Editor’s Note: Sign up to get this weekly column as a newsletter. We’re looking back at the strongest, smartest opinion takes of the week from CNN and other outlets.
On George Washington’s birthday in 1892, former President Grover Cleveland urged graduating students at the University of Michigan to “take with you … a strong and abiding faith in the value and potency of a good conscience and a pure heart. Never yield one iota to those who teach that these are weak and childish things, not needed in the struggle of manhood with the stern realities of life.”
The speech embracing Washington’s virtues was “perhaps the most unusual kickoff to a presidential campaign in American history,” wrote Cleveland biographer Troy Senik.
Nine months later, Cleveland won the presidency for the second time, becoming the only person in American history to serve non-consecutive terms in the White House. It is a feat former President Donald Trump is trying to duplicate this year.
Cleveland overcame scandal in his first run for president when he had to admit to having possibly fathered a child out of wedlock — his opponents derisively chanted, “Ma, ma, where’s my Pa?”
But his travails pale in comparison to Trump’s 91 felony charges — and Cleveland’s speech saluting homely American virtues is worlds away from the 2024 Republican frontrunner’s repeated focus on his own grievances, spoken as he travels from primary appearances to courtrooms. And, of course, Cleveland didn’t refuse to accept that he lost his bid for reelection — in 1888 to Benjamin Harrison — as Trump has, claiming without evidence that the 2020 election was a fraud.
The first true test of Trump’s comeback occurs Monday in Iowa, where caucusgoers will venture into sub-zero temperatures to choose between Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and others.
After months of speculation, we’ll finally get some answers to a few questions: Is there an opening for any Republican aside from Trump? Will DeSantis’ decision to focus on Iowa, where he’s visited all 99 counties, pay off? Does Haley’s momentum in New Hampshire, where she is second in the polls, also apply to Iowa?
Most of our contributors thought Haley won Wednesday’s CNN debate in Iowa against DeSantis, but Trump’s absence from the stage again loomed large.
“Haley sounded like someone looking to take on the genuine article — the Republican frontrunner,” wrote W. James Antle III. “Her refrain of ‘make America proud again’ appropriated Trump’s signature line while suggesting his term wasn’t always a source of national pride. She went even more directly against his divisiveness and conduct during the January 6 Capitol riot.”
“There’s a limit to how far that will take you in a Republican primary, as former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie can attest after campaigning hard against Trump only to drop out Wednesday. … But if Haley can dispatch DeSantis and put up some resistance to Trump, the frontrunner might have difficulty continuing to avoid debates — and might not benefit from joining her on stage.”
“But that is still a lot of ‘ifs’ for Haley,” Antle observed.
“Make no mistake,” wrote SE Cupp, “Haley made conservative arguments. But for someone looking for a Trump alternative, who’s turned off by the new GOP’s regressive extremism, who wants to move past Trump’s chaos, Haley made an appeal to them without giving up on her principles.”
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Sophia A. Nelson argued that “Haley isn’t quite there yet. She certainly has the intelligence and ability to be president. But … she and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis engaged in petty, juvenile sniping at one another. She opened the night looking presidential and sounding sober-minded — right up until she told voters to go to Desantislies.com (which she repeated multiple times throughout the night). That was a low point — for me and the room full of family members I watched the debate with.”
Debate coach Todd Graham gave Haley a B for her performance: “Haley deftly pivoted away from Trump. She was more forceful in her criticisms of the former president than she’d been in previous debates. Haley knows it’s now or never to highlight their contrasting styles and policies. This could be something to build on for future debates.” DeSantis got a D+ from Graham: “His answers became alarmingly policy-free and could easily fit on bumper stickers.”
For more:
John Avlon: Trump spreads birther lie about Nikki Haley
Violence and immunity
In the world of legal developments swirling around Trump last week, the most significant was the DC Circuit Court’s oral arguments over his claim to immunity from criminal prosecution under nearly all circumstances.
“Right out of the gate,” wrote Laurence Tribe, Norman Eisen and Taylor Redd, “Judge Florence Pan, who emerged as the panel’s most incisive questioner, presented Trump’s counsel John Sauer with a hypothetical that exposed the unthinkable consequences of Trump’s extreme position: Could a president who used his official authority to order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival ever be prosecuted?”
They wrote that “placing presidents above the law — by making them immune from criminal accountability — gets separation of powers backwards and upends the rule of law.”
