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Donald Trump, Central Planner

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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.

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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.

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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/.

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The Latest: California, Reliably Blue and Reliably a Mess.

Gas prices near $10 per gallon in California - YouTube

Yep, Californios, it is worsening. The troubling trends continue. Here’s the latest.

Tomorrow, July 1, the cost of getting from point A to point B in California will increase. The state’s gas tax rises from 59.6 cents per gallon to 61.2. More is in the offing each year for the foreseeable future. Also, the state’s latest tightening of its low-carbon fuel standard will be slamming drivers on the same day adding up to 15 cents to each gallon. Coupled with the garroting of California’s domestic oil production and the loss of oil refineries (Valero, Philips 66 in Benicia by next year), Californios could be looking at sticker shock at the pump – $8-per-gallon in 18 months is a real possibility.

Keep in mind that this is a popularly elected government in veto-proof numbers. Ruin is quite popular in the state.

Like Stalin’s prosecutor at the show trials, the state’s apparatchiks are impervious to the pain they are causing. They are zealots to the revolution. According to the San Joaquin Valley Sun, California Air Resources Board Chair Liane Randolph said in recent testimony before the Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee, “’We don’t analyze a retail cost …. [CARB’s analysis] does not identify specific costs to specific consumers ….’” (see #1)

Through what can only be described as Soviet-style central planning, the one-party state is constructing environmentalism’s utopia – like Lenin, or Mao, or Castro did Marx’s – no matter the impracticality or the economic bleeding of its people. Gas prices are just one canary in the mine. There’s a whole slew of other symptoms of the rotting corpse. Some are toxic policies and some are pure stats.

In US News and World Report’s state rankings, California is last in affordability, “47th in employment, 47th in energy infrastructure, 46th in air and water quality, 45th in growth, 42nd in public safety, 42nd in short-term fiscal stability, and 37th in K–12 education.” (see #2) The ruling party is running the state into the ground.

This is a high-tax state, dahhhh! The Tax Foundation places the state near the bottom (48th) in its State Tax Competitiveness Index (see #3). My gosh, how can anyone afford to live there?! This is a financially and personally deadly utopia.

If you’re looking for a place to retire, don’t make it California. According to BankRate’s annual analysis, only three other states are worse than the “golden state” (47th), while, adding insult to injury, you are still spry enough not to have your kids take away your car keys and occasionally have to roll up to a gas pump in the state.

Indeed, driving is increasingly a perilous adventure in the state. It is at the bottom in the quality of its roads, fifth-worst (see #4). While on those washboards, you will be facing collectively some of the worst drivers, the third-worst, and the second-worst accident and drunk driving rates in the country. No wonder its donkey-party insurance market is in tatters.

Putting up with all that will leave you and your kids exposed to some of the worst cultural influences on the planet. The ruling party’s theoreticians have embedded transgenderism and the mission statement of the LGBTQ+ Human Rights Campaign into elementary school instruction. Identity politics, rooted in neo-Marxist theory, was getting set to become a high school graduation requirement in a new “ethnic studies” course, till Donald Trump and AG Pam Bondi began to enforce recent Supreme Court decisions banning the noxious bunkum of “racism to fight racism”. With state encouragement, and the heightened potential of social contagion of too many kids on too many “smart” phones, you might find your kid transitioning without you even knowing about it, all under the protective wing of your kid’s guidance counselor.

For your daughters, highly sexualized boys could be sharing a bathroom, locker room, or competing with them. The whole scene is turning into a monstrous social sewer. No wonder the state’s only growth industry is the outward-bounded moving trade. So says U-Haul (see #6).

People aren’t stupid, except possibly for a critical mass of the state’s electorate, or so it seems. It can’t last. Even for the most die-hard California new age Democrat neo-socialist, civilizational decline can’t be a pleasant experience. Till that realization becomes a reality, you-the-sane have two options: get out like so many others or just continue to swim around in the septic tank. Simple.

