There are times, such as in the depths of Washington DC’s frigid winter or during the swelteringly humid summer that I wonder why on Earth I live here. I gave up living in Johannesburg with its practically perfect climate for a city where it’s really only nice to be outside for about three months of the year.

But this week we were treated to a glorious thunderstorm, just like one of the beautiful, energising Highveld summer afternoon storms I remember. The rain cleared the air, cooled everything down, and gave my garden a reprieve from the baking heat. As I type this, I’m sitting on my front porch, watching bumblebees enjoying the lavender that thrives here, and everything in the world seems lovely … seems lovely … let me not get ahead of myself, there are plenty of things to ruin my mood.

This has been a busy week. Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral at the National Cathedral, brought both Bibi Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelenskyy to town. Meanwhile Dr Anthony Fauci’s testified in the United States (US) Senate; President Donald Trump has been monkeying around with a new bridge to Canada; economic growth data has been disappointing; and New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani is on a tear. After all that I may need to be sedated … or perhaps I’ll just mix myself an especially strong boulevardier this evening.

Saying Goodbye to Lindsey Graham

I have already written about Lindsey Graham, so there isn’t an awful lot more to say on the topic, except that his dignified funeral brought in the great and the good from around the world. With Netanyahu and Trump along with Vice President JD Vance among the mourners, Fox News presenter Sean Hannity gave an important eulogy. From the pulpit Hannity made several remarks that I assume were directed at those Republicans who might be wavering in their support for Israel and the Jewish people. Hannity, in recognising Netanyahu said:

“He [Graham] loved the state of Israel. He loved the people of Israel. Under your leadership Israel has been one of America’s most consistent t and loyal allies. He was never shy to say it till the day he passed. Just as President Trump has been Israel’s strongest friends in the history of the White House. … Lindsey was [a] friend to Israel in the US Senate.”

After debunking the idea that Graham was a warmonger, Hannity said “Lindsey desperately wanted and talked to the president about a lasting peace in the middle east. He wanted every country in the region on that path to peace … His greatest gift in life … was Lindsey had moral clarity. He understood right from wrong, good from evil … and he knew as President Trump knows, as Israel knows … there can be no path to peace until evil is defeated. Evil in this case embodied in a death cult, an ideology. The world’s number one state sponsor of terror.”

After essentially calling on Trump to finish the job in the war against the Islamic Republic, Hannity turned his attention to Ukraine, pointing out how touched Graham would have been to have President Zelenskyy at his funeral. He mentioned how Graham remarked on Zelenskyy’s strength “against one of the world’s most brutal regimes.” Hannity pointed out how Ukraine has shown a fighting spirit that no one would have predicted and that Graham “was proud of you and your countrymen.”

Drawing these two conflicts together, particularly after the Ukrainians reportedly attacked an Iranian ship transporting military equipment to Russia, was wise of Hannity. Although Trump has wavered in his support for Ukraine, it seems like we are entering a new, and hopefully positive, era of cooperation between the forces of good against the forces of evil.

“Who the f**k do you think you were …”

I don’t think I’m much of a prude. I like the use of a good expletive as much as the next effete columnist, but there’s a time and a place. Our politics is increasingly coarse, and it seems all the rage for politicians to swear in public. It happened this week when Ohio’s Republican Senator Bernie Moreno asked Dr Anthony Fauci during a Senate hearing “Who the f**k do you think you were for doing that?”

When I saw a clip Moreno saying that I tut-tutted quietly, but as soon as I saw the context immediately found myself aligning with the good Ohioan; I must say had I been a Senator trying to get some information out of Dr Anthony Fauci, the longtime head of the US National Institute for Allergy and Infection Disease (NIAID), I might have lost my temper too and would have gone full Australian in my discourse.

As we discussed on the latest Talking Sense, Fauci was for many years the highest-paid federal government employee as the head of the NIAID and one of the most influential and powerful public health officials in the world. He is also one of the most polarising figures in the country thanks to his handling of the Covid pandemic.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has been dogged in his search for the truth about Covid, where the virus came from, and how and why the health agencies determined we should shut down our lives in the name of saving lives. Kudos to Paul, who is himself an ophthalmologist and surgeon and so knows a thing or two about healthcare.

During the pandemic, Paul began investigating the source of the virus and the role that US-funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology played. In past Senate hearings Fauci alternately dissembling and evasive, or aggressively combative when questioned. We now know he was behind attempts to shut down any discussion about the role gain-of-function played, pushing the idea that Covid emerged naturally, possibly from wet markets in China.

