Politics Archives

Wednesday

April 16, 2025

Could this be the last time I ever have to pay my taxes?

Another Tax Day has come and gone. Here I sit, all broken-hearted. The tax-industrial complex has once again swallowed up thousands of dollars that used to be mine. But this year, I found myself legitimately wondering: could this be the last time I ever have to pay my taxes? One of the major pillars of President Trump’s economic platform is the abolition of income tax for all Americans who make less than $150,000 a year. This sounds like a fantasy, an empty chicken-in-every-pot promise, like a student council candidate winking after saying, “If you elect me, I’ll make sure we have soda in the drinking fountains.” But if Trump 2.0 has shown anything this year, it’s a willingness to set into motion seemingly impossible plans.

Ben Domenech

It’s no mystery how Democrats plan to attack Republicans

It's no mystery how Democrats plan to attack Republicans over the coming year and a half: tie them to Elon Musk like a billionaire-sized string of dynamite. They're doing it already, and intend to ramp it up to 11. Yet Republicans don't seem to have an answer for how to deal with it – and saying "Musk isn't on the ballot, I am" isn't an answer.There was a significant portion of time where Republicans struggled to figure out how to defend Donald Trump, but they've solved that problem. Trump's poll numbers and popularity are now solid as a mountain – people love him or they hate him, and moving those numbers is very difficult, especially when there are dedicated well-funded ad campaigns promoting what he's doing on a daily basis.

James T. Fishback

Trump should have the power to fire the Fed chair

The Chair of the Federal Reserve is arguably the most powerful economic official in the United States. He’s also the least accountable. He sets borrowing costs for households and businesses, opens lending windows to banks deemed “too big to fail,” and decides when to tame or ignite inflationary forces. Unlike the Treasury Secretary or even the President himself, he answers to no one. That may soon change. In Trump v. Wilcox, the Supreme Court is weighing whether the President should be allowed to remove the head of an independent agency.

Ben Clerkin

Is Trump killing the American dream for mom-and-pops?

He’s survived an assassination, bounced back from bankruptcy and – so far, at least – avoided all attempts to jail him. But Donald Trump’s most audacious feat is yet before him: to persuade Americans to pay more for their goods as their beloved businesses struggle – and then be grateful to him at the polls. While tariffs threaten to raise prices across the board for consumers, small businesses with lower margins than their larger competitors are struggling. “Whether or not you support tariffs, or whether or not you think certain offices should be cut, I think overall, any kind of economic turbulence is uniquely burdensome for small businesses,” says Molly Day, the National Small Business Association’s vice president of public affairs.

Angus Hanton

J.D. Vance is wrong about Britain and America’s relationship

J.D. Vance told UnHerd yesterday that the United States has a “much more reciprocal relationship” with the UK than it does with countries such as Germany. This is a highly selective assertion. What is more accurate to say is that the US has taken over and squeezed the UK economy. American politicians never allude to the vast number of American enterprises with large, high-margin UK operations steadily extracting profits. Such firms include Starbucks of Seattle, Costa Coffee (owned by Coca-Cola of Atlanta, Georgia) and Boots the Chemist (owned by Walgreens Boots Alliance of Illinois).

Tuesday

April 15, 2025

Paul du Quenoy

Bernie Sanders at Coachella shows time is not on the Democrats’ side

As the Church of England faces an exodus of parishioners, some of its more inventive clerics have rushed to embrace EDM as a new medium to draw young people back to their faith. “Our 90s-themed silent disco will be appropriate to and respectful of the cathedral,” curiously insisted the Very Reverend David Monteith, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, to much derision over that sacred space’s conversion into a party zone for 3,000 revelers in 2024.

Teresa Mull

The Blue Origin lady spaceflight was desperate, sad and tasteless

I was determined to write something positive about Blue Origin’s “historic all-female spaceflight.” The spectacle was an all-American underdog story. Jeff Bezos worked his way up from dorky book salesman to buff billionaire who can launch his busty bride-to-be into space alongside some celebrities — because hey, why not? Then I saw the group photos of the girl gang, and I just couldn’t. My resolve dissolved faster than the lip fillers in Khloé Kardashian’s fake face. All I could think was, “Vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!

