Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

March 13, 2025

What’s in a rename?

As insane as some of Donald Trump’s policy proposals first appear, many acquire a certain logic on closer examination. Greenland, with only 56,000 people, has mineral wealth as essential to the weaponry of the twenty-first century as South Africa’s uranium was to that of the twentieth. The place really may require exceptional treatment, as Trump suggests. Meanwhile, the US Agency for International Development actually did drift so far into propaganda and election interference that zeroing out its budget came to seem sensible. But there are other policies on which the halo of idiocy still burns as bright as it did on the day the President first proposed them. Chief among these is the executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.

Ben Domenech

‘I had two jobs: to run the country and to survive’: an interview with President Trump

From the moment you enter Donald J. Trump’s Oval Office, you are surrounded, not by staff or Secret Service, but by presidents. In his second term, he has chosen to envelop himself in Americana to an unprecedented degree. He faces Franklin D. Roosevelt whenever he sits at his desk. Looking back are Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln, McKinley, Polk, Jackson, Jefferson, and alone among them as a non-president, Franklin. Ronald Reagan looks over his shoulder for every decision he makes. “We took them out of the vaults. We have incredible vaults of things,” he tells me. “They have 3,900 paintings.” It’s a roster of the greatest American leaders assembled in an oval around him in their most sterling depictions. They serve as motivation.

Bridget Phetasy

Cut the bureaucracy — and the chainsaw

I retain a requisite amount of contempt for government-run institutions and the bureaucrats with whom I have to deal on occasion. Every interaction with them makes me want to pull my hair out. Government websites function as if they haven’t been updated since dial-up. I would rather go to the dentist than the DMV. It’s as if each employee has been specially hand-picked to make you hate the government more. These are features of the system, not bugs. Take the TSA, the organization which seems to derive the most joy out of making things difficult for parents flying with toddlers. In an effort to thwart these desperate adults chaperoning tiny terrorists, the agency will inexplicably change up the protocol for strollers every single time.

Daniel McCarthy

Landlord Trump, the tenants’ best bet

Donald Trump is the world’s largest landlord — not in his own capacity, perhaps, but in his role as leader of the most powerful nation on earth. He’s the CEO of America, and his development corporation owns the Western hemisphere. It also owns property in Europe, where the tenants are troublesome and are always behind on their rent. There are just a few other landlords on the planet, notably Vladimir Putin, who isn’t a rival, and Xi Jinping, who is. This might sound like a perspective on world politics for someone who rose to prominence in the cutthroat environs of New York real estate. Yet the truth is that government is always about who’s the landlord and who’s the tenant.

Matt Purple

DEI another day

Conservatives’ loathing for diversity, equity and inclusion is easy to understand. DEI’s very mission — junking Thomas Jefferson’s natural aristocracy of talents in favor of race- and gender-based advancement — runs against everything the American right is supposed to stand for. They watched with chagrin during the Biden years as DEI offices spread across the nation, into corporate C-suites and government departments and, of course, universities. Conservative heroes in the early 2020s were those like Florida governor Ron DeSantis who pushed back against DEI in their home states. Then Donald Trump returned and all that seemed to change. Upon taking the Oval Office, he shut down all DEI initiatives throughout the federal government.

Kara Kennedy

The ubiquitous Lara Trump

"Sorry, super busy,” replies someone from Lara Trump’s media team, after I texted to ask for an interview. "I’m working on her music stuff.” The Trumps love to multitask and, in the President’s first 100 days, King Donald’s favorite (that is, only) daughter-in-law has been showing off how hard she can work. Since the inauguration, and now free from the burdens of campaign politics, Lara has released a song called “No Days Off” with the rapper French Montana; a Saturday night show on Fox News; and an activewear collection in the color “MAGA red,” alongside her already established podcast, The Right View. Unfortunately, she has a different press person to dodge questions over each venture.

Freddy Gray

What’s RFK Jr. really up to?

