From the right: Trump Stuns His Critics on Mexico

In The Washington Post, Hugh Hewitt writes: “Because President Trump emerges as a clear winner from his week-long confrontation with Mexico over our neighbor’s lax enforcement of its southern border, reflexive Trump critics will scramble to find some way of containing what is a clear Trump triumph.” The warnings over permanent damage to bilateral relations and investor freak-outs didn’t pan out, which left the president’s opponents “flailing about” and denying the obvious. But, says Hewitt: Such antics say “nothing about Trump and much about those critics.”

2020 watch: Trump’s African-American Bet

President Trump won a decent 8 percent of the black vote in 2016 by urging African-Americans to take a gamble on him. Now he is telling them they have “a lot” to lose by voting against him in 2020, given the criminal-justice reforms and historic jobless rates he’s delivered, notes Philip Wegmann at RealClearPolitics. “The campaign knows that gaining majority support is impossible,” but Trump needs only to garner a little more black support than he did last time — or prevent the Democratic nominee from rallying the community. Democrats hope the black community believes accusations of racism against Trump, but the president’s team is working to win black voters who deride him publicly but secretly appreciate his policies. Wegmann concludes: “A second term for Trump hinges on this silent black majority.”

Culture critic: Chill Out With Mary Jane Alarmism

In recent years, “there has been a steady, uninterrupted trend toward decriminalization and outright legalization” of marijuana, observes Jesse Singal at City & State New York. But “longstanding fears about the risks of using cannabis” have also returned. While the scientific evidence is far from conclusive, opponents of pot legalization can’t help painting “an exaggerated caricature of marijuana’s effects,” Singal contends. Most notably, supposed links between legalization or consumption and an increase in violent crime and homeless rates remain largely unsubstantiated. Until we discover more definitive answers, it’s important to fill the “vacuum of solid research” with “common sense, the science we do have and future research — not with fear mongering.”

Iconoclast: Tucker Carlson Is the Future of the GOP

The “discontent that Trump tapped into and unleashed in 2016” still simmers, The Week’s Damon Linker suggests, and “the man who may well be best positioned to catalyze” the party’s long-term transformation might just be Tucker Carlson. Whether or not the Fox News personality has presidential ambitions, “the direction he’s been pushing on his show” ­reflects the ideology now ascendant on the right. It combines traditionalist values with the “sweeping attacks on big business” typically associated with the left. That’s not to say that a Tucker-ized GOP will compromise with Democrats: “The culture wars” over immigration, diversity and family values that “have metastasized on both sides of the political spectrum will continue to be a sharp point of contrast between the two parties.” Linker points out that Sen. Liz Warren embodies a leftist analogue to Carlson’s politics, and the two versions of the ideology are likely to go head-to-head “over the next few election cycles.”

Libertarian: Cowardice Isn’t a Crime

A judge recently approved an arrest warrant targeting former Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson, who neglected to intervene in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Peterson’s behavior was clearly cowardly, but to call it criminal “seems like a stretch,” says Reason’s Jacob Sullum. Most of the charges “are novel applications of laws that are generally invoked in very different contexts.” The warrant is based on the assumption that Peterson “could have prevented several murders if he had done what he was supposed to do,” which may or may not be true. It places Peterson in the role of a caregiver and suggests he was obligated to risk his life. Sullum explains the “unprecedented” case comes down to whether Peterson “had a legal duty that went beyond what would be required of a mother who is afraid to get between her violent husband and the child he is beating.”

— Compiled by Ashley Allen & Sohrab Ahmari