Trump’s Animus Against NATO Could Lead to a Geopolitical Disaster

By Eric S. Edelman & Franklin C. Miller

Tuesday, April 07, 2026

 

Donald Trump does not understand NATO. Neither does he understand alliances, let alone alliance leadership. Nevertheless, based on animosities and grievances he has harbored in his ignorance for multiple decades, he appears disposed to allow the most successful political-military alliance in modern history to be destroyed. Vladimir Putin could not be happier, as this would represent one of his long-sought vengeful goals in retaliation for the Soviet Union’s breakup. That would be a true tragedy for Europe and, indeed, for the United States—and it is even more the case because Trump’s animus is based on a series of assumptions that do not bear scrutiny.

 

In brief, Trump appears to believe:

 

·         Member states of NATO have not paid their “bills” or “dues” or
“NATO fees,” reflecting an imperfect, to say the least, understanding of how NATO functions as an alliance and an organization.

 

·         NATO must follow America’s lead even when not consulted about military action.

 

·         NATO is a “one-way street—we will protect them, but they will do nothing for us.”

 

·         Joining in the military operations against Iran and clearing the Strait of Hormuz to end Iran’s chokehold on Gulf energy supplies have become a “loyalty audit” of the alliance.

 

All of the above are palpably false.

 

NATO does not have “member dues.” Each individual nation both submits funds to the alliance’s common activities and also contributes to the common defense by maintaining its own military forces. It is certainly true that since the end of the Cold War, many NATO states have been delinquent on both scores, and in fairness Trump is not the first president to complain that U.S. allies have not borne their share of the collective defense burden that comes in the form of national spending on defense. But things are changing, in large part due to Trump. At last year’s NATO summit in The Hague, member states agreed to the goal of spending 5 percent of their GDP on defense (3.5 percent of defense on their armed forces and an additional 1.5 percent of GDP on critical infrastructure protection and investment in the European defense industrial base), leading Trump to pronounce this “a big win for Europe and for, actually, Western civilization.” Trump either has forgotten this or is misrepresenting what occurred. (The United States, for the record, has not committed to raising its commitment of 3.5 percent to 5 percent.)

 

NATO, a collection of 32 independent and (mostly) democratic states, is not an American vassal. The alliance, founded in 1949 under American leadership, has throughout its nearly 80-year history always stressed collective action based upon consultation and coordination. Trump did not consult with NATO (or any of its member states collectively or individually) before attacking Iran. They were, therefore, under no obligation—moral or otherwise—to assist in his unilateral campaign. This stands in sharp contrast to NATO’s collective response to the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. Those attacks marked the only time that Article 5 has actually been invoked—and it was to defend the U.S., not Europe. Over the next 20 years, hundreds of NATO troops died in the Afghanistan war, including nearly 500 Britons, 159 Canadians, 90 French, 62 Germans, 53 Italians, and 44 Danes. (On a per capita basis, British losses were almost as large as those of the U.S., and the Danish losses actually slightly exceeded those of their American comrades in arms.) Trump’s allegation that the allies “have not been there for us” traduces the memory of these brave NATO soldiers.

 

The suggestion, rampant in parts of the administration, that NATO is a “gift” the United States has bestowed on Europe is bad history and even worse geopolitics. In both 1917 and 1941, the United States found itself joining wars it sought to avoid but nevertheless was compelled to enter. After the end of World War II, a bipartisan consensus united Democrats and Republicans in the view that, to prevent a third recurrence, the United States must be involved in European affairs to deter and, if necessary, stop a hostile foreign power from threatening American interests by dominating the European landmass. NATO was and is the result. The threat in 1949 was an aggressive Soviet Union bent on imposing hegemony over Western Europe; today the threat is a hegemonic Russia led by a cold-eyed dictator seeking to reimpose Russia’s control over its neighbors.

 

Then and now, this poses a threat to America’s vital national security interests. Our role in NATO not only stabilizes the continent but has brought an unprecedented eight decades of relative peace to an area that routinely fell into general wars every 10 to 20 years. Additionally, the U.S. role in NATO has provided us with a network of military bases across Europe, which allows the projection of American military power far from our shores—proving that forward defense begins with forward basing. It has also granted Washington unprecedented influence in shaping events in Europe, a capability it lacked until NATO’s creation.

 

The president’s insistence that NATO must involve itself in the war against Iran also ignores the fact that in 1949, when the NATO treaty was being drafted, largely at U.S. insistence, the treaty limited the obligation of a common defense to an attack on the “territory of Europe or North America.” This was to avoid the U.S. being dragged into wars sparked by the push for decolonization in the 1950s and the fact that France was already embroiled in Indochina, and Britain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and others had colonial dependencies throughout the Third World.

 

There have been frequent crises in the alliance triggered by recriminations that allies have expected support from other NATO partners in conflicts that they have not received. The 1956 Suez crisis is instructive here. Britain and France colluded with Israel to invade Egypt without telling the United States, even though the U.S. arguably shared an interest in not having the Suez Canal nationalized by Gamal Abdel Nasser. The result was a sharp break by the U.S. with its two closest allies, ending when the Eisenhower administration forced them to withdraw (thereby foreclosing their role as Middle Eastern powers). In today’s circumstances, the shoe is on the other foot. Trump acted without consulting allies in launching the current war with Iran. Our European NATO allies clearly have an interest in degrading Iran’s military capabilities and perhaps an even greater interest than the U.S. in opening the Strait of Hormuz because they are more dependent on energy supplies from the Gulf than the U.S. But it takes a certain amount of gall to ask our allies to undertake a complex and risky military mission (clearing the Strait of Hormuz) which, in current circumstances, the U.S. Navy is unwilling to undertake because of the high level of risk to warships transiting a narrow body of water that Iran retains the ability to turn into a shooting gallery.

 

The president’s angry comment last week that U.S. membership in NATO is “beyond reconsideration” marks one of his strongest rebukes of the alliance to date: “I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration. … I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way.” Actually, Putin knows that NATO collectively fields more than 3.5 million active personnel, with combined defense spending representing over half of the global total. The alliance holds a massive conventional advantage over potential rivals, with roughly 20,375 aircraft, 2,818 naval vessels, and 12,299 main battle tanks. He knows it poses a massive impediment to his imperial desires, and it is a main reason he is trying so assiduously to destroy it politically.

 

If Trump remains determined, to America’s and Europe’s complete and utter detriment, to turn his anger and emotion into action, if he truly intends to withdraw from or downgrade U.S. participation in NATO, he will thankfully run into several legal roadblocks. In December 2023, Congress approved Section 1250A of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which specifically requires either the advice and consent of the Senate (requiring a two-thirds vote) or an act of Congress before the president can unilaterally withdraw the United States from the alliance. Both conveniently and inconveniently (depending on one’s point of view), the co-sponsor of the provision was none other than Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who had championed the requirement since 2020). It is not clear if the legal provision infringes on the president’s treaty-making powers, but it is safe to say that if Trump attempted to withdraw in defiance of the law, the issue would be tied up in litigation for some time.

