The Amnesiac Politics of American Leftists

By Eric Heinze

Saturday, April 05, 2025

 

Note: This essay is adapted from Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left by Eric Heinze (The MIT Press, 2025) with permission of the publisher.

 

***

 

Today we find critical theorists—or “crits,” as they are often called—around the world hatching many of the ideas that propel the left. Crits write in fields as varied as economics, law, politics, war, media, education, art, and climate change, and it can be hard to find much unity among them. Yet many crits accept some version of the following point: It is crucial to educate the public about patterns of oppression waged by and within Western societies over hundreds of years.

 

Some people, especially conservatives, dismiss this trend as “grievance studies,” inviting people to hate Western democracies. But it can also be described in more neutral terms as “memory politics”—a belief that we can remedy current social ills only by grasping their historical roots.

 

Invariably, controversies about race, colonialism, gender, sex, war, and economic exploitation prompt questions about history, so there is no such thing as no memory politics. State-orchestrated amnesia itself is a form of memory politics—often of the most sinister kind. It is the history taught in Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China. It is the history favored by school boards in the United States that want to replace the words slave trade in children’s textbooks with euphemisms like involuntary relocation or to describe 19th-century plantation slavery as an opportunity for slaves to learn “skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”

 

Memory politics unfold in two steps. Memory forms the first step, where we gather evidence about past injustices. But, for crits, politics forms the second and decisive step. We must bring critical understandings of history out of the lecture hall and into public consciousness through street protests, films, television, radio, and other channels. The harms caused by racism, colonialism, militarism, sexism, or heteronormativity will never be overcome until the widest possible public understands them.

 

Recall William Faulkner’s immortal quip: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” This approach to history demands that we must connect the dots from past wrongs to present crises. We will end cycles of injustice only by publicly and proactively communicating the West’s bleak histories to future generations.

 

Memory politics can be called the left’s most powerful contribution to today’s world, as a quick comparison makes clear. A few centuries ago, our disputes about justice commonly involved questions about who held the rightful claim to a throne, or how powers should divide between the church and the state, or what kind of authority a monarch could rightfully wield over other members of the aristocracy. But nowadays, when you find yourself locked into a war of words around the dinner table, I doubt you are debating those types of questions. More likely, you are arguing about issues such as race, class, sex, or gender. Typical social problems today involve topics as different as earning power, street crime, illegal immigration, health care, environmental protection, child protection, abortion rights, weapons possession, substance abuse, criminal justice, or access to education. At first glance, these issues seem to have little in common, yet in all of them, discussions about unfair impacts based on race, class, sex, or gender often end up playing a crucial role.

 

Progressive stances do not always triumph in debates on these issues, yet the left’s single greatest achievement consists in having defined the very terms we use to discuss justice, regardless of the positions each of us may end up taking on any given controversy. People like Donald Trump and Elon Musk may holler right-wing stances in debates about race, class, sex, or gender, but what leftists pioneered long ago was a culture in which these are the issues that define the arguments we are all having and the ways in which we are all thinking about justice. Leftists often claim to speak from an underdog position, yet when it comes to the single most powerful idea in ethics, law, and politics—the idea of justice—it is the left that has defined today’s conversations. To shape culture in such a pervasive way is to wield power indeed.

 

***

 

Battles about historical memory rage around the world. In 2020, more than 250,000 people signed a petition to the British Parliament entitled “Teach Britain’s Colonial Past as Part of the UK’s Compulsory Curriculum.” The document insisted that by educating children about “the events of the past, we can forge a better future.” How would this education work? The petition stated: “Colonial powers must own up to their pasts by raising awareness of the forced labour of Black people, past and present mistreatment of BAME [Black, Asian, and Middle Eastern] people, and most importantly, how this contributes to the unfair systems of power at the foundation of our modern society.” At that time, Britain’s government was headed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the Conservative Party, whose minister for education dismissed the campaign, announcing that he did not want to “pile on” more topics in schools. Yet the petition authors fired back: “Vital information has been withheld from the people by institutions meant to educate them.” One of them recalled that she had read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in school but “never got to read a book with a person of colour in it.”

 

But this leads to my main question: How have crits taught the public about the left’s own histories? A defining feature of critical theory is collective self-examination, sometimes called “autocritique.” What this means is that many leftists feel entitled to insist that we must all take a critical view of Western history—because they themselves have always reflected on the left’s own histories, openly and candidly confessing leftist failures. Admittedly, today’s leftists do usually acknowledge atrocities committed in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the North Korea of the Kim dynasty; these histories can be widely found in university curricula. In other words, when it comes to a memory politics of the left, most leftists today do take step one: to admit wrongdoing in the first place. The problem is that leftists never take step two: They never carry knowledge of leftist atrocities out of the seminar room to promote greater public awareness.

 

For example, progressives across the globe have long organized events and protests calling for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions of Israel. They have written Israeli conduct into histories of Western racism dating back centuries, before the state was even conceived, frequently including comparisons to European colonialism, Nazism, apartheid, and Jim Crow. But this reading of history does not just take place in sleepy seminar rooms; it has formed a vital pillar of public awareness campaigns and grassroots activism, as we witness on college campuses today.

 

In response, defenders of Israel virulently reject these analogies to fascism, settler colonialism, and racial discrimination. What then unfolds are full-blown culture wars. Polar extremes fire their polemics back and forth for years without end. These entrenched positions make it impossible for any serious conversation to move forward.

 

I propose a new approach. Questions about Israeli treatment of Palestinians are legitimate and must be discussed. After all, histories of ethnic discrimination have long plagued societies across the globe, so it would be odd for this evil not to be found in Israel. The problem is that, for more than a century, crits have done little more than replace one set of untold stories with another. If they believe that all stories of oppression must be told, then they must broaden their histories to include decades in which leftists lent legitimacy, if not zealous support, to oppressive dictatorships. At various times these included, for example, Soviet involvement with Egypt, Syria, Iraq, South Yemen, Algeria, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The Soviets also promoted the spread of antisemitism in Arab and other Muslim nations. If leftists believe in self-scrutiny, then why don’t they tell those stories? What, exactly, do they think collective autocritique should look like on the left?

 

If the left is to maintain credibility, it must start to do what it has taught the rest of us to do. It is time for the left’s memory politics of the left to advance from step one to step two—to advance from merely acknowledging leftist injustices to actively teaching the widest possible public about them. If leftists do not think that mass education about leftist injustices is vital, then it becomes a mystery why they would think that education about Western injustices should merit any attention at all.

Silver Linings Playbook

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, April 04, 2025

 

The most poignant comment I’ve seen about the president’s groin-punch to the U.S. economy came from his secretary of state. During a visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels on Friday, Marco Rubio told reporters, “We’re not the government of the world now.”

 

He said it triumphantly, I assume, which is part of what makes it poignant. In an alternate universe where ambition hasn’t rotted his brain, Sen. Marco Rubio is saying the same thing today, verbatim, about the first two-and-a-half months of Donald Trump’s second presidency. But his tone is entirely different.

 

Being the government of the world worked out okay for America, not to mention the world. Rubio circa 2016 would have been eloquent on that point. But he chose instead to be a cymbal-banging monkey for Trump, so now he’s required to say inane things about the nationalist virtues of immense wealth destruction.

