Tariffs

At the start of the second Trump administration, the words on everyone’s lips were “breakneck speed.” On the day of his inauguration, Donald Trump declared a border emergency, designated drug cartels as terrorist organizations and challenged birthright citizenship. He withdrew from international climate agreements and ditched Joe Biden’s mandates on electric vehicles. He rescinded various Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives. On January 20, 2025, he issued pardons for individuals connected to the 2021 riot on Capitol Hill. And he established the Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE), which empowered Elon Musk to begin hacking away at federal bureaucratic bloat. Trump signed 143 executive orders in those first 100 days, more than any previous president.

“I love inflation,” said Donald Trump earlier this month, when asked about the latest increase in the Consumer Prices Index to an annualized 4.2 percent. But the power of the President’s positive thinking cannot overwhelm the enormous threat that rising prices pose to his legacy. The new figure is more than an inconvenience or a technicality. It could bring about a sharp change in the political order. Rising costs will likely prove to be Trump’s undoing and present the Democrats with a free hit for November’s midterms and beyond. There was one reason above all others why Trump returned to the White House in 2024: high inflation during the Biden years. His 2016 slogan, “Make America Great Again,” morphed into “Make America Affordable Again.

Thomas Massie’s predicament, as he fends off a Trump-backed challenger – and Trump himself – in the Republican primary for his seat in Congress, is symbolic of the vexed relationship libertarians have with the right these days. Massie was not only a Tea Party Republican when he was first elected in 2012, he was a Ron Paul Republican, inspired by the longtime, philosophically libertarian Texas congressman who made his second bid for the GOP presidential nomination that year. The Commonwealth of Kentucky had sent Paul’s son, Rand, to the US Senate two years before, and its 4th congressional district put Massie in the House. Libertarians are natural junior partners in someone else’s enterprise ​Now Trump is trying to take him out.

On February 24, Donald Trump will deliver the first State of the Union speech of his second term as president. That impending date goes a long way toward explaining Trump’s avidity for annexing Greenland – sooner rather than later – as the centerpiece of his program for restoring an American golden age of imperial power. Nothing would please Trump more than to be able to declare mission accomplished when he addresses Congress in February. Far from backing away from the issue, Trump, who will travel to Davos next week, is doubling down. He seems convinced that he can cow European leaders into submission, but the more he badgers them, the greater the likelihood that they begin to resist.

Notionally, Americans have never been better off. The ructions in tech stocks over the past few weeks cannot detract from the fact that the US economy has been outgunning other developed economies all century. The overall graph of real disposable income for Americans continues to trend upward, almost as if the sharp dip during the pandemic had not happened. That is certainly not true everywhere: in many countries, Covid has been followed by stagnation in GDP and wages. Yet, for all the wealth generated, many Americans simply do not feel that they are living in a thriving country. On the things that really matter, such as basic living costs, citizens at the lower end of the income scale feel their wages are increasingly inadequate. They are not imagining it.

No sooner did Democrats in the Senate reach a deal to end the federal government shutdown than a frenzy of liberal pearl clutching ensued. The Democrats should have held out longer, they argued. Healthcare subsidies could have been rescued. Donald Trump’s approval ratings were plunging. Golly, maybe the Democrats could even have driven the dreaded Trump from office? Jonathan Chait’s verdict in the Atlantic was not untypical: “Senate Democrats just made a huge mistake.” Don’t believe a word of it. The surprising thing isn’t that Democrats folded. It’s that they held out as long as they did. In the end, the moderate Democratic Senators, ranging from Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman to Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, made the right call.

It’s becoming increasingly taxing for Donald Trump to defend his tariff policy. His latest gambit is to float the prospect of a $2,000 rebate to Americans from the tens of billions that the federal government has collected in tariffs. But will this prove any more successful than his previous attempts to justify his loopy tariffs?With the Supreme Court apparently poised to strike down his tariffs as a form of revenue collection designed to perform an end-run around Congress, Trump is scrambling. As usual, bravado prevails. On Sunday, he declared, “A dividend of at $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone,” the president said on Truth Social.” Trump also dismissed his detractors as “FOOLS!

The most important thing to know about the Trump administration’s defense of its hotly contested use of tariffs to bring allies and opponents to heel is not that it is a novel and unprecedented legal argument but rather a full-throated articulation of the campaign themes that got the president elected – in both 2016 and 2000.In its legal documents, and in the oral arguments that took place before the Supreme Court Wednesday, the Trump administration paints a picture of America under siege.Once thriving industrial towns in the Midwest hollowed out. Factories dismantled as supply chains have been moved offshore. Hostile foreign nations flooding the US with drugs and once productive workers turning to opioids and alcohol for solace as opportunities slip away.

It’s thanks to good old Yankee bravado that baseball’s most important fixture is called the "World Series," even though it’s a thoroughly North American affair. Yet Major League Baseball, like the National Hockey League, is not restricted to the US – Canada joins in, too. Tonight, for instance, the Toronto Blue Jays will compete against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the first game of what should be a thrilling World Series, and the now-familiar Canadian-American sporting rivalry has been given added spice thanks to a certain man who happens to be President of the United States. Last night, Donald Trump, who relishes abrupt announcements, abruptly announced that he was suspending trade negotiations with Canada. The reason?

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” William Shakespeare wrote in Sonnet 116, and he appears to have been prophetically talking about the very special relationship between President Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.  The first meeting between the two leaders a few months ago was friendly. But today’s press conference, before a tariff negotiation lunch, was essentially a cuddlefest. Carney called Trump a “transformative president.” Trump joked about the upcoming “US/Canada merger,” and said the two countries had “natural conflict and natural love,” like in any marriage.  The problem, Trump said, “is that they want a car company, and we want a car company. It’s a natural business conflict… nothing wrong with it.