 

Furthermore, if the president were to attempt to neuter NATO by withdrawing U.S. troops from Europe without formally withdrawing from NATO, he would be stymied by a provision in the 2026 NDAA co-authored by the chairs of the respective Defense and Armed Services Committees that says that the U.S. must maintain at least 76,000 troops in Europe. If the end strength falls below that number for more than 45 days, the secretary of defense must certify to Congress that the troop movements are in the national security interest of the United States and were executed in consultation with NATO.

 

Of course, the current administration has not distinguished itself for scrupulous adherence to the rule of law, so it is conceivable that Trump, despite the impediments created by Congress, might attempt to create a fait accompli by simply announcing the U.S. was withdrawing and daring anyone to stop him. This would constitute an act of recklessness virtually without parallel in the postwar history of the United States. In a world marked by increased and intensifying cooperation among America’s adversaries—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—wantonly destroying the alliance that, with all of its flaws and controversies, provided the basis for deterring communist aggression in Europe and ultimately for winning the Cold War, would divide the U.S. from its most important partners and make the world safe for authoritarian aggression including potentially war on the Korean peninsula, conflict in Europe in Moldova, along the Suwalki Gap or against Estonia and Finland and, of course, the dangers that lurk in the Indo-Pacific over the future of Taiwan.

 

Nations are clearly capable of such acts of self-inflicted damage. Others have done it. In the hands of the current national leadership, one can only hope that Otto von Bismarck’s adage that “God has a special providence for drunks, small children, and the United States of America” still holds true.

The Real Intelligence Failure in Iran

By Shane Harris

Sunday, April 05, 2026

 

In 2005, a bipartisan commission of lawmakers and security experts concluded that “the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” America’s spies had told President George W. Bush that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted a nuclear-weapons program and that Iraq possessed biological weapons and mobile production facilities, as well as stockpiles of chemical weapons. These supposed facts became the basis for a U.S. invasion and an eight-year occupation. “Not one bit of it could be confirmed when the war was over,” the commission found. “This was a major intelligence failure.”

 

If a similar panel of experts scrutinized the run-up to the current war in Iran, their assessment might go something like this:

 

The intelligence community was accurate and consistent in its prewar judgments about Iran’s capabilities and intentions to attack the United States and its allies. Contrary to what President Trump has said to justify his decision, the intelligence showed that the Iranian regime was not preparing to use a nuclear weapon; it did not have ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States; and in response to a U.S. military attack, Iran was likely to strike at neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf and try to close the Strait of Hormuz, precipitating a global economic crisis. All of this was known before the war and presented to President Trump. This was an intelligence success.

 

Trump’s “excursion,” as he calls the biggest U.S. military operation of his second term, has unleashed a parade of horribles. Iran now controls the strait, where it plans to charge vessels a toll and can govern global flows of oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and chemicals that are crucial for manufacturing. A regime that Trump claims to have replaced still remains in the hands of hard-liners, whose repression of the Iranian people will be strengthened for having survived a decapitation strike by the world’s only superpower. And neighboring countries in the Gulf, whose livelihoods depend on exporting energy and creating safe places for people to visit, live, and work, will amass new weapons and reconsider their strategic partnerships with the United States.

 

Two decades ago, a president embraced information that turned out to be wrong, and disaster followed. Today, a president disregards assessments that proved to be right, and the predictable comes to pass. There’s a failure of intelligence there too—just not the kind we’re used to seeing.

 

***

 

“Your successes are unheralded—your failures are trumpeted,” President John F. Kennedy remarked in a speech to CIA staff at their headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, in 1961. Ever since, intelligence officers have ruefully invoked that truism whenever they’re blamed for a major screwup. The familiar storyline of an intelligence failure features analysts who neglect to “connect the dots,” case officers who get seduced by sources who exaggerate or lie, and politicians who contort ambiguous information to align with their preferred outcome. That’s what happened in the months before the Iraq War.

 

The lead-up to Operation Epic Fury turns this narrative on its head. The spies called it right, but the president went another direction. The failures of the intelligence community on Iraq’s WMDs produced systemic changes meant to keep botched calls like that one from recurring. In many respects, those reforms have worked. But they couldn’t account for a decision maker who had been seduced by previous military successes into thinking that the U.S. armed forces, under his inspired and perhaps divinely endowed command, could never stumble.

 

Some of Trump’s allies have criticized him for not making a public case for war, as the Bush administration did. But if he had accurately presented the intelligence, the facts would have argued against attacking Iran—or at least for not striking before the diplomatic options had been exhausted. Perhaps that’s why the president ignored, and later misrepresented, what his advisers told him.

 

“The regime already had missiles capable of hitting Europe and our bases, both local and overseas, and would soon have had missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America,” Trump said before a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House on March 2. But the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded that building a missile that could hit the United States would take Iran until 2035, and only then if it was determined to do so, which analysts concluded it was not. When Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—hardly the model of an apolitical presidential adviser—testified before Congress a few weeks later, she reported that Iran had missile technology that “it could use to begin to develop a militarily viable ICBM before 2035,” but did not say that it had done so. That timeline is crucial to understand, because to hit the United States with the ultimate weapon, Iran would have to place a nuclear warhead on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

 

That threat was not years away, Trump insisted. Iran was “going to take over the Middle East. They were going to knock out Israel with their nuclear weapon,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on March 16. A charitable reading might be that Trump believes Iran wants to use a nuclear weapon. But desire, or even intention, does not equal capability.

 

It’s true that Iran possesses uranium that could eventually be used to build a nuclear weapon, were it to be further enriched. But in late June, U.S. bombers struck nuclear-related facilities in Iran, which had made “no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability,” Gabbard said in her written statement to Congress. “The entrances to the underground facilities that were bombed have been buried and shuttered with cement.” That’s not a picture of a country on the brink of using a nuclear weapon.

 

Trump not only has misstated intelligence about Iran’s military potential. He has expressed surprise at the regime’s response to American and Israeli bombing, particularly Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the heavy drone and missile attacks it has launched on its neighbors in the Persian Gulf. But the president’s advisers had told him this was likely to happen. They knew that restricting a shipping artery would give Iran a chokehold on the world’s economy. It’s such a no-brainer maneuver that the Pentagon has built it into its war planning. When Trump’s military advisers apprised him of this possibility, he appeared to have shrugged them off. Iran would probably capitulate before trying to close the strait, he said, and in any event, he thought the military could handle it, The Wall Street Journal reported.

