Trump’s Trade War Is Not Over

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, March 23, 2026

 

Liars think everyone is a liar, cheaters think everyone is a cheat, etc.: You know that story. Donald Trump is, from time to time, shocked that the world is not populated by grifters and con artists as thoroughly corrupt as he, and he sometimes confesses his consternation in a way that would be amusing if he were in the high-dollar Palm Beach retirement home where he belongs rather than waging illegal wars willy-nilly in Iran, Venezuela, Ecuador, possibly Cuba, as well as on random boats in the Caribbean, inconveniently located girls’ schools, Democratic cities, and the U.S. economy. He is, by his own telling, distressed that the justices he has appointed to the Supreme Court attempt to follow the Constitution rather than simply do his bidding. Earlier in March, he thundered on his boutique social-media site:

 

The decision that mattered most to me was TARIFFS! The Court knew where I stood, how badly I wanted this Victory for our Country, and instead decided to, potentially, give away Trillions of Dollars to Countries and Companies who have been taking advantage of the United States for decades.

 

…

 

The Democrats on the Court always “stick together,” no matter how strong a case is put before them — There is rarely even a minor “waver.” But Republicans do not do this. They openly disrespect the Presidents who nominate them to the highest position in the Land, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and go out of their way, with bad and wrongful rulings and intentions, to prove how “honest,” “independent,” and “legitimate” they are.

 

I do love the sneer quotes around “honest” and “legitimate.” Small wonder he lost his shirt in Atlantic City: Trump has no poker face—he always tells you exactly what he is thinking.

 

Beyond the usual shock all mentally normal people must feel when encountering the borderline illiteracy of the president of these United States—there are exceptions, but one can generally get a decent read on a man’s intelligence from how he writes in his native language, and I’d be shocked if Trump’s IQ were as high as the temperature in Indian Wells yesterday—consider the bluntness of the president’s political corruption as confessed here: There is no pretense that the Constitution or statutes matter, that an independent judiciary is a desirable part of our republican constitutional order, etc. Trump’s vision of jurisprudence is: I gave you what you wanted—a seat on the Supreme Court—and now your job is to give me what I want. I don’t take my oath of office seriously, and if you do, I consider that a personal betrayal.

 

There are, I am told, some poetic sentiments that can be expressed only in French and some psychological states that require German. But in the Age of Trump, we must lean on Yiddish in response to this meshugganah gonif.

 

The illegal war in Iran—and whatever illegal war the president will launch next with the acquiescence of that gutless, mindless rump that still has the bad taste to call itself the Republican Party—has drawn the spotlight away from Trump’s trade war. But the economic bellum Americanum contra omnes into which our nation, its entrepreneurs, its workers, and its capital have been dragged by this senescent gameshow host is very much a going concern. Tariffs remain high by historical standards, and they remain in place without any intelligible legal authority: Trump is supposedly acting under the authority of the Trade Act of 1974, which permits tariffs to address a balance-of-payments crisis—but there is no balance-of-payments crisis at this time and none on the horizon. (A balance-of-payments crisis is what happens when a country lacks funds to pay for necessary imports or is unable to meet its debt-service obligations. We’ll get there, someday, if we keep going in the direction Trump et al. are leading us at the moment, but we are not there at this time, and Trump’s recourse to the 1974 law is, as one might have easily predicted, entirely pretextual.) Trump has for 50 years been hostage to the incredibly asinine notion that the great economic problem facing Americans is that, when foreigners sell us stuff, they don’t charge us enough money, and that the government therefore must find ways to raise the prices of imports. (That ectoplasmic sound you’re hearing is the ghost of every president, prince, or emperor who ever went to the expense of building an army or a navy to keep the trade routes open smacking his incorporeal forehead in disbelief.) Of course, Trump would not put it this way, but what he is doing is waging war on abundance and choice.

 

That becomes clearer the nearer one gets to the real world of American business, which is not very much at all like the make-believe boardroom Trump inhabited as the host of The Apprentice. Ask Ed Schweitzer, until recently the president of SEL, a multi-billion-dollar company that designs and builds systems that help keep electric power systems running smoothly around the world, equipment that prevents blackouts, among other things. Schweitzer’s name is right there on the door—SEL stands for Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, and he is the firm’s founder and the inventor of the first microprocessor-based instrument for protecting transmission lines and locating faults in them. He started the company in 1982 and made his first sale soon thereafter, to the Otter Tail Power Company in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. A certain kind of populist malcontent will rage, from time to time, that “we don’t make things in this country anymore.” SEL does, operating five major factories in the United States along with regional assembly facilities and other outposts. It also operates facilities in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil and maintains field offices around the world. The firm carries no meaningful debt and is jointly owned by its more than 7,000 employees. It is one of those quintessential American success stories: A guy who received a first-rate state-college education (PhD, Washington State) had a big idea and started a business in his basement, and now his products help keep the lights on everywhere from Oakland to far-flung Saudi Aramco facilities.

 

All that work and innovation can be turned on its head with a stroke of Trump’s pen, and it has been.

 

When Trump announced his so-called Liberation Day tariff scheme on April 2, 2025, Schweitzer and his team began calculating the cost—or began trying to, at least: As Trump lurched from one tariff regime to another based on his interactions with imaginary worldwide figures such as the Swiss prime minister, keeping up with the damage estimates became a full-time job. “We estimated tariffs would cost us up to $140 million a year. At the time, that would have been about 7 percent of our sales and about half our profits confiscated.” Because of the nature of his clients’ operations, Schweitzer runs a very conservative business. “We use profits to fuel our growth. We don’t borrow money. We do it what used to be the American way and save it before we spend it. We’re in a conservative industry. Electric power utilities and major industries around the world depend on us to run our business in a very, very solid way.”

 

As such, political risk is a constant concern for SEL. Schweitzer once challenged his team to come up with a program for manufacturing certain products entirely in the United States but found that doing so would not only be uneconomical but impossible—there are some microprocessors and other necessary inputs that simply are not available from American sources.