The SEAL Team Six hypothetical “resonated because it aligns with the Trump we have all come to know: a politician who has encouraged, promoted, justified and even praised political violence, as long as he sees it as a sign of support for him,” Frida Ghitis observed. “And it resonated because Trump is once again sending very clear signals that he endorses and even encourages political violence to support his cause.” He is calling those imprisoned for the Capitol riot “hostages,” rather than people convicted of crimes, Ghitis noted.
Trump’s strategy of showing up for court sessions where his presence is not required appears to be working for him, along with his refusal to engage in debates. “There are many reasons for Trump’s formidable lead in the Republican primary, but at the top of the list is the fact that Haley, DeSantis and others in the GOP have struggled to attract similar levels of attention as the former president, whose mastery of grabbing the media spotlight is unrivaled,” wrote Julian Zelizer.
For more:
Dean Obeidallah: Trump’s comments about the Civil War are even worse than Nikki Haley’s
Striking back
The US and UK launched reprisal strikes in Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen this week, after the Iranian-backed militants continually attacked commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Peter Bergen asked: How did we get here? He traced the conflict’s roots back to 2015, when, in “a spectacular act of strategic folly, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, then the Saudi minister of defense, launched a war in neighboring Yemen to prevent the rebel Houthis from taking over the country.”
Recognizing the disastrous consequences, the Saudis are now negotiating a peace deal with the Houthis, Bergen noted. “Saudi Arabia was not one of the named participants on Thursday night’s strikes on Houthi targets. Yet, Saudi Arabia is a key reason that the Houthis are now so closely allied to Iran and so well armed.”
“Let’s hope that the US-led strikes restore deterrence against the Houthis launching more strikes in the Red Sea. But already the regional conflict that the Biden administration was hoping to contain has spread to Yemen, to Israel’s northern border with Hezbollah and to Iraq, where a recent US strike on the leader of an Iranian-backed militia has amplified calls for the removal of all US troops that remain in Iraq.”
Boeing’s Max problem
It’s been a scary new year in the skies. Alaska Airlines cancelled hundreds of flights after a mid-cabin door plug blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 plane as it ascended to 16,000 feet, forcing an emergency landing on January 5 at Portland International Airport in Oregon. It came three days after a runway collision at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport.
Last year ended with “no reported fatal accidents involving large commercial jets in scheduled service,” noted Hassan Shahidi, CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation. “2023 has been widely hailed as one of the safest years in the history of aviation. And the air transport system is safe.”
“But the aviation system and its safety margins are showing signs of stress. … Both regulators and the aviation industry must heed the recent warning signs and recommit to maintaining the highest standards and quality to build an even more resilient aviation system.”
Shahidi added, “This moment is not just about maintaining our impressive safety record; it’s about envisioning and creating a future where aviation safety is more resilient, more intuitive and more integrated than ever before.”
What Oprah knows about dieting
As Adrienne Bitar noted, “Oprah Winfrey recently disclosed that she had taken weight-loss medication, and some Americans felt betrayed. How could she, the queen of WeightWatchers and doyenne of dieting, be abandoning the equation of diet + exercise = slim?”
“Maybe because Oprah is conceding an uncomfortable truth: Diets rarely work. It doesn’t matter how much grit or willpower you have or how hard you’re willing to work, the weight comes back; it nearly always does.”
“If Oprah’s army of chefs and trainers couldn’t transform her into a size 6 without drugs, then maybe it’s time to question the tired American (diet) dream…”
Gypsy Rose Blanchard
Gypsy Rose Blanchard was recently paroled “after serving eight and a half years for helping to kill her abusive mother,” wrote Sarah Gundle. Blanchard, the subject of a new Lifetime series, “was for years paraded before reporters and the public as a sickly cancer patient, before it was revealed that her own mother, Claudine ‘Dee Dee’ Blanchard, had been slowly poisoning her. The revelation drove Gypsy Rose to seek revenge by convincing her boyfriend to murder her mother.”
Dee Dee Blanchard’s behavior, Gundle wrote, “was beyond the pale, rising to the level of evil. But as a psychologist, I often wonder if the so-called ‘wicked mother paradigm,’ like so many forms of othering, may be hiding more about us than it reveals about them.”