 

After threatening to bomb Iran if ships weren’t allowed to travel freely, Trump now says other nations should bear the burden of reopening the waterway. “The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future,” Trump said in a primetime address to the nation on Wednesday. “We don’t need it.” Oil prices rose following his remarks.

 

Trump has also said that no one told him that Iran was likely to attack Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and other Gulf nations that are close allies of the United States and host vital military bases. “They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East,” Trump said during a White House event on March 16. “Nobody expected that. We were shocked.”

 

How could they be? In 2025, the U.S. intelligence community publicly reported that “Iran’s large conventional forces are capable of inflicting substantial damage to an attacker, executing regional strikes, and disrupting shipping, particularly energy supplies, through the Strait of Hormuz.” No less than Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, perhaps the war’s biggest cheerleader in the administration, had to admit that Iran’s regional retaliation was not exactly a surprise. “I can’t say that we anticipated necessarily that’s exactly how they would react, but we knew it was a possibility,” he said at a press conference on March 10.

 

Before the war, officials from two Arab countries told Trump and his top aides that they worried Iran could launch counterattacks on them, in order to halt the flow of oil, drive up prices, and trigger a global economic crisis, Politico reported. In early February, as U.S. warships were moving into position, I met with several of Qatar’s senior government officials. The likelihood of an Iranian reprisal was top of mind. One official pointed out the obvious, that a war could make it impossible for Qatar to produce and ship liquefied natural gas, the foundation of its economy. That’s exactly what happened.

 

After conducting its own war-gaming, one of the United States’ closest intelligence-sharing partners in Europe determined that a major American attack would compel Iran to hit countries in the Gulf and try to close the strait, an official in that government recently told me on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive assessment. The Americans were aware of those conclusions, according to the official, who was baffled that Trump claimed to be surprised.

 

***

 

Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were also nonplussed, and angry, when Gabbard appeared before them last month. “There seems to be a discrepancy between what the intelligence community has reported over the years and what the president has said in terms of this action” in Iran, Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine, said. “And my question is, did you tell him?”

 

Gabbard avoided answering directly. But she said that the agencies she oversees had provided Trump “with the intelligence related to this operation in Iran, before and on an ongoing basis.” CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who was also present, said that he had participated in “dozens and dozens of briefings with the president,” including in the weeks before the war. He emphasized that “Iran had specific plans to hit U.S. interests in energy sites across the region.” Gabbard backed him up, noting that “this has long been an assessment of the IC that Iran would likely hold the Strait of Hormuz as leverage,” using a shorthand to refer to the intelligence community.

 

Senators were also keen to understand why one of Gabbard’s top deputies had quit his job over the president’s decision to go to war. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Joe Kent, whom Trump had nominated to run the National Counterterrorism Center, wrote in his resignation letter, a revealing statement from an official who had access to some of the most highly classified intelligence in the U.S. government. Ratcliffe told the committee that he disagreed with Kent and that Iran maintained an aspiration to build a nuclear weapon. But that is not the same thing as actually building one and preparing to use it, as Trump has claimed Iran was doing.

 

Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat from Georgia, read aloud a portion of a White House statement from the day after the war began: Trump had ordered “a military campaign to eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime.” He asked Gabbard: Had the intelligence community assessed that the threat was imminent?

 

The intelligence director, who had taken passionately anti-war stances as a member of Congress, walked an awkward line. She told Ossoff that the president is “the only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” and that doing so was not the intelligence community’s job. In fact, it is precisely the job of the intelligence community to make that determination. But putting Gabbard’s evasive characterization aside, she said that “Iran maintained the intention to rebuild and to continue to grow their nuclear enrichment capability.” What she didn’t mention: There is a world of difference between intention and imminent threat.

 

***

 

Plenty of presidents have dismissed the warnings and prognostications of their intelligence advisers, or simply not made time to hear them. When a stolen Cessna crashed on the South Lawn of the White House in 1994, some joked that it was flown by Bill Clinton’s CIA briefer, trying desperately to get a meeting with the president. At the other end of the spectrum, George W. Bush became obsessed with the minutiae of counterterrorism operations, keeping track of the various al-Qaeda members whom the CIA was hunting and killing.

 

Trump’s relationship with the intelligence community is more fraught than any of his predecessors’. As a candidate, he excoriated the agencies for their botched call on Iraq’s WMDs. As president, he has railed against a “deep state” that he claims has been out to get him for more than a decade. Trump has long said that he trusts his gut. He’ll know the war in Iran is over, he recently told an interviewer, “when I feel it, feel it in my bones.”

 

The U.S. intelligence community is neither designed nor equipped to restrain a president who is moved by impulse, emotion, and his own feelings. It can only provide him with information. When the president disregards what he’s told, or distorts it, that failure is his alone.

 

 

Trump Wants More Guns — and Should Get Them

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, April 07, 2026

 

If he has to choose between guns and butter, President Trump has made it clear he wants the guns.

 

This is the right choice for our national security and reflects, as well, a correct assessment of what should be the federal government’s top priority — not funding social services, but providing for the common defense.

 

Trump’s new budget proposes a $1.5 trillion defense budget in fiscal year 2027, a staggering 40 percent year-over-year increase.

 

At the same time, it outlines a 10 percent cut in so-called domestic discretionary programs (a category excluding entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security).

 

Progressives consider this tantamount to a crime against humanity.

 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the budget “rotten to the core.” Senator Patty Murray of Washington said its vision is “bleak and unacceptable.” Her colleague from Oregon, Jeff Merkley, deemed the document “an out-of-touch plea for more money for guns and bombs, and less for the things people need.”

 

Well, people need a military to protect us from enemies who want to kill Americans and end U.S. geopolitical preeminence, bringing all manner of negative consequences for our economy and safety.

 

We are not exactly living in a time of reassuring stability. The U.S. is embroiled in a war in the Middle East that has rocked global energy markets, while Russia has repeatedly invaded a neighboring country to its west, and China could be on the cusp of precipitating the greatest major-power conflict since World War II.

 

This is not a time when — if one ever existed — the fate of the country depends on robust federal funding for, say, community development block grants.

 

Trump intuits as much. “The United States can’t take care of daycare,” he said last week. “That has to be up to a state. We’re fighting wars. Medicaid, Medicare — they can do it on a state basis. We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”

 

Fighting and deterring wars should indeed be the prime responsibility of the federal government, rather than sending federal dollars sluicing throughout the nation to fund priorities large and small, worthy and utterly ridiculous.

 

In characteristic fashion, the New York Times noted of Trump’s budget that some of “the most severe cuts would reduce or eliminate funding that benefits minority groups and their communities” and also remarked that the administration seeks “to scrap money designed to reduce racial disparities in health and those supporting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.”

 

The mock headline writes itself: “Trump Seeks World-Class Military — Minorities and LGBTQ+ Community Hardest Hit.”