 

“We encourage our suppliers to make what we need from them closer to home—preferably somewhere we can drive a truck to, like the United States, Canada, or Mexico, partly to reduce sovereign risk, war, that sort of things, but also disasters, earthquakes, tsunamis, whatever. And now we’re having to respond to domestic sovereign risk created by the White House,” Schweitzer told me. “One thing I now wonder about is what do our international customers think about sovereign risk in buying products from the United States, including the stuff we make?”

 

There is no such thing as “Made in the USA.” There are firms making cotton balls out of U.S.-grown cotton in North Carolina and Ohio, but even these domestic factories processing domestic material are part of a vastly complex global supply chain—that cotton may come from the Texas Panhandle, but those cotton crops are fertilized with Canadian potash along with other imported materials. And with all due respect to my friends and family in the cotton business, the stuff that SEL makes is a hell of a lot more complicated than a cotton ball. (Though don’t let the simplicity of the end good mislead you about the simplicity of the production ecosystem: You can I, Cotton Ball this stuff all day and never really get a handle on it.) Slapping a sales tax on U.S. importers is not the way to remake global supply chains—which, the pointy-headed libertarian here will point out, may not actually need remaking, a process that is almost certain to impose costs far in excess of any real economic benefit. Trying to get that kind of complex geoeconomic work done under the leadership of a guy who couldn’t figure out a way to make money owning a New Jersey casino with a strip-joint in it is pretty much the definition of a fool’s errand.

 

But Trump’s attitude toward his business-owning constituents is the same as his attitude toward the Supreme Court: The gangsterism is the point. An arbitrary system of trade taxation makes clients and favor-seekers out of every business in the United States, creating opportunities for political advancement and personal enrichment for Trump and his circle of sycophants. “One elected official on the Hill told us, ‘We’ve got great relationships with the White House and the trade representative, let us know what you need and maybe we can get you some kind of an exemption,’” Schweitzer related. “I politely said, ‘No.’ We’re not going to do that. It’s not right for me to be able to call him up and get an exemption. I want an exemption for everybody. Special-interest politics is not draining the swamp—it’s putting more alligators in it. It’s been a good year for alligators and K Street restaurants, but that ain’t the way to run a railroad.”

 

If the Iran war starts to go badly—or maybe if it goes very well, or if Trump simply loses interest in it—it is a safe bet he will turn his attention back to trade.

 

No supply chain is safe.

 

And Furthermore …

 

Since I’ve now touched on the topic twice: Put me down with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rod Dreher who say that the growth and normalization of gambling in the United States is a social disaster. I could have told you that. And, well, I did. See “Play to Extinction” in Big White Ghetto.

 

Words About Words

 

“Tanty” for “tantrum” is a usage with which I was not familiar—I’m not sure I like it, but it does make the word sound more juvenile, which is, I suppose, the desired effect.

 

Do you know who is just as useless as teats on a boar? New York Times headline writers. I know I am late to this party, but, on the death of Paul Erlich, author of The Population Bomb, the Times writes: “His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.”

 

Premature? Did you mofos really just write premature?

 

Ehrlich, for those of you unfamiliar with his work, insisted it was a matter of absolute certainty—irrespective of any policy changes that might take place—that hundreds of millions of people would die in the 1970s and 1980s from worldwide famine, that countries such as the United Kingdom would simply cease to exist because of mass starvation, etc. There is much more, of course—he was a global-cooling guy before he was a global-warming guy—and of all the things you could say to characterize his predictions, premature is just indefensible. That isn’t just stupidity—that is old-fashioned tribalism. No progressive hero can ever be wrong (Ehrlich) or a crank (Margaret Sanger) or a crackpot (Linus Pauling) or an antisemite (Jesse Jackson) or  … You can almost hear them scratching out the “Cesar Chavez wasn’t really a progressive icon” pieces right now. When I last wrote about Sanger’s eugenics craziness, I was lectured that she held beliefs that were common at the time, which is true—and so did Jefferson Davis.

 

Premature–what a way to put it! I’m a New York Times and Washington Post subscriber (and very occasional contributor to both newspapers). It is, in my view, really important for a free, self-governing republic with democratic institutions such as ours to have institutions such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. But, guys—jeez.

 

Premature. Somebody ought to get sent down to the Long Island desk for that one.

 

And, While We’re at It …

 

Helen Lewis of That Esteemed Journalistic Institution is not wrong about this, also regarding the Times:

 

It is very strange to publish an article on the gender dynamics of mass shooters and not mention that the two “female” shooters used as flagship examples here were biologically male. Males commit more than 90% of violent crimes.

 

We should probably retire the term “trans women” along with the myth that the people described by that term are in some meaningful sense women. We can treat people with respect and kindness and offer many kinds of social accommodation without being obliged to play make-believe.

 

In Closing

 

A rising tide lifts all boats, the proverb goes. Sometimes, the rising tide has a name—in the case of the WNBA, it is Caitlin Clark. From the Wall Street Journal:

 

The WNBA was on a gradual upswing in 2024 when Clark arrived after breaking the NCAA career scoring record at Iowa. League attendance surged. Viewership on ESPN ballooned by 170%.

 

And even while Clark sat out most of last season due to injury, the WNBA continued its rise. In 2025, regular-season games averaged 1.3 million viewers on ESPN, the same that NBA games averaged on the network in 2024-25.

 

Now, NBA owners who once saw the WNBA as little more than a tax write-off are scrambling to buy expansion franchises. By 2030, the WNBA is set to have 18 teams, up 50% from 2024.

 

The upshot? A rise in the salary cap of 364 percent, which, as the Journal relates, represents “the biggest jump ever seen in U.S. professional sports history.”

 

I like to see hard-working people who are good at what they do get paid.

 

The energy I am personally willing to expend on professional sports of any kind would not, on an average day, be sufficient to light up a 40-watt lightbulb. Labor markets in professional sports are very weird in many ways, but they are, in the end, markets. And markets really do work. You can hector people all day, as Nike for some reason insists on doing, about the importance of women’s sports, but people either buy the tickets or they don’t. And they do.