 

Still, he’s right: We’re not the government of the world anymore. Which is also poignant if you’re a child of the Cold War like I am.

 

Before January 20, even a Trump doomsayer like me would have doubted that the president could do so much damage as to end the unipolar global order in 75 days, but he’s done it. America is considerably weaker economically and diplomatically than it was as recently as three months ago, and entirely by design. No crisis has been foisted on Trump in that period to make diminution inevitable, either. He’s chosen it freely, one needless groin-punch after another.

 

It’s indistinguishable from sabotage.

 

Comparisons have already begun between Trump’s trade war and George W. Bush’s Iraq war, which is unfair to both men. Trump’s war won’t have a body count (not directly, anyway) while Bush’s war wasn’t as comprehensively strategically indefensible. But the similarities are obvious: In each case, a Republican president gambled his party’s and his country’s credibility on a dubious ideological hobby horse that portended enormous human misery. It didn’t work out great for Bush’s GOP. Stay tuned.

 

The analogy got me thinking, though. Are there any silver linings to the dumbest trade war in history? There aren’t many from the Iraq war, but you can find a few if you look. Iraq’s new democracy has endured. Saddam Hussein and his lunatic sons were liquidated, sparing the world from whatever future calamities they would have instigated. And Americans learned a painful lesson about the limits of military power that may have averted other, even more painful U.S. misadventures abroad.

 

There must likewise be some upsides to Trump lighting American preeminence and millions of retirement accounts on fire, no? And indeed, there are.

 

Backlash upon backlash.

 

One silver lining is that public support for free trade will grow.

 

It happened during Trump’s first term. When he was elected in 2016, 58 percent of Americans told Gallup that they viewed foreign trade as an opportunity for economic growth versus 34 percent who regarded it as a threat to the U.S. economy. Within a year, that split had widened to 72-23. In 2020, it reached 79-18, the largest gap Gallup had recorded to that point in nearly 30 years of asking. Nothing made voters more enthusiastic about cheap foreign goods, it seems, than having to live with a president who wanted to make them more expensive.

 

Last month, with Trump back in office, Gallup asked the question again and found 81 percent of respondents in favor of free trade, a jump of 20 points since 2024 and another new record. In other words, a sharp backlash to the new president’s policies was in motion even before “Liberation Day.” Imagine what the numbers will look like the next time Gallup asks, now that Americans have experienced Trump juche in full flower.

 

Views of free trade tend to wax and wane depending on which party is in office, but the shock of this fiasco might put voters off of protectionism durably, the same way Iraq has with respect to major Middle Eastern wars. And that might come in handy as the damage from Trump’s presidency inevitably radicalizes some liberals: A Democrat elected on a wave of left-wing populism who’s tempted to experiment with juche himself will look long and hard at those Gallup numbers before doing so.

 

Another silver lining is that Congress might be moved to start reclaiming some of its powers from Trump.

 

Might. Don’t get your hopes up. The smart money says it won’t happen unless Democrats regain control next year. If things get so bad before then that even gutless congressional Republicans feel pressured to act, it will only be because they’ve exhausted every excuse to avoid doing so. From Politico:

 

“I think most members on our side are very willing to give the president time,” Arkansas Sen. John Boozman said, summing up the view of many GOP lawmakers who might have qualms about Trump’s massive new levies but showed little interest—at least for now and the near future—in doing anything concrete to restrain him.

 

…

 

One senior Republican aide, granted anonymity to describe the dynamics inside the party, said GOP lawmakers were prepared to give Trump “several months” at the very least. “Everyone is terrified,” the aide said. “But I don’t think anyone wants to cross the president right now.”

 

Forced to choose between your financial security and their electoral security, the right’s quisling leadership class will choose itself every time—for now. But there is, in theory, a point at which the two interests might align. If the economy topples into recession and Trump’s approval rating crashes into the low 30s, with his “soft” supporters abandoning him en masse, running as an anti-tariff conservative in a GOP primary might become marginally less risky than running as an anti-anti-tariff Trumpist in a general election.

 

But even then, I admit, it’s hard to imagine Republicans mustering the dignity to pass legislation ending Trump’s abuse of his tariff powers. The most we can realistically hope for from them is convincing him to lift the tariffs of his own accord before the midterms. “Would you rather do it yourself, Mr. President, or would you prefer to have the new House and Senate Democratic majorities do it for you?”

 

American decline.

 

A third silver lining of the new trade war isn’t so lustrous. Wednesday was the final proof, if more was needed, that Americans are no longer fit to lead the free world.

 

The greatest threat to liberalism is Chinese totalitarianism; containing and defeating it is the foreign policy challenge of the century for Western nations. There is no way around the fact that a people capable of electing Donald Trump twice, once after he attempted a coup, are not up to that challenge intellectually, civically, or morally. “The American age is over,” Jonathan Last argued on Thursday. “And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it.”

 

That’s correct. There’s too much rot in the American character to believe that our country can sustain the will, clarity, or cunning to defeat an enemy as formidable as modern China. On the contrary, from threatening near-abroad satellites like Greenland to pointlessly offending allies like Canada to declaring a global trade war that will isolate the United States, Trump in his first 75 days has done more to strengthen Beijing than any president in decades.

 

Moronic, groin-punching American authoritarianism will not solve Chinese totalitarianism. The silver lining of “Liberation Day” is that the whole world understands that now and can proceed accordingly. If the West is to avoid eastern hegemony, Europe will need to take the lead—the sooner, the better. Frankly, the way things are going, there’s a nonzero chance that the United States will eventually end up on the other side.

 

But if that’s too glum, here’s another silver lining to cheer you up. Watching MAGA diehards spitball theories to explain why an economic meltdown is Ackshually Good will be hilarious for us all, providing welcome entertainment in the grim months and years to come.

 

In fact, it’s already begun. Much of the initial cope over the last 48 hours has unwittingly replicated Biden-era Democratic excuses for inflation. Remember how that was supposed to be “transitory” but wasn’t? No worries—the Trump crash is transitory too.

 

Some of it has a distinct Soviet aroma to it: Do you need a new iPhone, comrade, or do you merely want one? (Columnist Josh Barro compared that logic to progressives urging people to eat bugs instead of meat because of the lower carbon emissions involved.) The MAGA right, so indignant last year about the cost of living, will learn to embrace life without luxuries—or even money itself—and to appreciate the government’s role in limiting individual consumption choices for the greater good.

 

Some true believers have reached for tortured metaphors, like equating tariffs with “chemotherapy” for America’s debt. It’s unclear how effective the medicine will be, especially in light of what’s afoot in Congress, but it’s in sync with the GOP’s broader message that before the richest country in history can “get well” economically, it first needs to get very, very sick.

 

Some populists prefer less complicated justifications, though. “Everyone I know who’s been wrong about literally everything for the last 10 years is SUPER pissed about” tariffs, one person said on Twitter, “so the ‘inverse retard’ indicator says it’s probably fine.” That captures the spirit of MAGA better than anything I’ve written: If the experts say “X,” surely the optimal move is “not X.” Enough so that we should gamble the U.S. economy on it.

 

As for Trump, his own rationales are as messy and incoherent as you’d expect. “MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE,” he declared on Truth Social, signaling to businesses that they should go ahead and recalculate their financial plans based on the new tariff regime. But he contradicted that yesterday, hinting that that regime might suddenly shift: “Every country is calling us. … The tariffs give us great power to negotiate. They always have.”

