◼ Notwithstanding the “cease-fire” between the United States and Iran, the Islamic Republic continues to lob missiles and drones at Kuwait and Bahrain. The U.S. has not responded to these attacks, and the House passed a resolution (which four Republicans supported alongside Democrats) against further strikes on Iran. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump told an interviewer that he’d like to meet his Iranian counterpart, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei: “We seem to be getting along quite well.” But the remnants of the Islamic Republic could be taking the president for a ride. On Iran’s behalf, Trump berated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for prosecuting a defensive war against Hezbollah—a concession to Iran for which Trump has gained nothing. The Sunni states gravitated toward the U.S. during the war because only the U.S. was defending their interests against Iranian aggression. Why would they keep their end of the bargain if Trump refuses to honor his? The president’s desperation for a deal threatens the gains he made during the war.

◼ California’s lethargic approach to ballot-counting means we don’t know the winners in the state’s primaries this week. But it appears that the state’s gubernatorial election will feature a Republican as well as a Democrat (which is not always guaranteed in that state): Trump-endorsed media personality Steve Hilton and Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra. In Los Angeles, with thousands of votes yet to count, right-leaning independent Spencer Pratt is set to edge every other Democrat out of the race save embattled incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. Elsewhere, however, primary politics have not played out so cleanly. Iowa Republicans shattered Trump’s streak of endorsement victories as the president’s pick for governor, Congressman Randy Feenstra, lost his race to populist businessman and MAHA favorite Zach Lahn. The Democratic establishment, too, took it on the chin in New Jersey’s twelfth district. There, party stalwarts lost to Adam Hamawy—a former combat surgeon who served as a defense witness for the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and who volunteered for a group that was exposed as a front for al-Qaeda in the early 1990s. Trump himself midwifed into existence the MAHA movement that now torments him. So, too, did Democrats give breathing space to a radical version of anti-Zionism that has spiraled out of their control. Neither party has anyone to blame but itself.

◼ Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner met with Democratic leadership in Washington, D.C., to assure them that no more skeletons are hiding in his closet—other than his SS Totenkopf tattoo. But before the emergency meeting, Platner’s own former political director, Genevieve McDonald, revealed that only months before he announced his candidacy, Platner’s wife found that he had been “sexting” various women on the anonymous app Kik. McDonald was charged with doing “internal oppo research” and resigned in disgust over what she found. Democrats at the meeting expressed concern that even worse revelations might follow. Now, their fears have been realized. In a New York Times report, three of Platner’s ex-girlfriends accused him of physical and emotional abuse. One of them, Lyndsey Fifield, said that Platner manhandled her, shared unsettling fantasies of murder and rape, and knew full well that the tattoo on his chest was a Nazi symbol. Platner has insisted that the allegations are politically motivated and that he will remain in the race. Democratic leaders may wish to decide otherwise.

◼ To appear to do something in response to 9/11, Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Policymakers were convinced that intelligence-sharing among 16 agencies would be improved by piling another bureaucracy on top. The ODNI became more adept at spinning intel for political ends than adding analytical value. Now Trump has named the utterly unqualified Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence. Pulte replaces Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s initial unqualified DNI. Installed as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (a job he will keep while running DNI in his spare time), Pulte used the FHFA post to mine the confidential government mortgage files of Trump’s political enemies (Letitia James, Adam Schiff, et al.) for trivial inconsistencies that he urged the Justice Department to inflate into bank fraud indictments. He has never worked in intelligence, even though experience in the field is a statutory requirement for being nominated for the job. (The loophole is that Trump has not nominated him.) There is mutiny in the Senate, where Democrats are threatening to let surveillance authority lapse, and even Republicans are grousing. Pulte shouldn’t be anywhere near the ODNI, and ODNI shouldn’t exist.

◼ The Justice Department beat a hasty retreat from its scheme to pour nearly $1.8 billion into a slush fund denominated the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which was to be used to pay “damages” to hundreds of rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 and promote the notion that all Biden DOJ prosecutions against them were corrupt. It turns out Trump is not immune from political gravity: As his approval ratings plummet, his grip on Congress loosens. When the administration realized that Congress might respond by canceling funds for such Trump priorities as immigration enforcement, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche suddenly announced that the Anti-Weaponization Fund had been scrapped. Election years have a way of putting a stop to indefensible things. It’s true that prior Democratic administrations have also used collusive settlements to pay off political allies. But that’s just another way of saying that what is wrong today was wrong before Trump got to town.