California Comes With Me

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Bains calls for CARB chief to step down”, Daniel Gligich, San Joaquin Valley Sun, 5/30/2025, at https://sjvsun.com/news/politics/bains-calls-for-carb-chief-to-step-down/
2. Thanks to Jim Geraghty for the summary at “‘No One Is Incredibly Pumped’ About Kamala Harris Running for Governor”, National Review, 6/30/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-one-is-incredibly-pumped-about-kamala-harris-running-for-governor/. I pirated many of the stats from him. For the USNWR report, “California” at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/california.
3. “Taxes in California: California Tax Rates, Collections, and Burdens” at https://taxfoundation.org/location/california/
4. See “U.S. States With the Worst Roads”, Jonathan Jones, Construction Coverage, 4/30/2025, at https://constructioncoverage.com/research/states-with-the-worst-roads. Also “California has some of the worst roads in the nation, new study says. Where does it rank?”, Jaqueline Pinedo, Sacramento Bee, 4/10/2024, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article287533375.html.
5. “The Numbers Don’t Lie: California Ranks Among the Worst Drivers in the U.S.”, Eugene Bruno, Eugene Bruno and Associates, 12/13/2024, at https://sdlawyers.com/the-numbers-dont-lie-california-ranks-among-the-worst-drivers-in-the-u-s/.
6. “California ranks last in growth for fifth consecutive year, U-Haul says”, 1/7/2025, at https://www.kdrv.com/news/regional/california-ranks-last-in-growth-for-fifth-consecutive-year-u-haul-says/article_31927000-6e72-5e25-b994-5951a1b1adf1.html.

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Are We Nuts? Steve Witkoff as Our Metternich?

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Steve Witkoff

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?

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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

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A Golden Opportunity

(Post on June 19, 2025, before US air and naval cruise missile strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities)

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Donald Trump has the ball on the 10-yard line, just 10 yards away from the winning touchdown. However, the braggart quarterback, the Deshaun Watson of political football, is mistake prone. Will he fumble the ball, be befuddled by the cacophony of bad advice in the huddle, or throw an interception? The allegory describes the situation facing Trump in the broader Ukraine-Iran-Taiwan conflict. At stake is success in the looming face-off with the dangerous ChiComs.

Will he blow it? Probably, if he listens to Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, VP Vance, and the rest of the MAGA-adjacent crowd who are paralyzed in fear by their version of the old Vietnam Syndrome, the Iraq Syndrome. Every conflict is imagined to be Iraq all over again. Trump is already preternaturally inclined to a kind of right-wing pacificism due to his loud commitment to no more “forever wars”.

But not all wars are “forever wars”. Many are one-and-done, quick strikes, no boots on the ground, what one 19th-century British wag referred to, in their Frontier Wars, as “butcher-and-bolt” affairs. And that leaves aside the mangling of the history of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, which is necessary to make the story fit the debilitating prescription of conflict avoidance at all costs.

Right now, Trump has the golden opportunity to clear the field for a genuine pivot to Asia. Putin is bogged down in Ukraine. The mullahs are on the cusp of collapse. They could go with their nuclear program. All that is needed is cementing a broad coalition to feed more aid to Ukraine, drop a few GBU-57 MOPs on Fordow, and construct a parameter of allies around China. America doesn’t have to do it all. It can be done on the cheap if Trump doesn’t blow it in pacifism and trade wars.

Today, there appears to be sweaty palms and hand-wringing in the administration over airstrikes to finish off the ayatollahs’ nuclear ambitions. Whether the regime survives or not is beside the point. So, this won’t be “regime change”, which by the way would be a pleasant thought, nonetheless. Pleasant but not necessary. Leave it to the millions of the disaffected in the country to deal with. Chaos or no, gone will be a nuclear-armed “Death to America”.

