C.A.A. on Vacation

The C.A.A. is currently on vacation. There may some sporadic updates this week, but regular updates will resume on Saturday, May 3rd. 

Déjà Vu

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, April 24, 2025

 

“It is clear from [Vladimir] Putin’s attack on Kyiv that he still does not believe there are any negative consequences for continuing the war,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich wrote this morning about the latest massacre of Ukrainian civilians. “The West has not yet convinced the Russian dictator that the alternative to a ceasefire is a lot greater threat to his regime. Until he fears that there is a serious consequence he will continue lying and fighting with stunning cynicism.”

 

That’s correct, save for two words. What do you mean by “the West,” Newt?

 

“The West” isn’t averse to imposing consequences on Moscow. Apart from the proto-fascist American right’s hero in Hungary, every European leader I can think of is foursquare behind Ukraine. Even NATO’s most authoritarian member is open to sending peacekeepers after the war ends to prevent the Russians from returning.

 

Faulting “the West” in this case for failing to get tough with Putin is transparently a rhetorical contrivance designed to shift culpability away from He Who Must Not Be Blamed. It’s like when MAGA diehards fault “advisers” for Donald Trump’s policy debacles. Whichever idiot told the president to declare an unsustainable trade war on the whole world at the same time should be fired.

 

It’s not “the West” that’s looked the other way for weeks while Putin has flagrantly defied the White House’s ceasefire demands. And it sure ain’t “the West” that routinely criticizes Volodymyr Zelensky more harshly, and more often, than it criticizes Putin. In fact, I’d be keen to hear Gingrich explain why he believes America should still be considered part of “the West” at all.

 

What has he seen over the past three months of Donald Trump’s leadership that convinces him the United States remains aligned with the Western liberal order that’s prevailed since 1945?

 

Consider the take-it-or-leave-it peace plan that, ahem, “the West” submitted this week to Ukrainian officials. Under the terms as reported by Axios, Russia would receive formal U.S. recognition of its sovereignty over Crimea, informal recognition of its sovereignty over the territory it has seized in the Donbas, guarantees that Ukraine won’t be admitted to NATO, relief from the sanctions America has imposed on it since 2014, and “enhanced economic cooperation” with the United States.

 

In return, Ukraine would receive magic beans—some minor territorial concessions, a vague promise of financial assistance in rebuilding, and a supposedly “robust security guarantee” that’s short on specifics and makes no mention of an American role. The U.S. would also gain control of the country’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the biggest in Europe, conveniently leaving Ukrainians at the mercy of “the West” for their future energy needs.

 

Nothing about that proposal is meaningfully pro-Western. A cynic might even wonder if it was designed to be so unpalatable to the Ukrainians that they’d have to reject it, creating a pretext for the Trump administration to “move on” from the conflict by cutting off military aid to Kyiv.

 

It reminds me of the president’s declaration of trade war on “Liberation Day” insofar as both gambits amount to the United States resigning its membership in “the West” as we’ve known it. No more will we follow the postwar international consensus supporting free trade, Trump seemed to say, and no more will we default to favoring liberal democracies that find themselves in conflict with postliberal autocracies. The Pax Americana is over, commercially and diplomatically.

 

That isn’t the only thing the new peace plan has in common with the dumbest trade war in history, though.

 

Political ignorance.

 

Assuming that the White House’s peace proposal is in earnest and not just a ploy engineered to make the Ukrainians choke, it’s shockingly ignorant of basic political reality.

 

The same was true of “Liberation Day.” I don’t know how the president imagined his tariff bombardment playing out, but it’s surprising how much he seems to have been surprised by the reaction. Trump being Trump, my guess is that he thought the stock market would dip for a few days before skyrocketing and that a teary Xi Jinping would call a press conference to beg him on camera for mercy.

 

He seemed not to anticipate that national pride and Xi’s own strongman cult of personality would force China to dig in and not let itself be bullied. Nor did he appear to grasp that investors would be so spooked by his recklessness that they might begin to dump U.S. Treasurys, signaling “no confidence” in America’s economic leadership and risking a global financial crisis. When Trump paused his new tariffs, he didn’t bother hiding the fact that the market response had spooked him in turn.

 

His Ukraine peace proposal—again, if it’s sincere—is similarly ignorant. Asking Kyiv to forfeit Crimea to Russia is a nonstarter, so much so that the country’s constitution forbids it. “Inside Ukraine, formal recognition of Russian control of Crimea would be widely viewed as a dangerous concession to a duplicitous rival and an abandonment of Ukrainians still living in the region,” the New York Times explained. “It would also dash hopes for reunification of the families separated by the 2014 occupation—when many pro-Ukrainian residents fled while their elderly or pro-Russian relatives remained behind.”

 

Zelensky can’t do it, and Trump’s team should have known that. To entice him into making a concession that painful, the White House would have needed to sweeten the pot by offering him the only thing he really wants, either membership in NATO or some copycat security guarantee backed by American might. The whole ballgame for Ukraine in this process is ensuring that Russia never again dares cross its borders; European militaries might one day be able to provide that insurance but right now only the United States can do it.

 

If, under Trump, we’re unwilling to do it, why bother asking Ukraine to do something as wrenching as conceding Crimea? It’s like asking friendly nations to band together to isolate China after you’ve gut-punched each of them with steep new tariffs. Why would they make a difficult sacrifice to satisfy an “ally” who no longer seems to care about their interests?

 

Credibility.

 

Which brings us to another parallel between the Ukraine peace plan and the trade war. In both cases there’s a paradox: The success of each gambit depends on American credibility, yet Trump is squandering that credibility hour by hour.

 

To incentivize businesses to relocate to the U.S. without blowing up the economy, he and his team should have introduced the new tariffs cautiously and resolved to stick to them in the face of pressure to retreat. That would have meant more modest rates with favorable treatment for friends over foes and a consistent message that new taxes on foreign imports were here to stay, encouraging companies to plan accordingly.

 

They did the opposite. They dropped tariffs on everyone all at once on “Liberation Day,” drew no distinction between allies and enemies (until after the “pause,” when they bore down on China), and committed a humiliating “oopsie” in their formula for new rates. White House deputies couldn’t agree whether the tariffs were etched in granite or merely the opening bid in a negotiation aimed at erasing current trade barriers. And Trump couldn’t stick to a number, frantically dropping rates on everyone except China after a market slide, then hiking rates steeply on the Chinese, then promising reporters on Tuesday that those rates would soon come down.

 

Whatever credibility he had on trade before is totally shot. In picking a tariff fight with Canada and Mexico before “Liberation Day,” he even violated a trade agreement that he negotiated himself. The recent sell-off in bond markets is a neon sign that investors no longer trust that the president has the faintest idea what he’s doing. At last check on Wednesday, he and his team were reportedly looking for a “face-saving off-ramp” even with Beijing.

 

He endeavored to bully the world; less than a month later, he’s never looked weaker. Why, at this point, would any American trade partner make a generous deal with him instead of waiting him out, letting him continue to melt down under the mounting pressure, and seeing where he finally settles?

 

Trump’s credibility on Ukraine is shot, too. For one thing, his peace plan is another example of him violating one of his own policies: In 2018 his State Department issued a declaration reaffirming that the United States “rejects Russia’s attempted annexation of Crimea and pledges to maintain this policy until Ukraine’s territorial integrity is restored.” Zelensky reminded the White House of it by posting the declaration online on Wednesday.

