens up wallets for Trump; Musk out of California; Deif dead

Donald Trump is riding a wave of good news: a literal dodged bullet in Pennsylvania, a figurative dodged bullet in the Florida classified documents case, and a series of high-profile endorsements from tech titans (see The Rest). In Bidenworld, meanwhile, the vibes are bad. 

On Tuesday, Julia Ioffe of Puck reported on an extraordinary Saturday Zoom call between Biden and several Democratic congressmen, which included this exchange between the president and Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, a Bronze Star veteran, who had asked a question about voter perceptions of national security. Here’s Ioffe:

“First of all, I think you’re dead wrong on national security,” the president says, the emotion at times garbling his words. “You saw what happened recently in terms of the meeting we had with NATO. I put NATO together. Name me a foreign leader who thinks I’m not the most effective leader in the world on foreign policy. Tell me! Tell me who the hell that is! Tell me who put NATO back together! Tell me who enlarged NATO, tell me who did the Pacific basin! Tell me who did something that you’ve never done with your Bronze Star like my son—and I’m proud of your leadership, but guess what, what’s happening, we’ve got Korea and Japan working together, I put Aukus together, anyway! … Things are in chaos, and I’m bringing some order to it. And again, find me a world leader who’s an ally of ours who doesn’t think I’m the most respected person they’ve ever—”

“It’s not breaking through, Mr. President,” said [Rep. Jason] Crow [D-CO], “to our voters.”

“You oughta talk about it!” Biden shot back, listing his accomplishments yet again. “On national security, nobody has been a better president than I’ve been. Name me one. Name me one! So I don’t want to hear that crap!”

One participant told Ioffe that the call was “worse than the debate.” Another said the president was “rambling” and “dismissive of concerns” and that if the assassination attempt had not occurred shortly after the call, “I imagine 50 people on that Zoom were ready to come out publicly against him.” We’d add that the transcript is more evidence for Omri Ceren’s theory that Biden’s aides systematically feed the president a diet of delusionally positive news. 

So, how is Biden trying to quash the mounting internal criticism? By running out the clock. The Biden team is now pushing to secure the nomination by holding a virtual roll-call vote weeks ahead of the party’s convention on Aug. 19. But the Democratic National Committee’s stated rationale for the move—an Aug. 7 deadline imposed by a Wisconsin law that does not take effect until September—makes no sense. On Tuesday, for instance, DNC Chair Jaime Harrison said the nomination needed to be wrapped by Aug. 7 to prevent “MAGA Republicans” from taking Biden off the Ohio ballot, an excuse that Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) told The New York Times was a “fig leaf.” 

In policy terms, the strategy is, as Alex Thompson and Andrew Solender report for Axios, “Leap left to survive.” Biden has endorsed or is planning to endorse a laundry list of far-left policy proposals to attempt to shore up the support of the party’s progressive flank. On Tuesday, for instance, The Washington Post reported that Biden was “finalizing plans to endorse major changes to the Supreme Court,” including proposing term limits and—a sop to the campaign against Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito waged by the NGO Borg over the past four years—an “enforceable ethics code.” Or, as Joe Simonson put it on X:

Also on Tuesday, Biden called on Congress to pass legislation for nationwide rent control, which would cap rent increases on existing units at 5% for “corporate landlords.” It’s a bad idea that would further disincentivize new housing construction, but Biden managed to make it sound even worse in a Tuesday speech to the NAACP convention in Las Vegas. The president, visibly struggling to read his teleprompter, told the crowd the legislation would bar rent increases of more than $55:

In the same speech, Biden told the NAACP, falsely, that he “got his start” at Delaware State University, a historically Black college, and ribbed Trump for his reference to “Black jobs” in the debate. Biden, it was reported last week, told a Milwaukee radio station that he had “more Blacks in my administration than any other president.” The station edited out the remark at the request of the campaign. 

But the anti-Biden forces aren’t quite dead yet. A new AP poll released Wednesday found that nearly two-thirds of Democrats now want Biden to step aside (just as remarkable, it found that 18% of U.S. adults think Biden is capable of winning in November). Politico reported that top Democrats are circulating a polling memo showing that “alternative Democratic candidates”—i.e., those other than Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris—are performing significantly better than the incumbent in swing states. One “senior lawmaker” told Politico, “I think a final push will come once the R convention ends on Thursday.” On Wednesday, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a close ally of Nancy Pelosi and a reliable apparatchik for the party’s deep-state wing, publicly called on Biden to step aside. 

