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After watching the public portion of President Trump's running mate search, Alexandra Petri is pretty sure what additional tests are taking place behind closed doors in the race to join the Republican Party's 2024 presidential front-runners.
“In this room, you are faced with a choice. Your mother is in a jar filled with stingrays, but Donald Trump is not. He wants you to stand here and clap while the jar fills with stingrays. No, he is not in danger. He just wants to see what you can do. He is not going to make a deal with another Mike Pence!”
We won't give away any spoilers, but don't expect Vance, Stefanik or Scott to last long, as their offspring try to prove their total loyalty to Trump. (Who do our columnists think is the wisest choice? See how they ranked in Alexi McCammond's latest edition of the Prompt 2024 newsletter.) Sign up here.
We now know that obedience is the trait Trump wants not just from his vice president but from the entire civil service that runs the executive branch. A bipartisan group of five former heads of national security, foreign affairs and intelligence agencies has fired back with an op-ed defending public officials' responsibility to speak truth to power.
The group also writes that bureaucrats need to be held more accountable for poor performance. “As a practical matter, a small number of bad actors among them are overprotected under the existing system,” they say. They present a plan to fix this particular problem without jeopardizing the independence of the entire civil service.
Chaser: We've seen the horrors of one-party rule in places where competition, resistance and innovation die. Look at Indiana (at least according to former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels).
“Gaza was once covered with citrus groves,” writes policy researcher Tariq Kenny Shawa in a harrowing case study of how Israel has suffocated Palestinian industry. Jaffa oranges are known around the world, and by the 1960s more than 30 percent of Gaza's workforce was employed in citrus cultivation.
After 1967, Israeli intervention caused the industry to decline: exports were blocked, orchards were bulldozed, and water restrictions killed even more trees. “Today, orange and lemon trees no longer dot the countryside,” writes Kenny Shawa. “An industry that was supposed to be the foundation of Gaza's economic development lies in tatters.”
This, he said, is proof that “Israel has been and will continue to be the biggest obstacle to Gaza's prosperity.”
In her neighbourhood in Haiti, journalist Monique Cresca documents another besieged community struggling to survive. Gangs have recently taken full control of the country, but as in Gaza, the situation, where people have no one to rely on but themselves, dates back generations.
When Cresca moved to the neighborhood in 1996, “there was no electricity, so my neighbors pooled together and we put in the towers and transformers to bring power to our area.” Now, Cresca wakes up to the sound of machine gun fire.
She said the word “combit,” a Creole word meaning “common labor,” is Haitians' only hope for getting through this crisis, even if it is unfair.
From Lena Wen's column about the rising prevalence of various STIs in this somewhat surprising group. Here's a quick recap of what public health experts like Lena can't, and probably shouldn't, say: Come on, seniors! I know you!
Of course, we want seniors to have fun safely. Lina writes that the surge in STIs is not necessarily due to increased sex, but is primarily due to lower condom use among seniors. Seniors' limited knowledge of STIs is also a problem in itself. Can you blame them for coming of age at a time when abstinence is all that's expected?
Liana writes that the medical community needs to start treating and educating people over 65 as people who can be just as healthy as younger people.
Chaser: A prolonged Covid-19 pandemic could herald a surge in applications for disability benefits, editorial board warns. Government needs to prepare.
Major League Baseball's recent incorporation of Negro League statistics into its record books is a “triumph,” writes Bob Kendrick, director of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo. He just wants to ensure that the memory of all the pain, strength and perseverance shown by players of color on segregated playing fields doesn't fade.
In his brief history of the league, Kendrick writes that achieving excellence there “wasn't easy. It was hard,” which is why the top players “knew perfectly well how good they were. They knew how good their league was. And, frankly, so did the major leaguers.”
Now the statistics back it up, and Kendrick hopes it's just a starting point for baseball fans to learn more about “the tenacity and entrepreneurial spirit of the Negro Leagues.”
Apparently, all US economists have become communists. Katherine Rampell examines the Republican Party's bold new claim! Jen Rubin writes that European allies have every reason to fear a Trump return. The Western alliance will not last another term. It may not be that the Constitution is failing us, but that we are failing the Constitution. After all, the Constitution was meant to unite, not divide, writes Ramesh Ponnuru.
It's goodbye. It's a haiku. It's… “goodbye.”
Rotten wooden box at the border
Have a newsy haiku of your own? Email me with any questions, comments or concerns you may have. See you tomorrow!