 

Trump’s new chief diplomat is also heavily compromised on the issue. In 2022 then-Sen. Marco Rubio co-sponsored a bill that would have prohibited the U.S. from acknowledging Russian sovereignty over territory it seized from Ukraine. “The United States cannot recognize Putin’s claims or we risk establishing a dangerous precedent for other authoritarian regimes, like the Chinese Communist Party, to imitate,” he said at the time, sensibly enough. Now he’s the face of a U.S. effort to get Kyiv to cough up Crimea.

 

Even if Trump were willing to guarantee Ukraine’s security as part of a deal with Russia, his bizarre aggression this year toward NATO nations like Canada and Greenland means that no one can or should trust that he’d honor his obligation if called on to do so, further depleting his leverage. Here again, as in his trade war, he went about things entirely the wrong way: If he was ever serious about brokering a peace between Kyiv and Moscow, his best shot at earning Ukraine’s trust before asking it to make hard concessions was to put pressure on Russia to stop shooting. Having watched the president stand with them to end the daily slaughter of their citizens, Ukrainians might have listened to a request to part with Crimea.

 

Instead he berated Zelensky on television during a diplomatic visit, threw him out of the White House, and has done everything he can to suggest that Ukraine is the true obstacle to peace in the conflict. Steve Witkoff, his top liaison to Moscow, frequently sounds like a Kremlin propagandist. (“Why would [Russia] want to absorb Ukraine?” he asked Tucker Carlson in an interview, as if Putin hasn’t discoursed on that subject a thousand times.) And so the trade-war pattern repeats—Trump, ever eager to use bullying tactics to look “strong,” ends up looking like the weakest chump in existence as Putin goes about merrily bombing Ukraine in defiance of his ceasefire demands. The president can’t get the deal he wants because he won’t bully the side that actually requires bullying. He has no credibility.

 

Strategic illogic.

 

Yet the weirdest parallel between his trade war and the Ukraine peace process is the strategic illogic of both ventures. These are momentous policy efforts with world-changing consequences, but not only is there no clear game plan for achieving the president’s goals, it’s not clear what his goals are.

 

Is the goal of his trade war to bring jobs back to America and raise revenue for the government or is it to pressure our trade partners into ending all barriers to U.S. exports? You can have protectionism or you can have free trade but you can’t have both—yet the White House seems to want both. Despite the fact that they contradict each other, we’ve heard both rationales from administration sources over the past month.

 

Meanwhile, by going about this process as chaotically as it has, the White House has guaranteed a terrible outcome for itself no matter what happens. In the best-case scenario, Trump folds quickly, markets stabilize, China says “no hard feelings,” and the president has to wear the fact for the next four years that he surrendered meekly on his flagship policy program—in a matter of weeks. Pathetic. So much for the art of the deal.

 

In the worst-case scenario, confidence in America’s economic leadership is already so badly shaken that markets continue to tank, Treasury yields rise, and a harsh recession ensues no matter what Trump does going forward. Perhaps China, having learned from this experience that it holds more “cards” on trade than the United States does, will decide not to resume its exports at pre-”Liberation Day” levels without some concessions from America.

 

The strategic logic of supporting Russia over Ukraine is just as inscrutable as the logic of Trump’s trade war. Michael McFaul, Barack Obama’s ambassador to Moscow, had to make a numbered list of the deficiencies of forfeiting Crimea under the new White House peace plan, so many were there:

 

(1) It is a reputational hit to the U.S. in the world; (2) Legitimizes use of force for annexation and encourages others to do so (think Taiwan); (3) Fosters division among our allies (a gift to Putin); (4) Fosters division within American society (gift to Putin and Xi); and (5) Alienates Ukrainians.

 

Handing Crimea to Russia would mark the first time since 1945 that a state has used military power to expand its own borders at a European country’s expense, historian Phillips O’Brien notes. In this case it would happen with America’s blessing. And other provisions of Trump’s peace plan would tee Putin up for more: The last thing Ukraine and its NATO neighbors need is for the U.S. to lift sanctions on Russia, as that would put Moscow on a fast track to rebuilding its economy and its military. If the goal of all this is long-term peace on the continent, that’s a funny way to go about it.

 

The White House’s surrender also seems to be coming surprisingly fast, as it did with tariffs. After promising ad nauseam during the campaign to end the conflict in 24 hours, Trump is threatening to quit the peace process (and to end military aid to Ukraine as a result, I assume) after three months of trying. Maybe those threats are empty and simply designed to pressure Kyiv, but given how quickly he retreated on tariffs, it’s more likely another case of strategic impatience foiling the White House’s not-so-carefully laid plans.

 

And as in the trade war, if he does cut Ukraine off he’ll leave himself with a pair of no-win outcomes in the making. Either the Ukrainian military will collapse and Russia will overrun the country, handing Trump a moral and political catastrophe that he’ll own just as entirely as he will the coming recession, or Ukraine will manage to fight on successfully with European support and the world will see that the liberal order no longer requires American leadership. Or wants it, perhaps.

 

Amid all this we’re left with a confounding overarching strategic question: What does the United States gain, exactly, by switching sides in a conflict between Russia and Europe?

 

Trump is supposed to be a “transactional” politician, forever demanding that foreign nations make it worth America’s while to partner with them. By most measures, the European Union is better positioned to do that than Russia. Its member states collectively have three times the population and 10 times the GDP. The EU is hungry for energy, and the United States happens to be the world’s biggest producer of oil and natural gas. Even Russia’s military advantage relative to the EU is no longer what it was after three years of bloodletting in Ukraine.

 

What is America getting in return for making enemies of Europe and a friend of Russia?

 

We’re not getting anything—which ends up being the most significant difference between the trade war and the Ukraine peace process. Both are examples of Trump behaving extremely ideologically but in the former case you can imagine certain material benefits accruing to the United States if tariffs actually, you know, worked. More U.S. jobs, a revitalized manufacturing base: There’s a bottom-line argument to be made for protectionism, just not a good one.

 

There’s no bottom-line argument for backstabbing “the West,” to borrow Newt Gingrich’s antiquated term, in order to ingratiate ourselves to a third-world mafia petrostate. It’s pure ideology on Trump’s part. He admires Russia’s authoritarian model, envies the power that it affords Putin, and would clearly like to emulate it here. That’s probably the closest we’ll get to a “strategic” logic for what he’s doing: The more he encourages his fans to believe that America’s liberal allies are actually enemies and that its fascist enemies are actually allies, the more willing they might be to reconsider which form of government would best serve their own country’s interests.

 

“The West” as we’ve traditionally understood it no longer exists. If nothing else good comes from Ukraine’s ordeal with the White House, and probably nothing will, at least we’ll all end up very clear about that.

Forcing Ukraine to Surrender to Russia Is No Path to Sustainable Peace

National Review Online

Thursday, April 24, 2025

 

On the face of it, the members of the Trump administration who set out their ideas for the basis of a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine appear to know as little about dealmaking as they do about diplomacy as they do about Russia. The suggestion that Ukraine should legally cede Crimea to Russia, something that had not been on the table before, does nothing other than strengthen Moscow’s negotiating position, while sending a terrible message to both Kyiv and the European members of NATO (a message that will not be overlooked by China or those threatened by it). Kyiv has rejected the idea, and the peace process (such as it is) is in disarray.

