Political Asylum And They’re Off! Plus: congressional senescence and assassinations. Nobody knows more about horse racing than Donald J. Trump, so it’s a little surprising he didn’t tell us who was going to win the Kentucky Derby on Saturday. Maybe he knew and, not wanting to skew the odds, he placed a discreet bet—nobody knows more about discretion than Trump does—and quietly went to the window and collected his winnings. That I could understand. Why he hasn’t crowed about it ever, of course, remains a mystery.  The truly sad thing about Derby Day, though, is that because Trump doesn’t drink, he’s missing most of the fun. Even if he wins, there’s a sense in which he loses. The first Saturday in May, for those of us who love the so-called Sport of Kings, is that wonderful moment when we enjoy the first mint julep of the season. For some of us, it is the only mint julep we’ll have all year. That’s why, as the post parade begins, we gratefully accept our second Mint Julep and maybe, if we are especially fortunate, our third or fourth.  Kentucky claims to have invented this bourbon-based boon to mankind. That’s why they are such a big deal at Churchill Downs and with those of us able only to watch the festivities on TV. Whatever their origins, we approach these concoctions with well-deserved respect.  Mint is a weed of course, almost impossible to eradicate from a garden. But on Derby Day mint takes on the status of a rare and costly hothouse flower. Its leaves are to be muddled, not crushed, and those who don’t know the difference can never regain the reputation they might previously have enjoyed. Brits have always been snooty about American drinking habits—about almost anything American, of course. Americans can be snooty, too, of course, on important matters such as whether to muddle mint leaves or crush them. As for British condescension, way back in 1849, Francis Trollope of Domestic Manners of the Americans fame made what must have been a painful admission. Yes, the mint julep was another example of our country’s boorishness, she wrote, but “it would, I truly believe, be utterly impossible for the art of man to administer anything so likely to restore them from the overwhelming effects of heat and fatigue” as these mint juleps. (This is something to remember come June, when the Belmont Stakes is run.) The late Roger Scruton, a philosophe of impeccably conservative credentials, has carried forward the proud British tradition of condescension toward Americans’ boozing habits, with particularly sniffish treatment of bourbon.  Bourbon, Scruton wrote in I Drink, Therefore I Am, is “a refuge for the American soul, to be understood not as a drink but as a ‘shot,’ injected through the mouth into the stomach.” Scruton’s claim that a cocktail, in which bourbon “is stirred with kitsch ingredients,” is a sad response to “the deep loneliness of America,” shows how little he understood, at least on this subject.  To his credit (the horses are now being loaded into the starting gate), Trump has announced that he is removing tariffs to make it easier for Kentucky’s distillers to ship their used bourbon barrels to Scotland. How presidents got the power to do this kind of thing unilaterally requires some explaining, of course, and justification.  The teetotaling President made this commendable move, he said, in time for this year’s Derby and to mark King Charles III and Queen Camilla’s visit. A spokesman for Kentucky distillers called the action “welcome news for our [state’s] signature industry’s efforts to share America’s only native spirit with enthusiasts around the world.” (“And they’re off!”) It’s too bad for everybody, of course, that the current occupant of the Oval Office doesn’t occasionally partake of Kentucky bourbon himself. There’s the obligatory mint julep on Derby Day, as mentioned, and when autumn returns, there’s nothing quite like an old fashioned to greet the season of “mists and mellow fruitfulness.” This president could use some mellow fruitfulness, it seems clear. He’s always in a rage about something or someone, and if he chilled out once in a while, nobody could do it better. Nobody. Everyone would tell him, “Sir, no one can chill out better than you can—nobody in the history of this great country, as much of a laughingstock as it has become under previous administrations.”  