Month: March 2025

It’s 1898. America doesn’t have an income tax, a web of federal regulations, independent agencies, or a welfare state, but it does have a large tariff. It doesn’t aspire to be a democratic shining city on a hill, but it demands to be taken seriously as a great military power. It is about to engage in a war for the ostensible purpose of eliminating human rights abuses in Cuba, but the war will end with satisfied imperial objectives in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

Most people used to think that America was last great in 1950, but Trump’s ultimate objectives have finally become clear; he wants to be William McKinley. After he gets around the 22nd Amendment, retakes the Panama Canal, and annexes Greenland, will he try to repeal the income tax?

For all of his partisanship and incompetence, I will give Pete Hegseth credit for one thing; instead of trashing America’s friends in Asia, he is genuinely trying to bolster our alliances. In the meantime, however, his boss is imposing automobile tariffs that will seriously damage the Japanese and South Korean economies. Will this end well?

No. At some point, the Japanese and South Koreans may decide, like the Europeans, that being vassals to a relatively benign and predictable lord is better than serving a despotic and unreliable one.

An old twist on the Golden Rule is that he who has the gold rules. This is the ethic that governs Trump and his administration. His primary means of achieving his reactionary objectives are tariffs and federal aid cut-offs.

But he and his GOP allies should give more consideration to the original meaning of the Golden Rule. They won’t be in power forever, and what goes around, comes around.

By all accounts, Trump admires Erdogan at least as much as Putin. Erdogan just put his principal political rival in jail. What conclusions should we draw from this?

It would be a mistake to assume the elections in 2026 and 2028 will be free and fair. The current administration, particularly if it is unpopular, may take the position that Americans shouldn’t have the right to vote irresponsibly; it will have the resources to see that it doesn’t happen.

In 2009, Obama decided the government had to save the auto industry. There was no playbook for it, and he received a lot of criticism for what was an unprecedented peacetime interference with the market. He did it because the industry was extremely important in and of itself, and because the cascading effects of losing millions of jobs would have taken the Great Recession to a completely different level. Against the odds, it worked. It was the signature accomplishment, along with the approval of Obamacare, of his tenure in office.

Trump’s tariffs are exactly the opposite. For no good reason, they are going to wreck the auto industry. And then what? Will he change his mind and spin it as a victory when things go wrong, or will he double down? TBD.

AMERICA THE IMPERIAL

Imperial

We own the skies.

We own the minerals, too.

Trump takes the best.

He leaves the rest.

It’s all for me and you.

America, America

We’ve lost what we hold dear.

But we’re the boss

At such great cost

Of the Western Hemisphere.

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to Russia, has taken to repeating Russian talking points about the war. He argues that Putin has no desire to swallow up all of Ukraine, that Russia has no further territorial ambitions, and that it would therefore be a mistake to put European troops in Ukraine to provide a guarantee against Russian cease-fire violations. What conclusions should we draw from this?

I argued in a previous post that we will know if Trump wants to completely change sides and ally himself with Russia against the rest of the EU if he intervenes to prevent the Euros from protecting Ukraine. Witkoff’s statements are evidence that this is, in fact, his intent. Either that, or Witkoff is a complete moron, which seems unlikely.

Does wrecking one of your country’s most important industries and alienating your trading partners sound like a good idea? To Donald Trump, it does. The new auto tariffs will be an economic and geopolitical disaster.

Trump’s apparent objective is to force every auto manufacturer that wants access to the American market to build its vehicles here. The irony, of course, is that this tactic might work in the long run for another president, but not for Trump. The auto manufacturers aren’t going to make investment decisions involving billions of dollars based on the statements of a man with Trump’s well-deserved reputation for capricious and whimsical decision-making.

By early 1762, the alliance of France, Austria, and Russia was choking the life out of plucky little Prussia. Russian troops were occupying large areas of the country. Only a miracle, it seemed, could save Frederick the Great this time.