 

Tacitly accepting that Ukraine will never win back Crimea (it won’t, at least militarily) is one thing, but for the administration to insist that Ukraine should give up its legal right to the peninsula is quite another. The president later posted on Truth Social that “nobody is asking Zelenskyy to recognize Crimea as Russian Territory.” That still leaves open the possibility that the U.S. would extend de jure recognition to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. That would be less humiliating for Ukraine, but it would still risk setting a dangerous precedent with regard to the territorial integrity (and, in the worst case, sovereignty) of parts of the former Soviet Union no longer under Moscow’s control. The administration may think that legally recognizing the loss of land beyond recall is no more than a goodwill gesture, a sweetener to induce Russia to come to terms. Good luck with that: The Kremlin will see it as an admission of weakness and ask for more.

 

In the summer of 1940, the U.S. stated that, legally, it would not recognize the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and it never did, even if, in practice, it largely went along with Soviet rule in the formerly independent Baltic states. This combined defense of an important principle (recognition of the Baltic nations’ right of self-determination) with grubby realpolitik (accepting that there was little the U.S. could do to help the Balts regain their independence, at least directly, any time soon). That, more or less, with the realpolitik again left unspoken, has been the position that Washington has maintained to date over Russia’s occupation of Crimea. If that holds, it is an undeservedly good result for Moscow. The deeper that Kremlin rule becomes entrenched in Crimea, the less chance there is that it will ever be handed back to Ukraine.

 

The second territorial issue concerns the large swath of eastern Ukraine now occupied by Russia. So far as that region is concerned, the American suggestion is that the front line should be “frozen.” Ukraine is, quite rightly, demanding a cease-fire before serious negotiations begin. Kyiv suspects, with good reason, that Russia will grab land while talking peace. The final determination of the fate of occupied eastern Ukraine (Crimea aside) would then (it is proposed) be settled by a more permanent peace deal. In practice, this would probably mean de facto, but not de jure, acceptance of the 2025 status quo and, in all likelihood, an arrangement somewhat similar to the “temporary” armistice at the intra-Korean border, which has endured since the 1950s.

 

That has worked because, until now, the U.S. has stood behind South Korea, which has taken advantage of the peace to build up its economy and, if not always smoothly, its democracy. A similar arrangement (accompanied by prisoner exchanges and the return of Ukrainian children effectively kidnapped by Russia) would likely be a deal that, albeit through gritted teeth, most Ukrainians would accept. They could then focus on rebuilding the roughly 80 percent of their country under Kyiv’s control. The more prosperous and democratic that Ukraine becomes, the more secure it will be. That’s why any deal should include confirmation of Ukraine’s right to join the EU. Joining the EU would take years, but the experience of post-Soviet Eastern Europe shows that the direction of travel — cleaning house ahead of EU membership — is healthy, both legally and democratically, and encourages foreign investment.

 

None of this will work, however, unless Ukraine has some assurance that its independence will be backed by hard power as well as soft (although there are good strategic reasons why it should conclude a metals deal with the U.S.). Unless suitable deterrence is put in place, the Kremlin will treat a peace agreement as an opportunity to restock its arsenal and replenish its forces before attempting another assault on Ukraine. That is why the American proposal that the peace deal should include a formal prohibition on Ukrainian membership in NATO is a serious mistake.

 

Ukraine will not be able to join NATO for a long time, if ever, not least because it would require the unanimous approval of all existing members, and this would be unlikely to be forthcoming. But that’s another unpleasant truth that is best left unspoken. Moscow, Washington, and, however unhappily, Kyiv know that NATO membership is out of Ukraine’s reach. But an absolute prohibition on NATO membership not only is an affront to Ukrainian sovereignty — Ukraine should be able to decide its alliances for itself — but also sends a signal that undermines the credibility of any security guarantees Kyiv receives from the West. The less credibility those have, the more likely that Putin will be tempted to try his luck with round three.

 

Sadly, establishing that credibility has been made much more difficult by the poisoned relationship between the U.S. and much of the rest of European NATO. Detoxing it, even if the desire to do so is there, will take a while (especially given the fight over tariffs). But if the administration intends to continue providing some support for Ukraine (for now, anyway), it must leave no doubt that it will stand behind European NATO (which is not the same as offering any guarantees to Ukraine), especially during the period when NATO’s European members assume — as they should — more responsibility for their defense and, independent of NATO, the security of their wider neighborhood.

 

If the administration, which has foolishly muddied the waters with its belligerent talk about Canada and Greenland (not to speak of slanging matches over X with President Zelensky, a practice both sides should cease), is not serious about continuing to stand up for the very basic principle that countries should not invade their neighbors, then the world, not just Ukraine, will face a very dangerous future.

Is This Ukraine Peace Deal Worth a Transatlantic Schism?

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

 

The scene that is being set as the United States presents the Trump administration’s “final offer” to Russia and Ukraine does not inspire confidence.

 

Yesterday, multilateral peace talks in London between the combatants in Russia’s war of conquest and major NATO allies was “downgraded.” Only Trump’s envoy to the conflict, Keith Kellogg, will represent America. Volodymyr Zelensky has preemptively rejected the terms and Russia’s chimerical concessions in advance of these talks, arguing instead for an “unconditional” cease-fire. For his part, Vladimir Putin insists that there are no concessions to reject because he didn’t offer any.

 

The optics are inauspicious. Still, the terms of the Trump administration’s deal, as we understand them, are the result of a three-month-long process that is likely to form the foundation of a future peace framework. They merit consideration.

 

The plan requires both Ukraine and Russia to put a halt to hostilities. Once a cease-fire across the line of contact was in place, it would compel Kyiv and Moscow to enter direct negotiations to hammer out a more durable peace.

 

In exchange for this opportunity, much has been asked of Ukraine. It is to accept a permanent ban on Kyiv’s accession to NATO, ceding to Russia a veto on the alliance’s composition. The Trump administration had maintained that its agreement with Ukraine to transfer the profits on the development of its mineral and hydrocarbon resources was not to be construed as retroactive reparations for U.S. military assistance under Joe Biden, but that’s what it looks like. The U.S. does not provide Kyiv with direct security guarantees or even a commitment to provide future assistance.

 

To compensate Russia for its generous agreement to temporarily halt its advance in Ukraine, the U.S. will lift most economic sanctions on Moscow and conclude a variety of joint economic development projects with the Kremlin. From public reporting, it doesn’t appear that Putin will commit to not invading Ukraine for a third time — an outcome that is all but certain since Russia will not abandon its territorial claims inside Ukraine.

 

And yet, Russia’s maximalist vision for a favorable peace accord is not reflected in this deal. Despite Witkoff’s naïve openness to the Russian ask, Ukraine will not be required to transfer territory that isn’t presently under Russian control to the invaders. Indeed, Russian forces will be required to withdraw from the tiny sliver of territory in Kharkiv Oblast where they remain entrenched (Kharkiv is not one of the four Ukrainian provinces Moscow illegally annexed in 2022). Ukraine will not be compelled to disarm or submit to a process of “Finlandization.”

 

There are many thorny issues yet to be worked out. The American framework (which Russia has previously rejected) allows Ukraine to seek security guarantees from European powers. Whether that would include the dispatch of European peacekeepers to Ukraine — NATO forces that could serve as a tripwire for a broader conflict if Russia violates the peace again — and whether either Moscow or Washington would accept that is an open question. The U.S. would reportedly take functional control over the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, deepening its commitments to the country and raising questions about who monitors the free navigation of the Dnipro River (which is also in the deal). But the most intractable problem with the prospective arrangement is likely to be America’s willingness to accept the legal validity of Russia’s occupation of Crimea.