 

Then, on Friday morning, he republished a post from a Twitter user speculating that he’s crashing the stock market on purpose as part of a brilliant five-dimensional-chess scheme to force the Federal Reserve to slash interest rates. Never did I dream I’d see a president take credit for making voters poorer—see why I said this all appears indistinguishable from sabotage?—but we live in an age of wonders. And in an age of wonders, the desperation of cope is wondrous too.

 

The American age is over because the American people are no longer worthy of it. The worse this gets and the more pathetic the face-saving logic by Trump fanatics becomes, the clearer that’ll be.

 

Squandered capital.

 

The most important silver lining of Trump’s trade war, though, is the timing. If you prefer the traditional constitutional order to whatever the hell the president and his cronies are cooking up, you should feel fortunate that he embarked on this folly sooner rather than later.

 

I agree with Jonathan Chait, who celebrated “Liberation Day” at The Atlantic by looking on the civic bright side:

 

Public-opinion polling on Trump’s economic management, which has always been the floor that has held him up in the face of widespread public dislike for his character, has tumbled. This has happened without Americans feeling the full effects of his trade war. Once they start experiencing widespread higher prices and slower growth, the bottom could fall out.

 

…

 

As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way point out, “Authoritarian leaders do the most damage when they enjoy broad public support.” Dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez have shown that power grabs are easier to pull off when the public is behind your agenda. Trump’s support, however, is already teetering. The more unpopular he becomes, the less his allies and his targets believe he will keep his boot on the opposition’s neck forever, and the less likely they will be to comply with his demands.

 

At some point, Trump is going to defy a court ruling, snatch more power away from Congress on “emergency” pretenses, and/or do something nutty domestically with the military. When he does, it would be ideal if his political support is already in the toilet. Judges, legislators, business interests, and his own deputies are more likely to confront him when resistance doesn’t seem as futile as it does now.

 

Presidents take office enjoying the benefit of the doubt from voters. Joe Biden was given the benefit of the doubt that he, an old Washington hand, would restore competence and normalcy to government in the post-Trump era. That changed when Afghanistan went sideways and prices began to climb, and it never changed back. His job approval was net negative for the rest of his term. Having once been lost, the benefit of the doubt is all but impossible to regain.

 

As Chait says, the benefit of the doubt Trump received from voters last fall was keyed to his economic record. Americans will accept a higher-than-usual risk of a coup in exchange for what they believe to be a higher-than-usual probability of job creation. Watching him turn around and detonate the global economy, and in truly the stupidest way possible, will shatter that benefit of the doubt for all but his most cultish supporters. There’s literally nothing he could do to more efficiently squander the source of his political capital.

 

I’m not sure that even George W. Bush owned the Iraq war as totally as Trump will own the recession that likely ensues from this trade debacle. Bush had congressional and public support for the invasion, a meaningful degree of strategic support from experts, and appeared less ideologically invested in the cause than some of his deputies, like Dick Cheney. Trump, on the other hand, has been plotting his trade war for literally decades. He ran on it, test-drove it during his first term, seems at least as eager as his aides to “go big” on it, and is flouting a near-universal expert consensus by pressing ahead with it.

 

He owns it completely. If it bombs, there’s nowhere for him and the GOP to hide and no reason for voters to trust his judgment on anything again. (Not that there ever was, but many do.) When he makes his move against the Supreme Court or Greenland or NATO or whoever, a public that’s ceased giving him the benefit of the doubt about his supposed core competency will view his conduct differently than it would have if the S&P 500 were still cruising along at altitude.

 

Simply put, “Liberation Day” has made his authoritarian schemes less likely to succeed. Cheers to that! But—and with pessimists, there’s always a “but”—it might also have made them more dangerous.

 

Authoritarians love chaos because chaos gives them an excuse to exercise authority. It’s no coincidence that Trump’s most aggressive power grabs have had to do with phony emergencies. He used the Alien Enemies Act to suspend due process for accused immigrant gang members on the dubious theory that they’re part of an “invasion” force acting at the behest of the Venezuelan government. And he justified using his tariff powers to wreck global markets this week by pretending that trade deficits are, by definition, a national emergency requiring urgent action by the president.

 

The worse the economy gets, the more civil unrest there’ll be, and the more civil unrest there is, the more license Trump will claim to “restore order.” The fact that he himself will have caused the economic chaos that led to the unrest won’t matter. Like any authoritarian, he’s perfectly willing to make trouble for the sake of giving himself a pretext to crack down on the reaction in hair-raising ways. Postliberalism is a self-perpetuating chaos machine.

 

I mean, how do megalomaniacs typically behave when their grand vision of the world meets reality and begins to crumble? Do they humbly admit error and change course? Or do they return to their core conviction that success in any endeavor is achievable with sufficient ruthlessness and act accordingly?

 

As his popularity tanks, then, Trump might be less likely to become an autocrat “legitimately” yet more likely to become one illegitimately. Or to try, anyway.

 

But that’s something to worry about on another day. This weekend should be spent celebrating the achievements of the Trump administration and the wisdom of the voters who made it possible. “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard,” H.L. Mencken wrote. Cheers to that too as recession beckons.

The Opportunistic End of the Biden Cover-Up

By Becket Adams

Sunday, April 06, 2025

 

The people who told you there was nothing wrong with former President Biden are excited to discuss all the ways in which there was absolutely something wrong with former President Biden.

 

If these people had any capacity for shame, they’d be feeling it about now.

 

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe last week, where host Joe Scarborough boasted not long before Biden’s disastrous June 2024 presidential debate performance that “this version of Biden — intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever,” NBC News’s Jonathan Allen and The Hill’s Amie Parnes discussed their new book, which details the lengths to which the former president’s inner circle reportedly went to keep his deterioration a secret from voters.

 

Scarborough and his chirpy co-host, Mika Brzezinski, nodded along during the segment, as if they were mere spectators to the effort to hide the president’s condition and not themselves active participants.

 

“You know,” said Scarborough, “we always look back in retrospect and think things were a certain way, just because it’s the way the media, at the time, defined it.”

 

He added, “I remember after Biden’s shockingly bad presidential debate, that’s when, like, the history books were starting, you know, you could just see that was going to be the reason why he was pushed out of the race, and he was doing badly.”

 

For the record, in the years leading up to Biden’s disgraceful exit from the White House, even as everyone with working eyeballs could tell you something was definitely wrong with the then-chief executive, Scarborough assured viewers that the president was fit as a fiddle and more energetic and vital than men half his age.

 

“He’ll wake me up when I’m asleep at 8:30 at night, because Mika and I, of course, wake up at 4:30 in the morning, and I’ll just go. ‘Hello? Yes, sir,’” Scarborough once bragged. “And about an hour later, he will aggressively and very effectively give me point by point by point about how my op-ed was flawed.”

 

In early 2024, Scarborough was especially livid following Special Counsel Robert Hur’s finding that Biden is a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” accusing the special counsel of publishing a “bad-faith” report. Scarborough bragged elsewhere that Biden “exercises every day,” imploring viewers to “look [at] how fit and trim he is.”

 

If you can believe it, Scarborough’s co-host was somehow worse, insisting even after the disastrous debate that Biden still had what it would take to win the general election.

