Let’s be clear, the “wagon” in the metaphor is your support and beliefs; the “horse” is a magnetic political personage, such as Donald Trump or Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Zohran Mamdani. Put the two factors together and you will experience “disappointment”.
One of the recent Trump dustups regards the August jobs report. The looming analysis on the state of employment at the time of the fuss was not likely to be encouraging, and wasn’t. So, President Trump dumped Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Erika McEntarfer. He nominated E.J. Antoni, a Heritage Foundation economist and fervent Trump supporter, to replace her. Based on his activity since January 6th, 2021, it would be fair to classify him as a Trump zealot, more like Sean Hannity than an economist. His since-deleted Twitter account was littered with inflammatory remarks about groups and Trump’s opponents. He was at the January 6th Capitol riot. In his role as Heritage economist, he was known to distort economic numbers to benefit Trump. His credibility as an honest broker was shattered long ago (see #1).
Quite understandably, Senators Collins (R, Maine) and Murkowski (R, Alaska) were taken aback and refused to fall in line behind Antoni. On Tuesday, President Trump pulled the nomination. Many Senators balked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics becoming The Bureau of MAGA Statistics (Dominic Pino’s phrase). The “Deep State” jargon can only take you so far in refashioning government agencies into mouthpieces of your personal agitprop.
And what about those employment numbers? They aren’t reassuring for the rest of us. Lets’ look under that rug. The August report was, to put it mildly, disappointing, like the May and June numbers (see #2). The economy added a disheartening 22,000 jobs, far below the forecasted 75,000. The unemployment rate rose to 4.3% and the number of unemployed persons increased to 7.4 million. It doesn’t stop there. Job openings decreased from the previous month and the long-term unemployed rose to 25.7%. Not good by any stretch of the imagination.
Maybe to a certain extent, Trump can’t believe it after all his “great trade deals” and his list of sporadic successes of individual plant openings, ribbon cuttings, and promises from various economic actors. Neither could FDR during the Great Depression, but a depression became a Great Depression under his watch. Both men suffered from a form of tunnel vision. FDR believed that feverish government activity would rescue us so couldn’t restrain himself. Ditto for Trump. His acumen in real estate was great for real estate, but not necessarily an advantage in understanding the whole economy. There remains much room in his head for economic illiteracy (Google “Thomas Sowell”).
The reaction can be attributed to bombastic personalities and their attraction to big, flashy events, like a moth to a flame; however, the mundane and fundamental basics of an economy get short shrift. Trump is completely unaware of the serious trade-offs that accrued from his tariff war on the world. He unwittingly recreated the conditions of the COVID shutdowns by disrupting supply chains in his April demand that the world bend a knee. Long-established business arrangements were ripped apart.
Trump now needs easy money to paper over his damage, leading to persistent attacks on Fed chair Powell and the rest of the Fed Board. Of course, easy money after assaults on the supply chain won’t end well, any more than it did after COVID and Biden’s $3.7 trillion infusion in 2021. Here we go again. This time it’s Fox News as cheer leader instead of CNN, MSNBC, and the networks with the pom poms. Hitching wagons can be dangerous if the “horse” is a spirited believer in things that aren’t true. Don’t expect the ride to be comfortable.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Three sources on the background of E.J. Antoni: (1) CNN at https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/30/politics/ej-antoni-nomination-withdrawn-bls; (2) New York Post at https://nypost.com/2025/10/01/us-news/white-house-yanks-controversial-nominee-ej-antoni-to-helm-bureau-of-labor-statistics/; and (3) National Review at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-obamacare-ratchet-effect/.
2. “Payrolls rose 22,000 in August, less than expected in further sign of hiring slowdown”, CNBC, 9/5/2025, at https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/05/jobs-report-august-2025.html?msockid=287a0b967a9564c61c991f537b2f65ee.
From left, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Cori Bush, D-Mo.; Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., are among the lawmakers who signed the letter. (Getty Images)Donald Trump delivers remarks in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, on Sept. 28, 2024.Rep. Maxine Waters (D, Ca,) in June 2018 advocating public intimidation of Trump administration officials
Maxine Waters (D, Ca.) advocating mob intimidation of Trump administration officials and their families in restaurants and other public settings in June of 2018: “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them! And you tell them that they are not welcome, anymore, anywhere.” (see #1)
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC, D, NY) on the eve of Trump’s second inaugural, January 20, 2025: “Well, we are on the eve of an authoritarian administration. This is what 21st century fascism is starting to look like.” (see #2)
Vice President J.D. Vance’s response to Jon Favreau, former Obama speechwriter, who questioned his account of the sniper attack on immigration officers in Dallas: “The gunman had anti-ICE messaging carved on the bullets he used. What, precisely, did I get wrong, dips***?” (see #3)
*******************
In Freud’s schema, the human mind is a bureaucracy divided into three departments. At the base level, we have our id, our basic drives and primal desires. It is checked by the ego, the rational department that ties us to reality, and the superego which is our moral conscience. If our politics today is anything like Freud’s theory, our id has free reign and the other two are atrophying due to lack of use.
“Dips***”? Vice President Vance is all of 41 years old, an adolescent among officeholders (Sen. Grassley, 92). His crassness can be attributed to his youth, but not completely. The young are very impressionable. His mentor is Donald Trump. Our president has a well-rehearsed schtick of public coarseness. We’ve even invented a word, “Trumpian”, to soften our squeamishness about language and behavior that would have led our mother to send us to our room without dinner. Then, watch the rest of the Trump entourage in and out of his inner circle indulge in sycophantic loutishness.
Vice President J.D. Vance
Hold on, though. The Left, meaning the Democratic Party (the institutional Left) and its street militias, Antifa and their tans-militant allies, even pre-Trump, had nearly cornered the market on linguistic and behavioral incivility. They’ve been doing it for years. “Bush lied, people died”; “No blood for oil”. The Weather Underground. The spiked trees to injure lumbermen. Of late, recall Ferguson, Kenosha, George Floyd, the entire 2020 summer of riots, torched downtowns, the killings, the statue toppling, defacements of our founders and those who died in our wars? Recall the invention of new words to castigate those who disagree – nearly anything with a “phobia” suffix and the boundless use of racist, patriarchy, heteronormativity, white supremacy, “settler colonialism”, et al? Recall The 1619 Project, the attempt to implant revolution in the minds of young people? The 2023-4 cancel mobs and antisemitic hostility on campuses? Sen. Chuck Schumer’s threat to Supreme Court justices?
This is not “both sides-ism”. It’s my survey of the political landscape. What the Right has done in being “Trumpian”, the Left was already there and upped the ante. There was nowhere else for the Left to go but mayhem. Bellicosity is a territory they already occupy.
As such, some on the Left’s fiery id edge have added firearms to the Molotov cocktail in their arsenal. Convinced of the truth of trans ideology, children were targeted in Minneapolis and Nashville as well as a Supreme Court justice or two or three. Let’s not forget the murder of Charlie Kirk. In 2017, a Bernie Sanders supporter decided to try and veto with a rifle the lives of Republican congressmen practicing for a baseball game. In a state with an electorate already overwhelmingly oriented to the Left, California, mobs rampaged to stop the enforcement of federal immigration law. It happens wherever a Democrat one-party state is firmly entrenched.
The Left’s assault on law enforcement is resplendent in Texas, an epicenter of the chaotic and flagrant and massive illegal immigration of the prior administration. Reminiscent of Fidel Castro’s cadres in Cuba’s outback, leftists orchestrated ambushes of law enforcement. The recent sniper attack in Dallas on ICE vans (by Joshua Jahn) is just the latest episode in a string of armed “resistance”. It’s the unrestrained id expressed through the barrel of a gun.
Joshua Jahn, the 29-year-old behind the deadly Dallas ICE shooting on Sept. 24, 2025.