 

The deal would call on all parties to accept the “de facto recognition” of Russia’s military occupation of most of the territories in the four oblasts it is presently invading: Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. That’s distasteful, but understandable; Ukraine does not have the capability at present to take them back, just as Russia cannot apparently seize by force all the kilometers of Ukrainian land it has claimed for itself. But the U.S. would also offer formal “de jure” recognition of Russian sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia seized by force in 2014.

 

These terms are unacceptable to all parties to this conflict save the Kremlin and the Trump administration (Trump himself has been open to this outcome for nearly a decade). Neither this Ukrainian government nor any conceivable future government would consent to the country’s dismemberment. If it did, it wouldn’t remain the Ukrainian government for long. Europe, too, will not consent to terms that require it to lend legal legitimacy to Russia’s attempt to redraw Europe’s borders by force.

 

That was America’s position, too, since the end of the Second World War — it didn’t even recognize the legitimacy of Soviet domination over the “captive peoples” in the Baltic states. To countenance the validity of Russia’s claim over Crimea would radically alter the U.S. posture in both geopolitical and moral terms. It would also signal to the world’s revisionist powers that the United States was no longer an obstacle to their territorial ambitions; at least, not in the long run.

 

This demand may yet scuttle the agreement, but even considering Russia’s claims risks hastening the transatlantic schism the Trump administration has spent its first three months in office engineering. It gives America’s adversaries hope, and it steals from its allies the same. It sacrifices America’s hard-won reputation as a power committed to liberty over tyranny and is, thus, contemptuous of the sacrifices the generations that came before us made to bequeath us that legacy.

 

Perhaps these negotiations are salvageable, but the administration does appear to be racing to conclude an agreement — any agreement that it can call a cease-fire — within the president’s first 100 days in office. That political objective is now running counter to America’s strategic interests. But as the Republican Party once understood, no deal is preferable to a bad deal — certainly not one that legitimizes Russia’s war of conquest and sets the stage for yet another brutal land grab in the easily foreseeable future.

 

This process has already cost the United States political capital and the trust of its partners abroad. It may yet cost the United States in strategic terms. It is clear what Donald Trump would get out of the conclusion of this framework. How his country benefits is another matter entirely.

Trump Shifts His Own Vibe

By Rich Lowry

Friday, April 25, 2025

 

The vibe around President Trump’s second term has shifted, and it’s all his doing.

 

The president entered office with a bit of a wind at his back. His polling was better than the first time around, protesters weren’t in the streets, and federal investigators weren’t after him. The GOP was more united than in 2016 and business leaders wanted to work with him, while the culture was generally heading in an anti-woke direction.

 

Now, though, his polling is in a marked decline. His job approval rating is sliding. Depending on what poll you believe, it’s down to 44 percent (Fox News), 40 percent (Pew Research), or 42 percent (Reuters). According to RealClearPolitics, his average approval rating was about 50 percent when he took office and is 46 percent now.

 

It’s not hard to discern the root of the discontent. In the Fox News poll, just 38 percent approve of Trump on the economy. On tariffs and inflation, the numbers are almost 2–1 against him; 33 percent approve and 59 percent disapprove on inflation, while it’s 33–58 on tariffs.

 

Pew Research found 45 percent were confident in his ability to handle the economy, down from 59 percent after his election, and lower than in his first term in 2019 and 2020.

 

Via his snap imposition of sweeping tariffs, Trump in short order took a traditional strength that could see him through any controversy, or counterbalance any vulnerability, and at least vitiated it and perhaps made it a weakness.

 

It’s hard to think of another example of a president changing the momentum of his administration from positive to negative so quickly and decisively. Trump did it literally in a matter of days.

 

Usually, presidencies are rocked by events — a hostage crisis, a war gone wrong, uncontrolled inflation. Here, nothing was done to Trump; he did it to himself. He was the event.

 

This wasn’t him getting denied, either by more cautious advisers or a recalcitrant Congress. He hasn’t been sabotaged by the Deep State. No, he got exactly what he wanted, with a couple of strokes of his pen.

 

The problem is that Trump didn’t run in 2024 on economic dislocation, business uncertainty, higher prices, or pain for manufacturers. People didn’t want any of these things and understandably don’t like them.

 

It’s true that he promised tariffs, although all the potential downsides were ignored or minimized. No one could be certain whether he was truly talking of tariffs on the scale of those he imposed on “liberation day” — shocking and unsustainable — or those of his first term, which were much smaller and less disruptive.

 

Listening to him during the campaign and his Inaugural Address, you’d have thought the promised Golden Age started on Day One. Instead, his message has shifted to the notion that the sunny uplands are off somewhere in the future, after we work through all the gut-wrenching turmoil. In other words, the Golden Age is coming, but, in the meantime, stock up on toilet paper.

 

Trump’s other numbers aren’t looking so great, either. The Fox News poll has him at 40 percent approve and 54 percent disapprove on foreign policy. Here, too, he’s been the master of his own fate. Canada, Mexico, and Denmark didn’t pick fights with him; he created them out of nothing. The overpromising on a Ukraine peace deal — and retaking the Panama Canal — can’t be helping, either.

 

Defenders of Trump’s unorthodox way of doing business will often say that he’s a “disrupter,” meaning it as a compliment. But what he’s been disrupting lately is his own presidency. His splashy tariff announcements, rapid reversals, and sense of mystery about where he’s headed next all have real-world consequences on businesses, consumers, and allied nations, and none of it is redounding to his political benefit.

 

The good news is that having created this situation of his own volition, he can undo most of it if he reverses field on the tariffs. In the meantime, the vibe has definitely changed.

Trump Is Chaotic—and Kind of Boring

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, April 24, 2025

 

For the past few years, whenever I tell someone what I do for a living, they respond with something like “Well, there’s a lot to write about these days” or the sarcastic version, “Too bad nothing interesting is happening in politics at the moment.” What non-journalists don’t realize—nor should they—is that there’s always something that needs writing about. And whether or not Donald Trump is in the White House, you have to meet the demands of your job.

 

What they also don’t realize is that the Trump carnival can become, in its own way, more boring than pre-Trump politics. Because, when you get down to it, there’s not much to engage with. Nothing is definitive, everything is in motion, and the man at the center of it all is at once a painfully known quantity and an impenetrable black box. We all know exactly how he acts, but we never know what he really thinks.

 

That sounds intriguing at first. It becomes tedious, however, once you realize that it doesn’t matter what he thinks—because he changes his mind from moment to moment. So the black box is no longer much of a mystery either. Its contents are ephemeral.

 

Yes, there’s perpetual upheaval. But, as I noted in an earlier newsletter, that can become its own type of white noise. Tariffs one day, no tariffs the next. Rage at Volodymyr one day, rage at Vladimir the next. Threatening Iran one day, negotiating with Iran the next.

 

We’re watching a wall of screens, each running an endless game of Pong. And in each game, Trump is playing against himself. First, he acts, and then he reacts to the events that he alone set in motion. Trump announces the coming of “Liberation Day” and then rails against “Panicans” for the market crash he caused. He appoints Jerome Powell as chair of the Federal Reserve and then attacks Powell as a “major loser” for not slashing interest rates during the market chaos that Trump created. He sides with Russia entirely, nearly severs ties with Ukraine, and then fumes at Vladimir Putin for acting as if he can bomb Kyiv with impunity.