Thanks to Senator Paul’s dogged search for the truth, we now know an awful lot more about Dr Fauci and the way he operated. This week Senator Paul released Dr Fauci’s diary that he kept during the pandemic. To be clear, these were all work records he kept on a work computer, so Fauci has no right to privacy, given the laws we have giving us access to official records.

A few things to note:

1. Fauci admits very early on in the pandemic that “we now know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.” He says that we knew, and yet for years he and his colleagues would call anyone who mentioned the possibility of a lab leak or who questioned whether this came naturally from a market a conspiracy theorist. Fauci and his colleagues then worked with scientists to get a paper into Nature to explicitly state that the virus did not come out of a lab. What were they trying to cover up? Probably their involvement in gain-of-function research;
2. Fauci has long denied any role in shutting down schools or the wider economy. Yet his diary shows how he was actively lobbying the governors of several key states, including New York and California, to shut down. The costs to children, to businesses, to our economy, and society as a whole from these policies are hard to fathom and we will probably never get a full accounting. And despite pleading innocent, we now know that Fauci was behind much of it; and
3. Fauci was revelling in the attention. His diaries show a profound narcissism and an almost complete infatuation with himself. The constant attention he was getting from journalists, politicians, and celebrities went to his head. But at the same time Fauci was portraying himself as someone who “represented science.” He wanted to be both a serious scientist and Kim Kardashian, but he couldn’t be both. The power he was exercising overtly and covertly along with the adoring press he received from the media resulted in catastrophically bad policies being foisted on the country and the world.

On Wednesday Fauci appeared, reluctantly, at a hearing of the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, which is chaired by Senator Paul. The hearing was a fiasco, with Fauci refusing to answer any questions, stating more than 100 times: “on the advice of counsel I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution”

Fauci was given a pre-emptive pardon by President Biden just before he left office, which gives a great deal of protection to the now-retired scientist. But he had to protect himself from perjuring himself any further, hence his flat refusal to say anything at all.

Thankfully in these United States we allow different states to follow different paths. The good people of Florida went one way, kept their economy open, and did rather well while California shut everything down and suffered immensely. And the difference in Covid illness and deaths? Not much at all. Long may that beautiful federalist system last so that we, as individuals, can choose a better path.

In the meantime, Fauci will continue to be seen as a saviour to some and a villain to others. And I fear that after Fauci’s disgraceful performance in the Senate, we will have learned precious little from this whole episode.

Trump’s Bridge Games

In 2021, a few hours after he was sworn in, President Biden signed an executive order that had even me, jaded cynic that I am, completely agog and nonplussed. He cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline which was nearing completion and that would have taken crude oil from the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, through the US and ultimately to refiners in the Gulf of Mexico. The project, led by Canadian TC Energy involved more than $8 billion in investment and had, at that point, taken up 12 years of permitting and construction.

The first Trump Administration greenlit the program, after the Obama Administration put our friends and allies from up north through the regulatory and permitting wringer. But then, caving to pressure from his radical environmentalist and anti-energy supporters, Biden abruptly cancelled the permit as one of his first actions as president. The pipeline is non-existent and much of that oil now heads west and ultimately to China and beyond.

How could it be, I asked myself, that here, in America, in this bastion of private enterprise, a President could just, almost on a whim, cancel more than a decade of hard work and billions of dollars of private investment. I cursed Mr Biden and the signal this decision would have sent to investors seeking to build anything here. Well, now I find myself cursing Mr Trump, who I thought might at least have a bit more sense when it comes to sending the right signals to investors.

Canada is our closest ally, neighbour, and trading partner. A great deal of freight travels back and forth across our northern border. In 2012 the then-governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, signed a deal with Canada to build a new and much-needed bridge across the Detroit River taking traffic from Detroit in Michigan to Windsor, Ontario.

The new bridge, to be named after Gordie Howe, one of the greatest ice hockey players in history (I had to look that one up), was going to be paid for by Canada at a cost of $4.7 billion, and Michigan and Canada would split the toll revenues after construction.

All sounds fine and dandy, doesn’t it? Except that the new bridge would have competed with an existing bridge, the Ambassador Bridge, which was built in 1929, and handles about 1.8 million trucks every year. The old bridge is susceptible to congestion and as anyone who has ever run a business knows, every hour a truck sits in traffic slows commerce and adds to costs. The Ambassador Bridge has been privately owned by the billionaire Moroun family since 1979 and they did everything they could, including sponsoring a statewide ballot initiative, to stop the new bridge being built.

