Latest from Coffee House

Friday

14 Mar 2025

Eliminating the Education Department is the key to restoring American culture

Since the US Department of Education’s inception in 1980, the agency has proven itself to be incompetent at its principal task: teaching American children. Adding insult to injury, the agency has also earned a big, fat F when it comes to fiscal responsibility. Despite this reality, headlines announcing the Trump administration’s newly streamlined Department of Education cast a somber tone. Layoffs “gutted” the Education Department, reports the AP. Democratic attorneys general are suing over “gutting of Education Department,” echoes the New York Times. The cuts will “decimate” the agency that “compiles ‘Nation’s Report Card’ and measures student performance,” laments ABC News. Cutting, gutting, decimating.

Charles Lipson

Will Putin give peace a chance?

At a summit meeting in Moscow, Ronald Reagan was asked about his basic approach. He famously answered, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose.” Vladimir Putin has the same strategy for Ukraine. That is certainly his first response to President Trump’s offer to mediate an end to the war and bring a reluctant Ukraine to the negotiating table. If “we win, they lose” is Putin’s final response, then the war cannot end without Ukraine’s surrender or Russia’s collapse. Putin’s initial reply, filled with his maximalist demands, indicates he is still committed to the conquest of his neighbor, whose independence and sovereignty he has long rejected.

Thursday

13 Mar 2025

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.

Ian Williams

Is the Trump administration ready to stop Chinese espionage?

For Republican voters sick of “deep-state” shenanigans, Kash Patel, the new head of the FBI, seems an ideal appointment. He and his new deputy, the former police officer turned podcaster Dan Bongino, look and sound like exactly the right men to disrupt a bureau that has at times in the past eight years acted as an investigative arm of the Democratic party in its attempts to thwart Donald Trump through the legal system. Patel is considered so pleasingly anti-establishment that his ties to a Chinese e-commerce business have been largely overlooked. He has holdings worth up to $5 million in a fast-fashion company called Shein, founded in China but headquartered in Singapore, and he intends to keep his stock. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se.

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

12 Mar 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.

Tuesday

11 Mar 2025

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump and Elon’s White House Tesla auto show

So Donald Trump and Sean Hannity are each springing for a Tesla. It shouldn’t prove much of a hit to their respective wallets, seeing as how each has amassed a not insubstantial fortune thanks to the emergence of the MAGA movement, though Hannity is probably something of a piker next to Trump. Trump went all-in: “Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby,’ in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stand for.

Cockburn

Musk and Rubio make up after USAID funding clash

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elon Musk settled their week-long feud this morning — through their shared love of eliminating government waste. How cute! The spat began during last week’s cabinet meeting when Musk and Rubio clashed over their different approaches to cutting the US Agency for International Development. The New York Times reported that Musk called out Rubio for firing “nobody,” arguing that he was unwilling to dismiss large groups of employees. Rubio responded by saying that more than 1,500 State Department officials had retired early or accepted redundancy offers under his leadership, the Times reported.

Gavin Mortimer

Romania’s democracy has descended into farce

Violence broke out in Bucharest on Sunday evening after Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau disqualified Cǎlin Georgescu from running in May’s re-run presidential election. In a statement, the bureau justified its decision to exclude Georgescu on the grounds that his candidacy “doesn’t meet the conditions of legality” because he “violated the very obligation to defend democracy.” Supporters of Georgescu, whom the BBC has described as a “far-right, pro-Russia candidate,” gathered outside the Central Electoral Bureau to express their outrage and soon clashed with police. Until six months ago, Georgescu’s name was virtually unknown outside Romania.

Philip D. Bunn

Why I hate Substack

Last month, the online magazine Current announced it will be shuttering in April. A small magazine run by a dedicated team of editors volunteering their time, Current was a lovely diamond in a whole mess of internet rough. I was only able to publish a few short pieces there since discovering it, but many of my favorite writers have appeared in its digital pages, and the outpouring of support it has received since the announcement makes me confident that it will be sorely missed. The economics of online publishing without ugly advertisements dominating the page are dismal, and the magazine’s announcement indicates that financial support through subscriptions was declining, even as “the number of clicks on the site has remained steady.

Kate Andrews

Can the MAGA coalition survive a recession?

The color red splashed across every news channel yesterday, as Donald Trump’s seemingly blasé attitude towards a possible recession wiped $4 trillion off the United States’s stock market. All day and all night, the airwaves were dominated by talk and speculation over the future of the US economy, as the President pushes forward (and pulls back) certain parts of his tariff agenda. It’s the sheer uncertainty that has investors spooked, leading to one of the worst days on Wall Street in years. The details of this “period of transition” for the economy that the President alluded to are so vague, and so unclear, that you can make of the comments almost whatever you want.