 

There’s something mind-numbing about tracking the moves of a man with no concept of the world outside his head. Yesterday, Trump was asked if he expected Ukraine to recognize Crimea as Russian territory. His answer: "I just want to see the war end, I don’t care.” As if he—not Ukraine or Russia—is the sole stakeholder with an interest in the war. This morning, after a massive Russian barrage on Ukraine, Trump posted on Truth Social: “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying. Lets get the Peace Deal DONE!” That should finally do it.

 

There’s a famous Twilight Zone episode titled “It’s a Good Life,” about a six-year-old boy named Anthony with godlike powers. Anthony can use his mind to control or transform anyone who doesn’t approve of bizarre, childish works. Trump thinks he can do the same merely by making a pronouncement at a press conference or on social media. He can’t.

 

Ironically, as president of the United States, he really is the most powerful man in the world. But he often uses the powers of the presidency to enact confused policies. Then he rejects the response and relies on wishful thinking to clean up the mess. In real life, that doesn’t work.

 

If Anthony couldn’t actually banish people into the cornfield or turn a man into a jack-in-the-box, the show would be boring. It gets tiresome to watch a kid play with imaginary abilities.

The Campus Protests Will Challenge Democrats’ Newfound Commitment to the Rule of Law

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, April 24, 2025

 

Democrats have reason to think their strategy is working.

 

The latest Fox News poll found that, while the public supports Donald Trump’s actions in relation to border security by a whopping 15 points, he is narrowly underwater on the issue of “immigration.” The distinction between border policy and immigration policy is one the president himself helped establish. It probably reflects the public’s discomfort with the extent to which Trump’s deportation policies have produced conflicts with the courts.

 

A Pew Research Center survey released this week supports this assessment. By overwhelming margins — 88 and 78 percent respectively — the public thinks the administration must follow the rulings issued by the Supreme Court and federal district courts. Moreover, voters are more worried about the president’s observing the rule of law than they are about the judiciary. Fully two-thirds of Fox poll respondents, including a majority of Republicans, say the president should not defy the courts even if he believes they are overreaching.

 

If Democrats are so inclined, they might cite this data to conclude that the public is once again on their side. All the flashy trips to El Salvador, the theatrical press conferences outside U.S. detention centers, and appeals to voters’ emotions are paying off. Right?

 

Perhaps. But the fact that the president’s political position might be eroding doesn’t mean Democrats are the beneficiaries. What’s more, the Democratic Party’s rebranding as a vehicle for the promotion and preservation of the rule of law is about to be tested.

 

The president’s deportation initiatives that Democrats have taken a stand against are inextricably bound to campus politics and Trump’s executive order aimed at combating antisemitism. Again, that’s not Trump’s doing but his opposition’s.

 

Democratic lawmakers manned the barricades on behalf of Columbia University–affiliated deportation target Mahmoud Khalil. They argued that the administration had sought to punish him for engaging in constitutionally protected speech and, therefore, could not meet the procedural requirements necessary to expedite his removal — right up until the Trump administration did just that.

 

The Democratic Party went to bat for this figure, a test case for the administration’s contention that noncitizen agitators who align with U.S.-designated terrorist groups are making life on campuses hell for other students. And now that hell, which they tacitly defended, is making a comeback.

 

On Wednesday night, Yale University hosted Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir — a controversialist and contentious figure, even within the Israeli government. The invitation was bound to stir the “pro-Palestinian” mobs to action, and it did just that. True to form, the demonstrators didn’t reserve their ire solely for Ben-Gvir and Yale’s administrators. Rather, they took their frustrations out on the Jews in their midst.

 

Masked protesters cosplaying in Bedouin scarves locked arms in the effort to block visibly Jewish students from navigating Yale’s campus. They barked at and harassed media figures documenting their escapades, such as the Daily Wire’s Kassy Akiva. They adorned themselves with Hamas-branded regalia.

 

Yale responded to the menacing disruptions by rescinding its recognition of the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter and promising disciplinary action for those who engaged in the demonstration — a prudent course, since the university is already facing a Department of Education probe into its lax approach to similar past events. But this gesture may be insufficient to satisfy the Trump administration. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division “is tracking the concerning activities at Yale, and is in touch with affected students,” wrote Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.

 

Yale isn’t the only font from which Democratic headaches continue to flow. Columbia University — the center of the outbreak of campus antisemitism that erupted, perversely enough, following the worst one-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — is at it again. “A group of protesters is planning to set up tent encampments on Columbia University campuses this week in protest of the war in Gaza,” NBC News reported on Wednesday. “Columbia did not confirm or deny whether it knew about the upcoming protests.”

 

Well, Columbia’s administrators are aware of them now. It is incumbent on them to take proactive measures to ensure that their students’ civil rights are not violated. Moreover, Democratic lawmakers are obliged to pressure campus administrators to do their jobs.

 

These schools know which of the two major political parties is more deferential to their faculty and staff. Democratic officials know that they benefit more from the absurdly lopsided political donations of education professionals at the university level. And the public knows full well that the institutional culture on America’s campuses is liberal. No one is confused about the power dynamics at play here. And if colleges experience another antisemitic eruption, voters will know whom to blame.

 

The public isn’t stupid. They remember the excuses that were made for the pro-Hamas protesters throughout 2024. They recall the efforts made to coddle the protesters, to insist that they had “a point” even as they vandalized their surroundings and terrorized people. Maybe much of the public didn’t read the Associated Press report noting that, even six days out from the election, Kamala Harris still hoped to harness the protesters’ enthusiasm if she could only “validate their concerns.” But they saw the results of that effort in her deferential approach toward her tormentors. Most forebodingly, as evinced by the firebombing of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home, they know this is a violent movement in search of a pretext.

 

Democrats have made a smart bet in positioning themselves squarely on the side of the rule of law. If they want that makeover to stick in voters’ minds, they cannot be selective about the laws they want to see rule. Overcoming the Biden administration’s legacy of contempt for the primacy of law would be challenging enough, but giving the universities aligned with their politics another pass might scuttle the enterprise entirely.

 

If Democrats can stand consistently behind their newfound convictions, voters may reward them. If they won’t, Democratic discomfort over the Trump administration’s flirtation with defying the courts will be exposed as opportunistic and hollow — another confirmation of the wisdom of the verdict that voters rendered last November.

Carpe Diem, Harvard

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, April 25, 2025

 

Harvard University and Hillsdale College have a lot more in common than you might expect: Both are home to many good and serious students and faculty, neither is very much like the cartoon of itself outsiders see, and they both have the one big important thing that kept Donald Regan from getting bossed around by Nancy Reagan—it is, after all, to Ronald Reagan’s irascible treasury secretary that we reportedly owe the popularization of the term “f—k-you money.”

 

“Why does Harvard need such a big endowment?” people used to ask. “Why is Hillsdale so insistent about not taking government money?” others demanded.

 

Now you know.

 

Harvard’s endowment was right around $64 billion at last count, equal to about 10 years of the school’s operating expenses. Those investments produce billions of dollars in income for the university, which uses some of the proceeds for operating expenses and reinvests the rest. Endowment income is Harvard’s largest source of revenue. It’s a little complicated, of course: Harvard’s “endowment” isn’t a fund but some 14,000 individual funds, most of which are restricted to certain uses in certain programs. But it is a big pile of money, and there’s a great big stream of revenue from tuition and other sources, too.

 

It is not that Harvard isn’t going to miss the $2.2 billion in grants and contracts the Trump administration has frozen on account of … pretexts for its pique and resentment and vindictiveness. But Harvard can adapt. So can Yale University ($41 billion) Stanford University ($36 billion), Princeton University ($33 billion), and the University of Pennsylvania ($21 billion), etc.

