Month: March 2025

On the once-again President Trump.

Opposition makes him a big grump.

Public spending’s been slashed;

Business hopes have been dashed;

Pretty soon we’ll be having a slump.

CDs: The horror! The horror! Wrecking American institutions and abandoning alliances is not conservatism.

CLs: The DOGE thing is a good start, but it is mostly theater; Trump won’t prove he’s serious about reducing the size of the state unless he’s willing to cut entitlements. We don’t like the deportations and the attacks on the First Amendment, either.

Reactionaries: Awesome! He’s burning it down, just as he said he would! We have some concerns about Musk, though. He needs to go after his work is done.

PBPs: So far, we have capricious actions on tariffs, a bogus form of deregulation, and no tax cut. It’s our worst nightmare; Trump told the truth about the stuff we didn’t like and lied about the stuff we did.

You can see the potential cracks in Trump’s armor here. Most of the right is reserving judgment. That won’t last much longer.

It would be difficult to identify anything that Trump has done in his first sixty days to improve the lot of the struggling workers who voted for him. No matter. The base is thrilled that he is inflicting pain on blue America, the enemy, on a daily basis. For now, it seems, that is enough.

Boris Johnson’s signature initiative was called “leveling up.” Trump’s is more like “leveling down.” And the base calls his opponents Marxists!

The real question here is whether the base will remain happy if, a year or two from now, the economy is staggering under the weight of Trump’s tariffs and deportations. Do cultural victories take precedence over economic failures? My best guess is that they do for the base, but not for the country as a whole.

Trump’s hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center represents a new front in the culture war. Simply bashing elites and trans people is no longer enough; Trump now wants to redefine what great American culture is.

It won’t work, of course. Trump can do a lot of wrecking along the way, but he can’t make me love country music and NASCAR. Nobody has that kind of power.

American education systems are overwhelmingly funded and regulated by state and local governments. I’m not aware of any evidence which suggests that increasing the federal role over the last few decades resulted in a significant improvement in test scores. And so, if you view the dismantling of the Department of Education purely as a policy matter, it doesn’t excite me that much as long as the genuinely federal functions, such as the operation of the student loan program, remain unimpaired. In fact, since Trump’s DOE would undoubtedly use its powers for evil purposes, you can make a decent argument that abolishing it is actually a good thing.

Of course, there is more to the story than that. The DOE was created by statute and was funded by appropriations from Congress; Trump doesn’t have the legal authority to make it disappear. This is yet another gross and unwarranted power grab by the executive. It will have to be resisted regardless of the merits of the underlying action.

I predicted all sorts of dire results during the initial phases of a Trump presidency during the campaign. Does the record prove me right?

It has actually been worse than I thought in three respects. First, I figured that Trump would decapitate the top of the civil service in order to make it serve his interests. Instead, he is cutting the “deep state” viciously and randomly in order to assert his dominance over it; as a result, one of the most powerful men in America is a nineteen-year-old who calls himself “Big Balls” on the web. Second, it never occurred to me that we would be threatening to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal. Finally, the hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center came as a surprise. Where was that in the Trump campaign commercials?

Everything else–the tariff chaos, the defiance of court orders, the abandonment of Ukraine, etc.–is as expected.

Viewed from the outside, Putin’s war has been a massive strategic failure. Russia has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, while taking relatively little ground; NATO has expanded along its border; it is now effectively a Chinese client state; its best and brightest have left the country; its Syrian satellite has been lost; and its economy is feeling some strain. From Putin’s perspective, however, the war has been a success, because it enabled him to dispense with any remaining liberal democratic niceties and govern directly as a fascist. That’s a big win.

With that as background, why would he agree to end the war? Expect him to deal with cease-fire proposals the way Lucy did with Charlie Brown and the football; he’ll sort of agree but insist on conditions that are clearly unacceptable to the Ukrainians with the expectation that Trump will either give in to him or that he will gain more ground while he prolongs the negotiations.

GET BACK

Zelensky did his best to stand up to the Russians

But he’s just our vassal now.

Trump said he won’t help, and neither can the Euros.

He’ll have to get by somehow.

Get back; get back;

Get back to where you once belonged.

Get back; get back;

Get back to where you once belonged.

Get back, Zelensky!

________

Justin was a man who thought he ran a country

But it’s just another state.

Trump talked lots of trash and helped keep him in power

But it was a bit too late.

Get back; get back;

Get back to where you once belonged.

Get back; get back;

Get back to where you once belonged.

Get back, Justin!

___________

Parody of “Get Back” by the Beatles.

As the saying goes, a fish rots from the head. Is the same true of our economy?

The Trump cocktail of deportations, tax cuts for the wealthy, chaotic deregulation, and constantly changing tariffs will have both immediate and long-term impacts. The immediate impacts will be a sharp drop in consumer confidence and higher inflation. The long-term problem will be a lack of investment and lost productivity.

In other words, we are creating an American equivalent of Brexit. It will have similar consequences.

For no obviously good reason, Trump ordered major air strikes on the Houthis a few days ago. Now the Israelis are ramping up their attacks in Gaza. Are these related, and what do they mean?

Bibi wants Trump to be his yard guy with the Iranians, but Trump won’t agree to fight that way; for him, perpetual low-level wars are off the table. Trump thinks he can use victories over Iranian proxies to drive the Islamic Republic to the table. It’s a relatively risk-free way of creating leverage for future negotiations.

Will it work? Probably not. My guess is that the Iranians are working furiously on a bomb even as I write this and have written off the proxies for now.

That didn’t take long. We’re less than two months into Trump’s term, and he has already moved from passive-aggression to outright defiance of court orders. It is a move that I predicted even before the election.

From a political perspective, Trump has chosen his ground wisely; who could be less popular than an alleged Venezuelan gang member? But from a legal perspective, the story is different; the judiciary prizes due process above practically anything else.

I’m not sure that this is the case that leads to the ultimate confrontation. To quote Churchill, however, it is the end of the beginning.

There is a legitimate argument in favor of prohibiting some trans females from participating in women’s sports. This issue was already being regulated by international and domestic sports organizations, however, and in the big picture, it is a minnow. Anyone who was inspired to vote for the GOP on that basis was an utter fool.

There is a marginal argument for the state to limit the ability of minors to transition in light of the coercion that was being applied to doctors by trans activists. This was also a very minor issue, however. Decisions about transitioning should be made by patients, parents, and physicians without any coercion, either by activists or the government.

That said, the most important thing to remember about trans people is that they are people. Regardless of how annoying the activists are, there is no moral basis for dehumanizing, oppressing, and discriminating against them, which is precisely what the current government is doing today.

April 1 is April Fools’ Day. Trump is set to unveil his reciprocal tariffs the following day. While he never discussed them during the campaign, they are the centerpiece of his tariff scheme and are intended to be permanent, albeit with occasional adjustments purely at his whim. What happens after that? Will Trump tell America that this tariff scheme will cause significant short-term pain? Will he give us a coherent justification for the tariffs? Will he assure businesses that the tariffs won’t be changed arbitrarily, thus providing them with the ability to make informed decisions about the future? Or will he simply blow off the impacts and demand that we trust him?

If you think he’s going to be open and honest about his plans and their impact, you’re the April fool.

Universities wrecked. The civil service dismantled. Alliances trashed. The rule of law questioned. The First Amendment attacked. It’s been less than two months, and Trump has already done untold damage to the America we knew and took for granted for decades. It will only get worse from here.

As I’ve noted many times before, the accumulation of executive power by the right presents an opportunity for the left to break free of the constraints of the McConnell Project and to make fundamental changes to the American economy. It will be very difficult just to put the genie back in the bottle–if you don’t believe me, just ask the Poles–so that may be the default position of the Democrats in 2028.

The billionaire vandal named Musk

Turned the government into a husk.

While Trump has his back

At some point, he’ll be sacked.

Will his tenure last longer than Truss?