 

“[He’s] the man for this moment,” she declared, addressing directly the “chorus of Biden doubters.”

 

“So many draw hope from his empathy and his ability to have perspective, even right now, and to persevere when he is completely counted out,” Brzezinski pleaded during what would end up being a 15-minute segment defending Biden’s flailing presidency.

 

Amazing that Mika Brzezinski wasn’t able to turn the ship around.

 

Elsewhere in the world of self-serving opportunists is former Biden White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, who claims now that he had an idea during debate prep with Biden last year that the president wasn’t firing on all cylinders.

 

Biden “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and couldn’t grasp what the back and forth was,” Klain told author Chris Whipple for the forthcoming book Uncharted. Klain also told Whipple he was “startled” by Biden’s lack of focus, including when the then-president bailed on debate prep to take a nap by the pool; Biden obsessed over foreign leaders, saying “these guys say I’m doing a great job as president so I must be a great president”; he “didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation”; and he “had nothing to say about a second term other than finish the job.”

 

Klain had “never seen [Biden] so exhausted and out of it,” Whipple writes. “Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign.”

 

(In separate remarks to Politico, Klain did not dispute the accuracy of the quotes.)

 

Yet, you may recall Klain was the one who said in July of last year, after the debate and after voters had for years correctly called out Biden’s obvious infirmities, that the “president is absolutely sharp, fit, on top of his game.”

 

He added during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe (because of course), “People can see that for themselves . . . sometimes presidents have bad debates.”

 

Elsewhere, on CNN, Klain blamed a cold and overseas travel for Biden’s debate implosion.

 

“I don’t deny that it was a bad debate performance; that’s different than whether or not the president is up to the job,” Klain said. “He’s clearly up to the job. He’s doing it every day. He’s doing it successfully.”

 

Amazingly, considering what Klain claims now, he also maintained during his 2024 appearance on CNN that Biden had “done well” in the debate practices.

 

Speaking of CNN, let’s not forget anchor Jake Tapper, who passed on covering what was then a national security threat for what now fits more comfortably in the category of palace intrigue.

 

“Toni Morrison once said, ‘If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,’” Tapper said in a statement announcing the release of a book he co-authored with Axios’s Alex Thompson. (Note: Alex Thompson deserves special recognition for his reporting on this front. He has been unrelenting and consistent in covering this story, which is more than can be said for his compatriot.) “That’s what inspired this book: we wanted to know more about what we all just lived through. More than 200 interviews later, Alex and I have a much better idea. And soon you all will too.”

 

Biden’s debate performance was “not an anomaly,” the authors explained, but “the natural result of an eighty-one-year-old man whose faculties had been diminishing for years.”

 

See, that’s an interesting thing to hear from Tapper because, in 2020, after Lara Trump claimed Biden had displayed obvious signs of “cognitive decline,” the CNN anchor was apoplectic, accusing her of “mocking his stutter.”

 

“How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that?” Tapper demanded. “I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline.”

 

Silly Lara Trump.

 

Didn’t she know you’re supposed to save that sort of material for a book deal — and safely after the fact?

Democrats Want Young Men Back. Just Ask Them

By Jack Butler

Sunday, April 06, 2025

 

If you’re not a fan of Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice-presidential candidate believes he could (probably) kick your ass. Walz, the governor of Minnesota, told his fellow Democratic governor Gavin Newsom (of California) as much on the latter’s podcast. Walz was specifically addressing critics of his posturing as masculine, whose comments he (bizarrely) attributes to “misogyny” and the fact that “I scare them.”

 

Walz, recently unchained and apparently unashamed after his ticket’s defeat last year, is not the only Democrat talking about masculinity these days. Since last November, some Democrats have begun pointing to a dramatic drop in appeal among men, especially young men (of all races), as an essential factor in their 2024 defeat. Go figure: The party that has trouble acknowledging the differences between sexes, that accepts caricatures of masculinity and femininity as the real thing, is having serious trouble with men.

 

Trump’s appeared on podcasts such as Joe Rogan’s and allied with celebrities like Hulk Hogan to seek out young men deliberately. It was part of his campaign strategy in 2024. The Kamala Harris campaign tried this too, in its unique way. Walz himself was at the center of the effort. Constantly flannel-clad, Walz in one particular stunt went hunting with a shotgun that he appeared not to know how to load. And don’t forget the manly men for Harris who turned out to be actors and influencers. Ultimately, Harris’s campaign relied more on hectoring male voters, as former President Barack Obama did. It did not work. In 2020, 56 percent of men under 30 voted for Joe Biden. Fifty-six percent of the same group voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

 

Now, some Democrats are trying again. Walz, who was a high school football coach before he betrayed Minnesota students, is one of several Democrats leaning into sports commentary as a way to reach young men. “It shows you’re a real human being,” Walz said of this effort — something that may be necessary in his case.

 

Other Democrats are attempting a pro-masculine messaging about as subtle as the “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme. Speaking of “the well-being of our young men and boys,” Maryland Governor Wes Moore said, “I want Maryland to be the one that is aggressive and unapologetic about being able to address it and being able to fix it.” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer directed a recent speech “to all young people, but especially to our young men.” Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont announced “a DEI initiative, which folks on both sides of the aisle may appreciate,” to encourage men to become teachers.

 

It’s good that some Democrats are beginning to realize the errors of their ways. Young men are falling behind women in many social indicators. But the intersectionality framework that has taken over the party makes it difficult for most of its leaders to imagine that such a supposedly privileged demographic needs attention — except, perhaps, as villains. Moreover, Democrats as well as the institutions favorable to or outright allied with them have taken on a humorless and oppressive character that regards even healthy, authentic masculinity with suspicion, if not pure antagonism. It would be beneficial if this changed.

 

But trying to fit young men into the intersectionality framework as simply another aggrieved demographic won’t work. Nor should it. There are higher callings of manhood that will never fit into such an understanding of the world. Even referring to such a complex and multifaceted group by the simple label of “young men,” as so many post-election analyses (including this one!) have done, can be reductive and shortchanging. So long as Democrats’ appeals to men remain superficial, caricatured, and constrained by leftist priors, don’t expect them to work.

 

Republicans should not assume they have no work left to do, however. Politics is always changing; even Democrats could someday figure out what they’re doing wrong. Conservatives must continue defending a healthy masculinity. That includes rejecting attempts from the left to demonize and belittle men, but it also means rebuking the attempts of figures such as Andrew Tate and Costin Alamariu (a.k.a. Bronze Age Pervert) to advance a seemingly male-coded worldview that, in fact, undermines true manhood, the family, healthy sexuality, and so much more. Tim Walz, an ass-kicker in his own mind, may not really understand what it means to be a man. The Tate idolizers and the Bronze Age–minded bros don’t, either.

Trump Is Wrong to Defy TikTok Law

National Review Online

Saturday, April 05, 2025

 

President Trump is freelancing on TikTok.

 

Defying the clearly expressed mandates of a statute passed recently with wide bipartisan support in Congress, he is delaying a ban on the app for another 75 days. His first 75-day extension of the ban also violated the law, which allows for a single extension up to 90 days provided that the president certifies that there is a serious deal on the table. Now, he’s doubling down. His TikTok extensions belong in the same category of executive lawlessness as former President Biden’s actions to wipe out student loan debt and President Obama’s non-enforcement of immigration law.