Our own sense is that Democratic strategists assumed that by now, Trump would have been bankrupted, humiliated, discredited, or jailed by one of the several legal cases against him and therefore that there wasn’t much need to worry about Biden’s weaknesses as a candidate. But Trump survived, and now the Dems are stuck trying to take the car keys from a stubborn old man who thinks he’s the most effective driver in the world because his aides have spent the past four years telling him so. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: The Lebanon war is coming, Judith Miller writes. Which side will America be on?

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The Rest

→As we hinted in the Big Story, Silicon Valley billionaires are starting to warm to Donald Trump, according to a Wednesday story in The Wall Street Journal. There’s Elon Musk, obviously, who plans to donate $45 million a month to a Trump-affiliated super PAC, as we reported yesterday. But the Journal identifies a host of other formerly Trump-skeptical tech titans who are now opening up their wallets: venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Sequoia Capital partners Shaun Maguire and Doug Leone, and early PayPal investor David Sacks. Several have cited the Biden administration’s aggressive regulatory approach toward AI and cryptocurrency as reasons for the switch, but they were also likely influenced by Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance, himself a former venture capitalist who is well-connected in Silicon Valley. 

Certainly, skepticism of the tech industry remains warranted, regardless of who the billionaires give their money to. But the emergence of a GOP donor base in the tech industry is important for reasons that go beyond money. As David Samuels wrote in Tablet earlier this week, of the Musk endorsement:

While Trump may represent a truculent refusal to give up on a bygone America, even to many of his supporters, Musk represents the future. By joining his chi to Trump’s, Musk has flipped the script of the election, and turned Trump from an artifact of the past into a possible bridge to the future.

→In related news, Musk announced Tuesday that he was moving the headquarters of two of his companies, X and SpaceX, from California to Texas, after California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill on Monday banning policies that require schools to notify parents if their children socially transition to another gender at school. In a post on X, Musk called the bill the “final straw.” The world’s richest man has previously blamed a progressive California school for brainwashing his eldest son, Xavier, into becoming a transgender communist. Which just goes to show that when you go after people’s children, they tend to take it personally.

→Even beyond the Deif assassination, Israeli leaders are sounding increasingly optimistic about the course of the war. On Tuesday, The Times of Israel reports, IDF officials announced that the war in Gaza will “not last indefinitely” and that Hamas is struggling to keep up with the increased tempo of IDF operations. According to the military’s assessment, the terror group is suffering from “severe morale issues,” widespread desertions, and shortages of weapons and ammunition. A separate TOI report on Tuesday noted that the Israelis have received a major diplomatic boost from the U.S. news cycle. “With the Biden administration focused on domestic politics after the president’s disastrous debate performance last month,” writes TOI’s Lazar Berman, “there is no reason to expect any drastic new pressure on Israel from Washington before the presidential election. Saturday’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump will further hold the attention of the U.S. media and administration.”

→But watch out for this play, articulated by The Wall Street Journal’s Elliot Kaufman:

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

A Tallit of My Own, by Kate McGregor

I wanted to create something that symbolized my journey to Judaism, which had spanned decades and thousands of miles

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The Lebanon War Is Coming

Whose side will America be on?

By Judith Miller

Israel faces a conundrum to which there is no easily discernible, sustainable solution: how best to counter the growing strategic threat posed by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite terrorist group that runs Lebanon.

On July 4, Hezbollah fired 200 rockets and more than 20 drones into northern Israel—one of its largest attacks to date—after Israel killed yet another of its high-ranking commanders in a drone strike in the Lebanese coastal city of Tyre. Lebanon’s National News Agency said that Muhammad Nimah Nasser, aka Abu Nimah, was killed along with two other passengers in the drone strike on July 3. Nasser, the head of Hezbollah’s Aziz unit, was reportedly responsible for military operations in southwestern Lebanon and for firing hundreds of rockets into Israel.

Nasser is the latest senior Hezbollah commander to be killed since Oct. 7, when Palestinian Hamas slaughtered some 1,200 people in southern Israel and took 240 hostages in the deadliest single attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Since then, Israel has killed seven Hezbollah lieutenant generals and some 360 fighters and commanders overall, according to estimates. For its part, Israel has lost at least 19 soldiers and 12 civilians in rockets fired from Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s latest rocket and drone barrage—part of a total of some 7,000 rockets and missiles that it has fired into Israel since Oct. 7—has increased concern about a possible escalation of the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza into a full-scale conflict between the two heavily armed foes. With some 45,000 fighters and an arsenal of more than 150,000 rockets, drones, and missiles, many of them precision-guided, Hezbollah has always posed a far greater strategic threat to Israel than Hamas, which has been significantly degraded since Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

Moreover, while world attention has been focused on the Gaza war to Israel’s south, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s focus has been on the north. His government has been under increasing political pressure to find a way to allow the estimated 70,000 Israelis who fled Hezbollah’s missiles and shelling there and have been living in hotels and temporary shelters to return home. The depopulation of the north near Lebanon and parts of southern Israel near Gaza has hurt Israel’s economy and depressed morale. “A 5-kilometer swatch of Israel in the north has effectively been rendered uninhabitable by Israel’s foes without occupation,” said Peter Berkowitz, a fellow at the Hoover Institute who worked in former President Trump’s State Department. “The land of Israel has become so small,” said Smadar Perry, the Arab affairs correspondent for Yediot Ahronoth, Israel’s largest newspaper.