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s program to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) appears to be ahead of schedule. At the start of the month, the burger chain Steak ’n Shake announced that it would be frying its food in beef tallow rather than seed oils — and other major restaurant groups are following suit.This week, Kennedy, who hates seed oils and processed foods, rewarded Steak with an almighty PR stunt. He sat down with Fox News’s Sean Hannity to enjoy a burger (Hannity had two) at a branch in Florida. “People are raving about these French fries,” said JFK’s nephew. “They’re amazing,” Hannity agreed.It remains to be seen if the “RFK-ing” of fast food will achieve substantial results.

Steve Hsu

America needs talent

Before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk caused a huge controversy within the MAGA movement by advocating increased high-skill immigration. As head of the Department of Government Efficiency he wanted, for example, to expand the H-1B visa program, which many Trump supporters are against. The angry debate over the visa issue still rages on social media and both sides tend to talk past each other. The MAGA movement is against any increase in immigration, whether high- or low-skill. Musk has acknowledged that the existing H-1B program was subject to abuse by employers and especially by IT firms that rely on outsourcing: the workers they import are often no better than the Americans they replace.

Scott McConnell

Neoconservative moment

In younger MAGA circles, “neocon” is a term of derision. It’s not always clear what twenty-somethings understand by the word, though its rough connotations are plain enough: “globalist” (often paired with “neocon”) and “forever wars.” The latter is what the US has fought continuously since the Soviet Union stood down thirty-five years ago — at great cost with no victories. Neoconservatism was the dominant strain of elite conservatism in the US from the Reagan era until fairly recently. So the new MAGA outlook might seem like a decisive turnabout in political and intellectual fashion. In some ways it is. Donald Trump mocked the neoconservatives’ most infamous project, the Iraq War, during his 2016 campaign and won nonetheless.

Joel Kotkin

The climate has changed on climate change

Like the Marxist dialectic, or the predictions of the Gospels, the green movement has long seen its triumph as preordained. Yet sometimes the inevitable turns out to be not so. Over the past few years green policies — notably the drive for “net zero” — have been failing. Both markets and politicians have seen the light. WhatJoe Biden’s treasury secretary Janet Yellen once called “the greatest business opportunity of the twenty-first century” has revealed itself to be something of a disaster. The new American President is likely to be blamed for the implosion of the green agenda, but its collapse long pre-dates his re-ascension.

Derek VanBuskirk

Among the rubble of Black Lives Matter Plaza

So, rest in power, Black Lives Matter Plaza. Mayor Muriel Bowser has at last caved to Republican pressure and is overseeing the renovation of the stretch of Washington's 16th Street NW leading up to the White House ahead of the US's 250th anniversary next year. Demolition of the plaza began Monday near Lafayette Square, where BLM protesters were cleared using tear gas in June 2020, and in front of St. John's Episcopal Church, where an arsonist started a fire in the basement during the protest. These events sparked Bowser’s decision to create a permanent plaza there in solidarity with their cause — protesting the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis a week earlier — and in resistance to then-President Donald Trump.

Ben Domenech

Republicans dare Senate Democrats to shut everything down

Call it the ultimate example of budgetary FAFO — or "F- around and find out": Republicans are practically daring Democrats in the Senate to follow through on Chuck Schumer’s threat to vote against the six-month continuing resolution passed by the House Tuesday night on a near-party-line vote. With Senator Rand Paul joining his fellow libertarian-minded Kentuckyian Representative Thomas Massie in opposing the measure, Republicans likely need eight Democrats to cross over. And despite Schumer’s claim yesterday that Republicans won’t get those votes, everyone in the know in Washington believes the old man’s threat is fist-shaking at clouds.

Hamish McRae

The US has entered a bear market

Could it be that Donald Trump actually wants a bear market now? At some point, one was bound to happen on his watch — after all, US equities weren’t going to keep up their stunning gains from the past two years for the rest of his term. A market correction was inevitable, and it seems we’ve already seen that, as the S&P 500 dipped into correction territory this week. And a bear market was almost certainly coming, given that there have been 27 of them in the S&P index since 1928. Hartford Funds provides a good summary here, showing that the average decline in a bear market is 35 percent, and they typically last 9.6 months. By contrast, the average bull market lasts 2.6 years, with prices rising 110 percent. Overall, bear markets occur about every 3.