 

There is no doubt that the scale of Trump’s budget, which would be the biggest single-year increase in defense spending since the Korean War, is equal to the challenge that we face. Much depends, though, on what specifically the budget funds, and how effectively the money is eventually spent.

 

In broad gauge, the priorities are the right ones, reflecting a new age of high-tech warfare and our shortfalls in shipbuilding.

 

The Pentagon is requesting $11.36 billion for Air Force missile procurement in 2027, an enormous increase from $3.7 billion in 2026. The missile budget is projected to keep growing. In 2029, it would be $16 billion, an eightfold increase from 2021.

 

Space Force would get a 77 percent increase.

 

As for the Navy, it wants roughly $65 billion for building ships, more than doubling the $27.2 billion from 2026.

 

In terms of bang for the buck, the administration has begun to fund more nimble, tech-driven defense firms while it pushes the traditional big players like Boeing and Lockheed to become faster and more efficient.

 

As a practical matter, the president is unlikely to get all the defense spending that he wants from Congress, which, when confronted with a choice between guns and butter, always chooses both.

 

But Trump is right to go big and to focus on the federal spending that could win or lose a war and determine our fate as a great power.

A First Step Toward Shrinking Government

National Review Online

Tuesday, April 07, 2026

 

Don’t look now, but the federal government might actually have gotten leaner.

 

The most recent data show that fewer people now work for the federal government than at any point since 1966, when Lyndon Johnson expanded the bureaucracy to construct his “Great Society.” As a share of the total U.S. workforce, the figures are even more impressive: Less than 2 percent of people employed work for the federal government — the lowest share since before World War II.

 

The Trump administration gets credit for this milestone. Federal employment has been falling only since President Trump was inaugurated last January, after growing during the Biden years. In the past 14 months alone, the government has shed 352,000 workers, a stunning 12 percent decline. Military personnel are excluded from the count, so all reductions were in civilian staff.

 

The process that got us here was less messy than it appeared. Haphazard firings by the short-lived Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, received the most media attention. Yet the lion’s share of workforce reductions came through orderly layoffs. Over 150,000 federal employees accepted a buyout offer from the Trump administration early in his term. Tens of thousands more were let go in lawful “reductions in force” as agencies reorganized. As separations rose in 2025, hirings to fill vacancies slowed.

 

Layoffs were concentrated in administrative positions, which have long been due for contraction. The overgrown Defense Department bureaucracy saw the largest absolute reduction. Several departments that should not exist — Education, Agriculture, and Housing and Urban Development — also underwent deep cuts.

 

Trump deserves credit for achieving the lightest federal workforce in living memory. The federal government should employ as many people as necessary to perform its legitimate functions, and no more. Hundreds of thousands of duplicative workers have been released to find productive employment in the private sector, rather than merely being a drain on society’s resources. Lower compensation and retirement costs may save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars over the coming decades.

 

Still, even with fewer employees, the size of government has not been tamed much. Federal spending accounted for a near-record share of the U.S. economy in 2025 and is projected to grow much further.

 

That’s because pay and benefits for civilian employees make up just 6 percent of total federal spending. The bulk of federal spending is on transfer payments to private citizens, grants to the states, and interest on the national debt. Ultimately, the federal government is not expensive because it employs too many people but because it gives away too much money.

 

In this regard, Trump is headed in the wrong direction. He recently proposed a 2027 budget that would dramatically cut non-defense discretionary spending, in line with his workforce reductions. But those savings would be swamped by the large-scale yet necessary defense expenditures he’s proposing. Meanwhile, unlike in past presidential budget proposals, Trump makes no effort to even mention entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security — the true drivers of gaping deficits. Almost no one in Washington has any vision of bringing long-term revenues and total spending into accord.

 

Nonetheless, trimming the federal bureaucracy was a needed step toward rationalizing the size and scope of government. It may result in a more productive economy and, on the margin, decrease spending relative to the alternate path. But there is much more work to be done.

Blue Danube

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, April 06, 2026

 

Life is stressful for Republicans right now, and when life gets stressful it’s natural to yearn for one’s happy place. For Lindsey Graham, that’s Disney World. For J.D. Vance, it’s Disneyland—specifically “Christian conservative Disneyland,” a.k.a. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

 

The vice president will arrive in Budapest tomorrow for a two-day visit during which he’ll meet with the Hungarian prime minister and “deliver remarks on the rich partnership between the United States and Hungary.” (“Rich” is the right word, but more on that later.) As it happens, the country is set to hold parliamentary elections on Sunday; according to one recent poll, Orbán’s Fidesz party trails its rival, Tisza, by nearly 20 points.

 

In other words, the VP is going overseas to hold a campaign event for a fading candidate in the home stretch of a foreign election, hoping to pull off the second miraculous rescue operation by the U.S. government in less than a week. (Orbán preferred to have Donald Trump, no doubt, but the president is famously averse to associating with likely losers.) For a few reasons, this is curious.

 

It’s curious as a matter of priorities. I understand why Vance would rather be anywhere than Washington at the moment, having largely disappeared from view over the past month to avoid having to take sides between his boss and his anti-war fan base. But the optics will be awkward if America starts “blowing up everything” in Iran tomorrow night while the VP is halfway around the world, clinking champagne glasses with Orbán.

 

Also curious is how his visit contradicts what he told Volodymyr Zelensky when Zelensky visited the Oval Office last year. Vance accused the Ukrainian leader of having traveled to Pennsylvania in the fall of 2024 to “campaign for the opposition,” referring to his appearance with Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro at a munitions plant to thank workers there for helping to arm Ukraine. (Zelensky met with Trump and with Kamala Harris on the same trip.) A foreign official shouldn’t be putting his thumb on another country’s electoral scale—unless, it seems, it’s Vance’s thumb and the scale is Hungary’s.

 

But the most curious thing is that Vance has always been understood to be the White House’s supreme “America First” apostle, a principled nationalist laser-focused on domestic problems while Trump and Marco Rubio gallivant around the globe in search of imperial glory. He’s the guy at the Cabinet meeting who’s supposed to shut down conversation about any foreign leader’s political plight with a righteously indignant, “Sorry, but how does this benefit the American people?”

 

Now here he is, volunteering to be an Orbán surrogate in Hungary’s election. That’s a direct betrayal of his “America First” ethos, isn’t it?

 

Not really. I’d say it’s an expression of it.

 

The ur-Trump.

 

Vance isn’t the first top Trump deputy dispatched to Budapest to try to save Orbán’s skin.

 

As a senator in 2019, Marco Rubio co-signed a letter complaining about the decline of democracy in Hungary under Orbán’s leadership, citing “a steady corrosion of freedom, the rule of law, and quality of governance according to virtually any indicator.” As Trump’s secretary of state in 2026, he now supports all of that stuff. So he stopped by the country in February to slobber on the prime minister, telling him, “President Trump is deeply committed to your success because your success is our success.”