Hezbollah has said it will stop firing rockets and missiles into Israel when there is a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza—a position that has been endorsed by the Biden administration and that now serves as the basis for its diplomatic initiative to broker a cease-fire on the Lebanese front. Still, American and Arab negotiators say that while progress has been made in this latest round of talks, such a deal between Israel and Hamas may not be imminent. Nor is it immediately clear that Hezbollah would stop its tit-for-tat strikes.

Even if a cease-fire is negotiated, Israeli analysts say, Hezbollah has repeatedly violated previous agreements with and commitments to Israel. Moreover, the U.S. initiative reportedly adopts the Lebanese side’s insistence that Israel stop all flights over Lebanon, hampering the IDF’s ability to monitor and interdict Hezbollah’s military buildup, something Israeli intelligence would be reluctant to do, and which would put Israel at a strategic disadvantage.

Soon after Oct. 7, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, indicated that his “Party of God” did not intend to open a second front when Israel invaded Gaza to decapitate Hamas’ leadership and destroy its ability ever to harm Israelis again. Nasrallah and his patron, Iran, undoubtedly feared jeopardizing the military presence the group has steadily built up since its last major clash with Israel in 2006. During that war, which Hezbollah provoked by killing three and kidnapping two Israeli soldiers, Israel bombed the homes and offices of Hezbollah’s leaders in Beirut’s southern suburbs and decimated the country’s infrastructure.

Nasrallah subsequently expressed regret for the war, which the Lebanese blamed on Hezbollah, saying that he never imagined that the capture of two Israeli soldiers would result in a war “of this magnitude.” Now, as in 2006, Hezbollah prefers the ongoing tempo of contained tit-for-tat strikes, allowing the group to achieve significant tactical and strategic gains without incurring the cost of massive devastation.

The current stalemate suits not only Hezbollah, but also its Iranian patron. Tehran has made good use of Hezbollah and its other proxy militias to keep Israel and its allies on the defensive and to set new precedents that advantage Iran. Attacks on ships in the Red Sea by the Iranian-supported Houthi militants in Yemen have depressed shipping there, giving Iran the de facto ability to obstruct freedom of navigation and global trade.

Yet Tehran’s strategic gains are only partly the result of actions by its regionwide network of proxies. They are also a consequence of a U.S. posture that has failed to punish Iranian-inspired aggression while calling for restraint by Iran’s targets. For months, American forces in Syria and Iraq were forced to protect themselves against repeated attacks by Iranian proxies. In Omani-mediated talks with Iran last March, the Biden administration pleaded with the Iranians to curb these attacks. U.S. ally Jordan, too, continues to fear infiltration from Iranian-backed fighters.

Soon after Oct. 7, Israel, fearing that Hezbollah militants might cross the border and seize Israelis as Hamas did in the south, ordered the removal of some 70,000 people from the country’s northern border area. While Hezbollah’s clashes and rocket attacks have caused few civilian casualties so far, the internally displaced Israelis are furious that the government has not protected their homes, fields, and shops from Hezbollah’s daily rocket and missile strikes. This passivity, too, was the result of American preferences. In December, The Wall Street Journal reported that President Joe Biden pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to forgo a preemptive strike against Hezbollah days after the Oct. 7 attack.

Nasrallah has made no secret of his desire to raid Israel’s Galilee. In fact, in the months before the Oct. 7 massacre, Hezbollah held a military exercise near the border and released a propaganda video of precisely such raids against Israeli military outposts across the border. This may well have been a diversionary tactic to keep Israel off balance and focused on the northern front while Hamas, whose fighters received training in Lebanon and Tehran for their Oct. 7 attack, planned their assault from Gaza.

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Increasingly, there is a growing view in Israel that, given Hezbollah’s enduring enmity and its vast, sophisticated military arsenal, a war with the Party of God and, in effect, with its patron Iran, may be inevitable.