 

TikTok is supposed to be taken down until ByteDance sells the app to a buyer that is not beholden to Beijing. The president’s preferred approach, though, keeps TikTok up and running, while the administration, in his words, makes “tremendous progress” toward a deal. In his Truth Social statement on Friday, the president tied the TikTok talks to the ongoing negotiations with Beijing regarding the tariffs he imposed on China during “liberation day” and at the start of his presidency.

 

At least this dispenses with the pretense that TikTok is anything but a tool of Beijing. ByteDance cannot sell TikTok without the Chinese Communist Party’s approval. If it were to do so, top ByteDance executives — and TikTok CEO Shou Chew, a Singaporean citizen who has extensive professional ties to China — would be severely punished. It’s why they toe Beijing’s line, and why TikTok is such a threat to America’s sovereignty and national security.

 

But Trump is negotiating against himself. He is making clear that he is loath to let TikTok go dark. The correct and lawful approach would be to ban the app until a deal is completed — if, that is, one can even be made. That would show General Secretary Xi Jinping that Trump’s interest is in putting America’s interests first and saving the app second.

 

By now, though, it’s become clear that the president is beholden to associates who take money to lobby for ByteDance, which is deeply tied to Beijing’s military-industrial complex. Through them, the Chinese firm has persuaded the president to defend a tool wielded by America’s foremost foreign adversary. It should be his obligation, instead, to heed a duly enacted U.S. statute, which is supposed to be the law of the land, not a suggestion to be heeded or ignored depending on how the president of the United States feels about TikTok today.

Tread and Trade Wars

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, April 04, 2025

 

I’ve seen a lot of attempts to find an analogy for the moment we’re in. Some are pretty literal—Smoot-Hawley and all that. Some are more figurative. A few friends have likened it to 9/11 in that it is just an epochal chapter break. Everyone I know who was an adult back then still sees the past in terms of pre-9/11 and post-9/11. Likewise, if Donald Trump doesn’t back off soon, or if Congress doesn’t grow a spine and stop him, then it does seem pretty clear that we will be talking about BLD and ALD—Before Liberation Day and After Liberation Day—for the rest of our lives. That’s true if it’s a success or if it’s a failure. 

 

I’m struggling to follow wise counsel and not look at my stock portfolio or retirement account. I haven’t yet, because I know what it will be like. In fact, Steven Spielberg did me the courtesy of visualizing my struggle. The kid from Poltergeist is me trying not to look at the clown show, as it were.

 

At least I have my I-told-you-so’s to keep me going. But I am fascinated with how the various pro-Trump factions are processing all of this, because I know what it feels like to be proven wrong by reality. I remember when it was becoming impossible to deny that the U.S. military would not in fact find the robust stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction the Bush administration used as the primary justification for the invasion of Iraq. I was always skeptical of emphasizing that rationale, but I also wanted it to be vindicated because it would make everything easier. It wasn’t vindicated, then the war itself started to go very badly.

 

It felt terrible for all sorts of reasons. First and foremost, it felt terrible because it was a terrible thing for America, American forces, our allies, and Iraqis. But being on the wrong side of something so important that I supported felt terrible. It’s not like things would have gone differently if I had opposed the war from the start. I spent years fighting with people whom I believed to be wrong on the facts and in their analysis of them. I convinced myself—sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly—that they were willing villains in the morality tale of the decade. So, to then watch as events unfolded in ways that supported their views and contradicted mine was a pretty miserable experience. I should say that I don’t think the other side always had the better arguments, given what we knew then, or even now. Iraq wasn’t a “war for oil” or any of that stuff. Indeed, that’s one of the things that made the period so excruciating. People who made bad arguments were being politically vindicated.

 

I bring all of that up because I know lots of people have convinced themselves that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are right: that their version of economic history is accurate and their prescriptions for how to fix our problems are the best remedies possible. I also know a bunch of people who have always known in their hearts that Trump’s  mercantilist hornswaggle is unsound, but who lacked the courage to say so. And, of course, plenty of people merely suspect Trump is wrong but hope he’s right and are eager to be proven wrong. There were people across the right—and a few on the left—who fell into similar places with regard to George W. Bush and the Iraq war.

 

Anyway, that’s why I find watching the MAGA right go through an extended Kübler-Ross “Five Stages of Grief” process so fascinating. Many are still in denial and anger. Even more are literally and figuratively in the bargaining phase, by which I mean they are still clinging to the idea that Trump is doing all of this as a negotiating tactic and he’ll find some “deal” that will have made it all worth it. The folks in the depression stage are hard to find, because they’re the least likely to do TV interviews. I haven’t seen much acceptance yet, though I think it’s more than a little intriguing that the Heritage Foundation’s trade guy is already singing a different tune than he was a few weeks ago. 

 

I’m glad to be on the right side of this argument. As terrible as it feels to watch my net worth plummet and to watch my country undergo the single most egregious deliberate act of economic self-harm perhaps in its history, at least I’m not being proven wrong in the process. My hopes aren’t being dashed, my views aren’t being discredited in real time the way Vance’s are and will continue to be. That may sound smug, but the more that offends you, the more likely it is that you’re feeling defensive about supporting a terrible policy and even worse implementation of it.

 

Making the case.

 

Still, I keep hearing from decent people who desperately want Donald Trump to be right about this or who think we should just give this a shot.

 

These encounters, whether via email and Twitter or in person at airports, are exhaustingly frustrating because the arguments they bring have an air of desperation. Many people accept Trump’s baseline premises. They believe that the economic era since NAFTA has been a disaster for America, hollowing out the middle class  and that, therefore, something has to be done to fix it. (For what it’s worth, a lot of that “hollowing-out” is due to the fact that a lot of middle-class people got richer, not poorer).

 

From there they insist that at least Trump’s goal is right—we should have an industrial policy of some kind that “brings back” manufacturing. Then these folks insist the onus is on me to provide a better strategy to achieve that goal. At least he’s trying something! All you’re doing is criticizing! What’s your plan?

 

I don’t have one, largely because I don’t feel like I need one. Trump is not alone in inventing this “crisis” (he’s just the  most important and consequential author). But it is a bogus, manufactured crisis (economically, politically,  legally, and constitutionally). The presumption that I must have my own plan to deal with a crisis I don’t think exists is a coping mechanism. I think NAFTA was good (for many of the reasons the Heritage Foundation laid out in the Before Times), but I also think it wasn’t that big a deal. The transformations to our economy that transpired after its passage would largely have happened anyway. Here’s something worth keeping in mind: Back in 2018, amid Trump’s first foray into tariffs, George Will wrote:

 

All this dictating and renegotiating is supposed to protect American jobs from the menace of NAFTA, which according to one of its ardent critics destroyed 1 million U.S. jobs in its first 20 years (1994–2014). An academic study argues that trade with China destroyed 2.4 million jobs between 1999 and 2011. But Don Boudreaux of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center says this means it took NAFTA two decades to destroy as many jobs as are erased by the normal churning of the American job market on average every 18 days. And the so-called “China shock” eliminated in 13 years as many jobs as are eliminated by the U.S. economy’s process of creative destruction, on average, every 41 days. So, if there are to be trade “wars” with China and Mexico, they will be launched to avenge job “casualties” that are far fewer than those routinely inflicted by the domestic processes that produce American prosperity.