Again, that bastion of the Left’s id, California, in their latest effort to harm federal law enforcement officers, passed a bill and signed into law by Gov. Newsom (SB 627) to forcibly unmask them and expose them and their families to the same people who are inspired like Joshua Jahn. Let’s be clear, California votes to secede, not once but continually, in so many ways. It’s a state in rebellion. SB 627 is unconstitutional, and cannot be enforced, and if it is, state officials should be arrested and charged with treason. It’s happened before, 1860-65.
Clearly, Sacramento’s performance politics is meant to appeal to the id of the one-party state’s large base. Throwing red meat is the tactic of the id feeding the id. On the Right we have Donald Trump and his followers doing it in the language of the schoolyard or locker room. Counterpoised are those on the Left and their trigger-happy id practitioners, some content with complete ruination and ostracization of their opponents while others veer into filling body bags. Our politics is a coarse, crude, and violent hot mess.
Where’s our collective ego and superego? Could it be in the person of Erika Kirk in her supreme act of grace and forgiveness? We couldn’t find a better way in the rediscovery of the better angels of our nature than following her lead. God bless her.
Erika Kirk at her husband’s memorial, 9/21/2025
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Watchdog says Maxine Waters inciting ‘mob violence,’ presses ethics complaint”, Adam Shaw, Fox News, 7/5/2018, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/watchdog-says-maxine-waters-inciting-mob-violence-presses-ethics-complaint?msockid=287a0b967a9564c61c991f537b2f65ee.
2. “AOC in total ‘fascism’ meltdown on evening of Trump inauguration”, Kelly Garino, Daily Mail, 1/20/2025, at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/galleries/article-14303887/AOC-total-fascism-meltdown-evening-Trump-inauguration.html.
3. Vice President J.D. Vance X post at https://x.com/JDVance/status/1970897642361135146.
“MUST CUT INTEREST RATES, NOW, AND BIGGER THAN HE HAD IN MIND. HOUSING WILL SOAR!!!” — President Trump on Truth Social, 9/15/2025 (see #1)
What is the “this” in the title? It’s the president’s push to lower interest rates by as much as 2.5 points, maybe 3. That’s a lot in monetary and interest rate terms. The president finds the Fed’s recent quarter point drop “too little, too late”. He wants 10 times that. Is the Fed Board suffering from TDS? Hardly. There are sound reasons to be cautious about lowering interest rates. The president is playing with fire.
What is the “bane” of populism? Vox populi is NOT vox dei, or “the voice of the people is NOT the voice of God”, a necessary reformulation of an old Roman saying. Popular opinions are erratic, often reliant on deeply embedded falsehoods, incoherent, and a slave to the moment. And to be honest, some “elites”, as well as almost all populists, are soiling themselves almost daily. The populace at times may seem to be a better fount of wisdom, until they aren’t.
In an election greatly influenced by Biden’s high inflation, meaning too many dollars chasing too few goods and services, President Trump, the so-called populist, seems intent on reinflating the inflation balloon. The last few incidences of galloping inflation and economy-wide maladjustment – the 1970s, 2007-8, and 2022 – were not euphoric traipsings through the economic daisies.
In this respect, before I get started, we have to remind ourselves that Donald Trump is a real estate tycoon. Real estate magnates love low interest rates, and so does the Dow. They focus like a laser on goosing demand for real property and securities. Their portfolios soar in value when money is easy. It’s great for the holders of these things, bad for everyone else looking to buy. Low interest rates help disguise in cheap loans the artificial leap in prices, the inflation. People are invited to run up more debt.
Everyone wins, right? Hogwash. The government swamps the economy in easy money until personal finances go underwater. The bubble bursts, asset values plummet, and people suddenly realize that they owe more than the thing is worth. Hello, tulip bubble of 1637. Hello, the 2007-8 financial crisis, and anyone who bought a new car in 2023. The 2007-8 crisis helped elect Obama and a coming to power of a party ideologically hard-wired to goose demand in all ways possible and ignore the supply half to the equation.
In this respect, Trump wants to inject heroine into the economy like the Democrats. The Democrats wish to make addicts of us through fiscal policy, like the Schumer/Pelosi/Biden trillion-dollar bills to refashion the nation to fit their dreams – adding $3.7 trillion to our national debt from 2022 to 2024. Floods of dollars sloshed around on the heels of the Covid lockdowns. Supply was disrupted as demand was goosed. This didn’t end well. Inflation leapt to 9% in summer 2022.
Trump is eager to repeat the formula. He disrupted supply with his declaration of a trade war on the world. Supply chains became tenuous, like during the COVID lockdowns, as suppliers reeled from Trump’s jump in tariff rates of up to 25% (or more) against everyone and nearly everything. When suppliers and producers adapt to this new environment, it won’t redound to lower prices. Compound the problem by the president’s refusal to do, or propose, meaningful fiscal restraint. The elevated fiscal floor of Biden and the Democrats essentially remains intact, with or without a DOGE, as the big-dollar entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) remain untouched on their path to insolvency.
The CBO in January expected the 2025 deficit (annual overspending) to hover around $2 trillion. The total federal debt (total accumulated tab) is pegged at $37.41 trillion as of this month (Sept.). Has overspending been cured by Trump, or DOGE? No. Add this fiscal heroine to the economy’s bloodstream. Mmmmm, rattled supply chains and a bloated money supply, have we seen this movie before?
The Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) won’t be of much help. Tax cuts are a great idea since they keep more money in the creative private sector. The tax cuts in the BBB were mostly, technically speaking, not a reduction in tax rates but a continuation of existing ones from 2017, with a few bribes for favored political constituencies in states like Nevada and organized labor in Michigan and Pennsylvania (the spiel of the tax-free tips, overtime, and Social Security benefits). One spur for growth – the lowering of the capital gains tax bite and generous depreciation allowances – won’t produce substantial economic benefits for a few years at a minimum. It took the money-supply belt tightening of Fed chair Paul Volcker and Reagan’s tax cuts a couple of years to create the climate for the Reagan boom.
Deregulation will have the same delayed effect. Now, to tide us over till the benefits of the business tax cuts and deregulation kick in, Trump wants easy money. So, any mid- and long-term economic advantages of the bill will be negated by worrisome inflation. Throw his tariffs into the mix and the benefits of the BBB and deregulation will not be felt till way over the horizon, if ever. Then, the whole enterprise will be short-circuited by a return to power of the neo-socialist Democratic Party riding a wave of popular displeasure over declining fortunes, the same circumstance that made Trump 45 into 47. With the Dems in power, any relief from the Leviathan will be thrown into reverse.
It’s the bane of populism. Populism can be reduced to “popular”, doing what is popular. And what is popular, once again, is fickle, contradictory, incoherent. It bounces around depending on the moment, group, circumstance, and frequently rides on a deep current of fables. “Elites” are held in disrepute after some disgraced themselves of late in their tenured positions and bureaucratic sinecures (Fauci, et al). For many among the populi, no one can be trusted except . . . Trump/MAGA. The bantering bilge flows with little check.
President Trump is the embodiment of populism. He pushes the BBB . . . and . . . his toxic tariffs. He excoriated Biden’s inflation as he repeats Biden’s mistake. Like he talks “peace through strength” while he shifts from hostility to nonchalance about the victim of the most flagrant act of aggression on the continent of Europe since Stalin incorporated all of Eastern Europe into personal satraps.
Like all populists, the dramatic gesture is preferred. Populist politicians are drama queens. A populist is a slave to headlines. Out comes the language and behavior of the drama queen, the belittling nicknames and quick strikes. The impulsiveness and insults fit into a medium – social media – which is not conducive to deep thought, to a populace growingly accustomed to thinking in social media’s rhetorical burps.
Sloganeering is the preferred mode of expression, if not thought. “No more forever wars” becomes code for an isolationism that cannot be said. Quick strikes – butcher-and-bolt – have a credible use in, let’s say, taking out Soleimani and Iran’s Fordow. But you have to possess more in the national security toolkit than a bunch of one-and-dones. Trump follows the headlines and loves to be in them, but don’t expect logical consistency or much of an eye for the long term. Trump is as flippant as fads, maybe more so. He has shown the capacity to embrace two things that undermine each other: condemn inflation while stoking it.
