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From the right: Omar Dad’s Dubious Past
What we know about “Nur Omar Mohamed’s military career” in the Somali army makes it “very doubtful” that Rep. Ilhan Omar’s father “met the US legal definition of a ‘refugee’,” argues National Review’s Jim Geraghty. One obituary noted that his “prestigious career in the military ended in 1991 after the Barre regime was ousted.” Notes Geraghty: “The Somali government was using its military to commit genocide for the better part of three decades, intensifying in the late 1980s.” Credible sources discredit the notion that her father could “rise to the rank of colonel with no role in that military’s massive-scale genocide.” How was a Somali colonel “qualified as a refugee” when he may have “ordered, incited, assisted or otherwise participated in the persecution” of civilians?
Midterm watch: Trump’s Sensible Appeal
President Trump “has been widely mocked for asking voters to ‘pretend I’m on the ballot,’ ” notes the Washington Examiner’s Byron York. Yet appealing to “low-propensity voters” — such one ones who won’t normally vote unless Trump’s on the ballot — “makes sense.” A 2025 Pew Research study found eligible voters nationwide who didn’t vote in 2020 and ’22 but did in ’24 backed Trump 55%-41%. “This was not just a tiny group of people”: “2024-only voters made up 12% of the entire electorate in the presidential race that year. It made a big difference for Trump.” So, “if Republicans are trying to turn out low-propensity voters” now, “it makes sense to ask them to pretend that Trump is on the ballot.”
From the left: Our Scammy Fundraising Problem
“Democrats should think hard about” the “broad spectrum of sketchy fundraising behavior, from outright scams to bad ideas,” argues Slow Boring’s Matt Yglesias after getting a “rather absurd request” from Gov. Maura Healy (D-Mass.), who’s in zero danger of losing. People “acutely frightened about the state of our country” must “be smart with our resources, not throwing them at dumb stuff” like unwinnable or unlosable races, or ones without “large strategic implications.” Never forget: “People make money off of political campaigns” — “vendors and consultants” who “benefit specifically from donations” to candidates who’ve hired them, “even if other candidates would be a better use of your money.” And “outright scams” include “PACs that say they’re supporting candidates but mostly just fund themselves.” To keep “the small-donor engine running,” Democrats should be “giving donors some assurances that their money is being well spent.”
Conservative: Say No to Toxic Candidates
The major political parties “keep force-feeding us s—t sandwiches and telling us to like them,” fumes Erick Erickson at The Free Press, and insisting that “we must debase ourselves a little further every cycle.” We’re told to “hold our noses” and “pull the lever” for “white nationalists, racists, and antisemites” and “crooks, frauds, charlatans, and those who’d attack the victim of molestation,” or else face “the end of America.” We “have heard that message every two years for 20 years,” but “America is still here” even as the “candidates keep getting worse.” No! Of every election requires us to swallow something rotten, we might as well starve.” America will never be made “great again” if we are “continually descending into the sewer to find candidates.”
Foreign desk: DC Must Protect Machado
María Corina Machado’s return to Venezuela “poses a challenge to the ruling regime of Delcy Rodríguez, but also to the Trump Administration,” frets The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board. Machado had left “the country in fear for her life” but now as promised has returned “to participate in a transition back to democracy” following former President Nicolás Maduro’s arrest. But Rodríguez “refuses to set a date for new elections.” Amid that stall, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Trump must ensure Machado’s safety: “It’s all too easy to imagine her suddenly dying in a car ‘accident’ or from a mysterious illness” — and Trump’s Venezuelan oil deal “won’t be worth much unless Venezuela has a government with democratic legitimacy,” something “that should start with a date and a credible process for a free and fair democratic election.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board