 

If you want me to offer ideas about how we can do better at manufacturing chips or building ships, or to contain China, I’m happy to think about that or have that conversation. But you’re not going to get me to agree that because we should do those things, declaring economic war on Mexico, Canada, Japan, the EU, and the U.K. makes sense. You won’t convince me we need to save manufacturing by making bananas and avocados more expensive. Nor will you get me to say, “at least he’s trying.”

 

I’m astounded that people will repeat Trump’s talking points back to me as if they are good faith, accurate, and often irrefutable descriptions of reality. They insist that our friendly trading partners have brilliantly used tariffs to prosper at our expense but can provide no examples that hold up to scrutiny. They claim that draconian tariffs will force corporations to bring back manufacturing to the United States. And because everyone simply agrees to believe that “manufacturing jobs” are definitionally synonymous with “middle class wages,” they think being opposed to more manufacturing jobs is being opposed to more Americans being able to live in Ozzie and Harriet-style prosperity. Nostalgia, Robert Nisbet once said, is the “rust of memory.” These fantasies about bringing back the Rust Belt are the economics of nostalgia.

 

Meanwhile, to listen to some of the more strident populists, you’d think that rich “elites” have shipped away these good jobs to Third World countries just so they can have cheap sneakers or inexpensive avocado toast. It never seems to occur to them that rich elites can afford more expensive sneakers and avocado toast. A closely related assumption is that poor and middle-class people don’t care as much about having cheap sneakers and avocados (also used in guacamole, by the way, at the sort of football-watching parties that these real Americans reportedly enjoy so much). Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent mocks the idea that the American dream involves having access to cheap goods. Talk about elitism.

 

But if you take your partisan blinders off for a nanosecond it is obvious that Americans with more constrained incomes spend a greater share of their disposable income on things like shoes or food than rich people do. I’ll keep the math easy. If you make, say, $100,000 per year, spending $1,000 a year on shoes for you and your family is 1 percent of pretax income. If you make a million dollars per year, spending the same amount is 0.1 percent of your income. Please feel free to check my work.

 

In this sense, shoes are 10 times more expensive for the middle-class person than the rich person.

 

In other words, the poorer you are, the more you benefit from “cheap goods.”

 

Look, I’ll be honest: I’m getting tired of talking about trade. It’s nothing like my specialty or expertise. I’d much rather be talking about women’s prison movies. But I feel the need to explain, as plainly as I can, why I think the people yelling at me don’t really understand the facts.

 

The fable of the shoes.

 

The late economist Murray Rothbard once offered a useful thought experiment. What if everyone had always gotten their shoes from the government, but then one day someone suggested that we privatize the shoe business? How could the private sector handle all the different sizes? Who would decide where to put the stores? Etc.

 

The Liberation Day crowd has a similar fable. They don’t want to get the government into the business of making shoes, they just want the government to make Americans buy shoes made in America because that would be “better.” Okay, so let’s think that through.

 

Let’s say you run a sneaker factory in Vietnam. Let’s just say for the sake of argument that semi-skilled workers there make $500 per month, which seems to be a bit high but in the ballpark. That’s $6,000 per year, working pretty long and difficult days. Looking at its website, Nike sells shoes in the U.S. from a high of $285 (the Alphafly 3) to a low of $55 (the Vapor Shark 3 football cleats). I’m excluding the cheaper sandals.

 

(Author’s note: When I looked at their website yesterday,  the price was $47. When my editor checked this afternoon, the price had gone up to $55. That’s a 17 percent increase overnight.)

 

Now, the stated goal of the Trump administration is to get Nike to move factories to the United States. Give those good, high-paying jobs to Americans, dammit. Vietnam’s per capita GDP is $4,904 (that’s the highest estimate from the International Monetary Fund. The U.N.’s is $4,282). So, $6,000 is nothing to sneeze at. Do you know anybody, outside of kids with after-school jobs, who thinks $6,000 a year is a living wage in the United States? The per capita GDP of the United States ranges from just over $80,000 to just below $90,000.

 

I am totally open to looking at other metrics, like Purchasing Power Parity per capita, or median income. The numbers change, but for our purposes, the ratios really don’t. An American worker might be able to live on an average Vietnamese worker’s income—in Vietnam. In the U.S. they would struggle to do better than mere subsistence as a homeless person or a charity case.

 

So, assuming it’s even possible, what happens when the sneaker factory is moved to America? Well, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. That’s $15,080 per year or $1,256.67 per month. So, the lowest paid American worker costs at least twice as much as a fairly well-paid Vietnamese worker. You can tack on a few more thousand dollars per year if you want, since these numbers reflect a 40-hour work week, and Vietnamese factory workers often work much longer than that.

 

But you get the point. This isn’t the stuff of good, middle-class American wages.

 

Let’s assume that Donald Trump can make Nike pay good American wages. Depending on where you live, middle-class wages are somewhere between $66,000 and just under $200,000 per year. So, the low end of that—$66,000—is 11 times the Vietnamese factory worker’s salary. Even if you hold everything else constant—access to raw materials, supply chains, worker regulations, etc.—labor costs for sneakers would be 1,100 percent greater in the U.S. Labor accounts for about 25 percent of the cost of a shoe (that’s in China, but let’s assume it’s similar for neighboring Vietnam). And it costs Nike $28 to make a shoe that retails for $100. So now, instead of $7 of labor per shoe, a $66,000-a-year factory worker makes that slice of the pie cost $77.

 

So you, sneaker factory owner, have three choices. You can pass those costs on to the consumer, you can eat those costs and go out of business, or you can invest in robots to make those sneakers more cheaply.

 

Now, I don’t know what sneaker-making-robots cost, assuming they exist. But let’s say they do. I also assume they cost more than what it costs to have Vietnamese workers make sneakers. Why? Because if robots could do the job much more cost effectively than Vietnamese workers, Nike would invest in said robots. It has not done so to date. That suggests that even if you could acquire such robots, the costs for making sneakers would still be greater than the cost of using Vietnamese humans. That means it would undoubtedly be more expensive than using American humans. Which is not to say that a few people wouldn’t make actual middle-class wages operating and maintaining the robots.

 

In other words, if Trump’s Liberation Day plans are wildly successful, American consumers will get to buy much more expensive sneakers in exchange for a handful of good jobs running sneaker-making robots. That sounds like a really stupid trade-off.

 

Oh, there’s an added expense that is more difficult to quantify: This dynamic will apply to electronics, clothes, auto parts, and other goods Vietnam produces. So by following through on this plan, we will have dealt a devastating blow to Vietnam’s economy, which will make any chance of pulling Vietnam out of China’s economic and strategic orbit infinitely more difficult. Why should the Vietnamese believe they are better off aligning with us, when aligning with us has led to this?

 

So there you have it. That’s one facet of why I think what Trump is doing is so stupid. It’s stupid not just because it won’t work, it’s stupid because if it did “work” we’d be worse off.

 

And I feel no obligation to save you from your Kübler-Ross spiral by offering my “better plan” for doing something I don’t think we should do.

Taxation Without Representation

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, April 03, 2025

 

The only thing I dislike about working for The Dispatch is that I’m forbidden from using profanity, and even that barely qualifies as a complaint. “No swearing” is the lightest of burdens for a writer.