 

The superstar effect is not limited to sports: From actors to CEOs to nonprofit executives, high-performing outliers command unusually rich compensation and, in the process, can—can, but do not always—raise compensation expectations and norms across an industry. Presidents of state universities, for example, have not always been paid north of $1 million. In the early 1990s, there was an attempt to make a scandal out of Elizabeth Dole’s compensation as president of the Red Cross—$200,000 a year, although she decided to forgo her salary in her first year on the job and had no problem making a multiple of that number from speaking engagements. She was very good at the job. Nonprofits were starting to discover that it makes good financial sense to spend a lot of money on talented executives and fundraisers rather than pay lower salaries to middling idealists. A billion-dollar CEO who makes shareholders $100 billion is not expensive—he is a bargain. If they deliver the goods, then that is money well spent.

 

Caitlin Clark is, as I understand it, a pretty reliable deliverer of the goods. And the fruit of her success is going to show up in a lot of paychecks other than her own. Basketball franchises that used to be worth $x are now going to be worth some multiple of that. A lot of intellectual property is going to get a lot more valuable. Certain sports facilities are going to be more profitable to operate and hence more valuable real estate than they had been. Nearby restaurants, hotels, and parking garages may in some cases grow more valuable as well. I couldn’t tell you what team Caitlin Clark plays for with a gun to my head, but I am happy to stand up and cheer for shared prosperity. Sometimes, the cup runneth over.

Joe Kent Is a Loon

By Rich Lowry

Monday, March 23, 2026

 

There are many qualities you look for in a director of the National Counterterrorism Center, but an active imagination isn’t one of them.

 

Joe Kent, though, has shown since his high-profile resignation that he has one, and not the kind of imagination that makes for a great Elizabethan poet or a compelling noir novelist but the sort of fevered fancy that fuels the Candace Owens podcast.

 

Kent says, apparently quite sincerely, that President Trump may have launched the war against Iran because he feels threatened from shadowy forces connected to Israel.

 

In other words, what the combined military might of Israel and the United States is attempting to achieve in Iran — get a top Iranian official to bend to our will by convincing him that he’ll otherwise get killed — the Jewish state has already done to the president of the United States.

 

We are supposed to believe that Donald Trump, one of the most indomitable figures in the history of American politics, who is bold and fearless, who never lets a thought go unexpressed, who is ardently pro-Israel and has been throughout his two terms in office, is secretly controlled by his fear of potential Israeli attempts against his life.

 

This must be the dumbest and craziest thing that any former high-level U.S. intelligence official has ever believed or floated.

 

To be sure, we’ve had lots of incompetent intelligence officials and lots of partisan haters, many of whom exposed themselves during Trump’s first term. But Kent’s irrationality is next-level.

 

It’s as if Allen Dulles left the CIA and went on a media tour explaining how the Rothschilds might be running a secret world government or that at least there are a lot of “data points” suggesting as much.

 

The more respectable “Israel is controlling Trump” theory is based on a distortion of Marco Rubio’s remarks at the start of the war. He said that if Israel attacked first without the U.S. joining in, our troops would be at greater risk from an Iranian retaliation than if the U.S. and Israel attacked together.

 

The point was about the timing of the U.S. strike, not its justification, as Rubio made clear at the time.

 

But critics of the war insist that Israel forced our hand. The idea is that rather than just telling Netanyahu, “No, don’t do that,” if he opposed a strike against Iran, Trump mustered an enormous U.S. armada and air fleet over the course of weeks and staked his presidency on a large-scale attack against Iran that he, in his hearts of hearts, thought was a mistake.

 

Is that plausible? Does that sound like Trump?

 

Kent is not content to leave it at that. He floats what he calls a “darker” scenario, namely that sinister forces have scared Trump into doing their bidding on foreign policy out of fear for his life.

 

This theory, like so much we hear from the conspiratorial right these days, goes back to the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

 

Kent says that Kirk wanted to rethink our relationship with Israel and opposed war with Iran — then got assassinated. This, Kent maintains, raises all sorts of questions, by which he means that Jewish interests might have killed Kirk, although in an admirable show of intellectual probity and restraint, he won’t flatly assert that these forces carried out the assassination.

 

Kent makes much of the FBI’s keeping him from pursuing leads in the Kirk case. During his interview with Tucker Carlson, he and Carlson dwelt on this at length, with a shocked Carlson — who is obviously close to Kent — pretending that it was the first he’s heard of it, although it’s been a matter of public knowledge.

 

Carlson kept asking what possible legitimate reason the FBI could have had to object to Kent’s “just asking questions,” as they say.

 

Well, when the New York Times reported on this bureaucratic dispute last year, it said:

 

The inquiry by Joe Kent, the director of the counterterrorism center, alarmed Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I. Mr. Patel and other senior officials believed Mr. Kent was overstepping, treading on F.B.I. responsibilities and potentially interfering with the investigation and the prosecution of the suspect, Tyler Robinson.

 

All of these certainly sound like standard-type concerns in such a case rather than a pretense to cover up the truth about the assassination.

 

And, by the way, why would MAGA hero and Trump loyalist Kash Patel make himself part of a conspiracy to hide a conspiracy to kill Kirk?

 

This alleged cover-up would have to be quite wide-ranging. On the narrow question of Kent’s inquiry alone, the Times reports that there was a high-level gathering:

 

Mr. Kent’s efforts were a topic at a White House meeting that included Mr. Patel, Mr. Kent and his direct superior, Ms. Gabbard. Top Justice Department officials, Vice President JD Vance and the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, were also there, according to several of the people who spoke to The New York Times about the matter.

 

So all these people would have had to be witting or unwitting facilitators of a plot to keep the public from knowing of the Jewish or Israeli interests that killed the most promising MAGA leader of his generation.

 

Et tu, Susie Wiles?

 

Then, there’s the minor matter of the avalanche of evidence against Tyler Robinson that’s already public. If all we knew about the case was that there was video of Robinson fleeing the scene with a rifle down his pants, that’d make for a pretty strong presumption of his guilt.

 

Also, if Robinson were a patsy for Israel, he might have mentioned it to someone by now, given that he’s facing the death penalty in an open-and-shut murder case.

