Welcome back, everybody, to What Really Matters. I'm Jeremy Stern with you in Los Angeles. I'm here as always with Walter Russell Mead of Tablet, The Wall Street Journal, Hudson Institute, and the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida. Let's start with this week's news. First story of the week: following Donald Trump's executive order to declassify all remaining documents related to the assassination of JFK over 60 years ago, the FBI has uncovered 2,400 records related to the murder, first reported by Axios. The existence of the documents was reported to the White House last Friday. The nonprofit Mary Ferrell Foundation, the country's largest source of Kennedy records online, said the announcement is huge and proves that the FBI is taking Trump's order seriously. Despite that enthusiasm, Axios claimed that the records are unlikely to prove whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone wolf. Walter, news or faux news?
That sounds like almost the definition of faux news: a bunch of secret records discovered that don't change our understanding of what happened. You know, I mean, I don't know, 2,400 files, you know, records, what does that include? Like expense allowances, you know, forms for various Dallas cops? I have no idea what's in there, obviously. But if the people who are in the know don't think it's going to change our perception of what happened, but it sounds like faux news to me. In the kind of canon of American conspiracy theories, including, you know, did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing in a studio? Or I guess the kind of foundational one was: did King George actually engage in a dark plot to crush our liberties? I guess on the spectrum from demonstrably nonsense to there are real and important questions here, where do you rate the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission? It does, at least from what I can tell, have both insane and some sane people, unlike some of our other great national conspiracy theories. You know, there are a lot of historical events that we may never fully understand. This could well be one of them. I have to say I'm one of maybe a minority of Americans who has never delved deeply into this. I did go so far as once to watch that Oliver Stone movie, JFK, and that pretty much made me feel like, okay, there may be a conspiracy here, but Oliver Stone has no idea what it is. There were so many levels of just where his story seemed so much less credible than the Warren Commission story. So I just, I honestly don't know, and I'm not sure that we ever will know. At a certain point you get so many, you know, so many interpretations, so many records, so many eyewitnesses, whatever. If anything, probably the most plausible reason, you know, you have to ask why. Why would the government cover it up? You know, what on Earth, you know, could be so terrible that a 60-year, you know, stew of conspiracy theories and putting out the fake Warren report or whatever, that that was somehow better than revealing the horrible truth? What was the horrible truth? The only one I can think of, and this may just show the limits of my imagination, would be that they really didn't want to show that what happened was that Fidel Castro got sick of Kennedy trying to assassinate him and so acted preemptively to lay down a marker. And people wouldn't have wanted that to come out, especially not at the time, because, you know, this was just, what, 13 months after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cold War was really at its peak. Would this have caused some kind of unstoppable demand for an invasion of Cuba, etc., etc., etc.? That's the only thing I can think of that would have led those people to try to do that thing. But like I say, we'll, you know, if there's anything more, we'll find out, and I'll be as interested as everybody else. But what I also felt, I felt really pretty much since about 1965 when I first started to think about this, you know, did it happen in the way they describe, was I'm actually not sure that my life would change all that much if it turns out that it was two people and there was a grassy knoll involved or whatever. What difference does it make? I'm not sure it makes very much at this point, especially.
All right, our second story: a federal judge temporarily blocked Elon Musk's government efficiency team from accessing government systems to use to process trillions of dollars in payments, citing a risk that sensitive information could be improperly disclosed. The US District Judge in Manhattan issued the order after a coalition of Democratic attorneys general from 19 US states filed the lawsuit, arguing Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has no legal power to access Treasury Department systems. Hours after it was issued, Musk called it absolutely insane and said the Treasury Department and DOGE had already agreed to require all outgoing government payments to include a rationale in the form of a comment and to have a categorization code. Walter, news or faux news?
Bit of both, I think. The injunction is probably faux news in the sense that, you know, if 19 attorneys general don't know how to forum shop and find a judge who will give them a temporary injunction, then our state attorneys general are just not doing their job. So, you know, whether this predicts a final legal outcome on this, it seems unlikely to me. The other thing is, last I heard, both the Treasury Department and DOGE reported to the same guy. His name was Donald Trump. And, you know, if it does turn out that there is some sort of bureaucratic issue and maybe, who knows, some convoluted statute somewhere actually does say, you know, you have to jump through these seven hoops before you can do it, I just wouldn't be terribly surprised if Donald Trump ordered the Treasury officials to jump through those seven hoops hand in hand with the DOGE people. So this feels more like delaying tactics and political theater than a sort of substantive change in what's been going on. I have to say, a lot of people have tried to use the courts to stop Donald Trump, both when he was in the White House the first time and then in the four years when he wasn't. I mean, you know, convicted of felonies, they had him indicted all over the place. None of it seems to have had a whole lot of impact. So I am not convinced that this particular legal strategy is going to be more effective than any one of the others. You get the feeling sometimes it's people just throwing spaghetti at the wall, throwing rits at the wall, hoping that one of them is going to work somewhere. A week from now we may say, wow, they stopped it. But so far, as far as I can tell, what they've done is sprinkled a little sand in the gears, but the process looks set to move ahead at some point.
There's been a big debate this week, real or imagined, about whether we're in a full-blown constitutional crisis three weeks into Trump's second term. People really seized on a tweet from JD Vance in particular to the effect that judges are not allowed to control legitimate executive power. Where do you fall on this debate about presidential authority?
As far as I can see, and, you know, I won't claim to have followed every twist and turn of the story, but from what I can see, as just your ordinary reader of papers or scanner of pixels, I don't know, maybe we should change that old newsprint expression now. I haven't seen a case where a judge has issued an order and the Trump administration has refused to obey it. I see plenty of cases where judges have issued orders and various officials in the Trump administration have said really nasty things about the order and occasionally even about the judge who gave the order. But so far that doesn't look to be particularly different from some of the things President Biden said at various points about judges who fail to see the law his way. So, you know, I think we'd only get to a constitutional crisis of the kind people are describing after a fairly lengthy process of appeals, attempts to compromise, and so on and so on finally winds its way up to the Supreme Court, slowly or quickly, maybe they find a fast track, Supreme Court rules, then you have the potential for a constitutional crisis. But we're not there yet. You know, I understand it's a very real fear that people have that we might actually get to that point and Trump would cross the Rubicon. But as far as I can tell, we're still several days' march from the Rubicon, and I'm going to wait till we get there before, you know, trying to pontificate about the end of the Republic.
All right, final story of the week: a late 2024 survey of nearly 130,000 registered voters conducted by the Democratic polling firm Blue Rose Research showed that anti-Semitic attitudes are far more prevalent among young Americans than older Americans. The survey results showed that 18-year-olds are about five times more likely to have, quote, explicit anti-Semitic attitudes than 65-year-olds. While the poll shows that young Trump supporters were on average a few points more anti-Semitic than young Kamala Harris supporters, David Shor, the firm's head of data science, said that according to data from the 2024 American National Election Study survey, self-described moderate voters of all ages were more likely to report, quote, cold feelings toward Jews than either liberals or conservatives. Walter, news or faux news?