 

But it’s getting heavier every day.

 

On Tuesday, a.k.a. “liberation” eve, the president addressed an upcoming vote in the Senate to block some of his tariffs on Canada. Don’t do it, he warned Republicans. Americans will die if you do. Fentanyl is being brought into the country across the northern border, after all, and one way to discourage people from using it is, and I quote, “by Tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy.”

 

The guy who just touched off a global trade war appears to believe that drug smuggling is taxed. How do you do justice to that without cursing?

 

It’s inane by its own logic. If Donald Trump earnestly believes that tariffs will deter illegal drug trafficking, why wouldn’t he jack up the rate to, say, 100,000 percent? Why not make Canadian fentanyl impossible to afford instead of “more costly”?

 

If nothing else, that would maximize the competitive advantage for American mom-and-pop fentanyl dealers. Or at least force Canadian drug cartels to move production to the good ol’ U.S. of A.

 

Every day, hour by hour, news hits the wire that tests my tolerance for Dispatch policy. If you’re not moved to curse a blue streak by the thought of Laura Loomer arguing with the national security adviser in the Oval Office over whether his intelligence deputies are sufficiently “loyal” to the president, you’re well and truly boiled.

 

Still, the sweeping tariffs announced on “Liberation Day” are a special cause for swearing. They’re not the most sinister policy Trump has set in his second term; that distinction belongs to the blanket clemency he granted to the January 6 insurrectionists. They might not even be the most damaging thing he’s done. Ending the Pax Americana that’s prevented new world wars from starting over the past 80 years will likely cause more human misery in the long run than trade policy will.

 

What makes the “Liberation Day” tariff-palooza special is how comprehensively perverse it is—legally, economically, and diplomatically. The rationales for it are incoherent and contradictory. The formula it relies on to calculate “reciprocal” tariff rates is daft and very well might have come from ChatGPT. Despite Trump’s pretension to populism, it will hit the working class hardest. According to Nobel-winning economist Lawrence Summers, it might plausibly cause a long-term wealth loss to the tune of … $30 trillion.

 

It’s probably the closest the U.S. government has ever come to sanctioning its own country.

 

It’s f—ed in every way.

 

In every way.

 

To start, these supposedly “reciprocal” tariffs aren’t reciprocal.

 

If reciprocity is what Trump had wanted, he would have followed his favorite Bible verse and demanded an eye for an eye. A foreign country that imposes, say, a 10 percent tariff on American goods would be tariffed 10 percent in turn. Then it could decide for itself whether to lift its tax on U.S. imports or bear the burden of having its exports taxed at the same rate here.

 

That’s not what happened Wednesday. The president imposed a baseline 10 percent tariff on nearly all American trading partners, including ones with whom we run a trade surplus, then jacked up the rate for each individual country according to a formula supposedly designed to make the trade balance between that nation and ours “fair.”

 

That formula wasn’t based on an eye for an eye. Instead of simply mirroring each country’s taxes on American goods, the White House appears to have divided the dollar amount of the trade deficit we’re running with each nation by the dollar amount of their exports to us. Then it divided that number in half. Et voila—that’s the new tariff rate.

 

In a country as rich as the United States, doing things that way is destined to produce freakishly steep penalties on poor countries, not necessarily on predatory ones. It’s a simple matter of purchasing power: We’re a huge nation with lots of disposable cash and high labor costs, so we’re probably spending much more buying from you than you are from us.

 

Consider the tiny African kingdom of Lesotho, which was hit with one of the stiffest rates (50 percent!) under the new scheme the president proposed yesterday. A small, impoverished country like theirs can’t afford to purchase costly U.S. goods, so we end up importing a lot more of their stuff (diamonds and textiles, mostly) than they import from us. That’s created a steep trade deficit, and under the new Trump juche formula, steep trade deficits necessarily mean crushing, grossly disproportionate tariffs.

 

Result: Goods from Lesotho will now be taxed at a higher rate than goods from China.

 

Or take Vietnam and Bangladesh, two nations that produce lots of things for American companies. The strongest strategic case for U.S. protectionism is that we need to reduce our consumption of Chinese goods urgently; the easiest way to do that in the short term is to incentivize businesses to shift their manufacturing to more cooperative nations where labor is cheap—like, say, Vietnam and Bangladesh. Logically, that would mean lower tariffs on those two. Instead, thanks to Trump’s formula, they’re facing garish, economy-crushing rates of 46 and 37 percent, respectively.

 

How is a small, poor country ever supposed to get out from under a tariff calculated this way? In a system based on true reciprocity, Lesotho could cancel its own taxes on American goods and wait for the White House to respond in kind. But under Trump’s system, it would presumably need to ramp its spending on U.S. products way up, erasing the trade deficit. And even if it had the money to do that, which it doesn’t and surely won’t once the new tariffs kill demand for its exports, it would still be facing the 10 percent baseline tariff that the president has imposed globally—except for, er, Russia, Cuba, and North Korea.

 

All of this is so perverse that I half-believe the theory that the White House came up with its formula not by consulting with economists but by asking AI.

 

Endgames.

 

It isn’t even clear what the endgame of this trade war is. In theory, “reciprocal” tariffs are designed to pressure other protectionist nations into dropping their taxes on U.S. goods. The endgame is global free trade: By playing tit for tat, the White House would be breaking down barriers abroad and leveling the playing field for American manufacturers. In the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking last month, “If you take it to zero, we’ll take it to zero.”

 

But that can’t be Trump’s endgame here. He keeps talking about how much tax revenue the government is supposedly going to raise from all this. If the trade war ended with all sides canceling their tariffs, where would the revenue be coming from?

 

Another theory is that Trump’s endgame is all about rebuilding our country’s manufacturing base. The president doesn’t want other nations dropping their tariffs on U.S. goods; he wants them moving production here, creating American jobs. He wants American consumers to buy domestically produced products, not the cheaper stuff from abroad. By eliminating the advantage foreign manufacturers currently enjoy, he’s making America competitive again.

 

For that to work, businesses need certainty. No one’s going to take the risk of building an expensive new plant in the U.S. if the trade policy that makes that option momentarily worth considering might disappear tomorrow. “If you want stuff being put in the ground, you have to tell people the price, and the price needs to be fully inclusive of the tariff risk,” an official from the president’s first administration told Politico.

 

According to the Washington Post, the White House appears to understand that. Talking points are circulating today that the new tariff rates are not up for negotiation. But … how confident are you that that’ll stick?

 

His own son advised U.S. trading partners just this morning on social media to hurry up and negotiate with the president before the new tariffs take effect. Does that mean the new rates aren’t set in stone? Could they suddenly be lifted six months from now if he’s in the right mood? You know how he is; the siren song of a “deal” is forever beckoning.

 

Why would a company recalibrate its long-term financial plans to account for Trump juche when Trump juche could (and probably will) be reversed out of the blue without notice?

 

There’s no endgame here. The president simply wanted to signal in the broadest, most dramatic way possible that trade deficits are Bad and Unfair and he was willing to instigate a market meltdown and possible recession to do it. Bessent, his highest-ranking economic adviser, didn’t even pretend to know what was going on when he was interviewed about all of this yesterday afternoon. He couldn’t even confidently answer a question as simple as “Are the new tariffs on China in addition to, or in place of, the current tariffs on China?”