 

Finally, why would Jewish interests want to kill Charlie Kirk? He was a philosemite who was clearly holding back some pretty nasty forces on the right. Yes, some Jewish donors were upset with him for providing a forum for an increasingly unhinged Tucker Carlson, but when donors are irked, what they generally do is pull their funding, not undertake elaborate assassination plots.

 

At the end of the day, more than anything else politically, Kirk was a Trump loyalist. So if lethal Jewish interests were — to indulge this insanity further — picking off anti-Israel voices to shape the U.S. debate over Iran, Kirk wouldn’t have been on the list.

 

Kent tells us that Kirk urged him to stop an Iran war the last time he saw him, briefly at the White House last year in the run-up to the Twelve-Day War. Assuming this is true, it didn’t stop Kirk from getting in line after Trump decided to launch Operation Midnight Hammer anyway, saying that he trusted Trump who was the man of the hour with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

 

As mentioned earlier, none of this accords with Trump’s temperament in general or his posture toward Israel in particular. When Trump appeared, exultant, in the Knesset last year for the most pro-Israel speech we’ve ever heard from an American president, was he really pretending because he was a kind of hostage, performing on a string for his frightening Israeli puppet masters?

 

Uh, Trump doesn’t scare easily and is very bad at fakery. So, on top of every other implausibility, the idea that he’s posing as an ally of Israel — and has been for years — only because he’s been intimidated into it is utterly laughable.

 

If Israel were holding a metaphorical, or perhaps literal, gun to Trump’s head, we might well be bombing Tel Aviv rather than Tehran.

 

Regarding all of this, one might be tempted to give Joe Kent points for creativity, but it’s a very bad thing when people in his former line of work are absurd fantasists.

The Lecture I Couldn’t Give

By Kori Schake

Sunday, March 22, 2026

 

Last May, I gave a lecture at the Air War College, the Air Force’s senior service school for officers. I have taught at West Point and spoken at several other senior service schools. At the Air War College, I presented my work on the history of U.S. civil-military relations—research that later led to a book that was favorably reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and the military’s Joint Force Quarterly. The college was complimentary of my presentation and invited me to reprise my talk this school year. But last week, I was asked not to come after all.

 

The professor who gave me the news was polite and professional, apologetic even. In a statement to The Atlantic, a spokesperson for Air University, the college’s parent institution, said, “Air University adjusted its academic schedule following the recent government shutdown, including the Air War College program, to prioritize core curriculum and program requirements. As a result, the scheduled guest lecture by Dr. Kori Schake was unable to be accommodated within the revised schedule. This was a command decision.”

 

Although I have no evidence that the decision was political, I nonetheless found myself wondering if something else was going on. The Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth has made clear that people and institutions may be excluded from involvement in professional military education for ideological reasons. The Pentagon has cut academic ties with numerous elite colleges that Hegseth called “factories of anti-American resentment and military disdain,” and rescinded a former Biden-administration official’s professorial appointment at West Point. The department has also sought to control the ideas taught at military institutions, instructing the service academies to remove library books that promote “divisive concepts and gender ideology” and requiring them to cancel some classes because of their content.

 

Hegseth has created a command climate in which subordinates might fear defending their educational programs. The dynamic reminds me of the tightening of the rules of engagement in Afghanistan during the Obama administration: When the military command sets a new standard that subordinates are worried about violating, they sometimes comply preemptively and even more stringently than the formal directive might require.

 

At any rate, the history of civil-military relations, the subject I was to lecture on, is extremely relevant today. Far more than their predecessors, Hegseth and President Trump have traduced the once-firm line between politics and the military. Here is what I would have said in my lecture.

 

It was not inevitable that a military strong enough to defend U.S. interests could avoid state capture or resist a military coup—it wasn’t even likely. In fact, no subject worried America’s Founding Fathers more than the risk of a standing army threatening civilian governance. Complaints about the potential danger posed by military forces are prominent in the Declaration of Independence. Thirteen of the 85 Federalist Papers directly address the issue. The Constitution would not have been ratified without the Second and Third Amendments’ protections against the federal government’s use of military force. Beginning with the 1795 Calling Forth Act and in subsequent legislation, Congress restrained the chief executive’s ability to mobilize militia. The Founders would be astonished to see how massive the country’s defense establishment has become today, and even more surprised by its tradition of deference to civilian authority.

 

How a country founded in fear of a standing army came to think of its military as a bulwark of American democracy is the subject of my work. As with so many other good things in American governance, George Washington’s example was crucial. While commander in chief of the Continental Army, Washington didn’t make demands of Congress; he pleaded and entreated, consistently reinforcing the war powers of the civilian authorities. Although he preferred a strategy of decisive battle, he adopted a “war of posts” because it was the best his army could carry out with the resources that Congress had provided. When Alexander Hamilton argued that the army should intimidate Congress into giving itself revenue-raising powers, Washington cautioned that an army “is a dangerous instrument to play with.” At the end of the war, Washington publicly surrendered his commission to Congress, “bidding an affectionate farewell to this august body, under whose orders I have so long acted.” Washington’s adroit handling of the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion as president established that a democratic government could legitimately compel compliance with the law, including by using the military. His unfailing commitment to civilian authority gave time for government institutions to sink roots, and established norms that gelled into the professional ethos of our military today.

 

Those norms weren’t uniformly respected by either civilian or military leaders during the 18th and 19th centuries. The first American president to vet military officers by their political affiliation was Thomas Jefferson. Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, John Fremont (twice!), William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses Grant, George Armstrong Custer, and other military officers exceeded their orders in ways that created severe political problems for the presidents they served. But they are all examples of singular leaders taking initiative in the conduct of their military duties, not of the gathering of armies to threaten the government.

 

The most difficult civil-military case to assess is that of Grant. During the constitutional crisis of 1867–68, President Andrew Johnson fired the secretary of war and attempted to appoint Grant in his place while Grant was also serving as commander of the U.S. Army. When Congress threatened Grant with five years in prison and a $10,000 fine if he accepted the dual appointment, Johnson offered to do the time and pay the fine should Grant uphold the president’s authority. Grant was thrust into the most consequential civil-military test that any American officer has had to navigate, namely deciding which of the two constitutionally authorized sources of civilian control to obey—Congress or the executive. Grant chose to obey the law, not the commander in chief, establishing that in peacetime, congressional authority takes precedence.