Wednesday

March 12, 2025

Cockburn

Steve Bannon blames Gavin Newsom for creating Elon Musk

Critics say California governor Gavin Newsom’s new podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom, is an attempt to appeal to the center ahead of a possible 2028 presidential bid. But the governor claims his goal is to begin an open dialogue with people who don’t agree with him. So who would be better to speak to than the right-wing populist nationalist, host of War Room — and intellectual godfather of the MAGA movement — Steve Bannon? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mvMP8uTgnU&ab_channel=ThisisGavinNewsom During their conversation, Newsom wanted to address Bannon’s issues with Musk. “Do I have any issues?” Bannon joked before quoting himself in calling Elon Musk “a parasitic illegal immigrant.

Samuel Gregg

Team Trump’s incoherent plan to change GDP measurements

If there is anything that all governments watch carefully, it is GDP growth. Without substantive and ongoing increases in what GDP measures — the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced in the economy over a specific time period — societies are in big trouble. That’s one reason why recessions usually result in electoral death for whoever holds office at the time. To accurately estimate total growth in an economy, everything that contributes to GDP must be measured. That presently includes consumer spending, private domestic investment, net exports, and, lastly, government consumption and spending. Now, however, Trump officials ranging from Elon Musk to Howard Lutnick are stating that we should consider excluding the latter category.

Kate Andrews

Will better-than-expected inflation numbers calm the markets?

Has Donald Trump’s return to the White House triggered a second round of inflation? Not yet, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which revealed this morning that the consumer price index rose to 2.8 percent in February — 0.1 percent less than markets had expected. The rise is being described as "stable," as annualized core inflation (which excludes more volatile prices like food and energy) rose to 3.1 percent — also a smaller rise than expected. While inflation on the year is ticking up slightly, it remains in the ballpark of what has been expected.

Dave Seminara

Are thought crimes now a deportable offense?

In his inaugural address, Donald Trump promised to safeguard the First Amendment. “After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an Executive Order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America,” he said. This was music to my ears — but with the recent arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian green-card holder who organized student protests at Columbia University, the administration is demonstrating that First Amendment protections don’t apply when it comes to criticizing Israel’s conduct in the Gaza conflict. I support the deportation of foreign nationals who are in the country illegally or have committed crimes.

Jane Stannus

Is Canada doing enough to tame Trump?

There’s such a thing as cutting off your nose to spite your face, and the tariff war between Canada and the US is starting to look like a prime example. On Monday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced a 25 percent surcharge on electricity exports to the US, affecting an estimated 1.5 million households and businesses in New York, Michigan, and Minnesota. Trump responded with all-caps outrage, raising the March 12 tariff on steel and aluminum imports from Canada from 25 to 50 percent — a move that would be devastating for Ontario’s auto sector. How, the President asked, could Canada stoop so low as to use electricity — a resource that impacts the daily lives of innocent people — as a bargaining chip and a threat?

Michael Evans

Why Putin could reject a ceasefire

With all the good news coming out of the Jeddah talks about a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine, there’s only one question that needs to be answered: Will President Putin be interested in any kind of deal right now? President Trump is convinced that Putin wants peace. But if the Russian leader truly wants to end his war, will he do so on America’s terms, or will he wait until he achieves one of his main objectives — the total subjugation of the four provinces in eastern Ukraine that he claimed to have annexed in the first seven months of the invasion? At a ceremony in St. George’s Hall at the Kremlin in September 2022, Putin declared that Russia now had four new regions: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.

Mark Galeotti

Has Ukraine called Putin’s bluff?

Has Vladimir Putin’s bluff been called? It certainly looks that way. As long as the Ukrainians refused to consider a ceasefire, Moscow could portray them as the obstacle to the kind of quick deal Donald Trump appears eager to secure. Previously, Kyiv had floated the idea — after another unhelpful intervention from French President Emmanuel Macron — of a limited ceasefire covering only long-range drone attacks on each other’s cities, critical infrastructure, and operations in the Black Sea. But that was a non-starter, too transparently a trap for Putin, designed to make him look like the intransigent party if he rejected it. That certainly seemed to be Kyiv’s plan as of last night, when an unprecedented attack on Moscow involving some 140 drones killed three civilians.