Monday

10 Mar 2025

Charles Lipson

Columbia exemplifies the failure of universities

Yesterday, with growing sadness, I read a wonderful book about teaching and learning, written by one of the great teachers of the past century. Why the sadness? Because the author, Gilbert Highet, was a revered professor at Columbia in the Fifties and Sixties. It is impossible to read his paean to learning, written a half-century ago, without weeping for what his university has become. When Highet wrote of learning, he meant absorbing from history’s greatest minds, from Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Virgil, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke, and teaching their lessons to students who wished to learn from them. Reading Highet’s words a half century later, we realize he was speaking of another time and place — virtually another university.

Travis Aaroe

Ignore the ‘oligarchy,’ Trump has mastered his coalition

The historian Niall Ferguson was in many ways typical of the high-level defectors to Trumpism. He found himself driven to MAGAdom only in extremis: over Biden’s plans to pack the Supreme Court, and over insufficient “deterrence” in the Democrats’ foreign policy. Last month, however, Ferguson tested the limits of this new coalition. He took to X to rebuke Trump’s handling of negotiations with Russia. Soon popped up no less a figure than J.D. Vance. “Moralistic garbage,” the vice president shot back. Ferguson felt obliged to clarify his position to the MAGA faithful.

James Heale

Mark Carney is Canada’s new prime minister

It is difficult to overstate how much Donald Trump has changed the dynamics of Canadian politics. When Justin Trudeau resigned on January 6, his Liberal party was on just 16 percent in the polls — 25 points behind Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. Within six weeks, that had narrowed substantially, with Nanos suggesting there was just two points between the two parties. The top issue of national concern? Donald Trump and US relations. Visiting Ottawa in January, I was struck by the remark which one Member of Parliament made to me. “We don’t see America and tariffs as foreign affairs — we see them as actually an extension of our domestic economic policies.

Friday

7 Mar 2025

Sara Spencer

Freedom of speech in the UK is very, very under threat

With all the transatlantic back-and-forth over Ukraine, and J.D. Vance’s contentious remarks on Fox News about some “random country that hasn’t fought a war in thirty or forty years,” it’s easy to forget that just three weeks ago, the vice president gave a landmark address about free speech in Europe and Britain, in particular. Last week, when Keir Starmer visited Washington, DC, Vance raised his concerns more directly with the prime minister about “infringements on free speech … that affect American technology companies and by extension American citizens.

Derek VanBuskirk

On the ground at the Sesame Street public media protest

Washington, DC The Sesame Street crew appeared at NPR headquarters to support a “Protect My Public Media” rally to protest President Donald Trump, Congress and the FCC yesterday. Big Bird, Elmo and Count von Count stood behind those who gave their prepared addresses. Around them stood nearly two dozen protesters carrying signs in support of NPR and PBS. One woman to the left of Elmo waved a banner that read, “No one voted for Elon Musk,” which she likely recycled from a previous protest. The rally was run by Protect My Public Media, an action network that aims to “protect the federal investment in public media.” Craig Aaron of the Free Press spoke first.

Thursday

6 Mar 2025

Freddy Gray

China’s response to Trump’s tariffs marks a dramatic escalation

Might peace in Ukraine be prelude to an even more serious conflict between the United States of America and China? Is that a hysterical question? The deal-or-no-deal drama starring Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders has dominated the news in recent days, so much so that the latest clash between Washington and Beijing has gone all but unnoticed. Yet China’s official response to the Trump administration’s move to raise its tariffs on Chinese imports to 20 percent does appear to mark a dramatic escalation. "Exerting extreme pressure on China is the wrong target and the wrong calculation,’’ said China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian. "If the US has other intentions and insists on a tariff war, trade war or any other war, China will fight to the end.

Derek VanBuskirk

Trump staffers are ‘mid-tier’ and ‘abject,’ says Michael Wolff

Who would have thought that Michael Wolff would have another book about Donald Trump in him? UK Books editor Sam Leith interviews Wolff on this week’s Book Club podcast. They discuss Wolff’s latest, All or Nothing, which follows the world of Trump from January 6, 2021, to his second inauguration. Seeing as this is now Wolff’s fourth book bringing to light some things those around Trump would presumably prefer to stay in the dark, Leith asks why anybody even bothers to pick up the phone when they see his name on the caller ID. Wolff says that it is in part because he has kind of become their friend after having followed Trump and his cohort around for the last ten years; but it is also because those in “Trumpworld” are themselves trying to figure out what’s been going on.