The last jobs report came out, it’s disturbing, so he fires Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer for delivering the bad news. For the populist leader, two beliefs came together in his mind: he’s convinced that a lurking deep state is at work, and he can never be wrong. He replaced her with a lackey, Heritage’s E.J. Antoni. Now, Trump has his Winston in Oceania’s Ministry of Truth. Life imitates Orwell’s art in “1984”.
E.J. Antoni with President Trump
President Trump wants easy money, the Federal Reserve Board seems reluctant, having been burned by lowering interest rates in summer 2022 which helped to ignite the 9% inflation. So, he replaced one retiring board member with his chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Stephen Miran. This guy had to square the circle of reducing inflation and inaugurating a trade war on the world. So much for credibility.
Stephen Miran
To make this move even more surprising, Miran didn’t resign from his position as Trump’s chief economic adviser. He took a “leave of absence” which expresses his desire to return to Trump’s inner sanctum and favor. If you believe that he’ll be an honest broker, stay away from the crazy uncle trying to convince you to invest in Mongolian tugrugs (currency).
Troubling signs are evident. The producer price index of services jumped 1.1% in one month, July (see #3). The last time it was that high for one month was the 1.3% in March 2022, the harbinger for Biden’s 9% inflation in the summer of 2022. Currently, inflation stays stubborn at around 3%, above the Fed’s target of 2% (see #2). The durable goods sector (autos, appliances, etc.) is in a tailspin. It’s what happens when you hammer supply chains with 25% tariffs. Trump absolutely needs easy money to cover the slide.
Add it all up and we have Trump’s mind: scatter-brained, fickle, and unintelligible. But what did you expect? He’s a populist. We’ll quickly learn that populists are no better than our disgraced elites. The populace doesn’t like inflation but like the things that bring it about. They love easy money and government bennies from all the spending. Trump is a leader, but a leader to where? This won’t end well.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Trump calls for ‘bigger’ interest rate cut ahead of Fed meeting”, Reuters, 9/15/2025, at https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-calls-bigger-interest-rate-cut-ahead-fed-meeting-2025-09-15/.
2. “Current U.S. Inflation Rate is 2.9%: Why It Matters”, Nerd Wallet, 9/11/2025, at https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/inflation#:~:text=The%20current%20U.S.%20inflation%20rate%20is%202.9%25%20for,release%20from%20the%20Bureau%20of%20Labor%20Statistics%20%28BLS%29?msockid=287a0b967a9564c61c991f537b2f65ee.
3. “Beware the Return of Inflation”, The Editors, National Review, 8/15/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/08/beware-the-return-of-inflation/.
No, the title is not a reference to the likes of Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson joining the ranks of Antifa or the crowd behind Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy. But they are unknowingly thinking like a Marxist.
The emergence of this new mental orientation on the Right begins with being “woke”. Specifically, it’s jargon for a hypothetical state of awareness, a capability of perceiving the deeper reality that is concealed to all but the most discerning. Facts are optional. The idea is traceable to Karl Marx, and therefore central to the “woke” Left with all their “critical theories” of oppressor/oppressed and the beleaguered “marginalized”.
Marx was not satisfied with a call for revolution. That’s too simple. His thought is more robust than that. He sought to explain the stream of all human experience since the dawn of time. For him, we are socialized into our status as oppressors or the oppressed. To set the world right according to him and Engels, the complete human, not just society, minds and all, need to be reshaped to be truly “free”. We must be cleansed of this filth of past and present socialization. He’s advocating totalitarianism pure and simple.
Marx called the malign socialization of traditional society “false consciousness”. In Marx’s fevered imagination, almost everything in our existence trains us into accepting our condition, like our language, family, marriage, faith, traditions, etc. Marx wanted all of it junked and refashioned at the behest of his woke “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. For anyone with an ounce of humanity, this should send shivers down your spine. We now have generations trained in the gibberish. It shows, look at the young.
Neo-Marxist thinkers of the Frankfurt School in 1920s and 1930s Germany (technically, the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research) – Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, etc. – fled Nazi Germany, landed in the West, most notably the U.S. The virus spread in the academic “soft sciences” throughout the 1950s to today, waiting on the gullibility of Robin DeAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, BLM, Occupy Wall Street, the college campus mobs, statue topplers, the faculty lounge, and the looser canons of the Democratic Party such as AOC, Mamdani, the surviving Squad, Bernie and his “bros”, the DNC.
Herbert MarcuseMax HorkheimerTheodore Adorno
What infected the Left has spread to the Right in what the French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye referred to as The Horseshoe Theory: both Left and Right come to mirror authoritarian tendencies, but actually more than that. A woke Left leads to a reaction in the rise of a new woke Right. Marx has his bourgeoisie bogeymen; Fascists have their liberals (classical liberals, that is), “cosmopolitans”, Jews, or anyone that they see as undermining national solidarity. Parts of the new Right have copyrighted their own hobgoblins.
The woke bookends: JD Vance, AOC
All claim to have the gift of seeing the clandestine threat, the hidden structure of oppression, and are thus awoken. An element of the Right shows symptoms of the “woke” infection. It starts with a unique vocabulary for the Right, words that remind a person of the allegedly hidden cabals and insidious networks not seen by the average person. Establishment, elites, neocons, globalists, warmongers, the deep state, for instance, all generalities, litter their harangues. Only they are awoken enough to expose it. QAnon appears, the alleged Epstein/Israeli cabal, the swamp, etc. Similarly, Marxists forever after 1917 were in a constant state of vigilance against “wreckers”, underground churches and worshippers, samizdat free thinkers, kulaks, saboteurs. Now the Right has joined the thought-fad by listing their own scapegoats.
Tune into Candace Owens and her tirades about the pernicious influence of Jews bordering on blood libel (the medieval canard about the murder of Christians by Jews to use their blood in religious rituals). Coming to the defense of the emotionally unstable Kanye West and his rant against the Jews of Hollywood, here’s Candace:
“What if that is what is happening right now in Hollywood? If there is just a very small ring of specific people who are using the fact that they are Jewish to shield themselves from any criticism, it’s food for thought, right? And I think, again, there have been enough people that are speaking out about a ring in Hollywood, also a ring potentially in DC, that we should start to ask those questions.” (see #1)
Sounds innocuous? The talk of a “ring of Jews to shield themselves” in Candace’s punditry smacks of the same shadowy forces occupying the minds of the Left. She said in the manner of Marx and Lenin when speaking of the bourgeoise, “They will kill people before they allow that ring to be exposed.”
The stark language of generalized and shadowy forces is strikingly similar to the bombast of the evil machinations of the bourgeoisie coming off the pen of Lenin in 1919: “The bourgeoisie and their agents in the workers’ organisations [sic] are making desperate attempts to find ideological and political arguments in defence [sic] of the rule of the exploiters.” (see #2)
For some on the Right, like their “woke” soulmates on the Left, antisemitism is making a comeback. Since the memory of the demonic Holocaust, though fading, still haunts us, their antisemitism is prefaced by disclaimers, versions of “Oh, no, not me” and “Some of my best friends are . . .” and “I love . . .”. It’s rhetorical maneuvering to engage in antisemitism by angling the Jewish identity into a cabal working against the interests and will of the American people.
Tucker Carlson and Candace Carlson traffic in antisemitism
The influential Tucker Carlson drinks at the same trough. Recently, he has been consumed in anxiety over the nefarious influence of the powerful, who just so happen to be Jews. On Zelensky, the president of Ukraine of Jewish ancestry, Tucker defames him and the leader of Blackrock in a two-fer, “Sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock.” Blackrock, the investment firm? It is led by Larry Fink, also Jewish. Compare this to some of the things in Völkischer Beobachter (National Socialist official newspaper, “People’s Observer”). (see #3)
He throws aspersions at Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, for being insufficiently devoted to the U.S., for having divided loyalties with you-know-who (Israel). Remember, Carlson has tirelessly expressed mortification about the post-9/11 wars, the “forever wars”, and warmongers. His argument, taken to its obvious conclusion, demands no foreign policy till we have solved all our problems. It is isolationism. Our special relationship with Israel, a country under constant threat of annihilation, is a regular source of annoyance to him.