 

All you need to know about how hamhanded this has all been is that two islands uninhabited by humans were among the nations targeted yesterday. Perverse.

 

For my friends, everything.

 

Legally perverse, too.

 

The Senate vote that I mentioned earlier ended up in a rare loss for Trump. Four Republicans joined with Democrats on Wednesday to pass a resolution, 51-48, that would rescind some of his tariffs on Canada. In theory, that’s the first step toward Congress reclaiming its Article I power to levy taxes from the president.

 

But in practice, it’s meaningless. The Republican majority in the House won’t dare take it up.

 

To put that differently: A global trade war that could plausibly destroy tens of trillions of dollars in wealth has been left to the devices of an elderly authoritarian dope who wants to tax drug deals because the branch of the federal government that’s supposed to wield that authority doesn’t have the nerve to do so.

 

That’s also f—ed in every way.

 

It’s a flagrant abuse of the trust Congress has placed in the president, for one thing. The executive’s power to impose tariffs unilaterally is an “emergency” power granted to him by statute in 1977. But despite Trump’s assertions to the contrary in yesterday’s presidential decree, there’s obviously no “emergency” that warrants global tariffs.

 

You could maybe convince me that there’s an emergency with respect to China given the threat it poses to American interests. But Lesotho? That’s a gross distortion of the law’s intent. Only if one believes that trade deficits are an “emergency” per se would it make sense, and that’s absurd given how tiny some of those deficits are and how prosperous America has become while running them.

 

Allowing one man to run a trade war will also lead to perverse civic outcomes. The power to impose tariffs implies the power to lift them, after all.

 

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy believes that’s Trump’s true endgame in building a juche regime. Tariff-palooza isn’t about onshoring manufacturing, he argued last night, it’s about placing the president at the center of the U.S. economy and forcing businesses to supplicate to him for relief. The Founders gave Congress, not the executive, the power to tax because “British kings used taxation to reward loyalty and punish dissent,” Murphy noted. And that’s no theoretical risk in this case: Trump has already used some of his other presidential powers in precisely the same way.

 

Every day that passes with the tariff magic wand safely in the president’s hands is a day that the United States operates under an ethic of, “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.”

 

Legislative duty.

 

The most perverse thing about him levying taxes while lawmakers look on passively, though, is that it amounts to taxation without (meaningful) representation. As I said on Tuesday, there’s no idea so quintessentially un-American. It’s the stuff of which tea parties—the 1773 kind, not the 2010 simulacrum—are made.

 

Legislators in a democracy can carry out their duties conscientiously in two ways. They can resolve to do whatever a majority of their constituents prefer, even if they disagree with the wisdom of that preference. Or they can resolve to do what they earnestly believe to be in their constituents’ best interests (or the country’s best interests) even if those constituents believe otherwise.

 

That being so, what’s the “conscientious” explanation for why congressional Republicans are letting Trump burn down the global economy and wreck U.S. economic alliances? They could stop him at any time by joining with Democrats to rescind his emergency powers. Why don’t they?

 

They surely don’t believe that his trade war is in their constituents’ best interest. A few might, but I’d bet several internal organs that the number of Republicans in both chambers who think Trump juche is a bad idea easily exceeds the number who don’t. How could it not? Apart from, say, Oren Cass, who are the economists who think tariff-palooza will be anything other than a historic disaster?

 

Imagine daffy old Joe Biden wandering into the Rose Garden with a “menu” of draconian tariff rates on a placard and seemingly no rhyme or reason to how he arrived at the numbers. What would the commentary about that from the congressional GOP sound like?

 

If Republicans in the House and Senate don’t believe in the tariffs, it must be that they’re prepared to let trillions of dollars be lit on fire because that’s what their constituents really, really want, right?

 

Well, sort of. What they want is for Trump to get his way, whatever “his way” entails.

 

In fairness, the polling on all of this isn’t great for the White House even on the right. Most Republicans are expecting prices to rise in the short term, are worried about tariffs and a recession, and will react the same way you have when they check their retirement accounts this evening. On top of that, it’s an open question how well the average American understands the mechanics of tariffs. (Trump sure doesn’t seem to.) If ever there were a moment when GOP members of Congress are justified in disregarding the judgment of their constituents and substituting their own, this is it.

 

But they won’t. To side with Democrats in stripping the president of a power he covets would be seen as a betrayal roughly as grave as voting for impeachment after January 6. It’s not that Republican voters want to wreck the global economy; it’s that they believe Trump is right about everything, that he embodies the will of The People (i.e., Trump voters), and that to sabotage him in his pet project would accordingly amount to something like treason. Any member who dared do so would be demagogued by the president, challenged electorally by one of his sycophants, and threatened by his fans.

 

They’d rather take their chances with furious swing voters in a post-recession general election than with insane Trump voters in a post-juche primary. Especially if they happen to represent a solidly red state or district.

 

So they’re going to stand aside. Congressional Republicans will let this catastrophe play out because the politics of Trumpist authoritarianism require taxation without representation. One of the biggest tax hikes in U.S. history will be levied not by the branch entrusted with that power by the Constitution, to maximize democratic accountability, but by an unaccountable term-limited autocrat whose supporters equate “the president’s desires” with the national interest even when he plainly doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

 

And hey, maybe the courts will do something to stop him. That’s the standard excuse for Republican cowards whenever Trump creates an emergency and they need an excuse not to punish him for it, right?

 

No bailouts.

 

I’ll end with a simple proposition. If Congress isn’t willing to stop Trump, it shouldn’t be willing to rescue him either.

 

David Frum made a compelling case on Wednesday that there should be absolutely, positively no bailouts of farmers as they suffer the consequences of the president’s destructive protectionism. Many Americans will face worse hardship from the White House’s decision to impose de facto sanctions on its own people. Farmers are relatively well-off, received financial assistance from the feds during Trump’s first-term trade war, and voted for him in droves last fall.

 

So why should they be bailed out? Trump was astonishingly candid during the campaign about what he intended to do on trade if given another turn in office. They supported him anyway, so they deserve what they’re about to get. Let them reap what they’ve sown, just like they do on the farm.

 

If the president comes to Congress and asks for a truckload of money for them, Democrats should filibuster the effort ruthlessly. America’s farmers deserve relief from tariffs, they might concede, but there are only two ways that should happen. Either Trump can end his trade war or Congress can strip him of his tariff power and end the trade war itself. There’s no third “bailout” option.

 

If Trump critics have to live with a powerless legislature, Trump supporters should have to live with it too.

 

Besides, farmers will be fine. If this trade disaster is half as bad as experts believe, we’re about to endure a years-long tantrum from Republicans aimed at blaming America’s economic decline on everyone except Trump. Farmers can cope with their pain the same way the rest of the right will, by screeching about “globalist” parasites supposedly jacking up prices unfairly to create a crisis which, but for that, surely wouldn’t exist.

 

Deep down, though, they’ll know the truth. Never in American history have a president’s supporters been as vulnerable to “I told you so” reproaches as Trump supporters are after reelecting a coup-plotting madman, and those of us who told them—and told them, and told them—before the election are going to remind them at every opportunity. Let that thought cheer you as your 401(k) disintegrates.