The Morning Dispatch: A Gaffe Heard Round the World

Happy Monday! After taking a quick trip to California and getting engaged to his girlfriend of 3.5 years, Declan is back in the saddle and ready to report the news.

And he’ll have help! Please give a warm TMD welcome to Esther Eaton, who is joining The Dispatch today as deputy editor of The Morning Dispatch. We’re thrilled to have her aboard, and she’s thrilled to help take this newsletter to the next level.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated in remarks to Russian journalists on Sunday Ukraine may be open to adopting a neutral stance as part of a peace deal with Russia—foreclosing the possibility of joining NATO—but added that any such agreement would need to be put to a referendum and guaranteed by other countries. “We will not sit at the negotiating table at all if we talk about some kind of demilitarization, some kind of ‘denazification,’” Zelensky said. “These are completely incomprehensible things.”

• President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a joint task force on Friday aimed at cutting Europe’s dependence on Russian energy by both tapping into alternative sources of liquefied natural gas (LNG) while “align[ing] with climate objectives” and reducing overall demand for fossil fuels. The plan calls for making an additional 15 billion cubic metres of LNG available for Europe in 2022, but does not specify from where the additional supply would come.

• The Islamic State claimed responsibility on Sunday for a shooting attack in Hadera, Israel, earlier in the day in which two militants killed two Israeli border police officers and injured more than 10 other people, including civilians.

• Sen. Joe Manchin announced Friday he intends to support Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court, all but assuring the federal judge will be confirmed in the coming days. To date, no Senate Democrats have said they will vote against Jackson’s confirmation, while no Senate Republicans have said definitively that they will support it.

• The Supreme Court announced that Justice Clarence Thomas was discharged from the hospital on Friday, one week after he was admitted with flu-like symptoms.

• Rep. Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska announced Saturday—two days after he was found guilty of lying to federal authorities investigating illegal donations to his reelection campaign—that he will resign from Congress effective March 31. The Republican—first elected in 2004—said he plans to appeal the conviction.

• CODA—the English-language remake of the 2014 French film La Famille Bélier about a child of deaf adults—won Best Picture at the Academy Awards on Sunday, becoming the first streaming-service movie to do so. Troy Kotsur became the first deaf man to win an Oscar for his supporting role in the same film.

Biden’s Gaffe Heard ‘Round the World

After nearly half a century in public office, President Joe Biden has made more than his fair share of verbal slip-ups. From the “slight Indian accent” incident, to the “you ain’t black” fiasco, to “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids,” even Biden himself has admitted to being a “gaffe machine.” But typically, the fallout for his errant comments is political, not nuclear.

Wrapping up his four-day swing through Belgium and Poland, Biden delivered a 30-minute address in Warsaw outlining the struggle between democracy and autocracy, detailing the next phase of NATO and the United States’ response to Russia’s continued invasion of Ukraine, and condemning the “brutality” of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Then he went off-script.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden concluded. His audience—comprised primarily of Polish dignitaries and lawmakers—responded with tepid applause, unclear if they had just witnessed the president of the United States calling for regime change in Moscow.

Less than an hour later, Biden’s staff tried to make clear that was not what had just transpired. “The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” read a statement blasted out to reporters and attributed only to a White House official. “He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”

The administration and its allies sought to drill this point home on Sunday. At a press conference in Israel, Secretary of State Antony Blinken maintained that Biden’s point was simply that Putin can’t “be empowered to wage war or engage in aggression against Ukraine or anyone else.” Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told CNN “the U.S. does not have a policy of regime change in Russia, full stop.” On Fox News Sunday, Rep. Ro Khanna of California pledged there’s “no support in the Democratic Congress for regime change.” Leaving church last night, Biden himself responded “no” when asked by a reporter if he meant what he had fairly unambiguously said one day earlier.

But the damage was done. “The White House walk back of [Biden’s] regime change call is unlikely to wash,” Richard Haass—president of the Council on Foreign Relations—said over the weekend. “Putin will see it as confirmation of what he’s believed all along. Bad lapse in discipline that runs [the] risk of extending the scope and duration of the war.”