Elbridge Colby, the number two at Defense, is known for his insistence on a pivot to Asia. Well, stop the tariff campaign against friends, the threats to allies like Denmark over Greenland, the sideshow of militarily menacing Panama, and the belittling of allies that you’ll need to corral China like Australia and the rest of the AUKUS coalition. And stop the Putin pandering (It’s absolutely shameful.) and funnel more coalition support to Ukraine. Clear the decks to be better able to confront Communist China and leave no brush fires burning behind the lines. Burdens are shared giving us time and resources to build up.

Trump, drop the MOPs and get out. Is that so difficult?

RogerG

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Boy, What a Week!

(Post from June 18, 2025)

Flags of Ukraine and Israel Lying Together Symbolizing Political Relationship. 3D Rendering ...

X (Twitter) An image showing a Tu-22M on fire at Soltsy-2 airbase
Photo from the BBC show a Tu-22M bomber on fire at Soltsy-2 airbase, Russia
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A photo of an Ukrainian drone as it strikes a military plane, a Tu-95, at Russia’s Olenya airbase during the attack, June 1, 2025.
Burning Tu-95s at Olenya air base
Burning Tu-95s at Olenya air base, Russia, on June 1, 2025
Eight Israeli Air Force F-15I Ra’am strike fighter jets of 69 Squadron “Hammers” at Hatzerim Airbase high above Israel on their way to attack Iran in mid June 2025. (photo: IDF)
Israel’s bombing of IRGC facilities in Tehran. (photo: Iranian news agency)
Thank God for Ukraine and Israel while some places in the good ‘ol USA go insane. Ukraine and now Israel have taken momentous steps to reestablish a civilized order in an often-chaotic world, but some on the Right – the MAGA-adjacent Right – refuse to accept the heady opportunity staring us and them in the face. Just devote a moment’s thought to a world without a nuclear-armed “Death to America”. On the other hand, the Left – now synonymous with the Democratic Party – has gone bonkers in violently defending the indefensible. Lawbreaking, compounded by more lawbreaking, appears to be a core tenet of the Party’s manifesto. It’s now a key aspect of what it means to be “blue” on today’s electoral map. The progressive’s “arc of history” is a fantasy; it’s a roller coaster. Civility and incivility reside side by side at the same time on the same planet, sometimes in the same country.

Much of our public discussion encourages the schizophrenia. Victor Davis Hanson on the Right has honed a reputation as a Ukraine skeptic in line with the “restrainers” in Trump world. He planted his flag on the inevitability of Ukraine’s defeat if they persist in fighting the war, maybe to justify Trump’s immoral attempt to strong arm the victim into accepting Putin’s aggression against them, or just a plain kowtowing to MAGA isolationists. In Hanson’s reckoning, Putin has more of everything: 5x’s the population, military dominance, resources, you name it. Then, in the fashion of Israel’s decapitation of Hezbollah, Ukraine eliminated a third of Putin’s strategic bomber fleet in one day. They have proven to be quite inventive in fighting the big bear to a standstill. Now, it’s an open question whether Putin will be able to outlast Ukraine or vice versa.

The West, with its consensual republics, is proving to be quite resilient no matter the numerical weight against them. A short time after Ukraine’s daring move, Israel struck. Under Hanson logic, Israel shouldn’t be on the same playing field with Iran: 9x’s the population and oodles of more resources (oil!). On paper, it’s the midget versus Andre the Giant. Of course, its relative standing shrinks further if you factor in much of the Middle East. Yet, Israel has systematically decimated Hamas, then Hezbollah, and now has taken on the big meanie, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Tackling the ayatollahs sent shivers down the spine of Tucker Carlson, MAGA-adjacent pacifists, the Biden/Obama administrations, the donkey party’s militias in the streets, and, honestly, me too. However, I favored war, war to jaw, jaw (in a reversal of Churchill’s famous formulation) after decades of fruitlessly piddling around with the ayatollahs. October 7 woke Israel up. They took on the head of the anaconda after chopping up smaller portions of its entrails.

What we are witnessing is absolutely amazing. It puts to shame Hanson’s defeatist logic. Consensual republics possess indefinable reserves of gumption and wiliness. They are proof that the prospect of looming destruction concentrates the mind.