 

In the 1870s, political jockeying led to what would become the nation’s most important restriction on the use of military forces domestically, the Posse Comitatus Act. For more than a decade after the Civil War ended, formerly seceded states remained under military occupation. Violence was so prevalent that, in 1871, Grant invoked martial law in South Carolina. He sent federal troops to protect legislatures and polling places, and even to supervise the counting of ballots in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida during the 1876 presidential election. By that time, however, support for Reconstruction had waned. Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican presidential nominee, made a pledge to end it in exchange for the southern states’ votes, and won. Congress enacted the bargain in 1878 by prohibiting, via Posse Comitatus, the use of U.S. military forces for law enforcement unless Congress authorizes such action, it is requested by a governor, or the president invokes the Insurrection Act. (Just last year, in Trump vs. Illinois, the Supreme Court reinforced this restriction.) Presidents can also override Posse Comitatus to ensure that states respect constitutional rights. Dwight Eisenhower did this in 1957 by federalizing the Arkansas National Guard and sending active-duty troops to the state—over the governor’s objection—to enforce the Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

 

In the 20th century, even as the size of the U.S. military ballooned, fewer military leaders challenged civilian authority than had in the prior century. There are only two examples of consequence: During World War I, Admiral William Sims expressly violated President Woodrow Wilson’s order that U.S. forces would be associated but not integrated with those of allies, and during the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur publicly campaigned against President Harry Truman’s strategy for the war. In both cases, the civilian leaders easily prevailed. In the 1930s, the Marine Corps, the most independent of the military services, wrote a doctrine explicitly subordinating its expeditionary forces to the direction of diplomats. There were no significant civil-military disputes during World War II despite the military’s preference, contra the civilian leadership, for an Asia-first strategy. A 1949 dispute over government funding for the military was branded as the “revolt of the admirals” but was in fact a legitimate public debate about postwar budgets and strategy, not a refusal by the military to enact them.

 

In more recent times, civil-military frictions have consisted almost entirely of civilian leaders pushing the military up to or over the bounds of traditional decorum or even the law. Most dangerously, Trump has deployed military forces into cities and states over the objections of their mayors and governors, or has attempted to. The abrupt retirement last year of the head of the U.S. Southern Command amid a series of controversial U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean, along with the fact that a classified Justice Department memo reportedly indemnified the military against prosecution for the strikes, suggests at least some level of concern inside the government that the administration is operating very close to the legal line in those operations.

 

More commonly, politicians today attempt to legitimate their policies and themselves by using the military as a prop: Think of candidates flaunting endorsements from veterans, and political conventions showcasing them as speakers. President Biden had uniformed Marines standing behind him when he gave a 2022 speech about democracy. Trump has given campaign speeches to military audiences and encouraged their participation in partisan activities. In a recent video, several Democratic members of Congress reminded the military not to obey illegal orders, making compliance with the law seem like a political act. Veteran endorsements appear to have a small-to-negligible effect on voters, but may also negatively affect their attitudes about the military as an institution.

 

The military’s ability to resist politicization rests almost wholly on the professionalism of the force itself. When Hegseth called hundreds of military leaders to Quantico, Virginia, last fall to watch what turned out to be political-rally-style speeches by him and Trump, the military leaders showed up, as they had been directed to do by their civilian leaders. But they all sat in stoic silence during the political program. This kind of professionalism runs deep in the U.S. military. Yet the armed forces will not long remain immune to our febrile politics if we keep dragging them into it. Avoiding that will be even harder if service members are denied opportunities to learn the history of the military’s relationship with its civilian leaders.

The Democratic Party Becomes Its Fringe

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, March 19, 2026

 

Last year in the Northern Virginia suburbs, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger seemed omnipresent on television screens during commercial breaks. Her appearances reminded viewers that — with stints at the Central Intelligence Agency and in “law enforcement” at the U.S. Postal Inspection Service — she would make a good protagonist for a knockoff Tom Clancy novel or CBS prime-time drama.

 

One ubiquitous commercial featured Spanberger’s father, Martin Davis. “You dream that your kids follow in your footsteps,” he gushed. “And for me, that dream happened. My daughter Abigail went into law enforcement just like me. She worked drug cases and helped take child predators off the street. Then she joined the CIA to keep our country safe.” In another ad, U.S. marshals and police chiefs called Spanberger “one of our own” and the child of “a military and law enforcement family.”

 

Biographical ads are a fact of life in modern politics, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with candidates for higher office assuring the public that their fathers are proud of them. But the Spanberger campaign was particularly soft-focus.

 

It wasn’t that she completely ignored issues. The congresswoman, who had been in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2019, effectively hung the still-high cost of living around the neck of President Donald Trump, then less than a year into his second term. One of her ads contended that “the Trump budget raises health-care costs, raises mortgages, raises the price of electricity and gas.” It also attacked her Republican rival, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, whom Democratic groups deluged with negative ads. Combined with Trump’s unpopularity, the strategy worked: Spanberger romped to victory with 57.5 percent of the vote, and Democrats won a 64–36 majority in the Virginia House of Delegates — their largest in decades.

 

But once Spanberger was in office, her moderate mask began to slip. After she ran on affordability and a traditional biography, Spanberger has served up pure culture-war fodder and let her party’s left wing run wild during her first months in office. Let that be a warning to other states tempted by a Democrat who insists he’s nothing like the fringe of his party.

 

As of this writing, Spanberger has signed four bills into law that will each be subject to a referendum. One would enshrine a right to abortion in the state constitution, another would enshrine same-sex marriage,  and a third would automatically restore voting rights to an estimated 260,000 convicted felons upon their release. All three will be on the ballot in November.

 

A fourth referendum, scheduled for April 21, concerns a proposed state constitutional amendment that would allow Democrats to implement a new congressional map featuring ten Democratic-leaning seats and only one Republican-leaning seat.

 

This is a reversal of Spanberger’s stance on the campaign trail.