The new bridge was due to open on June 12th, but that event was abruptly cancelled after Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, suggested to Mr Trump that the United States should revoke the permit allowing the bridge to open. Meanwhile, purely coincidentally you understand, the Moroun family donated $1 million to a Trump-aligned political group. The family also reportedly donated funds to the Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson’s political fundraising committee.

Democrats began using the bridge issue to attack the Republican Mike Rogers who is seeking to be elected as Michigan’s next Senator in November. Rogers put some pressure on the Trump Administration and thankfully it saw sense and allowed the bridge to open, but only after changing the tolling agreements, including a provision that limits the extent the new bridge can compete on pricing with the Morouns’ bridge. By monkeying around with the tolls, all traffic will end up paying more, and trade and the economy will suffer. But the Morouns will be a bit happier and so will the politicians they support.

What’s worse, dear reader, a president that caves to environmentalist pressure groups or one that caves to business cronies? I suppose you could make the argument that at least the Gordie Howe Bridge is open, even if under less-than-ideal circumstances, whereas the Keystone XL pipeline is kaput. But they are both terrible and send an awful message to investors that this country and its governments, whether Democratic or Republican, are not to be trusted.

Where’s that 3% Growth?

When President Trump took office for the second time, he and his team, including leading White House economists such as Kevin Hassett, promised the country 3% annual economic growth. This seemed like a reasonable goal given the Administration’s plan for regulatory reform, tax reform, and other supply-side reforms that we know work to boost growth. But then our dear leader engaged in his reckless, economically illiterate, and politically suicidal trade war.

The President’s capricious, and perhaps unconstitutional, efforts to impose import tariffs on wide ranges of products from almost every country on Earth have not just disrupted trade and investment, they have depressed our economic growth. This week the Commerce Department released second quarter GDP growth figures, which report slowing growth, to a 1.5% annual rate. So, we’re getting half what we were promised. To be clear, the difference between 1.5% growth and 3% growth is not 1.5%, it’s 100%.

This is not good enough and the voters will most likely punish Trump and the Republicans for this miss at the midterm elections. Perhaps the only thing that might mitigate Republican losses is that the Democrats seem bent on selecting some of the most far-left candidates imaginable, political hopefuls who I don’t think could be more radical if they were bred in a gain-of-socialism-function laboratory in China … or perhaps more appropriately North Korea.

Anyway, my message to Trump is, once again, if you want growth, peace, and prosperity, stop with this anti-trade madness and let the free market be truly free.

Mamdani’s Socialist Crusade

Mayor Mamdani, the democratic socialist who now occupies Gracie Mansion, recently announced the makeup of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary (MACJ), which is a body that screens appointments for New York City’s courts. The only thing was that not one of the 19 members he selected was Jewish. Now … forgive me if I’m stereotyping, but the Jews are not unknown in the legal profession. And Jews are also not unknown in New York … in fact the Big Apple is supposed to be the most Jewish city on Earth. You’d think that perhaps there might be one or two Jews on the MACJ, but no.

I’m sure his is just a clerical oversight and it has nothing to do with the fact that Mamdani is one of the most antisemitic and anti-Israel Americans ever to hold office.

While he was busy excluding Jews from an important committee, Mamdani is pressing ahead with his new tax on luxury second homes. It was not enough for the mayor to try to fleece New Yorkers, who already pay more than 50% of their income in taxes. No, Mamdani went further and released the names of the individuals who will be subject to his new tax. Remember that we have already had CEOs murdered in the streets of Manhattan. This move by the mayor is not only outrageous as a violation of individual privacy, but also very dangerous given the threats wealthy individuals face.

Meanwhile, in response to Mamdani’s anti-Western radicalism, some of the families of 9/11 victims launched a petition asking the mayor not to attend the 25th anniversary commemoration at Ground Zero. Mamdani has vowed to attend the ceremony; I just hope there isn’t any booing, justified though that might be, as it would ruin what should be a solemn occasion.

I wonder if Mamdani will bring along his father, Professor Mahmood Mamdani who, in his writings, has drawn a moral equivalency between the US and al-Qaeda. I wonder if he’ll invite his friend and ally Darializa Avila Chevalier, who must be the most anti-Israel and anti-American candidate seeking public office in the history of this nation.

Oh well, after those rather gloomy stories, the sun is still shining, and I think I deserve a nice cup of tea … or maybe I’ll head straight for the boulevardier. I’ll hopefully be back next week with some news of what happened in the Michigan Democratic primary, where yet another anti-Western antisemite, this time in the form of Abdul El-Sayed, is leading in the polls.

I hope you are having a good weekend.