The Jew thing crops up in his head. In response to Shapiro and other conservative commentators, he insists, “. . . so many of these people don’t seem to have the same level of actual care for American citizens.”
Contrasting himself with the allegedly rootless Shapiro, a Jew, he is unflinchingly American:
“I’m from here, my family’s been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. I’m shocked by how little they care about the country.” (see #4)
You see, this new online Right is immersed in the old bigoted trope of the “cosmopolitan” Jew, a people who cannot be trusted to have patriotic monogamy.
As for Americans who sign up for the IDF, Carlson ranted,
“There are a lot of Americans who’ve served in the IDF — they should lose their citizenship. You can’t fight for another country and remain an American, period.”
It is lost on him that Americans joined the Canadian Air Force to fight for Britain in WWII, that Americans for a century volunteered for the French Foreign Legion, and to fight communists in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, Angola, etc. Should they be booted from the ranks of citizen?
Carlson traffics in the Epstein/Mossad conspiracy story. More tales of the unhinged. He ruminates (see #5):
“. . . I think the real answer is Jeffrey Epstein was working on behalf of intel services, probably not American [Mossad]. . . . Now, no one’s allowed to say that the foreign government is Israel because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that’s naughty.”
There seems to be no grand mystery where a Jew cannot be found to be in the middle of it.
All such thought-fads that become embedded in the culture have a catalyst, usually a combination of events, mercurial personalities, and a potential reservoir of acolytes anxiously looking for a leader who can personify their angst. In 2015, a leader appeared in the form of Donald Trump and his coalescing MAGA movement. No, he’s not Hitler. No, he’s not an anti-Semite, far from it. He’s of the ilk of Theodore Roosevelt, a man who always wanted to be the “bride and every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every Christening” (according to TR’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth). Many people at the time became infatuated with TR as a force of nature (many still do). Specifics mattered little. Ditto for Trump and MAGA. Democracies are susceptible to enchantment.
His acolytes in the media and administration speak of him and his words with such reverence. His words carry the divine sanction of the Gospels. Yet, honestly, the yearning on the Right is based on real and pressing concerns. Our government is so big that it is no longer answerable to us. Our public spending and debt spiral out of control. Our education system has become the Left’s prep school, a training ground for future hordes of malcontents. The terms “boy” and “girl” are forcibly muddled making sexual privacy and safety meaningless. Genital mutilation of minors (“gender-affirming care”), really? Crime is seen as a call for therapy. Public barbarism in roving gangs of youth and ramshackle tent encampments sprawling across our cities have made salient parts of them unlivable.
This is the low-hanging fruits of the Left’s long march though the institutions. The Left’s cultural sickness spread to other countries in our foreign policy. Pride flags unfurled at our embassy in Kabul, really? The reaction did not stop there. The long twilight struggle against international terrorism in the 9/11 wars of Afghanistan and Iraq was fodder for “populists”, first by the Left (“Bush lied, people died”, “No blood for oil”, Code Pink) and now by parts of the Right, to take the indictment further to include “forever wars”, “warmongers”, “neocons”, the Bushes.
Trump and MAGA gave the angst organizational form. Trump and his movement produced the “populist” Right’s vocabulary and targets of derision. Everyone and everything in the newsfeed get sucked into the new Right’s vortex. Unwittingly, Trump and MAGA are the catalyst and accelerant for the new woke Right. Intentionality is irrelevant. Gadflies on the fringe, from tiki-torch machers in Charlottesville to Trump foolishly having lunch with the antisemite Kanye West and the far-Right blowhard Nick Fuentes, are attracted to a burgeoning movement with real concerns.
Without the rise of Trump populism and its disparagement of “elites” and the amorphous “establishment”, it’s hard to conceive of a wokeness on the Right. Real misbehavior – the Russia hoax, lawfare, “the resistance”, higher ed’s neo-Marxist cultural revolution, etc. – invites ruminations of a conspiratorial underworld. The Left sees it in “whiteness”. The Right might see it in the Jews, “neocons”, an intersectionality between the two, globalists, a conspiratorial “deep state”, etc.
Some on the “woke Right” end up sounding like their brethren on the Left in a condemnation of capitalism, or free markets, as nothing more than an abstract ideology and not the product of government simply leaving people alone. Both ends of the spectrum are enthused about government and its politics manipulating the economy to benefit some oppressed class.
Poster of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) showing the hidden hands of capitalism. Some on the right sound like the PSL.
Let our vice president, J.D. Vance, in his own words, illustrate the union of the Left and Right in their “wokeness”:
* The Left’s Mother Jones magazine quoted Vance’s endorsement of the 2023 UAW strike when Vance said he was “[r]ooting for the auto workers across our country demanding higher wages.” (see #6)
* Vance supported Biden’s “bigness in business is badness” FTC chair Lina Khan by saying, “A lot of my Republican colleagues look at Lina Khan … and they say, ‘well Lina Khan is sort of engaged in some sort of fundamental evil thing.” Further adding, “And I guess I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.” (see #7)
* Vance champions the Democrats’ spendthrift rationale for entitlements, reducing a looming disaster for the young to the blasé, “One way of understanding the Social Security problem is, old people can’t work, young people can, babies can’t.” And curtly concluding, “So people at a certain age support the babies and the old people.” (see #8)
Between bashing business for exploiting workers and praising lefty economists/lawyers and boosting bankrupting entitlements, Vance exemplifies something more than “populism”. He signifies that coming together of the woke Left and Right in embracing the union extortion racket, socialist economics (an oxymoron since socialism is all about government, not economics), and the old getting the chance to pillage the young. It’s abominable.
The French writer, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, in 1849 once quipped, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, or “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. Or at least, the two ends merge into the same mass over time, all “woke”, all sounding like each other, all sounding Marxist.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Candace Owens Goes on Bizarre Screed About ‘Ring’ of ‘Quite Sinister’ Jews in Hollywood”, Alex Griffin, Mediaite, 3/8/2024, at https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/candace-owens-goes-on-bizarre-screed-about-ring-of-quite-sinister-jews-in-hollywood/.
2. Lenin’s opening line in “Theses and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, March 1919, at https://old.iclfi.org/english/wv/935/qotw.html.
3. “Tucker Carlson called Ukraine’s Jewish leader Zelenskyy ‘rat-like’ on his Twitter show, repeating a well-worn antisemitic trope”, Haven Orecchio-Egresitz, Business Insider, 6/8/2023, at https://www.businessinsider.com/tucker-carlson-calls-zelenskyy-rat-like-antisemitic-trope-2023-6.
4. An excellent piece on Tucker Carlson’s darker manifestation of late was made by a former friend and colleague, James Kirchick, in “Tucker Carlson’s Dark Turn”, 7/24/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/09/tucker-carlsons-dark-turn/.
5. “Tucker Carlson Claims Jeffrey Epstein Was Working for Israel to Blackmail American Politicians”, Michael Luciano, Mediaite, 7/11/2025, at https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/tucker-carlson-claims-jeffrey-epstein-was-working-for-israel-to-blackmail-american-politicians/.
6. “J.D. Vance Really Wants You to Believe He Supports Striking Autoworkers”, Noah Lanard, Mother Jones, 9/19/2023, at https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/09/donald-trump-jd-vance-josh-hawley-uaw-strike-biden/.
7. “Vance: Biden FTC chief is ‘doing a pretty good job’”, Rebecca Klar, The Hill, 2/27/2024, at https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4491363-vance-biden-ftc-chief-is-doing-a-pretty-good-job/.