 

“Virginia by constitutional amendment has a new redistricting effort that was put in place and first utilized in the 2021 redistricting,” Spanberger told the Washington, D.C., ABC affiliate last August. “I’ve been watching with interest what other states are doing, but I have no plans to redistrict Virginia.” On March 5, Spanberger declared from her official governor’s account on X: “I’m voting YES on Virginia’s redistricting amendment.”

 

Spanberger ran on the high cost of living, but she is likely to sign tax increases into law this year. Since she took office, Virginia Democrats have introduced more than 50 new tax bills. They include: (1) a new top income tax bracket of 10 percent for millionaires, which would give Virginia the fifth-highest top income tax rate in the country; (2) a new tax on retail deliveries in Northern Virginia from companies such as Amazon, FedEx, UPS, and DoorDash; (3) a new 11 percent sales tax on the gross receipts from the retail sale of any firearm or ammunition; (4) a 10 percent tax on revenue earned by the operators of fantasy sports; (5) an extension of the state’s sales tax to digital property such as Netflix subscriptions and cloud storage, and an extension of the state’s retail sales tax to services such as dry cleaning and laundry services, companion animal care, and residential home repair or maintenance; and (6) an extension of the state’s personal property tax to electric-powered landscaping equipment, including lawn mowers, edgers, trimmers, leaf blowers, and chainsaws.

 

Here we see the difference between Argentina and Virginia: Down in Buenos Aires, President Javier Milei wielded a chainsaw at political rallies to demonstrate how he wanted to dramatically chop state spending, bureaucracy, and taxes. In Virginia, Democrats want you to pay an annual tax on the chainsaw — forever.

 

Taxpayers in Virginia pay a “personal property tax” on vehicles, in addition to the sales tax paid at the time of purchase. For most people, that means their car — generally taxed at $3–$5 per $100 of assessed value. In fiscal year 2025, Fairfax County found that a “typical” household paid $1,266 and change in personal property taxes.

 

Spanberger campaigned on eliminating Virginia’s personal property car tax; she called it the “most hated tax in all of Virginia.” But Democrats in the state assembly blocked a proposed budget amendment to eliminate it. If Spanberger objected, she was silent about it.

 

Mind you, Virginia is not facing a budget crisis like the one Mayor Zohran Mamdani is using to justify steep tax hikes and delays to his campaign promises in New York City. Virginia ended the 2025 fiscal year with a surplus of more than $570 million and — according to Glenn Youngkin, Spanberger’s predecessor — more than $900 million in rainy-day funds. Youngkin also claimed that the state enjoyed $10 billion in surplus revenue during the last four years.

 

Virginia used to rank in the middle of the pack on state tax burdens, but it’s starting to slide down the list. The Tax Foundation ranked Virginia 30th in this year’s State Tax Competitiveness Index, concluding that “many states have implemented significant income tax reforms in recent years, leaving Virginia behind.” Moreover, “the state’s progressive income tax has a top marginal rate higher than several of its neighbors, including Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia.”

 

In addition to the proposed tax increases, Spanberger has announced that Virginia will rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. The RGGI sells a limited number of carbon allowances to energy producers, and the pool of allowances shrinks each year. This is supposed to spur energy producers to move to more carbon-friendly fuels. In reality, however, Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest electric utility, simply covers the costs of its allowances through bill riders — additional costs tacked onto customer bills and approved by state regulators. One study from the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy estimates that rejoining the RGGI means Virginians will pay about $500 million more per year for electricity.

 

Remember, Spanberger ran for governor contending that Republicans were making everything less affordable.

 

Lawmakers’ dramatic veering to the left should make Virginians eager to march to the state capitol in Richmond and hurl rotten fruit at them. Of course, state legislators may be gone by the time voters get there. Like many state legislatures, Virginia’s meets only a fraction of the year. In even-numbered years, barring an emergency session, the session is held for 60 days. In odd-numbered years, the session is held for 30 days, although it is frequently extended to 45 days. This year’s budget included a provision raising legislative salaries from $18,000 a year for senators and $17,640 for delegates to $50,000 each — not counting a $237 per diem for each day the legislature is in session and $1,250 per month to help maintain an office in their district. That’s a 178 percent salary increase for senators and a 183 percent increase for delegates.

 

Remember those U.S. marshals and police chiefs who called Spanberger “one of our own”? Immediately upon taking office, the governor terminated all Virginia State Police and Virginia Department of Corrections assistance to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

 

That decision came under fire after Abdul Jalloh, an illegal immigrant from Sierra Leone, allegedly stabbed 41-year-old Fairfax County resident Stephanie Minter to death. Jalloh had previously been arrested more than 30 times for crimes including rape, malicious wounding, assault, and drug possession. In November 2023, he was convicted of malicious wounding; he was sentenced to two years in prison but was released after seven months.

 

In 2025, a Fairfax County police major wrote in an email to the chief deputy commonwealth’s attorney that Jalloh’s behavior was “escalating and becoming more violent and explosive. . . . I am concerned that it is not a matter of if, but rather when he will maliciously wound (or worse) again.” But it’s worth noting that according to Fairfax County jail officials, ICE never lodged a detainer or came to take Jalloh into custody during the nine times he was jailed between 2020 and 2025.

 

“There is a woman who is dead because ICE did not take action, and apparently they expect local law or state enforcement to do their jobs for them,” Spanberger told the Washington, D.C., NBC affiliate in March. Maybe barring law enforcement from cooperating with ICE wasn’t such a good idea after all.

 

Then there’s Spanberger’s friendship with Democrat Ralph Northam, Virginia’s governor from 2018 to 2022. You may recall that in 2019, a photo featured on Northam’s yearbook page from his time at Eastern Virginia Medical School surfaced. The infamous photo featured two young men — one in blackface and one in a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood — and listed one of Northam’s nicknames as “Coonman,” a Jim Crow–era racial slur.

 

Northam initially admitted he was one of the two figures in the photo, without saying which one; then he retracted that admission, claiming he wasn’t in the picture at all. Still, Northam finished his term, in large part because his two prospective successors faced scandals of their own.

