Trump on Trump | The Spectator

What would it take to make America healthy again?

The Executive Order establishing President Trump’s Make America Healthy Again Commission presented some big, fat, sobering truths. “Six in ten Americans have at least one chronic disease,” the order says, “and four in ten have two or more chronic diseases.” It also notes that our people don’t live, on average, as long as those in other developed nations: 78.8 years in the US compared to 82.6 years in our cousin countries. How did this happen? How did the world’s most powerful nation ever get to the point where 77 percent of its youth can’t qualify for military service and we need a commission to stop us from spiraling faster and faster down the Doritos Loco Tacos-Ozempic highway? Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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.

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.

Roger Kimball

Vance Derangement Syndrome

Bret Stephens has come a long way in his estimation of Donald Trump. Back in 2016, when Trump was first running for the presidency, Stephens wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “the candidacy of Donald Trump is the open sewer of American conservatism.” As the election season progressed, Stephens mostly dropped the sewer talk, sliding into its place evocations of Trump’s “darker antipathies” and warnings that his “candidacy is manna to every Jew-hater.” A “Trump administration,” he explained,“would give respectability and power to the gutter voices of American politics.” At one point he giddily announced that Trump’s chances of victory were “next to nil.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Christopher Caldwell

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.

John R. MacArthur

The federal-state collisions looming over New York

For New York liberals of a certain age, the term “states’ rights” has long been synonymous with segregation in the South. It’s personified by Alabama governor George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door,” in June 1963, to prevent desegregation of the state university. Wallace blocked two black students from entering the university auditorium, and the ensuing confrontation between the governor and the Kennedy administration signaled the beginning of the end of the Jim Crow system that followed the Civil War. The governor was partly acting on the not entirely fallacious contention that under the federal system, state prerogative should sometimes supersede federal government edicts, and even rulings by the US Supreme Court.

Spectator Editorial

Why abolishing DEI is only a partial revolution

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) continues merrily to chop programs and departments left, right and center. Federal diversity, equity and inclusion officials were suspended on his first day in office, prior to being given their marching orders. Government employees have been ordered to justify their existence by explaining what, if anything, they achieved last week. All of this ought to be a positive influence on how the US is governed. Some will claim it to be an ideological war waged by the Trump administration. Yet it is really just the same process that private corporations undergo constantly in their search for greater efficiency and profits. Yet there is a chink in Trump’s strategy.

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