Neal Pollack

Mahmoud Khalil is not the victimized cuddlebear the media would have you believe

A federal immigration judge ruled on Friday that the government could deport Mahmoud Khalil, not a student, but a “Columbia University graduate.” Judge Jamee Comans, a former Mississippi police officer and a Biden appointee in 2023, said that Khalil’s political activities posed “potentially serious foreign policy consequences” for the United States, which is claiming that Khalil is undermining “US policy to fight anti-Semitism.” Khalil supporters talk about him like he’s Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, Dr. King writing letters from Birmingham jail or Oscar Wilde staring wistfully at the moon from his cell in Reading Gaol. But anyone looking to ding the Trump administration on its deportation policy could find a better example of injustice.

Monday

April 14, 2025

Roger Kimball

What the left calls ‘chaos,’ the rest of us call ‘winning’

They never learn, the libs. Back in 2016, they provided hours of entertainment assuring themselves that Donald Trump would “never be president” (“take it to the bank,” said Nancy Pelosi, who in another galaxy, long, long ago was speaker of the House). Patriotic citizens, eager to instruct the public about the dialectic of hubris and nemesis, stitched together many joyful compilations of Hollywood celebrities, ditto-head news readers and Democratic politicians intoning that party line. Then, after the impossible mutated into the inevitable and Trump was elected, the narrative shifted to “the walls are closing in on Donald Trump.” If it wasn’t Russia, Russia, Russia it was Stormy Daniels, putatively shady business deals or putative efforts at insurrection.

Kara Kennedy

Is Kamala Harris turning into Meghan Markle?

Somewhere atop the sun-drenched hills of coastal California, failures go to rebrand themselves, and rebrand their rebrands as "pivots." There, Kamala Harris and Meghan Markle are busy writing the next chapter in the book of blaming the system for the personal failures of wealthy and powerful people. Harris, fresh from discovering that Democratic strategists had invented the America that was enthusiastic about her, now contemplates her political afterlife. She does so from the same region of the same state where Markle, having learned that royal traditions don't yield to Instagram aesthetics, crafts multi-million-dollar deals to explain why it's everyone else's fault. Welcome to the Golden State, where yesterday's rejections become tomorrow's empowerment memoirs.

Charles Lipson

How to deal with the student mob

Last week’s violent anti-Semitic protest at Stanford is yet another sign of a pernicious climate on many campuses. The immediate targets are Jews and Israel. The larger targets are many of the values we prize in the West. At Stanford, students broke into the university president’s office using hammers and crowbars. They proceeded to barricade themselves inside, destroy the furnishings, and scrawl noxious graffiti there and on the building outside. Some estimates say they caused $700,000 in damages. Twelve students were arrested by local police. The Santa Clara District attorney announced that the break-in had been carefully organized in advance, caused enormous damage and warranted criminal charges. But, he said, it did not warrant severe punishment.

Sunday

April 13, 2025

Lee Cohen

Security-consumed Prince Harry chooses war-torn Ukraine as latest backdrop

Prince Harry’s clandestine dash to Ukraine this week, trailing last year’s faux royal tours to Colombia and Nigeria, lays bare a brazen hypocrisy. He bangs on about the UK being too perilous for his family, waging legal crusades over security provisions, yet here he is, swanning into war zones and countries with travel warnings, trading on his fading royal luster to clutch at relevance – all while dodging the duties he willingly jettisoned. Bereft of official standing in America or Britain, his quest to play maverick royal smacks of pantomime, one that jeers at his claims of craving a secluded, secure existence. Take his Ukraine jaunt to Lviv’s Superhumans Center, where he mingled with wounded soldiers and civilians.

Friday

April 11, 2025

Ross Clark

Who knew about Trump’s flip-flop?

As a piece of financial punditry, it could hardly be bettered. “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY”, screamed a post on the platform Truth Social on Wednesday morning. Hours later, the S&P 500 surged by 9 percent – its biggest percentage rise since 2008. The only trouble is that the tipster handing out this invaluable advice was the same man whose announcement caused the surge in the stock market: Donald J. Trump. Unsurprisingly, it has raised questions about who knew that Trump was about to do an about-turn and delay tariffs for 90 days – and whether any of them used the information to their personal advantage. Insider trading has long been treated as a serious issue among corporations.

Thursday

April 10, 2025

Paul du Quenoy

What’s in a pronoun?

