Trump Praises Hamas’s Host

Plus, 315,126 applications for 2,700 Goldman Sachs internships

Trump called the emir of Qatar “a great and powerful leader.”

President Trump says the emir of Qatar and the prime minister of Qatar recently stopped by Palm Beach to visit him.

“It was great seeing my friends His Highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Amir of Qatar and His Excellency Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, Prime Minister of Qatar at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida,” Trump said in a Sunday, September 22, 2024 social media post that has so far attracted minimal notice. “The Amir has proven to be a great and powerful leader of his country, advancing on all levels at record speed. He is someone also who strongly wants peace in the Middle East, and all over the world. We had a great relationship during my years in the White House, and it will be even stronger this time around!”

Qatar, unlike its Gulf neighbors Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, is not a member of the Abraham Accords with Israel. It has been hosting some of the leadership of Hamas. Bloomberg estimates the ruling Al-Thani family’s wealth at $150 billion separate from Qatari government assets such as a $450 billion sovereign wealth fund. Bloomberg also reports that “Qatar has given American universities almost $6 billion, vastly more than any other country, according to a Bloomberg analysis of US Department of Education data. Cornell University, which opened an outpost of its medical school in Doha, was the biggest recipient, disclosing almost $2 billion in gifts.”

Maybe Trump is working on some sort of deal to add Qatar to the Abraham Accords and combat the influence of Iran. Maybe he’s trying to negotiate a hostage deal and ceasefire with Hamas, or prevent one, to outmaneuver the Biden-Harris administration. Maybe he’s just information-gathering so that he can hit the ground running if he wins the election. Maybe he’s trying to pump up the value of DJT stock. Whatever the objective, the fulsome praise of an undemocratic leader who is hosting terrorists is cringe-worthy. 

I do not much believe one of the central Democratic Party accusations against Trump, which is that he intends to end democracy in America and install himself as a dictator. Yet when Trump goes around lavishing praise on undemocratic leaders of other countries after private meetings with them, it only reinforces the impression that he doesn’t care much about freedom or democracy. If you’re wondering about Qatar, the Freedom House country report—“Not Free”—and the State Department’s human rights report — “The law prohibited criticism of the emir”—are useful sources of information. When Trump says the emir of Qatar has been “advancing on all levels at record speed,” he’s overlooking the levels of freedom and democracy. On those levels, Qatar is a laggard.

Democrats want to bring back housing projects: Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, both Democrats, have an opinion piece in the New York Times calling for government-owned land and apartments instead of “corporate landlords.”

“Instead of treating real estate as a commodity, we can underwrite the construction of millions of homes and apartments that, by law, must remain affordable,” they write. “Because we believe that housing is a human right, like food or health care, we believe that more Americans deserve the option of social housing…We can’t wait for the private market alone to solve the housing crisis.” 

“Our bill would also invest in public housing and repeal the Faircloth Amendment, which prevents the construction of new public housing,” they write.

An Ocasio-Cortez measure to repeal the Faircloth Amendment passed the House in July 2020 but did not make it into law.

Smith’s Senate version of the “Homes Act,” S. 5078, has backing from Senators Welch and Merkley, while the Ocasio-Cortez House version, H.R. 9662, has 37 cosponsors that include a collection of the far-left Democrats—Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Summer Lee, James McGovern, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar.  All three Democratic members with the last name Garcia—Chuy Garcia of Illinois, Sylvia Garcia of Texas, and Robert Garcia of California—are sponsors.

An Ocasio-Cortez press release announcing the legislation describes it as spending “$300 billion over the next decade” via “$30 billion in annual appropriations.” It says the bill is backed by the American Federation of Teachers and the United Auto Workers, along with the Sierra Club and the NAACP. 

It’d be useful to see the press try to pin down Vice President Harris and Governor Walz about whether they’d sign or veto the bring-back-housing projects bill. In Harris’s case, such an opportunity is unlikely, as she’s been avoiding the press, and when she encounters reporters, she doesn’t answer the questions she is asked but instead responds with platitudinous talking points about her purportedly middle class background. 

It gets to a broader point about an element of the contemporary left that sees government ownership as the solution to every problem, whether it is city-run grocery stores in Chicago, “community” control of “essential health resources,” or, in this case, rental apartment real estate. Food, health care, housing—you name the business, there’s a faction of Democrats who think the government can and should provide it cheaper, faster, and better than a free or private market. 

It may be tempting for free-market types to allow the Democrats to go ahead with these “public option” experiments just to demonstrate how costly and counterproductive they wind up being. Yet the experience the last time around with housing projects—concentrated, long-term poverty, crime, and welfare dependency—was so damaging that it’d be cruel to permit a repeat.

Harvard Communists: The Crimson student newspaper reports on an effort to persuade Harvard students to vote for the presidential candidates of the “Party for Socialism and Liberation”: 

According to literature handed out by event organizers, the PSL ticket advocates for policies to “seize the biggest 100 corporations,” “end all U.S. aid to Israel,” “cut the military budget by 90%,” and “end capitalism before it ends us.”

The effort is led by “Prince A. Williams ’25, an organizer with the group and a Crimson Editorial editor.”

The Guardian had a piece on the party earlier this year. Unlike the Crimson article, the Guardian noted that the party “sees a socialist US as part of a step towards ‘the creation of a communist world.’”

Aaron Bushnell, who committed suicide in February 2024 by lighting himself afire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, was reportedly active in the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

The Crimson doesn’t explain how an “unrecognized student organization” with a partisan political purpose obtained space in Emerson Hall to host the event, or whether there is any Harvard faculty or instructional staff involvement in the effort.

Watch what they do, not what they say: “Last year, 315,126 undergraduates applied for the 2,700 available undergraduate intern positions at Goldman Sachs,” Isabella Glassman reports for the New York Times. Typically for the Times, she has a negative take on it: “Careerism is running college,” is the Times headline over the article. 

Yet maybe it’s encouraging that for all the talk about how the college students are devoting themselves to anti-Israel, anti-capitalist activism, the reality is that a lot more are just trying to get hired by Google or Goldman Sachs? Sure, maybe there’s a risk of people going into finance who might be better suited to other pursuits where they might make meaningful contributions in other ways. Yet given a choice of problems, “too many talented people going into finance and consulting” and “young people hate capitalism so much that they don’t want to work for a bank or any other for-profit business venture,” America is much better off with the first of those two problems.

Yuval Levin on saving the universities: Yuval Levin writes in Commentary, remembering a 1972 Commentary article by Yale Law professor Alexander Bickel about a campus where faculty members managed to persuade students not to set fire to a ROTC building: “He saw that the people running the university were gradually choosing to cooperate with the people who wanted to burn it down. Rather than stand on the wall and defend the campus, they decided not only to negotiate with their would-be executioners but ultimately to invite them in—and to suggest to them that instead of destroying the university, they could just inherit it over time and, by votes of the faculty, turn it into what they wanted it to be.”

Levin advises a return to universities with a purpose of “teaching and learning in pursuit of greater knowledge of the truth and in an effort to form better human beings and citizens in its light.” As opposed to a different view of the university’s purpose, that of “social transformation of a particular sort—the liberation of the oppressed from their oppressors in every realm of life.”

Levin, whether he knows it or not, is echoing a January 2, 2024 column I wrote for the New York Sun: “To Reset Harvard and Higher Education, Put the Purpose First.” The subheadline was “Teaching, learning, and research are the reasons the institutions exist.”

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