Oh, yeah—the Derby. Who was it that won, again? The fact that our elected representatives in Washington are getting older and older—and dying on the job—calls to mind the exchange between a young boy and the legendary jockey Johnny Longden, who was still racing in his late 50s. The boy asked Longden if he was on Noah’s Ark. When Longden said, “Of course not,” the boy asked, “Then how come you weren’t drowned?” The death in late April of Georgia’s Rep. David Scott is no laughing matter, of course, but a cause of some concern. At 80, Scott, a Democrat, was the fifth member of the 119th Congress to expire while in office. That compares to four during the 118th congressional session, and six during the 117th. Records keep getting toppled. From 2003 to 2013, Sarah Fortinsky reports in The Hill, “each session saw a maximum of one member die, with the 110th Congress a notable outlier at eight.” The 119th “is one of the oldest on record,” Fortinsky tells us, though this would seem almost obvious to anyone not in a retirement home already. The octogenarian Mitch McConnell’s lapses have been impossible to miss, but the Kentucky senator remains in office. California’s Dianne Feinstein “served until the day she died at 90 in 2023, despite taking a three-month medical hiatus amid mounting concerns about her mental capacities.” There’s really only one rational response to all this: Anyone who isn’t concerned about the mental capacities of our elected representatives these days should have his head examined.  Is it too much to ask why leading Democrats aren’t erupting in righteous indignation over attempts to assassinate the president and telling their people to stop it? Isn’t political violence something they say they’re against? They aren’t even ramping up their demands for even stiffer gun control laws. Maybe we should ask the president what is going on here. Nobody knows more about hypocrisy than he does.  The post And They’re Off! appeared first on The American Conservative.

UK Special Coverage The Teal Tide Washes Over Britain Local elections show Reform surging and the establishment parties receding. UK Special Coverage (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) This week’s English local elections are nothing short of revolutionary. The right-populist Reform UK has not simply gained ground in the Labour Party’s former heartlands—it is swallowing them up wholesale. The populist juggernaut is routing the mainstream, establishment parties.  In normal times, most people in the UK would pay very little attention to their local-council elections. Turnout tends to be embarrassingly low. Debates tend to focus on subjects as riveting as refuse collection and traffic-calming measures. Indeed, the phrase “historic local elections” would once have sounded like an oxymoron. But these are not normal times. In these elections, we can see the crumbling of the old Labour–Tory duopoly. And in its place, a surging Reform and, to a lesser extent, the Green Party and assorted Islamic independents.  English local elections are often compared to U.S. midterms, in that they’re an important gauge of the national mood and that incumbents tend to do badly. Certainly, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s press team are spinning that governments always fare badly a few years into their terms, but they can still go on to be reelected. But this is nonsense. Starmer’s Labour has endured the worst performance in local elections in the past 30 years. As results continue to come in, Starmer’s party is losing half of the seats it’s defending. This is almost, but not quite, the worst-ever rate of loss for a governing party. That dishonour belongs to, er, Starmer’s Labour Party, which performed slightly worse in the local elections in May 2025. These elections, unlike U.S. midterms, do not change the balance of power in the House of Commons. But they will certainly increase the volume of the calls on Starmer to resign from within his own party. These demands had already become deafening in the wake of the Peter Mandelson scandal, in which the PM appointed a known associate of Jeffrey Epstein as the UK’s ambassador to Washington. This, coupled with Starmer’s unprecedentedly poor approval ratings and his astonishing lack of achievements in office, had effectively sealed his fate. If the Labour Party has any sense (though I see no evidence that it does), these local elections ought to be the final nail in Starmer’s coffin. Of course, what really makes these elections historic is not just that a poor prime minister and his hated party have received a drubbing. What matters most is where voters are flocking—namely, towards Reform.  