The provided texts consist of several columns written by George F. Will for The Washington Post, where he has been a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist since 1974, covering politics and domestic and foreign affairs. These columns, published in July 2025, offer critical commentary on a range of contemporary American issues. Will analyzes Donald Trump’s influence on the private sector and executive power, critiques the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic as a public policy failure, and examines the political prospects of Democratic figures like Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear and Rahm Emanuel, along with the internal challenges facing the Democratic Party. Furthermore, he assesses the Republican Senate primary in Texas, highlighting the contrasting figures of John Cornyn and Ken Paxton, and discusses a Supreme Court decision concerning the Voting Rights Act and racial gerrymandering. Across these articles, Will consistently employs a conservative perspective to dissect the complexities of American governance, society, and electoral politics.
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George F. Will: Columnist, Author, Commentator
George F. Will has had a distinguished career primarily as a columnist, author, and political commentator. He is well-known for his twice-weekly column covering politics, domestic, and foreign affairs, which he began writing for The Washington Post in 1974. His contributions to commentary were recognized with the Pulitzer Prize in 1977. Beyond his work with The Post, he is also a regular contributor to NewsNation.
Will is a prolific author, having published numerous books throughout his career. His most recent book, “American Happiness and Discontents,” was released in September 2021. Other significant works include “The Conservative Sensibility” (2019), “One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation” (2008), “Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy” (1992), “Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball” (1989), “The New Season: A Spectator’s Guide to the 1988 Election” (1987), and “Statecraft as Soulcraft” (1983). Additional books by him include “The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts,” “The Pursuit of Virtue and Other Tory Notions,” “The Morning After: American Successes and Excesses 1981-1986,” “Suddenly: The American Idea Abroad and at Home 1986-1990,” “The Leveling Wind: Politics, the Culture, and Other News, 1990-1994,” “The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America’s Fabric,” and “With a Happy Eye, But … America and the World, 1997-2002”.
His educational background includes attendance at Trinity College and Oxford University, and he holds a PhD from Princeton University. George Will grew up in Champaign, Illinois.
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, his career has been marked by several other honors and awards:
- He was a finalist in the essay and criticism category for the National Magazine Awards in 1979.
- He received the National Headliners Award in 1978.
- The Silurian Award for editorial writing was bestowed upon him in 1980.
- In 1985, The Washington Journalism Review named him the best writer on any subject.
- He was named among the 25 most influential Washington journalists by the National Journal in 1997.
Trump’s Transformative Presidency: Power, Policy, and Party Influence
Donald Trump’s political impact, as discussed in the sources, centers on his transformative approach to executive power, his economic policies, specific actions that test constitutional norms, and his significant influence on the Republican Party.
His approach to governance is characterized as a demonstration of how a transactional politician, lacking a defined political philosophy and disregarding norms like the separation of powers, can use the existing institutional framework to achieve “unconstrained executive power”. George Will suggests that a “president without constitutional scruples” is not limited by institutions that are only theoretically, but not actually, rivalrous. Trump is portrayed as someone who views laws as “mere whispered suggestions” from Congress, believing Congress needs to “rediscover its pride and grows a spine” to counter him. This contributes to a “shambolic civic life” where the public sector dominates and corrupts the private sector, revealing a decay in the Founders’ system of checks and balances when institutions are “inhabited by the unenlightened”.
In terms of economic policy, Trump’s use of tariffs is described not as an economic strategy but a political one aimed at “aggrandizing personal power”. His “tornado of tariffs-by-whim” fosters an environment where businesses “bid for beneficial whims,” leading to private rent-seeking displacing entrepreneurial talent as the path to economic success. This has resulted in a scale of rent-seeking unseen before, with numerous factions “groveling for presidential favors”. His administration is called “the most statist administration in U.S. history,” replacing capitalism with “economic repression,” where the government compels or restrains economic activities for political objectives. Despite previously criticizing price controls as “socialist” or “Marxist,” he has promised them for prescription pharmaceuticals and threatened to investigate noncompliant companies. This is framed as “personalist rule” where “the process is the punishment”.
Specific examples of his impact include the effective “nationalization of U.S. Steel,” where the company must grant presidents a “golden share” in perpetuity, allowing presidential approval for nearly a dozen corporate activities, following an “administrative-state farce” over “faux ‘national security’ worries.” Another instance is his handling of the TikTok ban, where he ordered multiple extensions without justifying them to Congress as required by law, which is seen as “nullification of a law” and a “veto without an opportunity for Congress to override it,” challenging established Supreme Court precedent against a president’s “dispensing power”. Furthermore, he filed a “risible lawsuit” against CBS over an editing decision, extorting a settlement that appears to be Paramount’s attempt to “buy him off” to prevent administrative agencies from blocking desired mergers. This demonstrates how the administrative state can be “wielded like a cudgel” by a president with “seemingly limitless discretion”.