Sen. Jim Risch—the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—argued the ad-lib marred what was otherwise a “good” speech from Biden. “Whoever wrote that speech did a good job for him. But, my gosh, I wish they would keep him on script,” he said Sunday. “This administration has done everything they can to stop escalating. There’s not a whole lot more you can do to escalate than to call for regime change.”

The remarks—which came just 24 hours after Russian officials appeared to be narrowing their war aims to Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region—also rattled some of Biden’s allies across the pond. “I wouldn’t use this type of wording because I continue to hold discussions with President Putin,” French President Emmanuel Macron told a TV station. “We want to stop the war that Russia has launched in Ukraine without escalation—that’s the objective. … We can’t escalate either in words or actions.”

The Kremlin, for its part, was uncharacteristically restrained in its response. “That’s not for Biden to decide,” Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Reuters. “The president of Russia is elected by Russians.” The latter half of that statement would certainly earn a “missing important context” designation in a Dispatch Fact Check, but Putin has been accusing the United States of seeking to undermine him for over a decade. And Sen. Lindsey Graham’s comments earlier this month—“the only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out”—likely did little to assuage Putin’s paranoia. Biden’s offhand remark—which came after he labeled his counterpart a “war criminal” and “butcher”—could lead the Russian president to behave even more rashly.

Ironically, the Biden administration has repeatedly brought up concerns about raising tensions when pushed by more hawkish lawmakers to do more for Ukraine, like transfer military aircraft or share real-time intelligence. One of the main thrusts of Biden’s speech on Saturday was that the West was not seeking to escalate the situation further, reiterating that American troops stationed in Europe are there solely to defend NATO allies. “The Kremlin wants to portray NATO enlargement as an imperial project aimed at destabilizing Russia,” he said. “Nothing is further from the truth. NATO is a defensive alliance, it has never sought the demise of Russia.”

But Biden spent the hours leading up to the speech meeting with Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw, and—ill-advised as they may have been—it’s easy to see how he blurted something out in emotion. The United Nations now pegs the low-end estimate of Ukrainian civilian casualties in Putin’s war at nearly 3,000—including more than 1,100 dead—and the fighting has forced more than 3.8 million people to flee their home country.

“He went to the National Stadium in Warsaw and literally met with hundreds of Ukrainians,” Smith, the U.S. Ambassador to NATO, said when asked to explain Biden’s comments. “He heard their heroic stories as they were fleeing Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine. In the moment, I think that was a principled human reaction to the stories that he had heard that day.”

Threatening regime change, however, does nothing to aid that suffering—and increases the likelihood of a miscalculation that could lead to a lot more of it. It would appear even White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain agrees: On Sunday night, he retweeted an article that described Biden’s ad-lib as a “significant lapse in discipline” in an otherwise sound strategy aimed at avoiding military escalation.

David Perdue Banks on a Trump Bump in Georgia

Andrew was back in the Peach State over the weekend staking out one of the most important Republican primaries of the 2022 cycle: The gubernatorial race between incumbent Brian Kemp and former Sen. David Perdue. 

Donald Trump descended upon Commerce, Georgia, on Saturday to stump for the latter candidate, who has gone all-in on the former president’s election conspiracies. Andrew details the event with his trademark style in a piece for the site. 

For Trump, the 2022 midterms are about one thing: punishing Republicans who failed to support his claims of a stolen election when he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.

And Kemp—who despite Trump’s 2018 endorsement declined to involve himself in Trump’s efforts to overturn Biden’s win in Georgia—may be enemy number one.

Trump has therefore selected Perdue as his instrument of vengeance, and in return Perdue has lashed himself more completely than ever to Trump’s stolen-election lies. In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, when Perdue was forced into a runoff election he would ultimately lose to Democrat Jon Ossoff, he drew scattered boos at a November rally with then-Vice President Mike Pence when he referenced something “President Biden” would do—before an audience that was anything but convinced Biden would be inaugurated president at all. In the face of a “Stop the steal!” chant, Perdue uncomfortably suggested that “what we have to do right now is hold the line.”