In America, we’d rather enfeeble ourselves between isolationist hand-wringing on the Right and the neo-Marxism of the Democratic Party. The donkey party is so compromised that flying the American flag at one of its confabs is . . . incongruous, to say the least. The flags of Palestine and Mexico seem more at home, along with bricks, Molotov cocktails, and homemade flame throwers directed at law enforcement.

Why the furor from the Left? It’s the sudden realization that Title 8 of the U.S. code (federal immigration law) actually exists. Trump took his Article II job of executing the law seriously. Some obviously don’t like the law to be enforced. Many Americans have grown accustomed to cheap landscaping, domestic servants, and ag labor as if that is the natural order of things. The cognitively compromised Biden took this logic to its ultimate conclusion, just eliminate the border and be done with it.

The donkey party is onboard with lawbreaking. Let’s be honest, at its core, “sanctuary” cities and states have little to do with federalism and everything to do with an indulgence for law breaking. The Constitution only matters to them as something to be twisted to protect their preferred type of law breaking, immigration law breaking.

So, Trump and his people found a way to write them and their “sanctuaries” out of the picture. Use federal warrants to renew respect for immigration law over the interference of by people like Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass. They dare not obstruct this federal justice, for federal charges await them if they do. How sweet would it be to see Newsom and Bass in perp walks?

California is home of this insanity. Conversely, Ukraine and Israel are beacons of clear-eyed moral purpose in a world with the U.S. bullying Ukraine and countries like Denmark over Greenland, and conducting trade wars against friend and foe alike.

True to form, Trump tries to unseemly hog the spotlight of Israel’s success on Truth Social: “WE [my caps] now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.” He crudely panders to a kind of American chauvinism when he touts American-made: “[Iran’s stuff] doesn’t compare to American made, conceived, and manufactured ‘stuff.’” Further, “Nobody does it better than the good ol’ USA.” Our stuff is indeed great but it’s Israelis, their people in command, on the ground, and in the air, who pulled this off. That’s the real lesson for MAGA and the donkey party’s neo-Marxists. Resilience, perseverance, and possessing the moral high ground are force multipliers and crude jingoism is just plain embarrassing.

Americans riot in the streets for law breaking. Ukraine and Israel show guts and gumption. Trump displays his crudity. Will he, fearful of missing his share of the glory, finally do the right thing and obliterate the last remnants of the mullahs’ nuclear program?

In sum, wow, what a week!

RogerG

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RogerG
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Crazy Times

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AOC (l) and Pres. Trump

Major elements of the Right and Left are completely unhinged. Crazy has been institutionalized. In Freud-speak, the superego and ego have been short-circuited and it’s a clear path to the raw id.

On the Right, something happened in the time frame from the 2008 Tea Party to the MAGA of today. It actually took a short seven years (2008-2015). What had started out as a call for a smaller government of lower taxes and less regulation, an advocacy of a return to our governmental roots, had somehow morphed into a cathartic cry, a demand for a rhetorical middle finger, an enthusiasm for stick-it-to-the-libs political theater. Thus, we get a continual stream of owning-the-libs YouTube videos; we get Donald Trump and his MAGA in all its bombast and incoherence. It feels good to watch and hear Trump crudely insult anybody not-Trump or Charlie Kirk in his well-choreographed, rapid-fire schtick verbally dismantling a mental adolescent without the public practice. It’s Lebron James against the weekend warrior. It’s fun, it feels good, but how healthy is it?

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MAGA

The Right “wins”, but what have they won? A trade war against the world? A cuddling with anti-American thugs? A fusillade of verbal tirades against our friends and allies? The cavorting with union thugs? A silly nibbling at our spending habits (DOGE, a banal assault on “waste, fraud, and abuse”) while ignoring the drunken sailors of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid who are pell-mell driving us over the cliff? Does any of this make any sense? Of course not.