Within the Republican Party, Trump’s influence is characterized by the party becoming “less of a party than of a personality cult”. His presence on the ballot can motivate voters, as suggested by the idea that many of his supporters are “fans” of “its entertaining leader,” and his absence might make politics “unappetizing” for them. He has demonstrated an ability to attract diverse voters, notably increasing his share of the Latino vote from 36 percent to 48 percent between 2020 and 2024. His endorsement power remains significant, as exemplified by the potential impact on the 2026 Texas Senate election where his support for Ken Paxton could lead to Republicans losing the state, requiring massive financial expenditure even for a chance at victory. The fact that a sitting Republican Senator, John Cornyn, hired Trump’s political adviser and pollster for his reelection campaign further underscores Trump’s continued sway within the party.
Democrats’ Dilemmas: Messaging, Factions, and Electoral Strategy
The Democratic Party faces several challenges, as discussed in the sources, related to its communication style, internal dynamics, and broader electoral strategy.
One significant challenge stems from the party’s messaging and communication, which some within the party criticize as being out of touch with the general electorate. Rahm Emanuel, for instance, suggests that too many Democrats speak as though their words have been “focus-grouped in a faculty lounge”. This leads to the use of language that can mystify or bemuse voters, making them less likely to support candidates who “speak a private language”. Specific examples of this include the use of terms like “Latinx” instead of “Americans” for Hispanics, and referring to people in jail as “justice-involved populations”. There is also a perception that some Democrats prioritize issues that are not top concerns for many voters, with Emanuel wishing the party would worry less about “a child’s right to pick his pronouns” and more about “children who do not know what a pronoun is”. Similarly, responses to issues like biological men competing in women’s sports have been described as “dusty answers” that may not resonate with the public.
The influence of various “groups” within the party poses another hurdle. All Democratic candidates are described as needing to “run the gantlet of ‘the groups’”. These factions are often “ideologically contentious” and can represent a disproportionate share of the vote in primaries, sometimes pushing agendas that “strike many people outside the groups as cultural aggression”. This internal dynamic can lead to the nomination of candidates who might be out of step with the broader electorate, as illustrated by the New York City mayoral primary where a candidate resembling “an adjunct professor of applied Trotskyism” was nominated by a plurality of registered Democrats. To overcome this, Emanuel suggests that candidates should project “strength, confidence and optimism” and consider “ignoring ‘the culture police’ on his party’s left”.
In terms of electoral strategy and public perception, the Democratic Party is seen as having “scant aptitude” for politics despite it being their business. Historically, the party has found success with more centrist candidates, such as Southern governors like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. However, the party is now characterized as having “coastal obsessions,” leading to an atrophy of the skill needed “to speak Middle American”. The party also carries the “stigma resulting from Democratic control of sagging cities” like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. This can be compounded by an “impulse to incessantly annoy the electorate’s temperate center”. The party has also seen a shift in demographic support, with Donald Trump increasing his share of the Latino vote from 36 percent to 48 percent between 2020 and 2024.
Beyond these practical challenges, there’s a broader philosophical issue concerning the party’s focus on group rights. As interpreted in some legal contexts, like the Voting Rights Act, the emphasis on group rights to “effective” representation, determined by racial calculations, is seen as deconstructing the nation into “an archipelago of racial and ethnic constituencies”. This focus, arguing that people behave predictably due to group membership, encourages a “group conflict model of American politics” and deviates from the Founders’ Constitution for “freely thinking individuals”.
A Dissection of US COVID-19 Policy Failures
The COVID-19 pandemic response in the U.S. is described as arguably the worst public policy failure in the nation’s history, not only due to the public health crisis but also because of the “social pathologies” it triggered. It revealed “intellectual malpractice and authoritarian impulses” infecting governmental, scientific, academic, and media institutions.
A comprehensive mobilization of emergency powers was wielded with little regard for collateral consequences, exacerbating inequalities and including “extraordinary restrictions on free speech”. This period constituted a “stress test” for the central truth-seeking departments of liberal democracy—journalism, science, and universities—which frequently “flunked”. Disagreements were “moralized,” which stifled dissent and employed censorship and shaming. The constant call to “follow the science” obscured the fact that science alone cannot dictate what to do, as large government interventions involve “contestable judgments across the range of human values” and require difficult choices and cost-benefit analyses, which were neglected.
The pandemic restrictions also demonstrated class biases, favoring the “laptop class” who could work remotely, while “essential workers,” largely working class and disproportionately minorities, were expected to continue their work. Historically, there was no precedent for the success of non-pharmaceutical interventions like lockdowns, social distancing, and masking in stifling a pandemic. Furthermore, there was “no relationship between the stringency of state” restrictions and COVID mortality rates.
Regarding the virus’s origin, the biomedical establishment, academia, and media reacted “ferociously — politically, not scientifically —” against the theory of a leak from a Chinese lab conducting “gain of function” research. This origin is now widely considered plausible or even probable. Anthony S. Fauci, then the leading U.S. infectious-disease specialist, initiated a paper asserting the virus’s natural origin, which he then cited against the lab-leak hypothesis. He also repeatedly and clearly misled Congress about his involvement in funding gain-of-function research.