He got one. Empress Elizabeth died and was succeeded by Tsar Peter III, who was an extreme fanboy of Frederick’s. He immediately pulled Russia out of the war. Prussia would live to fight another day, and the rest is history.

You have to think Putin is aware of the analogy to his own position with Trump and Ukraine. Of course, he may think Trump’s victory is largely his own doing, but if he does, he’s wrong; the misguided American voter and the price of eggs did the job for him.

Noting that the DOGE cuts provide little tangible benefit to Musk or the rest of the wannabe techno-aristocrats, Ross Douthat argues that the revolutionary initiatives of the new administration are mostly driven by reactionary (my word, not his) ideology. He reserves judgment on whether attacks on Musk will be politically profitable. Is he on the right track?

As to the first issue, yes; the techno-aristocrats are driven by the desire for deregulation and tax cuts, not filthy national parks and sicker veterans. The process of satisfying them requires legislation and a more methodical form of deregulation and will take more than a few months. As to the second question, Musk is easily the most visible member of the government, and he looks and sounds like a Bond villain; how can the Democrats resist attacking him?

I’ve read a lot of rubbish about why the Democrats lost the election, but I found a plausible concept in a magazine article a few days ago. The theory was that the Democrats talk to people as they should be, while Republicans meet them where they actually are.

It is abundantly clear that the blue base consists of a scolding, neo-puritanical core that sits around waiting to slap anyone who gets out of line on social media. As a result, Democratic politicians are afraid to say what they really think–look at Harris in her interviews in 2024. That leads to allegations of inauthenticity and an alienated electorate.

With that as background, consider the reaction to “Governor Hot Wheels,” which was genuinely funny and not really insulting to disabled people. The Democrats can’t win a race to the bottom with Trump and the GOP, but they can loosen up a bit. And they should.

Trump’s war against the Constitution and the rule of law will reach a climax, not in one, but in a series of Supreme Court cases. There are three plausible outcomes:

1. The Court tries to split the difference. It gives Trump most of what he wants, but not all, and makes a great show of its independence. Trump grudgingly acquiesces.
2. The Court remains genuinely independent, to Trump’s fury. He ignores the rulings he doesn’t like but suffers few consequences for it.
3. The Court remains genuinely independent. Trump is forced by the state of public opinion to accept its rulings.

Option #2 provides the necessary precedent for a future Democratic president to disregard unfavorable rulings. Option #1 will bring the Court into disrepute with the left and probably results in the same outcome. Only Option #3 keeps the Court relevant and the McConnell Project in place.

Over to you, John. You can’t keep the McConnell version of the Constitution without taking some risks.

The imperfect present is always with us. The right despises it. And so, we have the illusory and temporary alliance of the techno-aristocrats and the MAGA populists; the former want to accelerate the future, while the latter want to revive the past.

For their part, the Democrats have become a genuinely conservative party, advocating slow and incremental change; given the constraints of the McConnell Project and its uncharismatic leaders after Obama, the party’s slogan might as well have been “No, we can’t.” Once Trump is finished wrecking America as we know it, however, the landscape will probably be different. The McConnell Project will be dead; there will be no plausible way back; and the left will be free to advocate for brighter future that is unimaginable today.

In yet another effort to prove he can be just as Trumpy as the original, Ron DeSantis has taken to trash talking Canadian tourists. Using figures that predate the impacts of Trump’s 51st state rhetoric, DeSantis is insisting that Canadians are still flocking to Florida in record numbers. The implicit argument is that they have no other viable choices.

He’s wrong. We will have the same problems with Europeans, too. DeSantis needs to learn that abusing foreign tourists is not a good way to run an economy that relies heavily on their spending.

Erdogan just had his principal rival arrested. In Israel, Bibi is attempting to eliminate important checks on his government by firing the Attorney General and the head of intelligence. Are these events related?

It’s pretty clear that Trump’s legal bulldozer is the inspiration for them. If Trump can get away with authoritarian behavior, why can’t they? At a minimum, they know America will no longer object.