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.
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