On the Left, they’ve got all the political theater of Donald Trump at his worst, and more, much more. They’ve got Antifa, antisemitism, racism as “anti-racism” (DEI, CRT, etc.), campus mayhem, a summer of riots, keffiyeh-clad street goons armed with guns and Molotov cocktails, LGBTQAI+ gangsters, Bernie bros, the neo-Marxism of neo-Marxist professors, The Squad, AOC’s babblings, and a monopoly on the cultural commanding heights to propagate the cognitive filth. I could go on, but your eyes would glaze over.

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Antifa in uniform

For them, something happened from the time of Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, George Kennan, and JFK to The 1619 Project, to Trayvon Martin/Michael Brown/George Floyd, to maybe 2014, maybe 60 years. “The long march through the institutions” of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School (google it) took a little longer to fully dominate the synapses of the stewards of the Democratic Party. After that, it didn’t take long for them to replicate MAGA – a middle finger but only on the left hand – and take it to Spinal Tap’s “11”, their preferred behavioral stance.

When the Left resorts to political theater, it’s often of the lethal variety. Talk to store owners across the country in 2020 and the Holocaust survivors of today marching for mercy for the Hamas-held hostages. Many of the innocent end up walking on rubble, maimed, dead, or being treated in burn wards. “Free Palestine” has replaced “Allahu Akbar”.

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The fringes of the political continuum are an unholy mess. I don’t expect darlings of the Right like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk (sometimes), a chunk of the Right’s podcast world, et al, to rush out and praise Ukraine’s amazing drone strike against Russia’s strategic airfields (see #1) or Israel’s sudden decapitation of Hezbollah with exploding pagers and airstrikes. Such imaginative gutsiness on the part of the Ukrainians and Israelis is hardly applauded in such circles. The fact that Ukraine and Israel occupy the front lines in the defense of western civilization scarcely crosses their radar screen.

Records Show Fox and G.O.P.’s Shared Quandary: Trump - The New York Times
Tucker Carlson with Marjorie Taylor Greene and former President Donald J. Trump summer 2020. “I hate him passionately,” the Fox host texted in January 2021, referring to Mr. Trump. (photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times)

 

Their tunnel vision is America First, which really is America Alone, and America Weaker. In their myopic minds, we are not to have a foreign policy till every American problem, real or imagined, addressable by government or not, has been eradicated. Till then, our oceans will protect us, they assume . . . despite the fact that illiterate jihadists wielding box cutters, strategic bombers, missiles, high-altitude surveillance ballons, nuclear subs, drones, and satellites have shown them to be irrelevant or just another conduit, not a barrier, for those who wish to do us harm. Faith in geographical features is not a substitute for strategy.

I also don’t expect the elders of the donkey party to turn over a new leaf from the neo-Marxist infestation in their midst since Barack Obama ushered it into the party’s inner sanctum. They are just as fearful of their fanatics as the GOP is of the MAGA horde lurking in their venues. Both cohorts at the fringes cause the parties’ “adults in the room” to cower in fear.

For donkey party loyalists, their notion of reform after their defeat at the hands of the orange man is to be shriller about what got them booted in the first place: boys now girls/girls now boys, border erasure, a state-sponsored onslaught on the people’s quality of life in pursuit of environmentalist fairy tales, a morbidly obese government that only promises the déjà vu of 1980s Argentina, etc. – the same stuff that drives average people nuts. They don’t get it, and probably won’t till a few more debacles finally detox them.

For a GOP still hitched to an impulsive and bullheaded chieftain, they are left to be dragged along in whatever direction his impulses take them. They are left to stunningly embrace Big Labor’s robber barons after spending a career condemning them. No “right to work” for these sycophants. Former free traders are sounding like zealous converts to the cult of Smoot-Hawley. If Regan were alive today, he’d have to leave the Republican Party as the Democratic Party left him in the 1950s.

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Watch Trump castigate the Courts, his courts, since many of these judges were appointed by him, including the current 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. They were chosen for their adherence to the rule of law – original intent – not the rule of Trump. The Rule of Trump is strict obedience to his every wish. In a few upcoming cases, he may come to understand that the rule of law is not the rule of Trump. He may well learn that “emergencies” are not construed to be a carte blanche takeover of Congress’s trade powers in Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 (Trump, it’s in Article I, not Article II.). The vast body of immigration law has some due process provisions in limited circumstances; the whole thing does not fall under Trump caprice. The presidency does not have temples with altars waiting to receive sacrifices to them.

As for the Democratic Party, their temples have in their inner sanctums, not open to the prying eyes of the general public, altars to Karl Marx and his apostles. He goes unmentioned but is the guiding light for the party beliefs and actions. Little that they propose escapes the ideological straitjacket of his junk thought. Their Don Quixote revolution against imaginary oppressors has little room for reality, culture, restraint, law and constitutions. The crusade ends up where it always has: a disaster for all concerned. Look at California. Look at North Korea. Look at post-Soviet Russia.

Karl Marx and the Dems | Editorial Cartoons | wmicentral.com

So, here we are, buffeted by fringe crazies. MAGA follows their guru in lockstep and the donkey party can’t escape the neo-Marxist mind-fog of its shrillest members. Interesting times.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Ukraine stages audacious attack on airfields deep in Russian territory”, Christopher Miller, et al, Financial Times, 6/1/2025, at https://archive.is/dVnxk#selection-1571.0-1571.70

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Voilà, We Still Have a Constitution. Oops, I May Have Been Premature.

Biden Nominates Judges to District Benches, Court of International Trade

After the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) decided that the president does not have unilateral power to declare a trade war on the world, Stephen Miller, President Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, proclaimed (see #1), “The judicial coup is out of control.” What Millerite rubbish.

Miller’s feral reaction had resonance at a time when courts were inventing “rights” and making law out of whole judicial cloth. That was the time of the imperial judiciary, and rightly condemned. Not now, at a time of a 6-3 originalist, conservative majority.

Now, we’re in the era of new imperium, that of the imperial presidency. So, what do we call it when Trump with a stroke of his pen declares a trade “emergency” against the planet? The tariff power unquestionably resides with Congress in Art. I, Sec. 8. It’s nice to hear a court – The U.S. Court of International Trade – return to the literal, original, and simple meaning of the law and The Constitution. There is no place in our rule of law for Obama’s phone and pen, Biden’s edicts on rent moratoriums and student loans, and his wanton dereliction of duty to enforce immigration law, and now Trump’s decrees on tariffs on anyone, at any time, at any rate, for almost any reason – just declare an “emergency”.

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But not so fast. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a stay (a stop order) of the CIT decision in V.O.S. Selections v. Trump to give time for the Trump people and the plaintiffs to present their appellate briefs.

Well, let’s clear this up right now. Who are the plaintiffs, the people who brought suit? They aren’t your typical eco-lefties or your run-of-the-mill identity group hustlers angling for more privileges and taxpayer-funded bennies. They are folks who have a conception of government more in line with the Founders, people who seek to have The Constitution applied as written. Their creed stems from James Madison, not Karl Marx. They are free market, limited government people.

Spearheading this suit against His Majesty Donald Trump is the Liberty Justice Center (LJC), not the ACLU or the radically leftist Southern Poverty Law Center. The Liberty Justice Center’s mission is to “challenge the latest and greatest threats to liberty across the country” and strives to “revitalize constitutional restraints on government power and protections for individual rights” (see #2). The LJC stepped up to the plate to defend VOS Selections (importer of wines and spirits), FishUSA (fishing tackle producer), Genova Pipe (producer of irrigation and plumbing supplies), MicroKits (producer of electronics kits), and Terry Precision Cycling (producers of bicycles and cycling accessories) to stop Trump’s tariffs from driving them into bankruptcy.

LJC is doing for them what they did for Mark Janus before the U.S. Supreme Court in the famous Janus v. AFSCME decision of 2018 which reaffirmed the freedom of an individual public employee to not join a union. Today, it’s the freedom to stay in business without having to face the existential threat of arbitrary and capricious actions of a national executive straying far outside his constitutional lane.