 

Between that and the VP’s upcoming trip, the White House really wants Orbán to win. And because it does, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Orbán’s opponent must be some sort of communist who wants China to have bases along the Danube or whatever.

 

But he isn’t. Péter Magyar, head of the opposition party Tisza, is a center-right politician and former member of Orbán’s Fidesz. “He has promised to keep some of the prime minister’s policies he views as positive,” the Associated Press reports, “such as a fence along the southern border to keep out migrants.” He’s also taken care not to break too sharply with the famously anti-Ukrainian Orbán about the war next door. Magyar has ruled out sending weapons to Zelensky, for instance, and members of his party recently opposed a 90-billion euro loan to Kyiv in the European Parliament. “No one wants a pro-Ukrainian government,” he declared last month.

 

Sounds like a guy whom this White House can work with! So why is the administration so invested in seeing Orbán prevail?

 

Benjamin Harnwell, a crony of Steve Bannon, put it well in an interview with the Washington Post. “Orbán really is now one of the global leaders of the worldwide populist-nationalist movement, and it would be a massive psychological blow were he not to get reelected,” he told the paper. “Viktor Orbán was Trump before Trump.”

 

Orbán is the ur-Trump, the man who “proved” in 2010 that what voters in the post-Christian West truly desire is strongman postliberalism. Anti-immigrant, culturally reactionary, and ruthless about marginalizing its critics: Fidesz’s success was the smoking gun for fascists and proto-fascists in the U.S. and across Europe that history hadn’t ended after all. The backlash to liberalism they’d been expecting for decades seemed to have finally arrived in Budapest and then, six years later, in Washington. The future was traditional. And authoritarian.

 

For all its nationalist pretensions, postliberalism is plainly transnational in its ambitions. (How could it not be when the 20^th-century cultural trends it seeks to reverse were also transnational?) That’s why Vance is en route to Budapest to campaign for Orbán, why he’s supported other far-right European parties, and why last year’s National Security Strategy sounded more concerned about “civilizational erasure” in Europe than it did about Chinese expansionism. The postliberal goal is to rid America and Europe of liberalism, not to establish short-lived beachheads in individual countries that are lost to the tides of election cycles.

 

Once you realize that J.D. Vance’s “America First” yada-yada is mostly just ideological postliberalism dressed up in patriotic garb for domestic consumption, you’ll understand why the prospect of Viktor Orbán being tossed out of office makes him nervous. As long as Orbán keeps getting reelected, the postliberal revolution that’s supposed to conquer the West remains theoretically in motion. Whereas his defeat might mean the global nationalist tide is receding, a flash in the pan brought to ruin by its own illiberal pathologies before achieving durable change. That’s the “psychological blow” to which Harnwell referred.

 

Go figure that J.D. Vance, the man touted as the future of American postliberalism, might feel special anxiety about that future potentially evaporating, especially with support here at home for the government in which he serves disappearing into the toilet. He joined a revolution, went all-in, and now a counterrevolution looks poised to quash it before he’s had his chance to rule.

 

Russia, Russia, Russia.

 

Whether he means to or not, Magyar is leading that counterrevolution—and I do think he means to, as he’s repeatedly criticized Orbán’s friendly relations with Russia. That’s an acid test for skepticism toward postliberalism.

 

Despite his ambivalence about Ukraine, the Hungarian frontrunner has forthrightly identified Russia as the aggressor in the war and gone as far as to accuse Orbán’s government of “outright treason” for its cooperation with Moscow. If that sounds heavy-handed, bear in mind that Orbán’s foreign minister recently got caught making “regular phone calls to provide his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, with ‘live reports on what’s been discussed’” during breaks in European Union meetings, according to the Washington Post.

 

Days before that came out, the Post reported that Russian intelligence had discussed staging an assassination attempt against Orbán to create sympathy for him and hopefully boost his election chances. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has personally promised to keep cheap Russian oil flowing to Hungary no matter how hairy things might get for the rest of the world in the Strait of Hormuz as a further inducement for Hungarian voters to stick with their current leader. Not even the president of the United States wants Viktor Orbán reelected as badly as the president of Russia does.

 

That’s because Hungary under Orbán has become a foothold for the Kremlin inside the EU, forming a postliberal pro-Russian mini-alliance within the broader liberal pro-Ukrainian continental alliance. Moscow is naturally keen to preserve it. “The story [of the election campaign] is less secret Russian interference than open Russian cooperation with our authorities on anti-Ukrainian messaging, energy cooperation, and hostility to the European Union,” one Hungarian activist complained to the New York Times. Magyar has made no bones about ending that arrangement, promising “to restore Hungary’s democratic institutions that have eroded under Orbán and steer the country back toward its Western allies,” per the AP.

 

“I think that Tisza will have an overwhelming electoral victory,” Magyar went on to predict, “because even Fidesz voters do not want our country to be a Russian puppet state, a colony, an assembly plant, instead of belonging to Europe.”

 

To a postliberal ideologue like J.D. Vance, a reversion in Hungarian opinion toward Europe and away from Russia can only be understood as a setback. Despite Russia’s pitiful military performance in Ukraine, all postliberals find Putinism attractive to some greater or lesser degree due to its ruthlessness toward enemies, macho contempt for Western liberalism, and cynical lip service toward Christian values. That’s the sort of culture they want to see migrate westward—and it did, in Orbán’s Hungary. Suddenly, it appears that the tide of Russification might be about to ebb.

 

There’s another, more venal reason Vance will be sad to see Moscow’s influence in Budapest diminish, though. Thanks in part to Russia, Orbán’s government has been a gravy train for the chud vanguard of American postliberalism, the sort of people to whom J.D. Vance looks for intellectual nourishment. The Washington Post explains:

 

As Orbán over the past decade took a forceful stance against migrants and refugees and proclaimed himself Europe’s champion of illiberal Christian democracy, Budapest became a magnet for American conservatives. Orbán’s government—bankrolled in part by cheap Russian energy supplies—poured money into a network of think tanks that became hubs for MAGA and nationalist ideology, and that in turn provided channels for the Kremlin to filter its talking points to American right-wing groups.

 

…

 

The numerous junkets funded by Budapest think tanks also played a role. Buoyed by his reputation as an anti-woke crusader, Orbán’s government was able to build influence by targeting those on the American right “who don’t do foreign policy and generating goodwill from the ground up,” the former official said, adding: “They’ve been doing trips where they invite congressional staff to Hungary, but they don’t bring the national security staff who know better.”