8. “The Trump-Vance Ticket is a Repudiation of Free-Market Conservatism”, Victoria Guida, Politico, 7/16/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/16/the-trump-vance-ticket-is-a-repudiation-of-free-market-conservatism-00168578.
US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the tarmac after they arrived at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 15, 2025. (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
President Trump has a meet-up with Vlad this Friday in Alaska. What is likely to come out of it: a Putin capitulation, a Zelensky one, or combination of both? Essentially, two of the three are Ukrainian surrenders, Zelensky and the combination. Lest we forget, Russia invaded the country and has been brutalizing the people for over three years. Putin is guilty of war crimes. Yet, we must have peace at any price by the reckoning of some around the president.
We’ll see. As usual, the cartoonist Ramirez captures my view of the matter quite succinctly.
Trump has signed an executive order for tariffs increase. (Reuters: Kevin Lamarque)
Introduction: An era of freer trade made it possible for me to give new life to a dying refrigerator. Better for it to be of use in my garage than in a landfill. No freer trade, I junk the thing.
************
No news here. President Trump proclaimed that his tariffs brought into the treasury $150 billion so far, by the end of July. His Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, projects $300 billion by the end of the year (see #1). The use of tariffs as a revenue generator is now a familiar part of Trump’s spiel. We’ve always had tariffs for a variety of well-worn reasons, but for most of our country’s history, a history without an income tax, tariffs were the chief source of revenue for Uncle Sam for all that the feds did at the time. Now we have an invasive income tax AND a new and ubiquitous tariff regime with a 15% floor covering most that enters the country thanks to Trump. The key lesson is our federal government’s insatiable appetite for more money to cover its still-growing $37 trillion debt, which just piles onto the backs of the citizens both the income tax and Trump’s tariff protectionism and its accompanying higher prices.
But who really pays the tariffs? In a display of economic illiteracy, Trump really believes foreigners pay. Read this display of historical and economic incoherence:
“In 1913 for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government.” (see #2)
Is Trump advocating the abolishment of the income tax to make room for his “most beautiful word in the English language”? No, an end to the income tax appears nowhere in sight. Astonishingly, he actually claimed that foreign countries paid for our federal government. In the same breath, he and his Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, contradict their logic by admitting price increases and fewer choices are the likely outcome.
Here’s Trump in an interview with Kristen Welker: “I don’t think that a beautiful baby girl needs – that’s 11 years old – needs to have 30 dolls.”
Here’s Lutnick in an interview with CBS’s Margaret Brennan advocating the avoidance of the tariffs by buying American: “[people who manufacture here] don’t pay a tariff. They don’t pay a tariff at all. So, President Trump says it all the time, build in America, you don’t pay a tariff.” And assumably you don’t have to worry about any tariff-induced price increases, or so says Lutnick (see #3).
The statements are incomprehensible. Trump doesn’t care that a margin of the buying public will be priced out of the market, and Lutnick fails to understand that a tariff raising the price of imports will lead to jumps in domestics as well. The price of the imported Toyota increases by $1,500 which leaves room for Ford to raise theirs by $750. The price floor is raised for all products no matter their country of origin (see #4).
Artificially raising prices alters behavior of all who confront them. Like me. Recently, my house refrigerator/freezer went on the fritz. It wasn’t cooling. The condenser coil was frosting over blocking the flow of air from the fan. The compressor is fine, so why the frost blockage? The defroster function clearly wasn’t working. The two most accessible parts in the defrost chain are the thermostat and defrost timer. Now began an online search for parts.
The price of parts varied dramatically for OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer, possibly American) and the import (some from China). The price for the thermostat ranged from the OEM $60 to the import $8, and the defrost timer went from the OEM $120 to the import $22. Following the advice of the $3.37-billion in net worth Howard Lutnick or the $5-billion Donald Trump, versus the income of pensioners (my wife and I), they would have me pay the $180, which might not fix the thing. These guys could afford to junk the thing and shell out $1,500 for new, for two, maybe more. No big deal for them, one living in a $35 million Bridgehampton, NY, estate, and the other at Mar-a-Lago. For me, $30 makes the gamble worth it, which is what I did.
President Trump with Mar-a-Lago in the backgroundHoward Lutnick and his Bridgehampton, NY, mansion
It worked. “Buying American” would mean another appliance in the county landfill instead of one in my garage for ice cream and cold drinks.
That’s how economics works. Prices are signals to us and unleash incentives and disincentives for certain economic actions. Policies that artificially raise prices inordinately affect people at one end of the income margin while being meaningless to those at the other end. But those at the upper-income end seem to be making the policy.
Speaking of being out of touch. Trump portrays himself as the blue-collar messiah. No, he’s only a blessing to certain blue-collars – the ones with plenty of campaign cash and political pull – at the expense of other blue-collars. And for the rest of us, we must navigate a more difficult market. Unfree trade has its costs, big time.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “July tariff revenues break monthly record, with $150B collected so far in 2025”, Amanda Macias, Fox Business, 7/29/2025, at https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/july-tariff-revenues-break-monthly-record-150-billion-collected-so-far-2025.
2. “’A little tough love’: Top quotes from Trump tariff talk”, France 24, 3/4/2025, at https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250402-a-little-tough-love-top-quotes-from-trump-tariff-talk.
3. “Transcript: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,” July 20, 2025”, CBS News: Face the Nation, 7/20/2025, at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/howard-lutnick-commerce-secretary-face-the-nation-transcript-07-20-2025/.
4. “Tariffs—Everything you need to know but were afraid to ask”, Adam S. Hersh and Josh Bivens, Economic Policy Institute, 2/10/2025, at https://www.epi.org/publication/tariffs-everything-you-need-to-know-but-were-afraid-to-ask/#:~:text=By%20raising%20the%20cost%20of%20foreign-produced%20goods%20or,goods%2C%20allowing%20domestic%20businesses%20to%20also%20raise%20prices.
Helicopter parenting seems to be a feature of some child raising today, may be an inbred reflex for older marrieds finally birthing one or two children. It comes with unforeseen costs which will be borne by the child later in life. The coddling cripples the youngster from developing the coping mechanisms and needed personality corrections when facing difficulties. Life disciplines if allowed to operate. The costs of leniency appear later when bail becomes necessary for storming federal courthouses, assaulting ICE agents, toppling statues and defacing cemeteries, and roaming around in mobs threatening free speech on campus. Mom and dad, get prepared for a hefty therapy bill as well. Coddled people are frequently nervous wrecks as adults.
The costs of coddling reach humungous levels when implemented on a national scale, such as showering subsidies, tax code benefits, and tariff protections on certain industries. Government becomes a helicopter parent, permissive and indulgent, enticing their dependents to continue in their morbid obesity and gross wastefulness. Who ultimately pays? Guess what . . . You!
Does any of this make any sense? “Yes” to the recipients, and “no” to everyone else. The more important question is, do our elected poohbahs wallow in this form of bad parenting on a national scale? Yes, because it pays. It buys the votes of people nostalgic for a world before the latest innovation. It goes something like this: my dad worked on Chevies, Fords, and Dodges, and that’s how God created the world. Who doesn’t want to freeze in amber the world of their formative years? Luddites of every generation will always be a potent political constituency.
The application of economic laws (supply, demand, price signals, incentives, etc.) to government was explored by economists Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan in something that they called Public Choice Theory. Surprise, they showed that politicians shop around for votes. They won the Nobel prize in economics for their groundbreaking work. Tullock took the analysis further by examining the immense hidden costs of tariffs; something Trump refuses to understand (see #1, #2).
Tariffs coddle the too-big-to-fail companies and their extortionate union parasites, both with their tentacles deep into the campaign war chests of the elected. Then, once in office, the bennies roll in, now especially under Trump. Trump’s most beautiful word in the English language, tariff, acts as an accelerant for a new growth industry, special consultancy services (tariff brokers and such) to help business navigate the new flood of paperwork and rules, and army of new government hires, regurgitated out of Leviathan. These services aren’t free, and add new costs to the bottom line and the public purse, all to be borne by you in fewer choices, higher prices, and higher taxes and/or public debt.