No such waffling now. In fact, Perdue has recently begun to claim that his own election victory was stolen in addition to Trump’s. “Let me be very clear,” Perdue says at the Commerce rally. “In the state of Georgia, thanks to Brian Kemp, our elections were absolutely stolen.”

Since Perdue jumped into the governor’s race last year, he has consistently trailed Kemp in fundraising and in the polls. 

This has permitted Kemp to largely ignore Perdue thus far, focusing in speeches on the ultimate threat of Stacey Abrams, who is running unopposed in the Democratic primary. But with a significant number of Republicans still unaware Trump is backing his candidacy, Perdue’s hoping that events like Saturday’s will give him the boost he needs to get over the top.

During his presidency, it wasn’t uncommon for Trump to show up at an event with a candidate he was endorsing and reel through nearly his entire speech before remembering to say a few nice words about the candidate at the end. Not so here.

“That’s a big crowd of people,” Trump says out of the gate, “and they love David Perdue.” And for the next 15 minutes, it’s one unbroken diatribe against the governor: “Before we can defeat the Democrat socialists and communists, which is exactly what we’re running against at the ballot box this fall, we first have to defeat the RINO sellouts and the losers in the primaries this spring.”

“If there’s one thing the people of Georgia need to know about this race, it’s that Brian Kemp, he sold you out,” Trump says. “He didn’t look, he didn’t wanna look. He didn’t want anything to do with it.” More: “Brian Kemp is a turncoat. He’s a coward and he’s a complete and total disaster.”

You get the idea. The problem with Trump’s diatribe is that, basically any time it turned to particulars of what Kemp had supposedly done, it was pretty much nonsense. Take his dismissal of SB 202, the elections law Georgia Republicans passed and Kemp signed over fierce Democratic opposition last year. “You don’t have a strong bill—you don’t even have signature verification,” Trump sneers. “I don’t know if you know that—wouldn’t it be nice to have signature verification on an election bill? But you don’t have it because of Brian Kemp.”

This is a funhouse mirror distortion of what the relevant provision of SB 202 actually did, which was replace the labor-intensive signature-matching process for absentee ballots with a new absentee voter ID system—a change, in other words, that made absentee voting more secure. Georgia elections official Gabe Sterling explained the change to The Dispatch more than a year ago: “A signature is a subjective thing. We’re trying to get to where there’s objective measurements that are easier for our county elections officials to train and execute. It’s easier to train the $10-an-hour temp employee to say, does this number match this number, than does this loop on the beginning of a cursive thing—now being done less with ink and pen and more on a digital pad—match this other one you’re now seeing with ink and pen?”

Of course, Trump’s point isn’t to pin Kemp down on particular weaknesses of his election policy—it’s to brand him an enemy of the MAGA agenda for failing to bend the knee. The big question: Will enough voters buy it?

Worth Your Time

• Ross Douthat’s Sunday column laments the decline of the Academy Awards—and movies as a whole. “The Oscars are declining because the movies they were made to showcase have been slowly disappearing,” he argues. “The ideal Oscar nominee is a high-middlebrow movie, aspiring to real artistry and sometimes achieving it, that’s made to be watched on the big screen, with famous stars, vivid cinematography and a memorable score. … This year’s nominees offer their share of famous actors, major directors and classic Hollywood genres. And yet, for all of that, almost nobody went to see them in the theaters. When the nominees were announced in February, nine of the 10 had made less than $40 million in domestic box office. The only exception, ‘Dune,’ barely exceeded $100 million domestically, making it the 13th-highest-grossing movie of 2021. All told, the 10 nominees together have earned barely one-fourth as much at the domestic box office as ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home.’ Even when Hollywood tries to conjure the old magic, in other words, the public isn’t there for it anymore.”