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◼ Very few Americans were itching to hear from former First Lady Jill Biden—or Doctor Jill Biden, as her shrinking fan base insists. Many Republicans never liked her, and many Democrats blame her and her elderly husband for enabling Trump’s second term. Her publicity tour for her new memoir is not helping. First, she told CBS News’ Rita Braver regarding her husband’s performance in his debate against Trump, “I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. . . . As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’” In her version of events, her husband was doddering and out-of-it only during the 90 minutes when he was on live television with the whole world watching—an amazing coincidence. In another interview, she said that had her husband stayed in the 2024 presidential race, he would have won. Yes, a first lady’s post–White House memoir is now a requirement of our political culture, but the Bidens have always lied about sensitive matters, perhaps especially to themselves.

◼ New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled his housing plan: “Block by Block, a Housing Policy for a New Era.” He promised to spend $22 billion in taxpayer funds to build 200,000 new “affordable” (meaning subsidized) apartments over a decade. Technically, those buildings will be owned and managed by private investors. But the city will foot much of the bill and, in return, layer on mandates that are sure to slow production and drive up costs. Once the buildings are completed, if ever, the city will keep rents capped. Mamdani also plans to pour money into New York’s notoriously awful housing authority, which manages one-fifth of the nation’s public housing stock. Far more effective would be to transfer dilapidated public housing to private hands, as many other cities have done since the 1990s, and have investors with skin in the game pay for improvements. The most galling part of Mamdani’s scheme is to ramp up confiscation of private buildings. He is ordering officials to “take aggressive legal action” against landlords of chronically neglected buildings. In some cases, the city would “transfer ownership” to “responsible stewards” of Mamdani’s choice, including “community land trusts, nonprofits or even the tenants themselves.” If Mamdani truly wanted to help renters, he would simply allow developers to build more homes.

◼ The British government has banned Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur from entering the United Kingdom on the grounds that “their presence in the U.K. may not be conducive to the public good.” This is an illiberal mistake that ought not to stand in a free nation and, if intended to suppress the ideas that the pair hoped to share, a strategic error to boot. Between them, Piker and Uygur have millions of online followers. If they cannot speak in the U.K., they will speak to the U.K. from afar. To put it mildly, we are fans of neither Piker nor Uygur, whose views are both shallow and grotesque. But, in this circumstance, that is a wholly irrelevant fact. Why? Because we are fans of untrammeled political debate, and because untrammeled political debate was the reason for Piker’s and Uygur’s curtailed visit to the U.K. The two men were hoping to participate in events at the South by Southwest London festival and at the University of Oxford. There are a handful of circumstances in which a government might wish to exclude foreigners from traveling to its shores, but neither of these rises even close to that level. Britain is the home of Hyde Park Corner, John Stuart Mill, and the Oxford Union. Can it really be the case that there is no room, even temporarily, for a couple of two-bit provocateurs?

◼ It was too much to hope that Tony Blair, who did so much to set Britain on its current, disastrous course, would apologize for it. Nevertheless, we hope that some who are (or would like to be) in controlling positions in the Labour Party pay attention to his latest sally, an epistle to a flock run amok. While this missive is still recognizably the work of a man of the left (or, as Blair would put it, “radical center”), his call for a return to more sensible policies is welcome—aside from a serving of bromides on immigration. He argues for energy sanity and for better spending priorities (more spending on defense, more discipline on welfare), which reflect the fact that taxation is already too high. He supports closer relations with the EU unburdened by a fruitless quest to rejoin, and he argues for a Transatlantic relationship in which European members play a bigger and better part. Blair may still be Blair, but he puts Starmer to shame.

◼ A new report by University of Rochester Professor David Primo, published by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, analyzed the political donations of tens of thousands of faculty members from dozens of universities. It concluded that professors as a group are only slightly less radical than the most progressive members of the Democratic Party. The study found that both population-wide donations and faculty donations have shifted toward the left over the past four decades. The faculty now make almost no right-of-center campaign contributions. Moreover, faculty members are much more politically active than the average American and four to five times more likely to donate. The report concludes, “Ideological diversity is essentially absent from universities today.” What we already knew, quantified.

◼ The rot in higher education runs yet deeper. In May 2020, the University of California system announced plans to eliminate standardized testing requirements for all applicants. The California State University system followed suit soon afterwards, meaning that since 2022 the two largest public university systems in America have banned the use of the SAT or ACT in admissions decisions. Their decisions were made under pressure from a series of lawsuits filed in 2019 and marked the fulfillment of a longstanding progressive goal: removing even the optional use of the SAT/ACT in college applications, which the plaintiffs’ attorneys described as a method of “illegal wealth and race discrimination.” Six years later, the results are in, and they are uniformly catastrophic. Last November, the University of California San Diego’s Senate Workgroup on Admissions published a devastating report charting the nearly instantaneous collapse in student preparedness and ability at its campus over the past half decade. The report documented a thirtyfold increase in freshmen who cannot handle even basic high school math. A shocking 12 percent of freshmen require middle-school-level remedial placement. We suspect that the companies that hire graduates from these universities will have to do some remediation as well.