Think about it, think about a time before the income tax. Yes, there was a time when April 15 was just another spring day, and not the deadline to avoid fines and jail. It used to be the natural order of things, except for the brief period of the Civil War, until 1913 and Woodrow Wilson signed the implementing law after the 1909 approval of the 16th Amendment allowed the monstrosity. After it and other changes to the tax code, who doesn’t need a tax accountant to steer clear of the maw of the IRS? Many, many. The government’s insatiable appetite for more money added a new layer to the cost of living, the professional tax accountant and lawyer and software.
Trump is accomplishing the same feat with his “Liberation Day”. That and all the subsequent trade deals will end up spiking the average U.S. tariff from a low of 2.5% in 2024 to over 5% in 2025, and a general 15% on a huge portion of it (see #3). It’s a flat-out tax increase added to the bottom line, added to your cost of living and running a business. Trump boasts of billions pouring into the federal treasury as if it is coming out of the pockets of foreigners. He’s selling a falsehood. Much analysis has been devoted to who pays the tariffs (see #2). It shows the residents of the authoring country footing the bill. I don’t think Trump cares because tariffs are “beautiful” to him; they harken him back to a time 70 years ago, the world of his youth, and his obsession with recreating it.
The sheer absurdity of Trump’s tariff regime will be clear if we take a look at one industry, copper. You know, the hotly sought-after basic and essential stuff for the Dems’ greenie electrified utopia or Trump’s buy-only-America one. It’s a classic case of a blockheaded Trump obsession mucking up U.S. industries by pushing a solution in search of a problem.
Let’s start with a basic stat: 45% of U.S. copper consumption is imported (see #5). The remaining 55% is domestically produced. So, why the 50% tariff on imported copper? Intended or not, Trump is forcing domestic users of copper to pay more for it out of a constricted internal supply. Why constricted? Over decades, we willed it so. Try to open a new mine and avoid the stinging swarms of eco-zealots at all levels. Behind walling off the richer seams behind national monuments and lines of legal-eagle firing squads, the potentially condemned seek other venues of investment. 55% could be a lot more but isn’t because we’d rather pay to dig up the land under other people. Currently, the U.S. ranks seventh in proven reserves in the world, more than China, but won’t touch much of it (see #5).
And, anyway, it’s not such a bad idea to diversify sources for national security reasons. Domestic supplies can be disrupted by events such as strikes by Trump’s newfound allies in organized labor’s extortion racket. Natural disasters and mechanical breakdowns in the chain from mine to mill, as happens in oil refining, are inevitable. Is it such a horrible thought to be on good terms with countries like Chile, our largest foreign source? Though, If you see foreigners as enemies, like Trump, economic or otherwise, don’t be surprised that many of them end up providing new naval basing and investment opportunities for the CCP. Tariffing our hemisphere will require a much bigger navy to blockade South America.
The bottom line is that coddling domestic producers behind the padded walls of 50% tariffs makes them more willing to buy off the eco-gangsters and their featherbedding union masters, a win/win for producer and parasites alike. The only loser is the DIYer trying to wire his garage. Maybe now, his only option is shivering in winter.
Coddling “Made in America” by federal helicopter parents is a surefire way to screw up people. It isn’t good policy in raising children nor in the making of prosperity.
RogerG
Sources:
1. If you want to get into the weeds of Tullock’s insight, read “The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, monopolies, and Theft”, Gordon Tullock, Rice University, June 1967, at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-7295.1967.tb01923.x.
2. For a more concise depiction of Tullock’s thesis, go to “The Hidden Costs of Trump’s Tariffs”, Augustin Forzani, National Review, 7/31/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/07/the-hidden-costs-of-trumps-tariffs/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=first.
3. “Trump Tariffs: Tracking the Economic Impact of the Trump Trade War”, Erica York and Alex Durante, Tax Foundation, 7/29/2025, at https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tariffs-trade-war/.
4. “Chart: The Average U.S. Tariff Rate (1890-2025)”, Dorothy Nuefeld, Visual Capitalist, 4/10/2025, at https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-average-u-s-tariff-rate-since-1890/.
5. “45%”, Dominic Pino, National Review Magazine, September 2025, p.11.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders participate in a stop on the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour at the Dignity Health Arena Theater in Bakersfield, California, on April 15, 2025. (photo: REUTERS/Aude Guerrucci)Zohran Mamdani, NYC mayoral candidate. (photo: Angelina Katsanis for The New York Times)Pres. Trump announcing his “Liberation Day” tariffs, April 2, 2025
It’s probably always been true that shallow thinking prevails in our world. X good/Y bad, the binary pervades thought without much cognitive work behind it. What else explains the teenage rise of the now 22-year-old phenom Greta Thunberg (mentioned in earlier posts)? Or the overturning of the century-plus expansion and refinements of the grid and personal transportation in the crushing span of two decades, by law? Or the sudden appearance of sex shapeshifting as an incontrovertible “reality” taking over women’s swimming and track meets? Or sports gaming profits are a “good” without any recognition that these profits represent many more “losers”? Or, in a similar manner, a boost in government revenues from tariffs is a “good” absent any realization that they come at the expense of consumers and businesses, a much bigger class of “losers”? Our public conversation is chock full of the silliness. It’s the era of the shrill and shallow.
At the spearhead of this nonsense is a combination of the Trump phenomenon and the neo-Marxist Left in the Democratic Party and its street militias. The former first. Take Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. The only thing being liberated is money out of our wallets and “freedom” from our beneficial supply chain arrangements. The confluence of “liberation” and rising economic distress is . . . amazing.
That won’t stop pundits like Hugh Hewitt on his radio show announcing the “good news” of higher-than-expected government revenues from Trump’s tariffs (last week). It doesn’t take much more than a thimble of reasoning to understand that, for instance, the MSRP of that new truck on the showroom floor just jumped $1,500, or Amazon deals are fewer and far between. When was the last time that you heard a self-proclaimed Reagan Republican extolling the virtue of a huge tax increase?
It doesn’t stop there. Trump’s on-again/off-again support for Ukraine stands out for head-scratching. Is Putin a good guy or bad guy, despite the fact that he wantonly invaded another country like the Wehrmacht did Poland. Is a dogmatic obsession with a “pivot to Asia (China)” the right way to go, even though crap happens elsewhere? In 1984, when asked by a reporter about the greatest difficulty facing a Prime Minister, British ex-PM Harold Macmillan responded, “Events, my dear boy, events.” Events are happening elsewhere that unexpectedly impact Trump’s much cherished “pivot”. Is it too much to expect of our leaders to understand that a green light to Putin is a green light to Xi, is a green light to the mullahs, is a green light to Kim? Empty grousing in the 1930s about Japan in Manchuria and Mussolini in Ethiopia was fully appreciated by the Chancellor of Germany. Dominoes exist in more than a game.
Many of Trump’s political successes is less evidence of him playing 4-D chess but is, more than anything, proof that he’s blessed by the sheer incoherence, incompetence, and malignancy of his opponents. Popular loathing for the donkey party is at record highs according to the latest WSJ poll (see #1). Are election results a product of an overwhelming enthusiasm for a particular candidate or a measure of a greater dislike for the other choice?
Trump-love occupies a niche in the American public, far from sufficient to get him elected. Helping Trump along the way is an opposition party oriented for dystopia. No matter Trump’s negatives, the alternative has positioned itself as a catalyst for XX “boys” and XY “girls” throughout K-12 into college, education dysfunction, defund the police, the mutilation of the economy and the quality of life in green fads and inflation and mounting public debt, and urban wastelands of filth, crime, and homelessness.
Who, other than Democrats, wants an intermingling of genitalia in middle school bathrooms based on nothing but the hormone-fueled feelings of tweens? Mercurial teen self-identity leads to XY “girls” blasting through the tape by 4 yards at the girls’ state high school track championships. Of course, don’t look for it to happen the other way around (XX “boys” taking gold medals in competitions with the XY variety). The whole scene flummoxes and angers ma and pa and grandma and grandpa in the stands. Democratic Party infatuations suddenly hit home.