Dissenting voices were disparaged; three eminent epidemiologists who proposed focused mitigations for the elderly and those with comorbidities in the Great Barrington Declaration were called “fringe” figures by the head of the National Institutes of Health. This term conveys a presumption against departures from groupthink. In one instance, about 100 Stanford public health professors denounced a colleague for arguing that policy should “minimize all harms” rather than just stopping the coronavirus “at all costs,” leading to a faculty senate vote to censure him rather than refute his argument. Those declaring the scientific consensus unquestionable included professors of comparative literature and theater and performance studies.
Despite the quick knowledge that COVID largely spared the young, major teachers’ unions called for prolonged school closures while their members were paid. Even after the ineffectiveness of masking was revealed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that children as young as two wear masks all day. Some extreme rhetoric was also noted, with Georgia’s decision to end lockdowns being called an “experiment in human sacrifice” in one publication.
The cumulative consequences of the unfocused measures taken against the coronavirus—such as missed cancer screenings due to lockdowns, a generation’s learning loss, chronic school absenteeism, myopia in children from excessive screen time, and accelerated dementia among the isolated elderly—are deemed to be worse than the disease itself, whose infections were mostly mild (over 98 percent). The costs of this “hysteria,” partly driven by “noble lies” to panic the public into compliance with authoritarian measures, are expected to affect the “health, wellbeing, and longevity of the whole population years into the future”. The sources emphasize that “government officials’ decisions” closed schools, businesses, theaters, and travel, rather than the “pandemic” itself. This period is described as a “dismaying dissection of U.S. policymaking,” revealing “broader and deeper cultural sicknesses”.
Voting Rights Act: From Ballot Access to Racial Entitlement
The Voting Rights Act (VRA), enacted sixty years ago from July 2025, was originally intended to guarantee ballot access. However, subsequent actions by Congress and a deferential Supreme Court are described as having transformed its original purpose, effectively turning its “gold” into “lead” by promoting a racial distribution of representation.
As the VRA has been construed by the court and amended by Congress, it now confers group rights to “effective” representation. This entitlement to a portion of political power is determined by racial calculations. This interpretation extends to specific minorities such as Black, Hispanic, and Native American individuals, presuming that members of these groups will choose to think as a group rather than as individuals. This stands in contrast to classical liberalism, which posits that individuals, despite differences in opinions, can be united by shared interests through the political process.
This ideology of multiculturalism has, according to one perspective, made race and ethnicity preeminent and inherently divisive legal categories, leading to the deconstruction of the nation into “an archipelago of racial and ethnic constituencies”. This development aligns with 20th-century “behavioral” social science, which suggests that people behave predictably due to group membership rather than acting freely. Consequently, the VRA, as interpreted and amended, is seen to implicitly endorse a “degraded theory of representation,” where elected representatives of a government-preferred minority are expected to mechanically serve any desire of the cohesive group.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was enacted to end the cognizance of race in law, has been bent to opposite purposes. Similarly, the VRA, initially designed to eliminate invidious discrimination, has been twisted to engineer racial balance in political processes by legally recognizing and encouraging racial identities over citizenship identities. Judicial decisions have asserted that “vote dilution,” a phrase not present in the 1965 VRA, occurs when government-approved minorities cannot elect candidates of their “choice,” which is presumed to be racially defined. The creation of minority-majority electoral districts, drawn to preserve or create racially homogenous enclaves, is believed to serve electoral fairness by facilitating minority office-holding. This has made the VRA an instrument for turning race and ethnicity into legally determinative categories for claims to proportional allocations of political power, thereby encouraging a “group conflict model of American politics”. This is seen to transform the Founders’ Constitution, designed for “freely thinking individuals,” into one for “thinking-alike victims of a perpetual past”.
An example of this issue is seen in Louisiana’s redistricting map, where approximately one-third of Louisianans are Black. After the 2020 Census, the legislature initially produced a map with only one “majority-minority” district. However, in a complex litigation process, the state, adhering to the court-created principle of racial proportionality, created a second Black-majority district. Simultaneously, the state engaged in political gerrymandering to protect the seats of three senior Republican members of Congress. The proposed 6th District in Louisiana, for instance, is described as resembling a “250-mile-long python” winding across the state to “scoop up” enough Black voters and exclude enough White ones to be slightly more than 50 percent Black. Race clearly predominated in creating this “affront to the VRA’s original intent”. This illustrates the current judicial “morass” in redistricting: race-consciousness is mandatory, but race as “predominant” is forbidden.
Justice Clarence Thomas has dissented, citing an “intractable” or “insoluble” conflict between the VRA, as the court has interpreted it to guarantee group rights, and the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws for persons. The Supreme Court recently delayed a decision on this Louisiana redistricting case, pending reargument, which could potentially reverse the VRA’s tarnishment. The sources suggest that the Supreme Court should “jettison most of its misbegotten VRA jurisprudence” by affirming the equal protection clause’s supremacy over previous interpretations, thereby restoring the VRA’s “golden gleam”.
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By Amjad Izhar
Contact: amjad.izhar@gmail.com
https://amjadizhar.blog
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