Trump relies on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), within the National Emergencies Act, in the same manner as the Democrats worship the Constitution’s commerce and necessary and proper clauses to bring down on our heads the bloated Leviathan, the same one that has jacked our economy, our lives, our national debt, our kids’ schools, our neighborhoods, our housing, our girls’ sports, etc. IEEPA grants to the president certain economic powers only during an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the nation. Thus, Trump is sharing the same ideological space with AOC, Bernie Sanders, The Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Elizabeth Warren, The Squad, and Karl Marx . . . if he was still around to mingle in Democratic Party confabs.

So, what’s the “unusual and extraordinary threat” to justify the power grab, according to Trump? Think about it. The “emergency” lies in the commonplace business arrangements that have been around for the past 40+ years, if not longer. Now that’s odd: a 40-year-old “unusual and extraordinary threat”. At what point in a time span does “normal” suddenly become an “emergency”? If he wants to bring back those $17/hour factory jobs in droves, bring back his glorious 1950s, he ought to work with Congress to throw up the protectionist walls, shower taxpayer funds on a few favorites, and possibly muzzle the eco-predators that are actually busy making a hash of our economy. Policy is the proper response, not imperial ukases. But try to get that through a Congress of razor thin majorities. In other words, in our constitutional order, there is no mandate for Trump central planning.

Once we clear away the MAGA rubbish talk and get our bearings, governance by imperial whim is not becoming of Lincoln’s last best hope of earth. The sloganeering America First is verily America Ruined. The least that we can do to rescue our reputation as a free people of a free country is to retain some sense of the rule of law. Let’s hope that we have a Supreme Court who agrees.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “The Sudden End to Tariffs and the TACO Trade”, Jim Geraghty, National Review, 5/29/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-sudden-end-to-tariffs-and-the-taco-trade/
2. Liberty Justice Center, “What We Do”, on their official website at https://libertyjusticecenter.org/about/

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Wall Street and Main Street Are in the Same Boat

The 39 Most Beautiful Main Streets Across America | Small towns, Places to go, Towns

President Donald Trump dances after speaking at the U.S. Steel Mon Valley Works-Irvin plant on Friday, May 30, 2025, in West Mifflin, Pa. (AP Photo/David Dermer)

Here’s President Trump speaking before the National Republican Congressional Committee in March (see #1): “I’m proud to be the president for the workers, not the outsourcers — the president who stands up for Main Street, not Wall Street.” Only in politics can a person sell such economic bunk. It’s class warfare coming out of the mouth of a Republican. Who’d have thunk it?

Earlier, before Trump selected him for the VP slot, J.D. Vance was positioning himself to the left, sharing ideological space with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. One investor told Financial Times in regards to this possible GOP dynamic duo in 2024 (see #2), “We don’t need a Republican Bernie Sanders.” Indeed. But left-wing demagoguery should not be surprising in a person (Trump) who pinball bounced since 1987 from Republican to Independent to Democrat to Republican to Independent to Republican, with a stopover in the Reform Party in the 1990s and early 2000s, picking up a little Marxian lingo along the way.

But here’s the rub: basing policy on the Marxist dialectic is not a path to prosperity. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Kim family of North Korea, and the Castros couldn’t make it work. Not the British Labor Party. The reality is that economic actors are linked in mutual cooperation. As such, Wall Street and Main Street are not at odds. They are in the same boat. One is inextricably tied to the other. When Wall Street sneezes, Main Street catches a cold. The Trump tariff campaign has given Wall Street the chills and small businesses are heading to the medicine cabinet.

For example, watch the video below to see how Trump’s war on imports is turning into a war on Main Street. In the clip, an owner of a small shop selling vintage and new audio gear in Des Moines, Iowa, describes the travails inaugurated by Trump’s chaotic crusade of on-again/off-again and wildly gyrating tariffs. Trump introduced price increases and massive uncertainty, wreaking havoc on any business doing . . . business.