When Trump tariffs, the Dems are boxed in a corner. Trump proves that he can be just as good a central planner as they ever were. How can they complain? Ever since Republicans began to embrace their inner Milton Friedman in the 1960s, Democrats were the buddies of economic xenophobia and our extortionate labor unions. Trump flips the old political script, tossing freedom economics out the window, and proves that the GOP can function as economic xenophobes and gangsters every bit as well as the Democrats in their effusive pandering to the AFL-CIO.
What’s left of the old Democrat coalition? They’ve got their eco-lobby with its thinly educated white-collar and mostly public-employee constituency. Add to them the cadres of social revolutionaries led by old socialist crackpots like Bernie Sanders and the New Age socialism of the glib and juvenile AOC. Oh, let’s not forget the only expanding clump in their atrophying coalition: unmarried women. Husbands and children are not on their agenda, while preferring a government spouse to a biological one. The party’s future is even more depressing as they fling the LGBTQ+ agenda at the face of God-fearing Hispanics, flood the labor market with desperate peasants, and persist in abandoning the economic and social interests of Black males.
We have the rule of the shallow and shrill. Our primary elections are not faithful renderings of a party’s members, but a playground for the most animated, the shrill and shallow. The rest stay home. MAGA and the Democrats’ social revolutionaries present firebrands to the general public in November, or people who speak the lingo. American politics, as seen by outsiders, must appear to be riotous clown show. Interesting.
Speaking of the shrill and shallow, an update: President Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a trade deal this past Sunday (7/27). After chores, and during exercise, I’ll listen to podcast and talk-show punditry and be exposed to the latest hyperbole about the deal. There’s too much we don’t know and too much yet to be negotiated. Yet, we do know to expect a jump in automobile and durable goods prices since tariffs on cars (15%) and steel and aluminum (50%) remains. Don’t forget that “tariff is the most beautiful word in the English language” for Trump. At least for now, till our potentate-in-chief changes his mind, some certainty returns to business. Stay tuned for more “progress” on the America-as-victim-of-the-world front.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Democrats Get Lowest Rating From Voters in 35 Years, WSJ Poll Finds”, Aaron Zitner, Wall Street Journal, 7/25/2025, at https://www.wsj.com/…/democratic-party-poll-voter….
President Trump announcing his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, 2025.
Javier Milei in a speech before the World Economic Forum in 2024: “If measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, competition, price systems, trade and ownership of private property, the only possible fate is poverty.” (see #1)
Donald Trump on his tariffs in April 2025: “You know, someone said, ‘Oh, the shelves, they’re going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. But we’re not talking about something that we have to go out of our way. They have ships that are loaded up with stuff, much of which — not all of it — but much of which we don’t need.” (see #2)
Is there a difference between Donald Trump and Javier Milei? Yes, an emphatic “yes”. Trump is a classic central planner with all the limitless self-regard that the position demands. Milei is reintroducing free markets to a country that has not had many for decades. With Trump, we get a person who asserts the power to determine how much we deserve and “need” and how much we should pay for it. Milei is dialing back Trump-style manipulations with impressive results. The other shoe has yet to drop in the U.S. on the fundamental disorder to supply chains from Trump’s economic illiteracy in his tariff campaign. Stay tuned, The Big Beautiful Bill or no, there are troubling signs in the consequential durable goods sector.
Argentina’s President Javier Milei attends the opening session of the legislative term at the National Congress in Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 1, 2025. (photo: Matias Baglietto/Reuters)
Let’s start with Milei’s Argentina, and add Poland’s rise to the mix. After decades of socialistic Peronism, Argentina under Milei is teaching a lesson to Donald Trump. Year-over-year, the nation’s economy has grown 7.7%. Poverty is beginning its downward slide. Milei has corseted government interference (for instance, ending rent control in Buenos Aires), cut spending, restrained the money supply, and eliminated many price controls. The result is an Argentinian renaissance.
Poland showed the way for Milei. In 1989, Leszek Balcerowicz, Poland’s Finance Minister after the shedding of communism, cut spending, balanced the budget, reigned in the money supply, ended many government spending programs, basically freed-up the economy, and Poland took off (see #3). It remained free of Brussels by not joining the euro. We would be happy with 3% growth in GDP. Poland is humming at 5%.
Where is Donald Trump leading the U.S.? In some ways, in the opposite direction. All governmental interventions are not equal in their effects. Some have greater impact than others. Supply chains are crucial. That which disrupts supply chains ripples down to layoffs, repos, and personal bankruptcies. After treating the U.K. like the CCP, one in which we amazingly had a trade surplus, Trump is targeting South Korea and Japan with 25% tariffs. It’s madness.
Expect showrooms and car lots to have fewer offerings in that industry of the most durable of all durable goods. No big deal for Trump, we only deserve two to choose from, right?
It’s all over the place, everywhere you look in automotive industry reports. Signs are abundant of a coming automotive industry recession. Quoting AutoForecast Solutions, industry insiders such as F & I and Showroom expects “light-vehicle sales will fall for the first time since 2022 due to uncertainty around the tariffs”. It’s a perfect storm of a Federal Reserve skittish about inflation and keeping interest at their current level, Moody’s downgrading of the U.S. credit rating, Conference Board Leading Economic Index’s fall of nearly 2% in March-April, rising loan defaults, etc. (see #4)
No wonder Trump is on a jihad against Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. Trump wants easy money to paper over the effects of his tariff war.
In putting makeup on the pig, President Trump and his spokespeople trot around citing normal manufacturing shifts (Mercedes, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Stellantis and Toyota) that were planned and announced before Trump announced his America-the-victim-of-the-world tariff war, as if the resulting chaos is a stroke of genius. Trump should take this comedy routine on the road.
Buyers aren’t stupid. If people see price increases on the horizon, they buy while the getting is still good. The numbers are the numbers. The June auto sales numbers fell by 2.6 million from April to June. March and April were great because tariff reality would soon set in. Jonathan Smoke, chief economist at Cox Automotive Inc., put it bluntly: “The party is over.” This isn’t a mysterious happening according to Smoke: “It’s clearly slowing. It’s because of affordability getting worse and forcing what we think will be production declines to keep supply in balance.” (see #5) Translation: Think again about buying that new car.
The goal is reshoring. Laudable, but the method asinine. It jumps over the question of why they left. Is it merely the attractiveness of slave or peasant labor? Cheaper labor overseas has always existed and yet the country grew. What happened between then and now? We decided to muck up the works. By law and government interventions, we turned organized labor into an extortion racket. We taxed and regulated our way into near oblivion. We have greater difficulties in building anything. Try to build power plants, refineries, dams, mines, roads, power lines, even housing, in the good ‘ol USA. Home-grown NIMBYs and greenie revolutionaries have a greater influence on our economy than Malaysian peasants.
Conversely, we could tack in the opposite direction and make our country accommodating to industries. It’d be like the mysterious voice in Field of Dreams: “Build it (a free economy) and they will come.”
Instead, we have a president and his Republican Party fan club who’d rather throw up a wall, like a curtain, to hide the extortion racket and the government bludgeoning of economic activity, and then paste “Make America Great Again” over the mess. Jargon replaces accountability.
In that good ‘ol USA, central planners like Trump, not us, decided that we needed upscaled electric golf carts to replace our family sedan. Anything large powered by fossil fuels was to be pounded into dust by CAFE standards. The car industry played along because they’re essentially cowards. Hitching your industry cart to government and its activists, whether Friends of the Earth or MAGA tariff-enthusiasts, depending on who temporarily holds the reins of power, can be an economically unhealthy thing to do. Watch California become a Third World nation, er state.
