Conservative: Left’s Contempt Will Re-Elect Trump

Democrats reportedly now think they can recapture the White House by targeting the 20 percent of Donald Trump’s 2016 voters who said they didn’t particular like him, but despised Hillary Clinton. One problem, suggests Marc Thiessen at The Washington Post: “The left’s nonstop, over-the-top attacks” on Trump are “not peeling those voters away from him; they are pushing them further into the president’s camp.” Indeed, “they are outraged not at Trump but at his critics. The unhinged hatred for the president makes these voters almost reflexively defend him.” The New York Times found this to be true by interviewing dozens of tepid Trump voters and polls also back it up. The left’s “miasma of contempt may feel cathartic, but it is the best thing that ever happened to Trump.”

Economist: Jersey’s Gov Invites More Residents To Flee

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy last week faced a state shutdown as he squabbled with fellow Democrats over whether to raise taxes on businesses or wealthy individuals. In the end, notes City Journal’s Steve Malanga, they compromised — “and raised taxes on both.” This, in a state where “residents and businesses already pay some of the nation’s steepest levies” and which already loses more citizens than almost anywhere else. Frankly, “it’s difficult to see how placing more burdens on the state’s economy will help stem that outflow” when “Jersey young people leave the state — and they don’t come back.” (It has the largest net outmigration of millennials and post-millennials.) Nor will it “do much for business confidence in a state that many firms, including homegrown ones, increasingly avoid.”

Foreign desk: Angela Merkel’s Self-Made Catastrophe

In a desperate bid to “keep her power and her grand coalition,” Chancellor Angela this week swallowed what Commentary’s Sohrab Ahmari calls “a poisoned chalice” and agreed — after three years of “sheer chaos” — to stanch the flow of Middle Eastern and North African migrants pouring into Germany. But whatever the immediate political outcome, Merkel has “cemented her legacy” and “it is a baleful one.” Her response to the migrant crisis “destabilized Europe and discredited the Western project in the eyes of global multitudes.” By “upending the traditional asylum-processing model,” Merkel “made it nearly impossible to figure out who was a genuine refugee and who was an economic migrant.” Bottom line: Merkelism “has already wrought disaster for Europe and the West, and there are more disasters yet to come.”

Political scribe: Pennsylvania’s Not-So-Pro-Life Senator

Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) calls himself pro-life. But as Politico’s Jennifer Haberkorn reports, “his voting record paints a different picture.” His father was a famously antiabortion governor who actually was barred from delivering a speech on the issue at Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential nominating convention. But his son, after two terms in the Senate, “has become an increasingly reliable vote in support of abortion rights.” Which is why the issue has become key as he faces a strong re-election challenge in the heavily Catholic Keystone State. Casey insists the pro-life label remains accurate, even though, as Haberkorn notes, his voting record “aligns significantly with abortion rights groups such as Planned Parenthood and NARAL.” As one anti-abortion group charges: “His father paid a price for being pro-life. Sen. Casey is trying to have it both ways now.”

Energy writer: America Is the New King of Oil

Move over, OPEC — US oil production is booming and oil exports are following, says Leia Klingel at Fox Business. In fact, the US Energy Information Administration reports that oil refining has “hit its highest level on record” and crude exports surged to a record 1.76 million barrels per day in April. This, she says, “is a big change for a country that just a few years ago wasn’t exporting any crude.” Not surprisingly, all this production — driven by the shale oil boom — “is very good for the US economy.” Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says he’s “never seen anything like it,” adding that fracking has “made extraordinary changes in crude oil production and our output is now close to the highest” in the world.

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann