Cromwell

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.

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.