 

Hillsdale does things a little differently. It has a respectable endowment, too, right around $1 billion. Tuition represents a relatively small share of its revenue; instead, the school has developed real proficiency at fund-raising and generating its own income over the years. Hillsdale has a reputation for conservatism, but conservatism is a slippery thing: Hillsdale was open to black and female students from its founding in 1844 (doing so was part of the point of its founding as a Christian college) whereas Harvard didn’t graduate its first African Americans until a generation later and didn’t admit female undergraduates until the 1970s. I taught a seminar at Hillsdale a few years back, and I was surprised (and pleased) to learn that while there were a lot more young people walking around with pictures of Margaret Thatcher there than at the typical campus, that was a minority enthusiasm, while most of the students were there to learn history and read philosophy and to be, in a word, educated.

 

What Hillsdale’s independence from government funding has enabled is not conservatism or sectarianism but independence. Does that sound good to anybody else right now? And by anybody, I mean anybody sitting in a university’s president’s office.

 

There’s an old story about two brothers, one an alcoholic and the other a teetotaler. The alcoholic explains himself: “My father was a drunk. My grandfather was a drunk. All my uncles were drunks. What choice did I have?” And the teetotaler explains himself: “My father was a drunk. My grandfather was a drunk. All my uncles were drunks. What choice did I have?” Hillsdale is a teetotaler when it comes to government money, but other institutions may be getting the message that it is time to sober up.

 

They should take advantage of the moment.

 

It is easy to find a lot of inane, insane, or counterproductive stuff being done with public money at universities. (There’s a whole weird little galaxy of right-wing media that employs telegenic 22-year-olds to do almost nothing else.) On the other hand, university-based (and most often government-supported) work in “basic science”—pure research into the fundamental questions—is an excellent use of the modest public resources involved. And, yes, the resources are modest: A typical year’s worth of federal support of basic science amounts to about 11 days of Social Security spending.

 

A smart political hustler, understanding that the road from pure research to commercialization is not as long and winding today as it was a generation ago, might propose some modest entitlement reform, using most of the savings for deficit-reduction but kicking in enough to, say, triple federal funding for basic science, which could have real benefits for the areas in which the United States actually excels, which isn’t 20^th-century manufacturing but cutting-edge information technology, pharmaceuticals and life sciences, other medical technologies, aerospace, robotics, energy, agriculture, etc. The graduate students and captains of industry you’d bring into your camp may not be a huge voting bloc, but Americans have, historically, enjoyed living in the country that keeps inventing the future, and we had a pretty good run of it from the Manhattan Project through the birth of the Internet. 

 

Unfortunately, our current generation of political hustlers is peopled by those who aren’t even smart enough to see the most obvious kinds of opportunity.

 

There is much to be said for government support of university research, as the Pentagon and NASA et al. have known for a long time. The case against the universities is the same as the case against other elite institutions: They are too fat and lazy, too smug and self-satisfied, too insulated from market pressures and democratic accountability, too keen on niche enthusiasms and voguish ideological jihads—too far removed from the people they are supposed to serve and the people who pay the taxes that support so much of their work. That case often is overstated, but it does not come out of nowhere, and it is not entirely without merit.

 

Harvard has an opportunity to set an example, to refocus itself on its most worthwhile work and to do a little pruning of the unfruitful and the meretricious. And maybe make a little bit of a show out of it—and drive home the point. Other universities—the ones that do not have Harvard’s resources—would benefit from Harvard’s taking the lead. Government money is always going to come with political strings, but there are better and worse ways to play the politics, and Harvard has enough in its rainy-day funds to enjoy some flexibility: Thanks to its endowment, Harvard doesn’t have to kowtow to this administration or to the next one. But the moment does call for action: This is one of those cases where good policy is good politics: Husbanding university resources more prudently would be a better practice and would also assuage some of the populist irritation that has made a political target of higher education.

 

Sure, there will be some howls down at the sundry grievance-studies departments, but what’s the point of having “f—k-you” money if you never say the words and do the thing? 

Trump’s Team of Losers

By Michael Warren

Friday, April 25, 2025

 

The sting of the loss was apparent at the civic center in St. Cloud, Minnesota, back in May 2012. A 31-year-old combat veteran, Princeton University graduate, and first-time candidate named Pete Hegseth had come to the state Republican convention with the hope of winning over enough delegates to earn the party’s endorsement for the U.S. Senate. He had TV-ready good looks, a picture-perfect family, youthful vigor, and an impressive backstory.

 

But his supporters were no match for the superfans of presidential candidate Ron Paul. They had flooded the state convention and, unfortunately for Hegseth, also threw their support decidedly to a state representative and economics teacher named Kurt Bills, who won a whopping 64 percent of the delegates. The convention vote was nonbinding, yet still was a critical boost for Bills. Hegseth—who had spent hours walking through the convention gladhanding and backslapping—watched the vote announcement from the back of the room before beating a hasty retreat out of the civic center. Within days Hegseth dropped out of the race for Senate. (Bills, meanwhile, would win the nomination and lose handily to Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar.)

 

As a cub reporter covering what my editors and I thought could be the start of a long political career, I wondered that afternoon in St. Cloud if I would ever see Hegseth again. Of course, this ambitious young man went on to a successful media career, first as an on-air advocate for a veterans group, then as a host on Fox News for eight years before Donald Trump nominated him as secretary of defense. It was a long and winding road, but Hegseth has (for now at least) leapfrogged back into politics after being denied all those years ago.

 

He’s not alone. Hegseth is only one member of the second Trump administration to have been plucked from the pantheon of electoral duds and given a second lease on political life. From the Cabinet all the way to high-profile White House aides, there are failed candidates for major office who might have otherwise toiled for years in obscurity or, even worse, local politics if not for Trump’s magnanimity. Contrary to the president’s boasted affection for winners, it’s loyalty to Trump, sometimes even in the face of defeat, that remains the most valuable characteristic for a Republican looking to get ahead these days. Even the losers.

 

Among these lucky losers from the 2022 midterm cycle are Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary who won the Republican nomination for a U.S. House seat in New Hampshire only to be trounced by the Democratic incumbent in the general election; Bo Hines, who narrowly lost his race for a House seat in North Carolina and is now heading up a brand new White House office creating policy on cryptocurrency; and TV doctor Mehmet Oz, who eked out a primary win in the Pennsylvania Senate race in 2022 only to lose in the general election to John Fetterman and is now the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

 

What unites many of these in the 2022 crowd is how closely they hewed to the pro-Trump line on the question of whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Their alignment with Trump on this may not only have cost some of them their races but seems to have been partially to blame for the underwhelming performance of Republicans overall in that midterm year. Candidates like Herschel Walker (now Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the Bahamas!) were boosted in the primaries by their allegiance to Trump, only to go down in defeat in the general election.

 

And all this losing was presaged by the defeat of Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in January 2021 in dual Georgia runoff elections. Both Loeffle and Perdue hugged Trump tightly at the height of his conspiracy theorizing about the 2020 election. But both lost, delivering Senate control to the Democrats just as Joe Biden was about to enter the White House. But they’ve both received their reward, with Loeffler as the Cabinet-level Small Business Administrator and Perdue as Trump’s nominee for ambassador to China.