And it shows in the crap foisted on us. It’s high-priced, underpowered, loaded down with gimmicks to mask their shortcomings (turbochargers); beset by stunts like cylinder deactivation, on/off engine disruptions during idling, the carbonization of direct fuel injection, the notorious 10-spead transmissions; and range anxiety coupled with spontaneous combustion of battery packs for those “virtuous” EVs.
At least The Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) corrected some of the folderol. The only problem is that we have a Donald Trump (DJT) intent on wreaking havoc on the guts of economic activity. What the BBB giveth, DJT taketh. Sounds like central planning.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Milei’s speech can be viewed in YouTube at https://youtu.be/4z44XP4u9Xs?si=OEB-mRfFMY2xts1U.
2. “Trump says children could have ‘2 dolls instead of 30’ with his tariff plan”, Alex Gangitano, The Hill, 4/30/2025, at https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5275798-trump-says-children-could-have-two-dolls-instead-of-30-with-his-tariff-plan/.
3. “Shock Therapy: What We Can Learn From Poland”, Taylor Marvin, Prospect Journal, at https://www.prospect-journal.org/articles/2010/11/11/shock-therapy-what-we-can-learn-from-poland.
4. “2025 Auto Sales Slump Forecast”, Hannah Mitchell, F & I and Showroom, 6/3/2025, at https://www.fi-magazine.com/376082/2025-auto-sales-slump-forecast.
5. “Car sales plummet following pre-tariffs panic buying: ‘The party is over’”, Ariel Zilber, The New York Post, 7/1/2025, at https://nypost.com/2025/07/01/business/car-sales-plummet-following-pre-tariffs-panic-buying-the-party-is-over/.
6. An excellent synopsis of Milei’s success can be read at “The Milei ‘Miracle’ Is a Vindication of Free Markets”, The Editors, National Review, 7/8/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/07/the-milei-miracle-is-a-vindication-of-free-markets/.
Yesterday (6/19/2025), Donald Trump announced a two-week reprieve for the mullahs. That’s dangerous. Many legitimate estimates put Iran at two weeks from a nuclear bomb. Two weeks is a rough assessment that can’t preclude one week or less, if rushed. If he succeeds, Khamenei will have the premiere blackmail weapon, or turn Tel Aviv into Hiroshima, before time runs out. Is Trump about to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory? How did we get to this point? Well, partially, it’s the language, stupid! (Like in James Carville’s famous words from 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid!”). Read further.
Today, our overheated politics disfigure our language. In the Left, “top 1%” (billionaires), “men” (the “patriarchy”), “privileged” (anybody white or male or anyone able to escape the public schools for their kids), “heteronormative”, “…phobia”, et al, denote an evil presence. In the Right, specifically the MAGA universe, “establishment”, “elites” (which practically means anyone of high status in a demographic), “neocons” (the old Reagan coalition), “Wall Street” (shared with the Left), “globalists”, et al, are used to identify their meanies in the world. Each side has their jargon. Since MAGA and the MAGA-adjacent are in power, it’s their linguistic twaddle that presently holds sway in personnel choices and policy.
In MAGA world, the buzzwords lead to some really odd policies (a tariff war against the planet, the crude verbal abuse of allies) and personnel choices. Right now, an “elite” real estate developer, Donald Trump – one who hobnobs with “Wall Street” and “globalists” – makes some stylistically crude overtures to blue collars, essentially big labor unions, but also turns to buddies in his high-end real-estate social circles for statecraft positions and advice, people whose only real experience is in the cocooned transactional world of U.S. law and real estate, people like Steve Witkoff. Any criticism of these picks is dismissed by tarring these wayward voices with MAGA’s list of jargonized horribles.
The ancient Greeks wrote of hubris (excessive pride) leading to nemesis (retribution, bad happenings). Could the reliance on buddies, absent any real background in the field, with overconfidence in their abilities, lead to nemesis and catastrophic failure for the nation? One need only examine Witkoff’s résumé to understand the lurking dangers.
Who is Steve Witkoff? He’s a lawyer and real estate developer from New York, like Trump (see #1). He was Trump’s lawyer in the 1980s. According to Witkoff’s testimony in Letitia James’s New York civil suit against Trump, his friendship with Trump began in 1985. During this decade, he became heavily involved in real estate development. His sole interaction with foreigners was his 2016 effort to sell his group’s stake in the Park Lane Hotel project in the Central Park neighborhood. All his activities occurred under the aegis of American legal norms. The friendship with Trump endured through it all.
The result is a man totally out of his lane in international diplomacy. He succeeded in the release of a couple of American hostages in singular transactions that required no real sacrifice from malevolent actors (Hamas, Putin). These were important for their families, but are not evidence of any acumen in the momentous arena of international statecraft. As Trump’s travelling envoy, he’s been an embarrassment. Maybe that’s because he doesn’t realize that he’s been given impossible tasks in trying to broker deals in conflicts without middle ground. In one, Putin invaded another sovereign country, brutalizes its people, and can’t back down because of the heavy sunk costs in the effort. It’s either conquest or being overthrown and execution, always a strong possibility for dictators.
An isolated American real estate lawyer is a duck out of water in places not corseted by American legal norms. Additionally, he was given the job of bringing an end to the Gaza War. What made him think that a deal was possible between the victim of mass murder and the butchers of men, women, the old, and children, many burned alive? A level of fanaticism is at work that a real estate lawyer schooled in real estate deals cannot comprehend. He cannot envision that the side across the table from him isn’t united with him in common purpose, like making money. They’re goal is your demise, not anything like achieving mutual benefit under American contract law. These malcontents are cut from the same cloth as the 911 hijackers. Negotiating with them will get your throat slit, as many discovered on the planes during 911.
People who have cut their teeth in a lifetime of American real estate transactions run the risk of being ill-suited to handle the world’s cutthroats. Witkoff was stunned coming face-to-face with them; he admits it. At the Arab summit in March, he said about his discussions with Hamas (see #2),
“I thought we had a deal, an acceptable deal. I even — I even thought we had an approval from Hamas, maybe that’s just me getting — getting, you know, duped . . . .” (see #2)
Getting “duped”? After being “duped” by Hamas, Witkoff engages with Putin and comes away with, “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy.” He then proceeded to sound like Putin’s Russia Today network endorsing Putin’s seizure of the Crimea and Ukraine’s eastern provinces (see #3). He then points to plebiscites in them, under Russia’s guns, to justify Putin’s declared right to rewrite borders at his whim. And, like a parrot out of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Witkoff blames NATO. Is this guy Putin’s ambassador to the U.S. or our envoy to Russia?
To be honest, he sounds like his partner in real estate, Donald Trump. Remember Trump’s Putin-like hammering of Zelensky in the Oval Office earlier this year? Repulsive, absolutely repulsive.
A transactional approach to foreign policy assumes a commonality of purpose that doesn’t exist. It’s easier if only money is at stake. Any other motive – ideology, religious fanaticism, an overriding sense of grievance – throws the transactional approach into the category of self-annihilation for the side not so disposed. Trump is transactional, and so is his special envoy. It’s stupid, it’s dangerous. Are we nuts?
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks for Jim Geraghty’s insights and sources in “The Fate of Israel and Iran Is in Steve Witkoff’s Hands”, National Review, 6/20/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-fate-of-israel-and-iran-is-in-steve-witkoffs-hands/. I strongly recommend his Morning Jolt newsletter. Sign up at https://link.nationalreview.com/join/4rc/newdesign-nls-signup?
2. Thanks to Jim Geraghty for this source: “Trump’s longtime buddy testifies as defense expert in Manhattan fraud case”, Erik Eubelacker, Courthouse News Service, 11/14/2023, at https://www.courthousenews.com/trumps-longtime-buddy-testifies-as-defense-expert-in-manhattan-fraud-case/
3. “Steve Witkoff Says Putin Not a ‘Bad Guy’, Stumbles on Ukraine Geography”, Ellie Cook, Newsweek, 3/23/2025, at https://www.newsweek.com/steve-witkoff-ukraine-ceasefire-russia-mistake-regions-annexed-vladimir-putin-2049224
