Editors’ Blog

Wars are not only bloody and murderous endeavors, they are also unpredictable. The specter of former forays into Lebanon looms over Israel’s current one: easy to get in, harder to get out. After the stunning assassination of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as well as most of the secondary leadership of the organization over the last three weeks, we’re hearing voices in Israel and the U.S. talking predictably about a “new Middle East.” Meanwhile others in the international community and the U.S. talk about these new developments as an “escalation” out of nowhere — Israel looking for a new war, basically.

This is complicated stuff, like everything which happens in this region and especially everything tied to Israel, the Palestinians, and the states surrounding both. But I wanted to share some thoughts on why this escalation and Israel’s fight with Hezbollah are qualitatively different from anything that is happening in Gaza.

After days of hints at it, Democrats are now making a serious foray into Florida and Texas in a last-ditch effort to hold on to their Senate majority. Before calling it “last-ditch,” I wondered what to call it. Is that too pessimistic? Too optimistic? I’m really not sure. You know the background. Democrats went into this cycle with an almost historically bad map. One seat in West Virginia was, by universal agreement, hopeless. Beyond that preordained loss, Democrats had incumbents up in a several of the swing states and new candidates trying to hold existing seats in other swing states. On the other side of the ledger there were no obvious pick-up opportunities. Starting from those inauspicious beginnings, the Democrats’ map has held up remarkably well. In all but one case, Senate Democratic candidates go into the last month of the campaign either favorites or strong contenders. That one exception is Montana, where Jon Tester is now a decided underdog. Which brings us to Florida and Texas.

Are these races really plausible?

One of the most toxic and politically explosive parts of the current abortion rights debate is tied the complexities and perhaps inanities of leaving national abortion policy up to individual states. And a comment yesterday from Trump spokesman Jason Miller put the question right back into the center of the campaign.

It’s not enough for many anti-abortion stalwarts to ban the procedure in their state. They want to ban legal drugs designed to induce abortion. They want to surveil and block women traveling to other states to obtain an abortion. One of the most threatening dimensions of these programs is that they threaten to make doctors and other medical professionals — who might give counsel on or simply know about a woman’s plans to obtain an abortion — responsible for reporting her actions. If you visit your OB-GYN and discuss traveling to another state to get an abortion, does your OB have to report you to the local sheriff? It applies to third parties who might assist a woman either in traveling to get an abortion or getting FDA-approved medications to induce an abortion at home. The cases we’ve already seen range the gamut from sheriff’s departments wanting to pull medical and travel records for evidence of pregnancies that ended for unexplained reasons, gaps in menstruation, trips out of state that coincided with a pregnancy not brought to term.

When New York Mayor Eric Adams was elected in 2021, I told a number of people that I thought he’d either be a great mayor or end up getting indicted for something. A baseball player who bats .500 is a god. So I’m feeling reasonably good about this prediction. I tried to see whether I’d written this down somewhere. Back in December 2021 I wrote on Twitter that “I think there’s a lot about Adams that is really what the city needs. Most of the things. But also concerned that he’ll get indicted for something.” A month later I explained the basis of my largely misguided bullishness on Adams. “For clarity, I’m not cheering anything from the last three days. I think a mayor rooted in the politics of the city’s black middle class (which is Adams’ base) is better for the city today than rooted in the politics of liberals in Manhattan and Brooklyn.”

This general point I still believe.

“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared … You will be protected, and I will be your protector … Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free …You will no longer be thinking about abortion.” You’ve probably heard some combination of these lines and others more than once by now. Donald Trump first posted them on social media sites and then added them to the scripted part of his speech at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday night. They’ve been greeted with a mix of consternation and mockery. I don’t want to speak for women. But I think it’s safe to say that any woman who has some meaningful investment in abortion rights and reproductive rights generally would find these words some mix of chilling, infuriating, bizarre and absurd. As I read them they essentially say, Only I can be and I will be your total protector. In fact, you will be so totally protected that you will cease to be who you are. Especially coming from a man known to be a serial predator and court-adjudicated rapist — “rape” being the ordinary word, according to the judge in the case, for the acts Trump was found to have committed — these words seem to describe less being protected than engulfed.

Perhaps most simply the words are, as a number of observers have put it, creepy.

I’ve been trying to get my head around a number of issues going on in the campaign. So today I’m just going to flag a few things to keep an eye on.

First, we have something that we’ve discussed a few times. Earlier this year, as part of the Trump campaign’s full takeover of the RNC, Trump’s campaign took field organizing away from the RNC and essentially outsourced it to a series of super PACs including Turning Point USA and Elon Musk’s America PAC. (Musk’s group is run by a team of former DeSantis campaign staffers.) That seemed to many like a risky and possibly self-destructive idea. In modern politics, ground operations are the main role of the national political parties during a presidential campaign. They have experience at it. Why would you hand it off to super PACs, which are often long on dollars but can lack basic institutional knowledge and experience?