“I am Kamala Harris. My pronouns are ‘she’ and ‘her.’ I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit.” That embarrassing exercise in self-parody was how the former vice president of the United States chose to introduce herself at a July 2022 roundtable on how the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade could affect disabled people. Harris’s pandering indulgence in radical gender ideology barely attracted notice at the time. But two years later, just after she took the mantle of the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination from the addled Joe Biden, a video of her awkward self-presentation resurfaced and went viral as evidence of her intellectual vapidity, poor public speaking skills, and display of a sensibility that most Americans reject.

Charles Lipson

Trump’s ‘on-again, off-again’ presidency

To win elections in a two-party system, the victor needs to erect a big tent. He needs to persuade all kinds of voters in the general election, including many who disagree with each other (but disagree with the other party even more), to vote for him. Experienced politicians call it, “the politics of addition, not subtraction.” The rest of us call it “big tent politics.” What can poke holes in that tent? What will allow the rain to come pouring in? Those questions loom over Republicans, looking for an umbrella amid tariff disagreement, a volatile market and whispers of a possible recession. The skies were clear when the big issue was illegal immigration. The party base loved it and so did voters.

Wednesday

April 9, 2025

Daniel McCarthy

Will a new era of tariffs really stop China’s rise?

If free trade and globalization enabled Communist China to become a superpower, will a new era of tariffs and trade war halt China’s rise? The Trump administration is betting the opposite of the policies that turned China into America’s most formidable rival will strengthen us and weaken them. Even before the President announced his sweeping new tariffs – including cripplingly high ones on China – the State Department was indicating that nations from the Caribbean to Europe faced a choice between doing business with Washington and doing business with Beijing.

Spectator Editorial

The 👊🇺🇸🔥 presidency

Much has been said and written about the Trump administration’s leaked Signal discussion on bombing Houthis in Yemen, most of it forgettable. Virtually all attention has focused on dull questions of competence and whether any heads should roll for communicating sensitive US matters through a private company’s platform, then ineptly letting a reporter in on the chat. The debate is largely news-cycle fodder. The new administration will not succeed or fail based on what phone apps its members use. Yet the Signal debate has entirely overshadowed what should be a major discussion in its own right. Is the new administration quietly sleepwalking the country back into a costly, dangerous policy of Middle East military meddling?

Curtis Yarvin

My DC bunker

Washington, DC My office this week has been the Starbucks on Capitol Hill. Any random subscriber to my Substack can get a half-hour with me if they book a slot. I do this a lot when I travel and oddly, given the rot of this rotting world, I rarely come away with the feeling that here were 30 precious minutes I’ll never see again. I often want to spend an hour or two. And no one yet has killed or even attacked me. A leftist policy wonk did show up without an appointment, but he just wanted to talk about Ezra Klein. One of this week’s characters was a Russia expert at a foreign policy thinktank, who seems to really know his stuff. He filled in important nuances ofthe Prigozhin coup. Yevgeny Prigozhin never meant to overthrow Vladimir Putin, he said.

Aidan McLaughlin

Can the Democrats rediscover themselves in the age of Trump?

Even on the placid streets of London’s Mayfair, James Carville cannot find peace. “Every five minutes I get stopped and asked about Chuck Schumer,” says the Democratic strategist when I speak to him. “I can’t even enjoy a $30 martini by myself.” Carville’s party is in dire straits. The humiliation of losing to Donald Trump had not yet worn off when the Donald stormed back to the White House with a vengeance, unleashing the chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk on the federal government, assembling a cabinet intent on carrying out even his most radical policies – and scaring the few Republican would-be dissenters in Congress into submission.

Ryan Girdusky

The Democrats have a voter problem

Data scientist David Shor has a message for Democrats: “Your problem with young men is worse than you think.” Shor is a respected and highly reputable Democratic data guru. He has released his autopsy on the 2024 election and why Kamala Harris lost. Unlike previous analysis, which primarily used exit polling, Shor’s company Blue Rose Research looked at polls, precinct-level returns and voter-file data to figure out who turned on the Democrats – and why. Democrats comforted themselves in the wake of their election loss by insisting that if more people had voted, Harris would have been sworn in as the 47th president. For decades it’s been true that Democrats win high-turnout elections while Republicans win votes with a smaller turnout.