 

One American egghead who now runs a Hungarian think tank is political theorist Gladden Pappin, a man well-connected enough to have received an invitation to the vice president’s home last year when Vance hosted Orbán. According to The Atlantic, Pappin “once predicted that Trump would dissolve Congress, at which point the pope would anoint Melania Trump, who is Catholic, to rule the United States as queen.” Pappin claims he was joking, but The Atlantic’s sources who heard the comment seemed not to detect the humor, and other remarks suggest Pappin’s tastes earnestly run toward monarchy and away from democracy.

 

That’s the sort of impossible-to-parody dreck in which the vice president is now immersed, and for which we have Viktor Orbán to thank for making it financially viable. (Magyar’s main critique of him has to do with corruption, not coincidentally.) American postliberalism is at least as much of a grift as it is an ideology, so Vance is doing what little he can to keep that grift going for his think-tank buddies by showing up in Budapest to try to reelect the man running it. When he says that our two countries have a “rich” partnership, he’s using the word advisedly.

 

In an administration that encourages everyone who loyally serves the White House to wet his or her beak, it’s nice that the VP hasn’t forgotten the nerds who supply the flimsy intellectual alchemy by which the president’s manic, violent, and autarkic impulses are transformed into an ideology called “Trumpism.”

 

Atonement.

 

If nothing else, visiting Budapest on the eve of the election might be Vance’s way of atoning to the anti-war right while it’s peeved at him for not talking Trump out of going to war in Iran.

 

The vice president can’t explicitly oppose the conflict without ending his career. But what he can do is physically separate himself from Trump and instead stand with the other great postliberal success story in Western politics over the last 20 years.

 

A joint appearance with Hungary’s prime minister is a way to reassure the Tucker Carlson faction that could make trouble for him in a 2028 primary that he’s still a proud member of Team Chud, an OG who’s returning to where it all began at a moment when his boss is in the midst of betraying “America First.” In a movement of warlike Trumpist zombies, he’s still an Orbánist at heart.

 

In that sense, it may be better for him that Orbán is poised to lose. Had Vance showed up with his friend Viktor poised to win, it would have been a straightforward case of him wanting to bathe in another politician’s glory when there isn’t much glory to bathe in at home. By showing up with Orbán likely headed to defeat, he’s signaling that his commitment to the postliberal cause is so pure that he’s willing to stand defiantly with his ally even in defeat.

 

If the polling holds, Sunday’s election will be Waterloo for authoritarian chuds everywhere—yet J.D. Vance is determined to fight to the last anyway. He’s leaving it all on the field. There’s probably some modest political benefit to him among the fringe right in doing so.

 

In any case, I’m looking forward to hearing his theory of why Orbán lost, if in fact he ends up losing. The premise of populist-nationalism is that Western governments have been “captured” by cosmopolitan elites who abuse power to serve their own interests, and that only by electing nationalists can the people reclaim their rightful authority. The fact that the Hungarian people are poised to rid themselves of the nationalist leader on whom their empowerment supposedly depends is an interesting challenge to that premise. I’m guessing the results of the November midterms will be as well.

Get Me the Movie of This Rescue, ASAP

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, April 07, 2026

 

By now you’ve likely already heard some of the story: On Friday morning of April 3, an F-15 Strike Eagle, flying on a deep penetration bombing run out of RAF Lakenheath in England, was shot down by Iranian anti-aircraft fire. (It is the first time the U.S. has lost a manned jet in combat during the war.) The two-man crew — their names are currently being kept under wraps — ejected immediately, landing far apart in the arid mountains of southwestern Iran, with hordes of regime soldiers now on the hunt for the most valuable wartime prize of all: U.S. military hostages.

 

The pilot was retrieved by our boys almost immediately. But his crewmate, a weapons system officer, was out of pocket — and initially feared dead. Although wounded during the ejection/landing, the officer ascended a 7,000-foot mountain ridge and hid himself in a crevice to avoid surveillance, as he activated his homing beacon.

 

The rest of the story reads like a triumphant Hollywood action flick, except that this actually happened. The details will positively thrill you: Apparently the United States currently has such dominance over Iranian airspace that it has set up its own temporary airstrip inside the country, in anticipation of such an event. (We set it up near Isfahan of all places, which is a central node in the nervous system of Iranian military power — akin to Russia setting up a temporary air base outside Detroit to exfiltrate someone from the outskirts of Pittsburgh.)

 

I invite you to read up on the details yourself, because if you ever doubted America’s continued logistical and problem-solving excellence, this is the story that will revive your flagging hopes — basically the military version of an Apollo 13 scenario. (In that sense, it happens to dovetail nicely with the successful launch of the Artemis II mission: America can still do big, difficult things.)

 

And that is what really matters. The usual foreign trolls offered their trolling snark on social media over the weekend, mocking the millions of dollars of expensive aircraft the Americans willingly torched on their way out of Iran, after a major hiccup in the attempted extraction. And in doing so, these people predictably missed the point: Yes, America will set as much money on fire as necessary to get our military men and women out of harm’s way, alive. We can do it, and we damn well will do it. Every soldier, sailor, and pilot implicitly understands this — do your part, and America will do its part to get you home — and it is but one of the many reasons that people with the sort of initiative and talent to do nearly impossible things (like get a hunted man out from deep behind enemy lines without a single loss of life) sign up to fight for the United States in the first place.

 

In any event: I want to see this movie, and I want it greenlit yesterday. There is absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t be in theaters by next year. Get me McQuarrie on the screenplay; Peter Berg can direct — he was made for this sort of material. I want Chalamet in a buzz cut as the improbably elfin weapons system officer, Tom Cruise pounding the table like a military version of Les Grossman at CENTCOM, Wahlberg as the guy who does his job, and Javier Bardem as a steely-eyed Iranian bad guy. I read in Variety about how the movie industry is abandoning shooting in the Los Angeles area, and I think: You can film this instant epic at Vasquez Rocks to boost the economy. Hollywood can make this happen, and they’ve got no excuse not to.

 

Trump Goes Full Frank Booth on Iran

 

But then again there’s a chance we’ll all forget about the rescue after today, because Iran’s life-sustaining infrastructure may be about to get leveled for an entire generation. Yes, in one of those programming notes that unavoidably affects the Carnival of Fools, Donald Trump has promised to unleash the apocalypse upon Iran later on today, after the publication of this piece. The timing is unfortunate for me professionally, but at least we can’t say we weren’t warned:

 

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.

 

Trump sent this missive to the world on Easter Sunday, which afforded the opportunity for ample commentary about how the president of the United States chose Christianity’s most solemn holiday to praise Allah. But I think we can all recognize sarcasm when we see it — typing in all caps helps. How many recognize, however, how eerily Donald Trump now seems to be channeling Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet with his escalating threats?