 

If Northam had resigned or been removed from office by the state legislature, Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax would have taken over, and he faced two serious accusations of sexual assault. (The Virginia House Democratic Caucus absurdly argued that the allegations, though “extremely serious,” should not be investigated by the state legislature.) But if Northam and Fairfax resigned, then state Attorney General Mark Herring would have become governor — and Harring had admitted to wearing blackface to a college party in 1980. And if all three had resigned, the speaker of the House, Republican Kirk Cox, would have become governor. Democrats concluded that a GOP governor was the truly unacceptable scenario.

 

In January, Spanberger appointed Northam to the board of the Virginia Military Institute. Apparently, he is sufficiently disgraced for Spanberger not to have announced the move with any fanfare, but not disgraced enough to be denied such an honor. Maybe he can consult on photo selections for the VMI yearbook.

 

For a long time, conservatives scoffed whenever the mainstream media described a prominent Democrat as a “moderate” or a “centrist.” While there have always been a few genuine articles, those terms have been promiscuously and erroneously applied to the likes of former President Barack Obama, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, former Vice President Kamala Harris, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Many inattentive political journalists and correspondents label Democrats “moderates” based on personality and speaking style rather than actual policy positions.

 

Since taking office, the Virginia state government has shifted so far to the left at such speed that Virginians would be justified in showing up in neck braces and threatening to sue for whiplash.

 

“Campaign as a centrist, govern as a progressive” is the oldest trick in the book, and it might as well be the unofficial motto of the modern Democratic Party. Considering how Richmond is changing, we may want to nickname that bait-and-switch maneuver “pulling a Spanberger.”

Who Fell Flat in the Transgender-Athletes Amendment Fight?

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, March 23, 2026

 

The New York Times headline declares, “G.O.P. Bid to Target Transgender Athletes Falls Flat in the Senate.”

 

Now, it did “fall flat” in the sense that the proposed amendment did not reach the 60 votes needed to be added to the SAVE Act, nor did it or the SAVE Act become law. But it didn’t “fall flat” in the sense that it didn’t get more votes than the other side did; 49 senators voted for the motion to invoke cloture on the amendment, and 41 senators voted against it. As the Times itself notes, “no Democrat rose to speak against the transgender proposals.”

 

Those of you who are good at math will notice that adds up to only 90 senators voting in the motion to invoke cloture; Democrats Chris Coons of Delaware, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Mark Kelly of Arizona, and Dick Durbin of Illinois missed the vote, as well as Republicans John Curtis of Utah, Tim Sheehy and Steve Daines of Montana, and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

 

Democratic senators probably had a good reason for not wanting to speak against the GOP proposal.

 

Gallup found in May that 69 percent of U.S. adults continue to believe that transgender athletes should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth sex. Among independents, 72 percent hold that position, and even 41 percent of self-identified Democrats hold that position.

 

So every Democratic senator running for reelection this year will face attack ads that they voted to keep transgender athletes in girls’ sports. Sure, Republicans would have preferred to pass the measure, but now every incumbent Democratic senator has taken an unpopular vote or skipped it, and advocates for transgender athletes in girls’ sports know that Democratic senators will vote their way but don’t want to defend that vote. For “falling flat,” that’s not so bad.

What Americans Want from the Iran War Isn’t What They Expect to Get

By Noah Rothman

Monday, March 23, 2026

 

A useful CBS News/YouGov survey released over the weekend reveals a stark divide in American public opinion regarding the ongoing war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

 

Overall, 57 percent of the adults surveyed told pollsters the war is going either “very” or “somewhat badly.” Just 43 percent disagree. Who can blame them? All but the most dedicated news consumers are so regularly bombarded by national media’s trepidation over the course the conflict has taken that their pessimism could be mistaken for prudence.

 

But the press doesn’t deserve all the blame for the public’s assessment. Americans, it seems, overwhelmingly support a range of objectives that could result from this conflict. They just don’t trust the president to secure them at all, much less at an acceptable cost.

 

Two-thirds of all respondents would like this war to end with the elimination of the Iranian threat to its regional neighbors and the world. Another 73 percent want to see the Iranian nuclear program “permanently” disabled. Eight in ten Americans want to make sure “Iran’s people are safe and free” at the conclusion of hostilities, which would likely only follow the implosion of the Islamist regime in Tehran. That’s perhaps why a majority of respondents (53 percent) believe it would be unacceptable to end the war with the regime still in power.

 

That’s what Americans want. What they expect they’ll get, however, is another matter.

 

About nine in ten Americans believe they’ll have to absorb higher gasoline prices for the time being. Another 58 percent anticipate that higher gas prices will persist indefinitely. Sixty percent believe the economy will suffer because of this war. Forty-four percent say it will not recover anytime soon. A majority said they believe the president will have to deploy U.S. ground troops to Iranian soil to accomplish his objectives. And Americans are not convinced that the war will make the country any safer, both in the near term (49 percent) and in the long run (42 percent).

 

National media’s relentless focus on American tactical and strategic setbacks in this war surely contributes to the public’s negativity, but this poll’s respondents also do not believe the president has addressed their misgivings. The number of respondents who told pollsters that the Trump administration has not “clearly explained” its war aims grew from 62 percent at the outset of hostilities to 68 percent today. As such, overall approval of this conflict declined from 44 percent on March 3 to just 40 percent today.

 

As I’ve written previously, the president did not trust the public enough at the beginning of this conflict to level with them about what it would entail, what would be expected of them, and why their sacrifice was a desirable contribution to a vital national project. Why shouldn’t they return the favor? Just one-third of poll respondents are willing to shoulder higher gas costs today, but they might be if that contributed to a future without the Islamic Republic in it. Most voters (58 percent) do not trust the president’s judgment in a crisis, and his inconstancy and undisciplined communications strategy have given them no reason to revise that assessment.

 

The good news for Trump here is that this poll suggests that he inherited a solid foundation on which to build support for the U.S.-Israeli campaign. To do that, he will have to overcome the public’s misgivings about his temperament as well as the commitments American soldiers and civilians alike will be expected to make to get there. Maybe that’s easier said than done, but we won’t know until the president makes an earnest and sustained attempt to persuade Americans toward his way of thinking about this war.