Ironically, some of Labour’s most devastating losses have been in the party’s traditional, working-class northern heartlands. Almost every seat contested in councils like Hartlepool in the north east, and Tameside and Wigan in Greater Manchester (both held by Labour for half a century), has fallen to Reform. The so-called red wall of formerly ultra-safe Labour seats has been washed away by the teal tide. Labour is also vulnerable on its left flank. Although the Green Party seems so far to have underperformed the media’s expectations (or wishful thinking), it has undeniably done serious damage to Labour in urban areas populated by students and especially those with large Muslim areas. “Palestine is on the ballot,” declared the Green leader Zack Polanski, in a not-so-subtle bid to court the Islamic sectarian vote. Unsurprisingly, there are many socially conservative British Muslims who do not see eye to eye with the Greens on a host of social issues. Polanski’s party is a big believer in trans ideology, in legalizing all drugs, and decriminalizing sex work. In Birmingham, Britain’s second city, candidates calling themselves “Muslim independents” ran directly in opposition to the “gay” Green Party. After decades of multiculturalism and failed integration, voting now takes the form of an ethnic headcount. Northern Ireland–style sectarianism has reached the British mainland. What these elections ultimately reveal is a Britain in the midst of a fundamental political realignment—one that is easily as significant as the rise of Labour itself a century ago. The old certainties are gone. The two-party system that defined British democracy for generations has been irreparably shattered. The teal tide is not receding. The post The Teal Tide Washes Over Britain appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs No, Russia Isn’t Finished To make Moscow less threatening, the West should threaten Moscow less. If you were exclusively on a mainstream Western media diet in recent weeks, you’d be excused for thinking that the Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime now lies on its deathbed. Signs of “public discontent” are all over the place, you see. Silicon-lipped beauty blogger Viktoria Bonya attacked the government on YouTube. So did the notorious Kremlin propagandist Ilya Remeslo, fresh from a stint at a psychiatric ward. Meanwhile, the former defense minister Sergey Shoygu might be plotting a coup, according to CNN. But if you talk to people inside Russia, as this author does on a daily basis, you’ll find them perplexed and doubting the West’s sanity upon hearing about this fresh bout of “Russia is finished” sentiments. Pretty much all of my interlocutors are strongly anti-Putin and antiwar. In my intelligentsia circle, you need to walk miles to find anyone pro. People do complain about the ongoing economic slowdown, pointing to the closure of some of their favorite small businesses, like boutique fashion brands that had only recently emerged. They are aghast at the Russian government’s (so-far unsuccessful) attacks on popular messaging services and perturbed by mobile internet interruptions in the center of Moscow caused by the Ukrainian drone threat.  But unlike Ukrainians, who live in constant fear of Russian strikes and of press gangs roaming the streets in search of fresh recruits, people in Russia are still enjoying much the same kind of lives as before the war, with living standards comparable to poorer EU member countries (check IMF’s GDP PPP charts). More than anything, Russians of all political convictions are flabbergasted by the onslaught of irrationally xenophobic and jingoistic pro-Ukrainian propaganda they subject themselves to whenever they turn on their VPNs and check feeds on X and Facebook. What Western government-backed online mobs like NAFO mostly achieve is confirming the Kremlin’s narratives about the West’s inherent hatred of Russia and intent to wipe it off the face of Earth. Clearly, those Western politicians and opinion makers—like former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson—who believed that a proxy war against Russia (in Johnson’s own terminology) would upend Putin’s regime were badly wrong and succeeded only in pushing Ukraine under a Russian bulldozer. So, what would it really take to change Russia for the better? As an 18-year-old student in 1991, I took part in overthrowing a political regime in Russia. I joined the defense of the White House—the one in Moscow, not Washington, and the seat of Boris Yeltsin’s government at the time—against the coup by hardline Soviet civilian and military leaders. Our victory resulted in the collapse of the communist system and subsequently of the USSR. The events were driven by public euphoria, particularly on the issue of independence movements in Soviet republics. To give an idea, one of the largest Moscow rallies of 1991—and arguably in the history of Russia—was in support of Baltic independence. As for Ukraine and Belarus, they appeared to us too stubbornly Soviet for refusing to go along with shock therapy reforms which Yeltsin’s government embarked on first thing after dissolving the USSR.  