Trump administration

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has been one of Donald Trump’s fiercest allies on Capitol Hill. But since his easy re-election last November, he’s also been someone within the Republican party who demanded public commitments from Trump’s nominees on several issues of importance to him – areas of concern that include the influence of big tech, the encroaching role of China and a promise on the part of nominees with little or no record on the abortion issue to support pro-life policies. Senator Hawley spoke to me on the 100th day of Trump’s second presidency about what he’s seeing on tariffs, foreign policy and China.

When it comes to Donald Trump and his achievements during his first 100 days, who are you going to believe, the New York Times or your lyin’ eyes?  By “the New York Times,” incidentally, I do not mean just that one woke media outlet masquerading as a source of news.  No, I take the Times as a metonym for the entire propaganda industrial complex, the giant dispenser of politically correct nostrums and seismically sensitive Keeper of the Narrative.  Thus it is that the Times is a reliable dispenser not of that sort of information we denominate “news” – that is, what is actually happening and who is involved in making it happen.

On Monday morning, the nation awoke to learn that 100 "Wanted"-style posters now line the driveway to the White House, featuring faces of people the Trump administration has deported and the crimes they’d committed. A perpetual shriek, warning about the rise of fascism, arose from the online cosmos, as people began posting, again, “This is how it starts.” I saw more than one person compare the display to a medieval king posting heads on spikes around a moat, or Nazi propaganda magazine spreads about dangerous “Juden.” Perhaps. Or maybe it was just oppositional troll-bait. This is how the Trump White House operates. It’s government by meme, and it can be very effective.

The Trump administration has been tossing around the idea of a $5,000 “baby bonus” to help encourage young marrieds to have kids. Elon Musk’s Genghis Khan-like IVF efforts aside, the national birthrate is in decline, leading to bureaucratic fears of a population collapse. If this bonus were to happen, it would give fresh meaning to the term “stimulus.” But there will never be a Trumpian baby boom.   You hear all kinds of excuses for our procreative decline: rampant pornography, sex robots, institutionally encouraged gender dysphoria, microplastics in the water. But the major reason that American people aren’t having kids? They’re too expensive. The baby bonus floated this week is supposed to address that, but there’s one problem: it’s not nearly enough.

Back in 2010, there was no more respected warfighter and general beloved by his men than Stanley McChrystal, commander of US forces in Afghanistan. Bob Gates once called him "the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I ever met." He was also a man of the people, uncomfortable around the fat and happy elites of the foreign policy and national security world. As the late reporter Michael Hastings wrote in his profile for Rolling Stone, McChrystal's favorite beer is Bud Light Lime, his favorite movie Talladega Nights, and dismissed fancy restaurants with candles on the table as "too Gucci". It was that notorious article that proved to be McChrystal's undoing and led directly to him offering his resignation to President Barack Obama.

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.

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?