Dems deal with Israel-haters, is Trump still for you and other commentary

Aligning “with the international left on Israel” may offer Democratic leaders “short-term relief but create hellish problems” later, warns The Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim.The “anti-Zionists” Dems ally with for “a winning coalition despise democratic politics,” and absolutely refuse to compromise: E.g., they’ve heckled Mayor Mamdani for bowing to “legal reality” that he can’t arrest Benjamin Netanyahu.

And however Jewish Democrats like House candidates Brad Lander and Scott Wiener pander to the anti-Israel diehards, they’re still despised.The party’s leaders “don’t grasp that the anti-Israel left would rather destroy them and their party than moderate or compromise.” Losing Jewish donors isn’t enough; Democrats will need “more pain” before dumping their “new friends.”“The defining moment of the 2024 presidential campaign” came when President Trump donned a yellow apron to work “the fry station and the drive-thru window at a McDonald’s,” argues the Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone.

That presented him as approachable, “serving ordinary people” while “acknowledging the seriousness of the work they do.” And what’s harmed his “political standing” since is the perception that he’s now “serving himself rather than his constituents,” even as prices rise due to “high tariffs and the Middle East conflict.” Indeed, “Trump’s job approval moves inversely to gas prices.” Republicans may “argue that Democrats are ‘for they/them,’ ” but convincing “voters that ‘President Trump is for you’” is harder.Moscow is denying plague rumors after “a technician at Russia’s Irkutsk Research Anti-Plague Institute has died of ‘pneumonia of unknown etiology,’ ” but Ivana Stradner & Mark Montgomery warn at The Hill that “Russia has been asking a darker question for nearly a century: how can disease be turned into a weapon?” Though “Russia officially ended the Sovi...