 

The list goes on, from failed gubernatorial and Senate candidate Kari Lake (now heading up the U.S. Agency for Global Media) to Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino (a three-time candidate for Congress in both Maryland and Florida) to Sean Parnell, who lost a Pennsylvania House race in 2020, withdrew from the 2022 Senate race, and is now the top spokesman at the Pentagon. In one case, the time between the last electoral defeat and appointment to the Trump administration has been long: Peter Navarro, the president’s top trade adviser, unsuccessfully ran for office five times, including for mayor of San Diego, San Diego City Council and county board, and the House of Representatives (in 1996, as a Democrat). He made a final bid for city council in a 2001 special election, getting a paltry 8 percent of the vote.

 

But my personal favorite may be Education Secretary Linda McMahon. The former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment was the Republican nominee for two consecutive open-seat Senate races in Connecticut, in 2010 and 2012. She lost both times in the general election and seemed better suited for a role as a GOP donor.

 

But her longtime friendship with Trump—he had appeared at Wrestlemania in 2007 in a staged feud with her husband and WWE impresario Vince McMahon—kept the dream alive for her. She donated to a super PAC to support Trump’s candidacy in 2016 and was rewarded with an appointment to head the Small Business Administration in his first term. During the interregnum, McMahon became more deeply ensconced in Trump’s world, chairing another super PAC and eventually co-chairing his presidential transition following the 2024 election before being tapped to head up the Education Department.

 

And as far as paths to power go, McMahon may have ended up better off losing those Senate races. Hobnobbing with other donors and having direct access to the most powerful Republican in the country sounds a lot easier than years of endless committee hearings and late-night votes on Capitol Hill. And at the end of the day, McMahon was appointed to the same Cabinet as a winning Senate candidate from 2010, Marco Rubio.

 

The good news for anyone in the Trump administration with aspirations to serve afterward is that it can be a launching pad. Just ask Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was Trump’s first-term press secretary. Or Rep. Max Miller of Ohio, a first-term White House aide for Trump. Or Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana, who was Trump’s first Interior secretary. Or Rep. Brian Jack of Georgia, the first Trump White House’s political director.

 

So the pathway for aspiring MAGA politicians is clear: in order to get the Trump administration imprimatur to win a future race for office, try losing one first.

Plot Holes

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

 

If we’re going to turn our politics into entertainment, we should at least get some dramatic satisfaction from it. On Tuesday The Trump Show delivered.

 

We all know this plot arc: An ambitious protagonist driven by overweening confidence overreaches and ends up humbled, bringing himself to ruin. That’s “hubris meets nemesis” and it’s as old as time—or western civilization, at least. It’s an ur-theme of literature.

 

But to have two protagonists humbled on the same day, at around the same hour, is inventive. That’s what happened yesterday. Watching the president forced to retreat from some of his worst ideas while his most influential aide was busy sifting through the ashes of his company had the feel of a movie montage in which various antiheroes each receive their individual comeuppances.

 

Nemesis arrived for Elon Musk in the form of a disastrous earnings report for Tesla, one of several businesses he neglected while chasing his new passion of lighting federal agencies on fire. Musk’s DOGE work for Donald Trump was the capstone on a political journey seemingly engineered to offend every crunchy, environmentally conscious liberal in the country, exactly the sort of person who’s most likely to be in the market for an electric vehicle.

 

Yesterday Tesla revealed that its net income had declined by—yes, really—71 percent compared to a year earlier. “Starting next month, May, my time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly,” Elon assured shareholders in a call, noting for good measure at one point that he’s not a fan of tariffs.

 

Tariffs were the cause of the president’s humbling during an appearance in the Oval Office, not coincidentally. Hours after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience that a 145 percent tax on Chinese imports is unsustainable, Trump informed reporters that the rate will be coming down. It’s unclear what sobered him up but Axios claims that the CEOs of Walmart, Target, and Home Depot warned him in a private meeting that “his tariff and trade policy could disrupt supply chains, raise prices, and empty shelves,” with consumers poised to feel the effects in as little as two weeks.

 

As for the president’s recent market-rattling invective about Jerome Powell, he now insists he has no intention of firing the Federal Reserve chairman. “I would like to see him be a little more active in terms of his idea to lower interest rates,” an uncharacteristically soft-spoken Trump said. “If he doesn’t, is it the end? No, it’s not, but it would be good timing.” Evidently aides like Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had a word with him beforehand to explain what would happen to markets if he didn’t quit pressuring the Fed.

 

Good drama, all in all. The only thing missing was a paranoid, out-of-his-depth lieutenant a la Ray Liotta in Goodfellas wondering how nemesis might soon arrive for him. (But if you look hard enough, you might find a paranoid character like that inside the administration as well.)

 

Two things make the dramatic arc strange, though. First, we’re not even 100 days into Trump’s term. Seeing him relinquish his trade-war fantasy and Musk ditch DOGE at this point is like watching the bad guys get rounded up 10 minutes into the movie. Where does the story go from here over the next two hours?

 

And second: How invested can one be in this drama when the plot is full of holes and getting stupider by the day?

 

Head in a turkey.

 

No president in my lifetime has been forced to retreat so soon from one of his core campaign promises.

 

The closest analogue is George W. Bush, who pushed hard for Social Security reform after his second inauguration. But Bush stuck with it until the summer of 2005 and didn’t concede defeat until fall, and I don’t recall entitlements figuring nearly as heavily into his campaign message as tariffs did in Trump’s. Bush was a war president, after all; the 2004 election was largely a referendum on Iraq. After he was reelected, voters could plausibly claim to have been blindsided by his interest in overhauling the welfare state.

 

No one can claim to have been blindsided by Trump’s interest in tariffs, which he spoke of last year in almost mystical terms. Practically any question put to him about the economy received an answer that somehow steered around to taxing imports.

 

Another easy comparison is to Bill Clinton’s failed effort to reform health care in 1993. But it wasn’t until September 1994, nearly two years into Clinton’s term, that the “Hillarycare” project was pronounced dead. And Clinton, like Bush with his Social Security gambit, never endured the humiliation of seeing his program backfire in practice. It was dogged opposition in Congress (and among the public) that killed his plan in its cradle, not a cascade of unintended consequences after it was implemented.

 

Trump made trade war the centerpiece of his economic agenda, moved boldly to follow through upon assuming office—and caused so much damage to markets so quickly as to invite comparisons to 1932. His great political strength, the roaring economy of his first term, has been smashed by his own folly: A new Gallup poll finds the share of Americans who believe their personal financial situation is getting worse to be at a 25-year high, greater than it was during the 2008 financial crisis or the COVID pandemic. A Reuters survey finds his approval on handling the economy down to 37 percent.

 

So now he’s backing off, even in part with respect to China. It’s as if Bush had ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and then had to hurriedly turn the tanks around en route to Baghdad because his battle plan was so dumb that it left the U.S. army on the verge of being routed. There’s never been a presidential blunder like it as long as I’ve been alive, especially so early into a term.

 

There’s a certain dramatic element to that, I suppose, but it’s not the stuff of which great shows are made. “Hubris meets nemesis” storylines typically involve a competent protagonist whose success seduces him into biting off more than he can chew. In this story the protagonist is so idiotic that his grand economic program manages to unseat America as the bedrock of global financial stability in a matter of weeks.

 

It’s basically a Mr. Bean episode. It’s the economic equivalent of Trump getting his head stuck in a turkey.

 

Bad drama.

 

But if you insist on treating it as drama, you’re left with a bunch of gaping plot holes to fill. For instance, what is the point of this trade war that’s so essential to the plot of season 2 of The Trump Show?