Wednesday

5 Mar 2025

Ben Domenech

The Democrats’ Trump Derangement Syndrome comes home to roost

The strangest thing happened last night: the Democratic Party, which has built its success in recent years thanks almost entirely to framing themselves as the candidates espousing normalcy versus the chaos offered by Republicans, showed up to Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress and cried havoc. Part of this may be due to institutional decay. The sight of a weakened Nancy Pelosi murmuring to Steny Hoyer in advance of the speech served as a reminder of the strongarm tactics from the Democratic leadership class that used to restrain their far-left wing from losing its shit in public with all the restraint of a toddler denied their binky.

Tuesday

4 Mar 2025

Roger Kimball

Trump bulldozes through joint address to Congress

We’ve been told that President Trump’s address to Congress tonight would dilate on the theme of the “Renewal of the American Dream.” And so it did. But for short hand, two ideas predominated. One was “Woke No More.” The other was “common sense.” Both were themes of Trump’s inaugural address. I have expatiated on the theme of Trump’s embrace of common sense in a talk I gave to the Connecticut outpost of Hillsdale College at the end of January. The irony is that what should be common to all has been so uncommon in an age marked by perversity and ideology. Together, the attack on wokeness and the reinstitution of common sense go a long way towards summarizing the extraordinary achievements of Donald Trump in his first forty-two days.

Kara Kennedy

With Love, Meghan is a nightmare ending to a fairytale

“Has anyone in the world ever been so tickled by the sight of lettuces?” Meghan titters to chef Alice Waters, on the final episode of her new “lifestyle television series,” With Love, Meghan. Meghan’s latest venture is an exercise in how many inspirational quotes you can simper out in five hours. She’s less duchess, more Instagram influencer. She doesn’t have the pissed-off husband half-arsedly holding the camera while she explains, in excruciating detail, how to make a balloon arch. Instead, she has a plentiful Netflix crew and reported $100 million budget. I’m trying my hardest to find something nice to say and, well, the guests aren’t too awful and the food looks alright.

Jane Stannus

Canada can do more to address the fentanyl crisis

It was a field day for the Canadian freight industry on Monday. Every truck in the country, stuffed to the gills with product, was racing the clock to the border. The few drivers still available commanded ridiculous prices — up to $12,000 higher than normal. At the stroke of midnight, the 25 percent blanket tariff kicked in. Trucks that had yet to make it across the border hit the brakes and turned around. The party was over; the coaches became pumpkins again, it was time for Cinderella to go home. The whole week before, business owners, brokers and shippers were asking each other: "Have you seen anything official on this? Anything from the Canadian government?" They hadn't.

Daniel DePetris

Will Trump’s pause of Ukrainian military aid force Zelensky to the negotiating table?

The decision couldn’t have come as a surprise to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. And if it did, then his capacity to read the room is even worse than imagined. Last night, the Trump administration paused all US military aid to Ukraine. The move came after an extremely tumultuous few weeks, which started on February 19 when Zelensky claimed that Trump was living in a Kremlin-orchestrated disinformation bubble. Trump wasted no time howling back by calling Zelensky a dictator because he canceled elections during a time of war. The spat accelerated on Friday, when the two men, egged on by Vice President J.D.

Monday

3 Mar 2025

Derek VanBuskirk

Melania Trump takes on revenge porn and deepfakes

First Lady Melania Trump held a roundtable on Capitol Hill Monday with victims of revenge porn, deepfakes and sextortion in support of the "Take It Down Act." The “Take It Down Act” is a bipartisan bill cosponsored by Senators Ted Cruz and Amy Klobuchar that would require social-media platforms to remove any nonconsensual intimate images within forty-eight hours of a victim’s request. While the act passed the Senate with a unanimous vote, FLOTUS hopes it will be passed with the same enthusiasm in the House before being signed into law by her husband. She called for the prioritization of “robust security measures and to uphold strict ethical standards to protect individual privacy.

Sunday

2 Mar 2025

Frank Ricci

The harm that DEI has done to public safety cannot be overstated

Firefighters do not run into a blaze like you see on TV. We crawl with purpose like rats in a maze, which is what a well-involved structure fire feels like, the smoke so thick our high-powered flashlights can’t cut through it. We are trained to locate windows and leave furniture in place as reference points while we conduct search and rescue then scurry to the nearest walls. It makes it all the more vital to have another firefighter with you. The fire was consuming a construction site on Yale’s campus. “The security guard’s inside.” The water company hadn’t arrived yet. No matter, we were going in. I ordered the firefighter to grab the forcible entry saw. He didn’t know where it was. Precious seconds gone.

Friday

28 Feb 2025

The Spectator

No peace at Trump-Zelensky talk

The much-awaited Oval Office meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky went off the rails Friday. What was expected to be the signing of a deal that granted the US privileged access to Ukrainian natural resources unraveled into a shouting match — as well as a masterclass in diplomatic self-immolation from the visiting Zelensky. At one point, Vice President J.D. Vance told a visibly cross Zelensky: “Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media. Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems.