From the right: Our Law-Enforcement Trust Problem

“We have a problem,” frets The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger: The “public’s positive
view of the FBI is 37%,” down from 52% in 2018. And that’s as data show “50% more
resignations nationally last year than in 2019” from police departments nationwide as a “perfect
storm of anticop sentiment put populations in many Northern cities at risk.” We could soon see
“the opposite of governing,” with “urban crime, mindless and random killings” and “tent-city
homelessness” rampant. It proves “institutional disintegration can happen when two sides talk
past each other for so long that the original stakes or issues become forgotten.”

Campaign watch: Trump Needs Third-Party Assist

President Donald Trump has one path to winning the 2024 general election, assuming “he wins
the GOP nomination and avoids a federal criminal conviction,” argues Merrill Matthews at The
Hill. It “depends on someone else — a viable third-party candidate.” Democrats are trying to
dissuade the bipartisan anti-Trump No Labels group from “from backing a third-party challenge”
that might siphon votes from President Biden and “give Trump a win — just like 2016.” Were
leftist professor Cornel West to win the Green Party nod, “he would only attract far-left voters
who might otherwise vote for Biden.” Indeed: “Without a viable third-party candidate, most
voters would likely hold their nose and vote for Biden again.”

Conservative: Joe Coers His Voters’ Loans

Women owe “66% of all college debt,” but men are going to bail them out, rages the Washington
Examiner’s Conn Carroll. Most Americans don’t attend college, and an “even smaller percentage
(15%) have student debt.” So why is President Biden making this a national issue? Because “the
vast majority of student debt held by adults is held by Biden voters”: “White women with a
college degree supported Democrats 56%-42%.” Women statistically major in lower-paying
subjects, so they naturally pay their debts more slowly than male graduates. Biden wants to rush
the process by making all American taxpayers foot the bill of the minority’s degrees — though
“most student loan debt is owed by the highest-income Americans.”

Eye on 2024: RFK Jr. Could Bump Biden

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s challenge to Joe Biden is “serious”: “After weeks of unceasingly hostile
press coverage, RFK Jr. still holds onto 15 percent of the Democratic primary vote,” notes Daniel
McCarthy at Spectator World. “The president is old enough to remember what happened in 1968:
Eugene McCarthy didn’t have to beat President Johnson to wreck his hopes of reelection.
Revealing his weakness was more than enough. Should RFK do that to Biden, there are stronger
contenders waiting to play the role that Kennedy’s father played in ’68, as the substitute for a
withdrawn incumbent.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom “would like to be president sooner rather
than later.” So would Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. And consider: “Democrats hold fewer
seats in the House of Representatives after last year’s midterms than they held after the previous
(2018) midterms. The administration’s foreign policy is marred by the botched exit from
Afghanistan. Biden is not a charismatic incumbent. And he confronts a growing scandal arising
from his family’s business relationships with foreign entities and the apparent favoritism that the
Justice Department has shown in treating his son Hunter leniently.”

Libertarian: School Choice Grows 

Teachers unions lost their iron hold on public schools, cheers Reason’s J.D. Tuccille, by “pushing
rigid pandemic policies and expressing open hostility to parental concerns” about the “explicitly
ideological positions” of Black Lives Matter and critical race theory. The mounting opposition
presents an opportunity for “parents of every conceivable viewpoint who want to guide their
children’s education.” State-level school-choice legislation is gaining ground, while Moms for
Liberty is using the pushback to advocate “implementing their ideas in public schools that they
see as under the control of ideological opponents in teachers’ unions.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board