 

The president and his team have tried to retcon a rationale for their “Liberation Day” tariffs by touting the many exciting trade deals those tariffs will supposedly yield. The problem, according to more than one source, is that no one seems to understand what the American side wants in those negotiations—including the Americans themselves. Trump’s team keeps changing its demands, per Fox Business reporter Charles Gasparino.

 

Why, it’s as if the White House never intended to negotiate at all and was suddenly forced into it to make it seem like their leader meant to stick his head in a turkey.

 

Another hole: What was the point of hiking tariffs on China to 145 percent only for Trump to undermine his own position by declaring that they won’t remain at that level? Having seen him blink, Beijing and the rest of the world now have every reason to wait him out for as long as they can stand the economic pain in the expectation that he’ll retreat further. No wonder Scott Bessent is trying to incentivize nations to come to the bargaining table. The president has foolishly disincentivized them to do so, forcing Bessent to sweeten the pot.

 

Meanwhile, Trump is reportedly anxious that American farmers in particular will suffer from the standoff. How did he not anticipate that when the same thing happened during his first term?

 

Another: Why is the White House allegedly looking to reduce the China tariffs “to between roughly 50 percent and 65 percent”? Is there any economic logic to that number or is it just another half-assed formulation that “sounds right”?

 

Given how much the U.S. imports from China, cutting the 145 percent tariff roughly in half will still cause enormous disruption to retailers like Walmart, Target, and Home Depot, never mind the numerous small businesses that can’t weather the costs as well. And so long as the number keeps moving, companies can’t make plans; hiring and capital investments will remain frozen until the dispute with China is settled, slowing the economy even as Trump retreats.

 

So why is he dragging this out? He can stand firm and wage a mutually destructive trade war on Beijing or he can look weak by caving in order to calm investors. Somehow he’s managed to look weak and spook markets. That’s some trick.

 

Another: Why does he continue to threaten Jerome Powell when doing so is obviously a fast track to further market panic? The Fed is an island of stability in an increasingly unstable country, possibly the last American institution capable of giving investors the confidence they need to continue treating the U.S. as a safe haven. If Trump axes Powell and replaces him with a crony keen to lower interest rates regardless of the inflation risk, that pillar will collapse and the “sell America” phenomenon will accelerate, sending long-term rates spiraling.

 

All of which is obvious to you and me but somehow isn’t to our protagonist. It’s not even clear what Trump thinks he would accomplish by cashiering Powell: The 12-member Federal Open Market Committee sets interest rates, not the chairman acting alone.

 

You can’t make a good drama about hubris and nemesis when your main character is a dope because his undoing is destined to be his dopeyness, not his hubris. (You can have good comedy, but, er, hardy har.) The closest The Trump Show will get to a traditional dramatic arc in this case is the way a life of wealth, privilege, and narcissism may have conditioned the president not to consider even the most predictable consequences of his actions. He loves tariffs and hates Jerome Powell, he acted on those impulses without weighing the ramifications, and now he’s discovering that he can’t bribe or bully markets into delivering him from the Hoover-esque precipice on which he’s placed himself.

 

I suppose there’s some tragedy in that. Although more for us than for him.

 

The next scene.

 

How will the rest of this movie play out? Can Trump recover?

 

I think Elon Musk can—to a degree.

 

Musk is a more traditional dramatic protagonist than Trump, having proved his competence at Tesla and SpaceX, but he’s another guy whose fame and fortune seems to have insulated him until now from the adverse consequences of his own conduct. I don’t know how he expected consumers would react to his increasingly authoritarian politics or his callous chainsaw shenanigans except for how they have, but presumably he didn’t care. He’s Elon Musk. He can do anything he likes. And I do mean anything.

 

What’s remarkable isn’t that he risked squandering so much of his cultural capital by working for Trump, it’s that he achieved so little by doing so. Like the president with his misbegotten trade war, Elon went full tilt at a pet political project and ended up with a self-discrediting fiasco.

 

DOGE’s work has been a fiasco in every sense except as culture-war performance art. If you imagine its mission as saving the government gobs of money by ruthlessly downsizing federal agencies, it’s a failure. Musk recently predicted a DOGE dividend next year of $150 billion, more than 90 percent off of his ambitious early projections and a number that will be entirely offset (and then some) by larger deficits once the Trump tax cuts are extended. In fact, insofar as the department has hampered the IRS’ ability to pursue wealthy tax cheats, it might end up costing the government more revenue than its spending cuts will save.

 

Federal expenditures are actually higher this year than they were in pre-DOGE 2024.

 

If, on the other hand, you imagine DOGE’s mission as trimming the fat from the federal budget and leaving only lean muscle behind, it’s also a failure. Indiscriminate cuts to U.S. foreign aid programs have created a diplomatic opportunity for China and indiscriminate cuts to U.S. scientific organizations have set back medical research. DOGE was never about separating the fat from the muscle, it was about demonstrating the postliberal right’s contempt for empathy and expertise. The indiscriminateness was the point. And that point was important enough to history’s richest man to justify a 71 percent hit to his flagship company’s net income and a major dent to his own personal popularity, apparently.

 

But here’s the thing about Elon: People like his cars. They’re in awe of his spaceships. He’ll never be fully forgiven for throwing in with the most repulsive elements in American politics but if he stepped away from the fray for a while and concentrated on business, many of his critics would talk themselves into giving his products a second chance. They trust his competence and want to buy Teslas. They just want to feel somewhat less disgusting when doing so. It’s within his power to make that happen.

 

The president is different. As more Americans come to realize that he doesn’t know what he’s doing on what was supposed to be his best issue, they’ll grant him less of the benefit of the doubt on his other policies.

 

Don’t look now but his numbers on immigration have begun to slip despite the fact that border enforcement has been the biggest success of his presidency so far. Recent surveys from Reuters, CBS, and Quinnipiac have him either at 50-50 in handling immigration or slightly negative on balance; a new poll out today from YouGov finds him 5 points underwater, down nearly 20 net points from January. The decline is obviously being driven by the gulag-ization of immigration enforcement but I’d bet that the economic chaos since “Liberation Day” is contributing to it indirectly as well. Without a compelling financial reason to go on defending Trump from his detractors in unrelated matters, some of his softer supporters have apparently … stopped.

 

Who knows how that attitude might influence their reaction to other needless headaches foisted by the president on his constituents?

 

He’s destined to rebound at some point, if only temporarily—again, there are two hours left in this movie—but the tariff upheaval will stick to him in ways that the average scandal will not. “Trump could appoint Jay Powell Fed Chair for life, scale back all of the tariffs and go on an international goodwill tour, singing kumbaya, and it still wouldn’t completely repair the tainted perception of U.S. assets,” Spencer Jakab wrote on Wednesday for the Wall Street Journal. Why should it? Whatever the president undoes today can, and quite possibly will, be redone again eventually. Global confidence in American stability has been shaken and won’t be restored so long as the country is governed by an impulsive narcissist who plainly doesn’t understand the implications of his own signature policy.

 

And even after he’s gone, it won’t return fully. Regular readers know why.

 

“Many of the Trump administration’s problems could be quickly addressed through the incredibly simple expedient of just not. doing. certain. things,” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote today, which is true but strange advice for a revolutionary movement. As J.D. Vance said shortly before being elected to the Senate, “we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with” if the right is to prevail in America’s “late republican period.” Doing certain “uncomfortable” things to punish the right’s domestic and foreign cultural enemies is the whole point of postliberal nationalism, the basic plot of The Trump Show.

 

But wrecking the global economy in the process? That’s a little too uncomfortable for the president—for the moment anyway. But check back tomorrow.