◼ The Florida Democratic Party nominated Angie Nixon as its Senate candidate. Nixon, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, supports eliminating private health insurance, abolishing ICE, and enacting a variation of the Green New Deal. The average Florida voter, however, has no appetite for what Nixon is selling. According to CNBC, Florida has boasted the strongest economy in the nation for the last three years. WalletHub reports that six of the ten best cities in the United States to start a business are in Florida. Moreover, South Florida is full of émigrés from Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia for whom “socialism” is the dirtiest of words. The state’s Jewish population, meanwhile, will bristle at Nixon’s fierce hostility to Israel. In recent years, the Republican Party has thrown away a host of winnable Senate seats by nominating strange or extreme candidates who lacked appeal to the political middle. Evidently, it is now the Democrats’ turn to make the same mistake.

◼ The American people were led to believe that President Donald Trump’s Qatari luxury airliner was so insecure that he was compelled to fly home from a recent NATO summit in Turkey on the old Air Force One. The real story is somehow worse. Trump was seen boarding Air Force One in Turkey, but that was a ruse. The president was, in fact, spirited off the plane and onto a catering truck, along with a handful of trusted aides, after which he boarded a smaller aircraft that took him to a military base in the U.K. Only there did he board his preferred, Qatari jet to return to the U.S. The ruse, we learned, was necessary because of an Iranian plot to attack Trump’s plane. As the New York Times reported, American security was aware of “a specific threat of a surface-to-air missile against Air Force One.” In fact, according to the Times, “someone in the vicinity of the NATO summit had been spotted with a shoulder-fired missile.” Snubbing the press gaggle by leaving it on the decoy Air Force One might have been a bonus for the president.

◼ The Trump Media & Technology Group has launched a new offering: early access to certain high-profile posts on the Truth Social social media network. This benefit costs subscribers up to $100,000 per month. This is corruption. In essence, the president is charging his fellow citizens a fee for the chance to learn about his official actions—actions related to the federal government’s foreign policy, financial regulation, business oversight and more—earlier than those who cannot afford the charge. Why? So that those subscribers can use that information to make money, naturally. Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Adam Schiff (Calif.) have described Trump’s plan as “an outrageous abuse of the President’s office for his personal benefit that undermines everyday investors and the integrity of our markets, while enriching Wall Street and other wealthy insiders.” If only just this once, they’re right.

◼ The U.S. national debt has officially exceeded $40 trillion. Subtract intragovernmental debt, and the true debt is $32 trillion. That’s more than enough to mean ballooning interest costs that will become ever more difficult to manage. Current debt levels are the result of a Congress and an electorate that have refused to pay for their chronic overspending, primarily on social programs and stimulus measures, over the past quarter century. Structurally imbalanced entitlement programs will likely add tens of trillions to the debt in the coming decades, with annual deficits surging above $2 trillion and counting. Simple arithmetic dictates that Americans will not be able to dodge the cost of such unprecedented borrowing much longer.

◼ Republican Congressman Max Miller’s reelection campaign is rapidly descending into new levels of depravity. The Ohio representative’s ex-wife, Emily, the daughter of Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno, claims that Miller held a gun to her head and threw boiling water at her. Miller denies these allegations. As part of his efforts to exonerate the congressman, his attorney, Aaron Minc, released nude photographs of Miller’s toddler daughter, which he now says was “completely unintentional and a mistake.” It has been a gross spectacle. The Republican lawmakers who have called on Miller to resign know that his conduct will likely cost the GOP his competitive House seat in the fall. GOP voters who are now tuning in to the midterms might rethink their commitments if what they see is a train wreck.

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◼ Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty to federal charges of stalking UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson before fatally shooting him in Manhattan. Explaining his actions in court, Mangione said that he was frustrated by the difficulty of navigating the health-care system while he suffered from chronic back pain. His admission drew another round of plaudits from the most virulent activists on the hard left, who champion Mangione as an anti-capitalist icon. Anyone mentally competent, however, will recognize that there is no justification for cold-blooded murder. At his next hearing, scheduled in December, Mangione faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. Throw away the key.

◼ A new report from the FBI shows an accelerating decline in violent crime in America. The violent crime rate fell by 9.7 percent last year, the largest annual drop since the FBI started tallying these numbers in 1936. The U.S. murder rate decreased by 18.1 percent, to its lowest level since 1956. Trump has tried to take credit for the trend, citing the deployment of national guardsmen to cities such as Washington, D.C., and Nashville. But the decline in violent crime is too widespread and consistent to be attributable to any one set of policies. Factors including the advancement of surveillance technology, the rise of the internet, and even the decline of lead content in paint have all been recognized by experts. But it will take years of study to more firmly establish the most salient causes. What’s clear, however, is that the fall in violent crime is another sign that America’s doomsayers are wrong.