 

I suppose the president thinks he is “sending a message” by warning that he will now savage Iran’s roads, bridges, desalinization plants, and the like. But it feels like cartoon logic to me: The regime seeks ideological survival above all else and will not bend to such warnings. Meanwhile the rest of the world gets to see what it looks like when the leader of the free world takes to huffing nitrous to relieve tension.

 

Whatever Happened to that Texas Senate Endorsement?

 

You remember the first round of the Texas Senate primary, right? Of course you do, if you’re a reader; I beat that topic down into the ground like it owed me money. The unnerving progressive James Talarico dispatched celebrity eyelash model Jasmine Crockett in the Democratic contest, whereas the Republican race went into overtime, with Gollum-like Attorney General Ken Paxton placing just behind incumbent Senator John Cornyn.

 

The morning afterward, out came President Trump to bluster on Truth Social that he would pass judgment on this matter soon — and expected to be listened to:

 

The Republican Primary Race for the United States Senate in the Great State of Texas . . . cannot, for the good of the Party, and our Country, itself, be allowed to go on any longer. . . . I will be making my Endorsement soon, and will be asking the candidate that I don’t Endorse to immediately DROP OUT OF THE RACE! Is that fair? We must win in November!!!

 

That was on March 4. Over a month later — silence. What happened? Oh, I could speculate, but I won’t. I can still wonder, however.

Justice, Upside Down

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, April 06, 2026

 

What should a self-respecting republic do with a figure such as Pam Bondi, assuming that horse-whipping is, for whatever strange reason, off the table?

 

Bondi, lately the attorney general of these United States, is an exemplary specimen of the sort of people who thrive in Donald Trump’s orbit: She is in a profound moral sense a criminal, but we lack an appropriate law under which to prosecute her.

 

Bondi’s 14-month career at the Department of Justice was, as a matter of her official duties, a crime spree. Her legacy is that she used the DOJ to launch a series of pretextual criminal investigations and prosecutions targeting the president’s political enemies, even when there was not the hint of an actual legal case to be made against them. Those targeted by Bondi’s DOJ as a matter of political vendetta include: Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, all of Minnesota; Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey; St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her; Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell; Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook; Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan; Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado; Rep. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire; Reps. Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania; Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona; Sen. Adam Schiff of California; former FBI Director James Comey; former CIA Director John Brennan; Attorney General Letitia James of New York. (The prosecution of former National Security Adviser John Bolton, no less political and pretextual where Bondi was concerned, is more complicated in that it is not solely the work of the Trump administration.)

 

That is quite a list—other than printing up a bunch of fake “Epstein files” binders, Bondi seems to have done very little with her time in office other than abuse the awesome powers of the DOJ to abuse, harass, and conduct retribution against the president’s political enemies.

 

Though vexing in this situation, it probably is for the best that we do not have a law under which the prosecution of Pam Bondi would be convenient—if Bondi’s career as attorney general shows us anything at all, it is that in our current debased political environment the DOJ could not be entrusted with a statute containing provisions flexible enough to treat as a criminal matter such abuses of power as Bondi’s. A law meant to curtail such abuses of power would, ironically, almost certainly facilitate new ones. Bondi is licensed in Florida, where she served as attorney general, and Florida law contemplates disbarment in light of a lawyer’s “cumulative misconduct” and permits permanent disbarment in cases “where an attorney’s conduct indicates he or she engages in a persistent course of unrepentant and egregious misconduct and is beyond redemption.”

 

Having recently celebrated the Resurrection, I do not believe that a human being is “beyond redemption” as a spiritual matter. But as to the question of whether a lawyer or a government officer is beyond redemption: If Pam Bondi has not engaged “in a persistent course of unrepentant and egregious misconduct,” then who has?

 

In his famous denunciation of the Roman aristocrat Catiline, who plotted a coup d’etat after losing an election (sound familiar?), Cicero famously thundered:

 

Oh, the times! Oh, the morals! The senate knows what is happening. The consul sees it—yet he lives. Lives? Not only that, he even comes to the senate to participate in the public business, and to mark each of us for assassination. We brave men think that we are doing enough for the republic if only we avoid getting ourselves murdered.

 

Cicero, supported by the conservative senator Cato the Younger, persuaded the senate to endorse summary execution for five of Catiline’s coconspirators, who were quickly put to death, an offense against Roman law and norms for which Cicero himself would later face a brief exile. The argument offered in favor of execution without trial was much like the one Romans made for crucifixion—that it would have a deterrent effect. And, in the case of the Catilinarian conspiracy, it worked: Catiline had raised a force to wage war on the republic and seize the consulship, but many of his dispirited allies deserted him before the battle—which did not last long and which Catiline did not survive, which probably was the best thing for him: Rome was pretty hard on insurrectionists, a fact that probably should be of interest to the illiterate sentimentalists attracted to the slogan “RETVRN.” That QAnon Shaman guy got all weepy about not having organic food in the lockup—imagine how he’d have whined about being shoved off the Tarpeian Rock.

 

Speaking of which: In addition to her other noncriminal crimes against the state, Bondi did not make a peep about Trump’s mass pardon of the January 6 insurrectionists and instead oversaw a DOJ purge in which the prosecutors who had worked on January 6-related cases—or on cases related to the actual crimes of Donald Trump and his lackeys in the first administration—were driven out. To protect the guilty and persecute the ... “innocent” is a strong word for Washington, but you know what I mean—that is not justice. It is the inversion of justice, and Pam Bondi was instrumental in turning the Department of Justice upside down.

 

Bondi, like many members of the Trump administration, could frequently be seen wearing a cross on a chain around her neck. She ought to think on that cross. Her career may be yesterday’s news, but there is news that stays news:

 

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! ...  Which justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him!

 

And Furthermore ...

 

One is tempted here to take the Lord’s name in vain: J.D. Vance, the George Babbitt of Elmer Gantrys, is about to publish a book about Christian conversion. Vance is, of course, the nation’s leading expert on conversion—he can and will convert himself into anything you like, for a price. Even man-of-many-faces Sohrab Ahmari must look at Vance from time to time and think:

 

“Dude.”

 

St. Thomas More—I mean the stage character, not the historical figure—knew the score:

 

... in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust, and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice, and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all.

 

We have to choose, to be human at all. Vance has chosen something else: to be all things to all cretins.

 

Who rises and who falls in this world may be part of some divine plan, although I have some doubts about that. (“God is a kid with an ant farm.”) Vance, who would sell his beloved Mamaw into white slavery if it suited his ambition, makes me think of Robert Browning’s narrator in “Porphyria’s Lover,” who has just murdered a young woman and sits embracing her corpse, pleased to have gotten away with the crime:

 

And thus we sit together now,

 

 And all night long we have not stirred,

 

And yet God has not said a word!