“What if instead of asking questions about these evil mothers or avidly attending to the details of their children’s lives, we viewed stories like these as an opportunity to ask difficult questions of ourselves and our own relationships? … would Dee Dee Blanchard have been able to stop the train of destruction if someone had more doggedly recognized and confronted her mental illness?”
Surrogacy
Pope Francis came out squarely against surrogacy, calling it “despicable.” Jill Filipovic wrote that “surrogacy is among the most ethically thorny reproductive questions. It creates many opportunities for exploitation, with wealthy people who want children willing to pay poorer women to carry and birth them. Feminists often rely on the concept of ‘choice’ when discussing reproduction, and choice is key, but it isn’t the only concern. No choice, after all, is made in a vacuum. And with surrogacy arrangements often involving poor women in developing countries who carry babies for far wealthier people in rich and developed ones, the potential for abuse is high and the negotiating table perilously uneven.”
The Pope’s stance fits with the Catholic Church’s overall approach to gender and human life, Filipovic noted, but shows that he is far from the “progressive Pope” he is often made out to be. The church’s views on such issues, she added, often amount to “simplistic rules made by men with no actual experience or skin in the game, which largely regulate women’s behavior, see our bodies as dangers to be managed and serve to keep us smaller.”
Lloyd Austin’s absence
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was hospitalized for days due to complications following prostate cancer surgery before President Joe Biden was informed. “There has rarely been a more fraught time during the Biden administration for the US secretary of defense to be out of commission than now,” Peter Bergen wrote. “The Middle East is on fire, and one of America’s chief firefighters was AWOL.”
“So, what, if anything, can Biden do? Probably not much. A public reprimand of Austin by Biden would also only serve to reinforce the view held by Republican critics that the Biden team isn’t especially competent.” And if Biden fired Austin, he would need the Senate to confirm a replacement in an election year.
Globes are back
If last week’s rebooted Golden Globes are any indication, this year’s award season is going to be dominated by “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie,” the box office hits that were both released July 21. (The distributor of “Barbie” and CNN share a parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.)
“If the Globes are to be given credence as harbingers for Academy Awards,” wrote Gene Seymour, “then ‘Oppenheimer’ would seem to have an edge — that is, unless you neglect the other big-screen winners Sunday, including ‘Poor Things,’ the Victorian period farce that won for best comedy or musical feature as well as a best female actor in comedy or musical prize for its star, Emma Stone.”
Seymour noted “the reformist spirit of this year’s Globes, which made sweeping changes in their operations that included phasing out the scandal-plagued Hollywood Foreign Press Association and bringing greater diversity to the voting process.”
“Which made for everything except a better show…”
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AND…
Bye bye Belichick
For sports traditionalists, it’s bad enough that the college football realignment is under way. Now the NFL’s legendary Bill Belichick is out as coach of the New England Patriots, the team he led to six Super Bowl victories.
Will Leitch argued that the “changes to college football seem potentially fatal. Sure, in the short term, they’ll work: I’m as excited to watch next year’s 12-team College Football Playoff as anyone. But in the long term, when you pattern yourself after the NFL in order to get some of their television juice, when you jettison the traditions and orthodoxies that made people fall in love with the sport in the first place, you stop being college football: You simply become Minor League NFL. And no one cares about minor league anything.”
Sports writer Jeff Pearlman classed Belichick’s departure with the nearly simultaneous retirement of University of Alabama head coach Nick Saban as big losses for football. Not least, they represent a disappearing kind of team leader: “the grump coach.”
“Belichick is a grump. Saban is a grump. One-word answers. Dismissive shrugs. Indifferent brush offs. Pointed stares. That look — that dreaded, nightmarish, awful look — that screams one of the following:
• ‘What type of stupid question is that?’
• ‘Who let you in here?’
• ‘You are a millimeter of lint on my sweater.’
Pearlman recalled, “When they addressed the media, it was usually done in a dark and dank office, a cracked-open Schlitz in one hand, a smoldering Camel in the other…”
“I once interviewed Lou Piniella, manager of the Seattle Mariners, as he (simultaneously) peed at a urinal, smoked a cigarette and ate a turkey-and-Swiss hoagie. ‘Ask me what you wanna know,’ he said, ‘then leave.’”
“On the one hand, it’s not always fun dealing with the grump. Actually, it’s rarely fun dealing with the grump. But at least grumps are sincere and straightforward and generally incapable of posting a video to Instagram (without a grandchild’s assistance).”