◼ The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has found itself beset by something even more irritating than incoming missiles: politically advantageous concern. Accounts of sailors considering jumping off the ship, poor food quality, and plumbing issues have drawn the attention of the American public. Such conditions, however, are nothing new. Life at sea is hard on men and materials. The aircraft carrier exists to project American power a thousand miles in any direction. So long as the ship can accomplish that, it is functioning as designed. Pressure from left- and right-wing groups who wish to see a reduced American presence in the world led the Pentagon to recall the Lincoln from the Middle East, replacing it with the USS George Washington—which, in turn, had to cease its operations in the West Pacific and leave the Seventh Fleet without a carrier to contend with North Korea and China. The public, sailors, and political leaders will have to reckon many more times with a finite number of aging carriers in an increasingly hostile world. Deployments will be extended, conditions aboard will worsen, and crew turnover will increase until the Navy builds ships at a pace that meets the moment.

◼ For the better part of two decades, American and South Korean forces have held a joint large-scale military exercise at this time of year. It is in part designed to emphasize to North Korea that the U.S. stands behind its southern neighbor. For Trump to scale back American participation in this year’s exercise was an act of recklessness made worse by the inadequate reasons he gave for it: his good relationship with Kim Jong-un and the “unthreatening and respectful” nature of his regime, South Korea’s refusal to take part in the campaign against Iran, and its slow progress in making the investments agreed to as part of a trade deal. The result will be to weaken American deterrence in Asia at a very dangerous time.

◼ There is growing concern that Russia might soon seize a sliver of NATO territory. Russia’s struggles in Ukraine may tempt the Kremlin to open a potentially useful second front in the West. The U.S., meanwhile, is entangled in the Iran war, and although Western Europe is rearming, that process has a long way to go. The two most likely candidates for a Russian land grab are Narva, the third-largest city in Estonia, and Daugavpils, the second-largest city in Latvia. They are vulnerable because of their proximity to Russia, small size, and large ethnically Russian populations. If Russia attempts such an incursion, the Western response should be broad and robust. The U.S., meanwhile, should do everything it can to deter Russian adventurism. That will be best achieved by unambiguously reaffirming our commitment to the Atlantic alliance. Any planned withdrawals of American military personnel or matériel from Europe should be stopped. Boosting our presence and that of other NATO states in the Baltic area would be prudent, and we should continue to support Ukraine. The most obvious and easy step we should take: Avoid picking needless fights with our European allies.

◼ Former Cambridge University sociology professor Jason Arday is dead, apparently by his own hand. In 2023, Arday became Cambridge’s youngest black professor. Yet he also turned out to be a plagiarist—most of his scholarly work, including his doctoral thesis, was pilfered from others—and a wild fabulist, who invented a life story so spectacular that he was paid $1.4 million by Simon & Schuster to write a memoir. Cambridge, having first supported Arday, announced that it would formally investigate him. Days after Arday resigned, he was found dead in his home. His death is a tragedy, of course. Notwithstanding the insistence of certain media outlets, however, those who noticed Arday’s fraudulence—and those who suffered from it—are not responsible for it.

◼ Beginning in the fall of 2027, incoming freshmen at the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts will not receive permanently recorded letter grades for their first semester in college. Although instructors will give students letter grades, their transcripts will reflect only whether they passed or failed, and their letter grades for that semester will not affect their GPAs. The goal of the so-called grade-covering program is to “help students start strong and curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” according to the school. That’s one way to combat grade inflation.

◼ Team presidents and general managers on the WNBA’s “anti-hate” task force held an all-day meeting to determine whether it’s fair for men to compete in professional women’s basketball. Apparently, they need more time to deliberate. The assembled executives, all of whom hold jobs that depend on sex segregation in sports, couldn’t bring themselves to rule out male participation, but they did have time to craft a statement condemning “bad-faith” critics who are cynically using the trans issue to “demean or marginalize others.” That description presumably applies to former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, who announced their intention to declare for the WNBA draft in an effort to force the league to confront the absurd consequences of its gender policy. (A recently signed collective-bargaining agreement states that “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA” but provides no definition of “woman.”) In a memo to team presidents and general managers, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced her intention to “continue to have important conversations with all of you and the Players Association.” One wonders how much conversation is necessary before reality can be acknowledged.