 

Economics for English Majors

 

Trump’s budget proposal is, of course, idiotic and dishonest. From the Wall Street Journal:

 

The budget calls for a 42% increase in defense spending and a 10% reduction in nondefense spending, taking particular aim at renewable-energy programs, refugee resettlement funding and housing initiatives the administration deems “woke.” The plan emphasizes missile defense and beautification in Washington, D.C., while shrinking funding for environmental-justice initiatives and electric-vehicle charging.

 

“Beautification in Washington” means Trump building more monuments to himself,  but set that aside for a second. Purely as a thought exercise, let us entertain the notion: Increasing defense spending by 42 percent while cutting non-defense spending by 10 percent would, in fact, represent a decrease in overall federal spending, since 42 percent of 13 percent (current defense spending) is a smaller number than 10 percent of 87 percent (non-defense spending). Given that almost all non-defense spending is entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) and interest on the debt (a non-optional outlay), best of luck coming up with a way to cut 10 percent out of non-defense spending while only gutting “woke” and “green” stuff. All education, training, employment, social services, and transportation spending combined comes out to about 4 percent of federal spending. A note here to my progressive friends who insist that we’d be fiscally fine if we returned to Eisenhower-era top tax rates of 90-odd percent: In spite of the on-paper rates, overall federal taxes in the Eisenhower years were a little bit lower than they have been in recent years (a little less than 17 percent of GDP in 1957, a little more than 17 percent in 2025, almost 19 percent in 2022), while Trump’s proposal to boost military spending while cutting domestic spending would be a step back in the direction of Eisenhower-era spending priorities. In the 1950s, defense spending accounted for nearly 60 percent of federal outlays, as opposed to the current level of about 13 percent. In the earlier part of the Eisenhower administration, the defense/social-spending split was more like 80/20. (Go ahead and dig inhere.) If you think that is what federal spending should look like—be careful what you wish for, because Trump may try to give it to you.

 

Words About Words

 

A New York Times headline wonders: Could there be “A North American Treaty Organization without America?” What would that even mean?

 

I come bearing good news for the anxious Times copy editors: There will never be a North American Treaty Organization without America! In fact, there is no such thing as the North American Treaty Organization. NATO has 32 members, 30 of which are in Europe and two of which are in North America, and it is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. 

 

I also have some bad news:

 

 

And Furtherermore ...

 

The Huffington Post, which still exists, reports: “Irritable Male Syndrome (IMS) Is An Actual Condition — And It Could Explain A Lot.”

 

About that:

 

Get off my lawn.

 

And Furthererermore ...

 

I came across an interesting name, one belonging to a lawyer for the Democracy Defenders Fund who was quoted this week in a New York Times article. And what a name:  Taryn Wilgus Null, which sounds like it should belong to a character in a book with a dragon on the cover and a subtitle advertising it as “Part 17 in the Wintersbane Saga” or something like that. It is an excellent name. As a boring ol’ “Kevin,” I am envious.

‘Liberation Day’ at One Year

National Review Online

Monday, April 06, 2026

 

On April 2 of last year, President Trump stood in the White House Rose Garden and announced that he was liberating America from the scourge of imports. The charts he displayed — showing planned tariff rates on nearly every country in the world — sent stock markets tumbling. Trump’s declaration promised nothing less than a complete remaking of America’s place in the global trading system. Now, one year after that so-called liberation day, we can review the record of the president’s tariff regime.

 

Proponents of protectionism argue that economists were discredited by their dire predictions after liberation day, as the U.S. economy continues to grow and inflation has cooled. But avoiding disaster should not be the measure of sound policy. More importantly, the tariff rates outlined on liberation day were not the ones we got.

 

Trump claimed that the original rates were purely “reciprocal,” with countries facing the same average duties that they imposed on U.S. exports. In truth, the rates had nothing to do with existing trade barriers. Countries faced a minimum tariff of 10 percent, and many faced much higher rates based on a faulty formula. The resulting panic was so great that Trump suspended the tariffs to make time for “negotiations.”

 

Trump spent the following months changing his tariff policy dozens of times: decreasing and increasing rates, layering on produce-specific duties, and exempting various import categories. Exemptions became so porous that, by the end of 2025, the liberation day tariffs applied to just 42 percent of imports. The president also lowered tariffs on several major trading partners in a series of agreements. His administration fell far short, however, of reaching its stated goal of “90 deals in 90 days.”

 

Still, even if tariffs turned out lower than initially expected, Trump successfully raised the average tax rate on U.S. imports to the highest level since the Great Depression. Have the tariffs had the glorious effects that Trump and his allies said they would? Hardly.

 

First, Trump promised on liberation day that jobs and factories would come “roaring back” once a deadened U.S. manufacturing sector was protected from foreign competition. Yet after a year of high tariffs, manufacturing has shed tens of thousands of jobs, continuing a slide that began in 2023. Other blue-collar industries that rely on imports, such as construction and transportation, saw similarly weak employment.

 

Investment in building new factories also declined in 2025. Protectionists might contend that tariffs need more than a year to bring manufacturing home. But American manufacturers overwhelmingly view tariff policy as a headwind to manage, not a boon to celebrate. The uncertainty generated by ever-changing duties has killed their ability to plan new investments. Meanwhile, factories pay higher prices on the 56 percent of U.S. imports that serve as inputs for other products.

 

Research finds that tariffs are passed on to Americans at rates of up to 96 percent, rather than paid by foreign countries, as Trump claims. Tariffs have raised the prices of imported and domestic goods alike, as dampened competition allows U.S. producers to charge more. Merchandise prices are now around 6 percent higher than they would have been under pre-tariff trends.

 

Trump also said that the trade deals he negotiated using tariffs had brought in trillions of dollars of foreign investment. Those numbers were always fanciful. Foreign direct investment in 2025 was lower than in previous years, and most of it was in retained earnings rather than in new ventures.

 

As taxes on Americans, tariffs had one sure effect: they raised revenue. New levies brought in roughly $200 billion last year — but most of that money may need to be given back. Trump’s primary tariff tool was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in February, prompting thousands of importers to sue for refunds. If they win in court, the tariffs might end up costing the government money, as companies will be owed billions of dollars in interest. Even if the government keeps all its ill-gotten gains, tariffs will have hardly dented the national debt.

 

Lastly, tariffs failed to alter the U.S. trade deficit — the object of Trump’s decades-long fixation. The trade deficit doesn’t harm anyone, but the president mistakenly believed he could reduce it by raising import costs. Instead, the goods deficit increased in 2025.

 

Although Trump’s country-by-country levies were struck down, he is reconstituting his tariff regime piecemeal — first through a temporary 10 percent duty across the board, then through phony investigations into foreign trade practices. Alas, the new tariffs will have the same impoverishing effects as the old ones for no discernible benefit. What were we supposed to be “liberated” from, again?