But there remains deep division within Israel’s national security establishment over when such a war should occur. Some analysts say that now is the right moment to strike. The threat from Hamas has been severely degraded, if not neutralized. The north is already evacuated and the Israeli Defense Forces are already mobilized and in fighting mode. Many Israelis, terrified by their country’s obvious vulnerability, favor striking Israel’s enemies sooner rather than later, suggesting that a war with Hezbollah would enjoy strong public support. The assassination of so many senior Hezbollah commanders suggests that Israel’s operational intelligence is far better in Lebanon today than it was in 2006, when the IDF had only 10 days’ worth of targets to strike.

If Israel chooses to go to war with Hezbollah, it would have to strike before October and the start of the rainy season and then winter. In fact, some Israeli analysts believe that the ongoing IDF strikes in Lebanon and targeted assassinations of key Hezbollah commanders are not simply opportunistic but have been methodically shaping the battlefield for an eventual, though not necessarily imminent, ground invasion. Amiad Cohen, an IDF reservist officer who heads the Herut Center, a conservative think tank, recently described what he saw as the IDF strategy over the past eight months: “We’re crushing, mostly with airstrikes, first of all the people running the operations in southern Lebanon, and the second part of it, the infrastructure,” including underground structures.

Cohen told me over the phone that Israel should have invaded southern Lebanon months ago. “In April I said that this was the time to force Hezbollah back behind the Litani River,” he said. “But President Biden’s opposition to escalating the conflict prevented us from doing that.”

Other analysts argue that current conditions are not ideal for a large-scale war, albeit for different reasons. “Not now,” said Tamir Hayman, the former head of Israeli military intelligence who now heads Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Hayman said it would be better to wait a couple of years. Israel, he said, now lacked the resources, international legitimacy, or Washington’s approval for such a war. Israel should strike Hezbollah “when we’re ready.”

Although Israel would ultimately win a war with Hezbollah, the price could be horrendous. While Hezbollah rockets and drones now fall on houses in northernmost towns like Metula, and set fields and forests on fire, they may well overwhelm Israel’s air defenses and level villages and parts of cities. Israel’s civilian death toll in such a war could easily dwarf the cost of Oct. 7.

Cohen disagrees. He said that with shelters in almost every Israeli home and a new system of laser defenses against rockets and missiles coming online soon, Israel could win a war with Lebanon and establish a defensible border at the Litani River within two or three months, at an acceptable cost to the Israeli military and civilians.

Analysts in D.C. argue that such a war would require American buy-in. They note that Israel remains dependent on the U.S. for military supplies that would be required for such a war, and President Biden is adamantly opposed to an escalation. His administration, which has publicly criticized Israel’s operations in Gaza and withheld 3,000 bombs and 23,000 munitions, has incentivized Israel’s foes. Moreover, because of its longstanding military aid relationship with the U.S., Israel is now more dependent on American supplies than it was during the last war. The relationship also had the effect of undermining Israel’s defense industry, which has been scrambling to meet demand for ammunition and weapons systems since Oct. 7.

After nine months of fighting in Gaza, “Israel needs to refill its stocks of JDAMs and other critical munitions needed to fight Hezbollah,” said David Schenker, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs who has worked closely on Lebanon policy, including the funding of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). Plus, many reservists are now on their third consecutive rotation. “The IDF badly needs a break,” he said.

The Biden administration’s ongoing effort to broker an agreement between Israel and Hezbollah also risks handing the terror group a win. For months, U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein has been trying to negotiate a de-escalation plan loosely based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. The document called for establishing a zone free of military personnel and weapons save for those of the Lebanese government. However, its critics say, the resolution was predestined to fail, as its implementation relied on Hezbollah’s accomplices and subordinates, the Lebanese government and the LAF, as well as a neutered U.N. force mandated to coordinate its activities with the Lebanese. While UNSCR 1701 may have looked good to Israel’s supporters on paper, its aims were at odds with the realities on the ground, rendering its promises of security practically meaningless. Critics of Hochstein’s talks fear a repetition of this failure and a similar outcome if by some chance his negotiations succeed.

While the need for security has almost always trumped the desire for economic growth for Israelis, a full-scale war with Hezbollah would come at a high economic cost. In the last quarter of 2023, Israel’s economy contracted sharply and its gross domestic product shrank by 20%. By May, however, the economy had rebounded, and first-quarter GDP grew some 14%, demonstrating its resilience.

Israel’s astonishing economic record, however, may have also contributed to its current strategic peril. For too long, Israel’s success as the “startup nation” has blinded the country and its leadership to growing dangers posed by its neighbors. Now, to protect themselves against Hezbollah and its patron Iran, the cost for Israelis has become far higher.