• In an effort to address his constituents’ discontent with sky-high gas prices, Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed issuing $400 payments to Californians per each car or truck they own, capped at two vehicles. But as Phil Klein points out in National Review, that move—if enacted—would do little to address the underlying problem, and likely make it worse. “It won’t do anything to actually address higher gas prices, and it would likely trigger price hikes by flooding the system with more cash, increasing the ability of individuals to pay, and thus increasing demand relative to supply,” he writes. “The current inflation crisis has been fueled by a combination of runaway national debt, a lax monetary policy by the Federal Reserve, and a historically unique disruption to the normal functioning system of supply and demand that works to keep prices stable. Throwing more money at the problem is not actually going to solve the problem — it will only make it worse.”

• In his latest newsletter, John McWhorter—a linguist and a black man—argues terms like “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) and “Latinx” serve a purpose, as long as those who use them recognize them as academic jargon and don’t try to force them on the general population. “Too often, we take terminology proposals from academics and journalists as if we will henceforth be penalized—even if only socially—for going against their prescriptions. But their suggestions do not automatically affect language as it is used by ordinary people making themselves understood casually and comfortably,” he notes. “It can seem that way because academics and journalists do a disproportionate amount of public writing and talking. For example, I suspect that normal people will continue saying ‘master bedroom’; I certainly will. Thus, there is no need to bristle at the proliferation of ‘BIPOC’ as some kind of glowering fiat. Very few BIPOCs use it, and as Amy Harmon reported last year for The Times, in one national poll, ‘more than twice as many white Democrats said they felt ‘very favorably’ toward ‘BIPOC’ as Americans who identify as any of the nonwhite racial categories it encompasses.’ And that is unlikely to change. Again, this doesn’t mean ‘BIPOC’ is a failed term. It has simply become part of a burgeoning register of English favored primarily by certain professors and political activists.”

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• In addition to Andrew’s piece on the site today, Chris Stirewalt looks at Biden’s sagging favorability numbers—which so far have seen little “rally round the flag” lift from Russia’s war on Ukraine—and looks ahead to the possibility of the 2024 election being a reprise of 2016, a contest between the two most unpopular major-party nominees in recent political history. And Andrew Fink examines some worrying signals of growing Russian saber-rattling against Poland.

• Last week’s second Uphill (🔒) touches on the Senate’s efforts to target Russian exports—and the procedural hangups keeping the legislation from passing. “The executive branch would like more power to impose human rights sanctions around the world, without the threat of expiration every few years,” Haley writes. “Some members of Congress, fearing the potential for overreach, do not want to give more power to the president.”

• On Friday’s Dispatch Podcast, Jonah, David, and Andrew chat about Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, the latest developments out of Ukraine, Ginni Thomas’ texts to Mark Meadows, and Donald Trump’s endorsement takeback in Alabama.

• Jonah’s Friday G-File (🔒) focuses on Compact, the new post-liberal publication from Sohrab Ahmari, Edwin Aponte, and Matthew Schmitz. “Compact bills itself as a ‘radical American journal,’” Jonah notes. “Where, exactly, is the ‘American’ here?” 

• In his Sunday French Press, David argues the mere presence of Christians at the highest level of our politics is not enough to ensure virtuous governance. “While some of the most important fights for justice have been led by Christians—including the civil rights and pro-life movements—some of the most destructive political and cultural forces have been loudly and proudly led by Christians as well,” he writes.

Let Us Know

If this newsletter is your first foray into the internet since Sunday afternoon, Will Smith set it ablaze last night by slapping Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars after the comedian made a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, and her alopecia-induced hair loss.

Though the quip may have been in poor taste, Smith clearly overreacted—particularly given the setting. But his behavior was far from unprecedented; former President Andrew Jackson, for example, killed a man in an 1806 duel for calling him a coward and insulting his wife.

In your view, are there ever any situations in which physical violence is an appropriate response to someone’s words? How should Smith have responded?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@lawsonreports), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).