The New York Times’ Love Affair with China

By Becket Adams

Sunday, March 22, 2026

 

What is it with the New York Times and communists?

 

They really love those guys.

 

Just consider the paper’s high regard for communist China, especially when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party’s supposed efforts to combat climate change. Never mind that nothing China says or does in this area involves altruism or global well-being; China is simply exploiting the progressive creed, which it knows resonates with the international community, to expand its sphere of influence. Never mind also that China is the world’s leading emitter of carbon.

 

Sure, nothing China says lines up with what it does, but it says it so well, and that’s what counts, right?

 

“Asia Turns Back to Coal as War Chokes Off Natural Gas,” declared a March 18 Times headline.

 

More notable than what the piece says is what it does not say. In a 1,100-plus-word article about Asia returning to coal, it’s never mentioned that China is the region’s largest consumer of . . . coal. Not once. The only mention of China is incidental, as a producer of low-cost solar panels.

 

We shouldn’t be surprised by this omission. Hiding the ball is typical of the Times’ coverage of communist regimes.

 

Instead of recognizing the obvious — that China is a cunning economic powerhouse and that it’s laughing itself silly as its rivals in Europe and North America willingly dismantle their energy capabilities — the Times’ news and opinion sections portray China as the world’s caretaker — the undisputed leader in humanity’s fight for survival.

 

“‘China Is the Engine’ Driving Nations Away From Fossil Fuels, Report Says,” reported the Times in September 2025.

 

Another article in the paper declared in August of that same year: “In the Quest for Clean Energy, China Went From Copycat to Creator.”

 

“China Poised to Take Lead on Climate After Trump’s Move to Undo Policies,” the paper declared a couple of years before that.

 

There’s also this: “There’s a Race to Power the Future. China Is Pulling Away.” And this: “What Happens if China Stops Trying to Save the World?” And this: “China Is the Adult in the Room on Climate Now.”

 

How about as far back as 2009: “On Climate Change Efforts, China Is Key.”

 

Or how about this gem: The “fight against climate change” is an “effort now mostly led by China.”

 

Har, har.

 

This isn’t just a fascination with China specifically. It’s a love and admiration for collectivism itself, a love bound by no race or border.

 

Recall that the Times spent decades reporting positively on the Soviet Union. Its infamous Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, used his position specifically to hide the empire’s brutality from the international community, including even the Holodomor famine. The Times didn’t disavow his reporting until 30 years after he had died.

 

The Times also published favorable coverage of the North Vietnamese Army in the 1960s, often minimizing or ignoring its excesses and brutality. Correspondent Harrison Salisbury’s field dispatches frequently relied heavily on information provided by NVA officials. The paper also extensively reported on the My Lai massacre, as it should have, while giving the short shrift to NVA atrocities such as the Huế Massacre, where an estimated 2,800–5,000 civilians were murdered and dumped into mass graves.

 

Then, of course, there’s the Times’ adoration of the Castro regime, which is well known to anyone who has read its coverage over the past 40 years.

 

Perhaps most shameful of all is that the paper was quick to dismiss U.S. intelligence reports that accurately predicted life under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

 

In April 1975, just before the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg (yes, the Killing Fields Schanberg) wrote a dispatch titled, “Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life.”

 

“It is difficult,” he argued in the article, “to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.”

 

Later, in the immediate aftermath of the communist takeover of Cambodia, Schanberg reported that executions under the new Khmer Rouge regime “will apparently bear no resemblance to the mass executions that had been predicted by Westerners.”

 

This on-the-ground coverage earned him a Pulitzer.

 

To Schanberg’s great credit, he later owned up to his shocking gullibility and made a sharp about-face, committing himself fully to the even more difficult and dangerous task of exposing the regime’s evils; this work would be immortalized eventually in Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields, which was released nearly a decade after the fall of Phnom Penh.

 

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

 

As for the Times, it painted a rosier picture in the early days of the Khmer Rouge. In July 1975, for example, it published work by a contributor who claimed that reports of mass starvation and killings in Cambodia were “self‐serving exaggerations planted [by the U.S. government] to discredit the new government.”

 

Enjoy this key passage:

 

These same sources gave birth to a flurry of sensational “bloodbath” stories, nourished with “eyewitness accounts,” that made headlines in the days immediately following the surrender of Phnom Penh. The “eyewitness accounts” turned out to be second‐ or third‐hand rumors, and the stories quickly disappeared in the press in the absence of any substantiating evidence.

 

Now that the war has at last come to an end, there is reason to believe that after initial difficulties are surmounted the new Government’s all-out effort to increase food production will transform Cambodia into a land self‐sufficient in food, and within a few years, into a rice‐exporting nation, as it was before it was ravished by war.

 

Even as the death toll steadily rose and the number of refugees fleeing Cambodia reached crisis proportions, the Times remained skeptical. Eventually, however, the paper shifted away from its hesitant framing. Yet despite humiliating itself once on the issue, the paper still published a contribution in 1990 titled, “Pol Pot: Not the Killer We Think He Is.” The article, which its own author disavowed in 2015, minimized the mass murders, doubted and contradicted the survivors, and even suggested that details of the Khmer Rouge’s worst excesses were actually part of a U.S. disinformation scheme.

 

Pol Pot, who would die peacefully eight years later, must’ve gotten a kick out of it.

 

What’s telling is that the paper never seems to learn or adjust its thinking, even after repeatedly getting it wrong.

 

Throughout these nearly identical episodes, which span an entire century, the pattern is the same: the Times provides favorable coverage of communist regimes until the wrongdoing becomes undeniable, leading to public embarrassment for the paper. This keeps happening. It’s still happening.

 

This tendency to “misjudge” and “misreport” on these regimes, despite the abundance of trend data, shows that the Times’ default approach to covering communist governments is not one of curiosity or journalistic inquiry but one of reflexive, almost instinctive support.

 

How else to explain the consistently sloppy coverage?

 

If a newspaper consistently grants communist regimes favorable coverage and continues to do so even after each regime proves to be just as evil as the rest of us suspected, and even after multiple professional humiliations, we must conclude that the paper isn’t just ignorant or forgetful — we must conclude that this keeps happening because the paper supports communist regimes.