The mass uprisings and burst of optimism became possible for one reason: While Soviet people of 1991 had many realistic fears, including economic collapse, military dictatorship, and Yugoslav-styled civil war, the last thing they feared was the West. Opposite from terrifying, the West was a beacon of hope, if not a freshly adopted political religion. This effect wasn’t achieved by the U.S. funding Osama bin Laden when he helped Afghan Mujahideen fight the Soviets, nor by the Iran-Contra affair, nor by propping up Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile or fighting Vietcong.  Rather, it was attained through soft power—music, films, quality goods, enviable lifestyles, and an effort by a myriad of Americans and Europeans, often on the left-wing and antiwar side of the aisle—to build bridges and friendships with us, Soviet people. What we saw through our rose-tinted glasses at the time was the West of “We Are the World,” of U2’s album The Joshua Tree, and of transcontinental U.S.-Soviet “TV bridges” hosted by Phil Donahue and Vladimir Pozner. When the Soviet system collapsed, we definitely didn’t feel defeated, no matter what America’s Cold War hawks said at the time. Instead, there was a sense of victory, achieved jointly with the West. That sentiment changed radically by the end of the 1990s when economic hardships and domestic security threats sobered people up, while the West had firmly adopted a policy of radical eastward expansion explicitly aimed at isolating and containing, rather than integrating, Russia (read Mary Sarote’s Not One Inch for details).  In 1999, NATO’s bombardment of Yugoslavia prompted Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov to write an op-ed which opened with the latest polling data: 64 percent of Russians now feared NATO and 70 percent believed the attack on Belgrade posed a direct security risk to Russia. Luzhkov, then seen as a presidential hopeful, pointed out that NATO’s expansion and its rising appetite for war were encouraging “sieged fortress” sentiments in Russian society that could lead to self-isolation. He called for social mobilization to overcome the deep economic crisis that dogged Russia throughout that decade and “to revive a strong Russia.” Although his views at the time were moderately pro-Western, Luzhkov was pictured by Western and Russian media alike as a Communist revanche figure. He was eventually forced out of the race in favor of a little-known intelligence officer chosen as a successor by Boris Yeltsin’s family and preferred by the West—Vladimir Putin. But Luzhkov’s words turned out to be prescient. The reason these warnings from him and a plethora of Western dignitaries, like U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, were ignored is a certain Western delusion best captured by a cover headline in the Atlantic from 2001, one year into Putin’s presidency: “Russia is finished.” That arrogant sentiment informed many ill-fated decisions—Ukraine’s and Georgia’s invitation into NATO at the Bucharest summit in 2008, the endorsement of a forced removal of a democratically elected Ukrainian president at the end of Euromaidan revolution in 2014, and the aggressive crossing of Putin’s red lines in the run-up to Russia’s all-out invasion in Ukraine in 2022. Fast forward to 2026 and Russia feels less “finished” than ever. Instead, it has evolved into a tech-savvy 21st-century autocracy with a highly modernized war economy. It has successfully adapted to a conflict in which it sees itself as an underdog confronting the mighty Western military industrial machine, which makes it not too concerned about inevitable setbacks. Most importantly, every alternative to Putin seems to pose risks of civil war and state collapse. To be sure, the country is going through what every Russian would admit to be a difficult period, but Putin’s Russia is showing far fewer “cracks in the regime” than the U.S.-led West, currently torn between Trump-style right-populism and Biden-style left-liberalism. As the Atlantic’s “Russia is finished” cover turns 25 this month, there is a nagging feeling that it is the West’s own hostility and appetite for conflict which has been the main factor in the rise of Russia’s high-end, 21st-century authoritarianism. Conversely, it is a return to the era of detente and soft power which could reverse this trend and change Russia for the better. But how many Ukrainians and Russians need to die in a senseless and avoidable war to prove the obvious? The post No, Russia Isn’t Finished appeared first on The American Conservative.

The CCP Doesn’t Need a Spy – It Just Needs Your Continuous Glucose Monitor