Scrap “Wall Street vs. Main Street”. It’s Trump vs. the Streets.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Debatable: Trump’s ‘Wall Street vs. Main Street’ argument for tariffs”, Morgan Chalfant, Semafor, 4/20/2025, at https://finance.yahoo.com/news/debatable-trump-wall-street-vs-042439600.html
2. “’We don’t need a Republican Bernie Sanders.’ Why Trump’s choice of Vance spooks Wall Street.”, Morningstar, 7/16/2024, at https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20240716129/we-dont-need-a-republican-bernie-sanders-why-trumps-choice-of-vance-spooks-wall-street

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The Clutter in Economic Thinking

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Pres. Trump wielding chart while announcing his trade war on April 2, 2025

There’s much litter lying around in popular economic discussions. Confusion abounds and drivel spreads when the subject turns to the economy. Most economic understanding doesn’t stretch beyond the popular nose. People go down to the supermarket and can’t afford eggs, or they notice that their young adult offspring can’t afford the American dream. The banalities in the popular discussion of “pocketbook issues” usually ends up becoming an attack on pocketbooks. Not much understanding is apparent. It’s the opening for the demagogue.

How so? Let’s begin with the basics. There are only two kinds of economics: free market economics and poli-sci economics, which is not really economics. Economics is the study of what we do for a living, both in what we produce and trade for, both at the micro (individual) and macro (national) levels. Unstated but essential is the personal freedom to make those decisions, ergo a free market. Once that freedom is curtailed beyond the widely accepted vices, the subject morphs into political science and the role of political functionaries to direct, manage, and plan. More succinctly, self-styled gurus assert the power to decide, not the individual. There’s no such thing as socialist or communist or managed-trade economics. At best, or worst, economics becomes nothing but a subsidiary of politics and the workings of government. The hybrid – an oxymoronic “politicized economics” – gives you a bastardized politics and a bastardized economics.

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The Democratic Party, Trump, Vance, and the MAGA movement are all into bastardization. They, in a myriad of ways, desire to direct us toward their grand vision of their better world. The Dems are bedeviled by a 360-degree dread of inequality and the human desire to make nature useful to us. Their economics is politics, the politics of a corpulent and intrusive Leviathan, with the exception of an expanded lane for moral license.

The MAGA crowd envisions an American paradise unspoiled of foreign influences. Theirs is the Eden of 1950s America, a time when our industrial competitors were still recuperating from the battlefields that were once their homes, businesses, and fields. An American head start that began in the 19th century dramatically lengthened post-WWII. But then, by the 1970s, much of the rest of the world came roaring back, and MAGA retaliates with tariff walls.

Did this refashioning of economics into politics make a better world? When taken to its logical conclusion in the many shades of socialism, protectionism, or progressivism, the history is not encouraging, whether in the form of the Soviet Union, Smoot-Hawley, the New Deal, or the many Democrat offspring of their Green New Deal.

Their desperation leads them to glue their eyes and ears to the momentary gyrations of markets and numbers for confirmation, not recognizing that their favorite intrusions take time to broadly impact buyers and sellers. Frankly, Democrats don’t care, but Trump-enthusiasts seem to. Trump declares a tariff war on the world and Trumpers look to trumpet or bury the subsequent news of the consequences.

 

Thus, the Trump universe reacted to the dramatic fall in security markets after Trump’s early April declaration of a trade war by bellowing that it’s “Wall Street vs. Main Street”. Then markets began to recover once Trump loosened the torture screws (tariffs) in his racking of trade (Trade, by the way, is quintessential economics.). After he backed off, the supply side of the economy with its supply chains began to see light at the end of Trump’s trade-war tunnel. Markets (S&P 500 and the Dow) rebounded to levels before Trump politics were injected in the economic bloodstream. Trumpers are elated at the recapture of lost ground, but not the expulsion of the intruder who caused the retreat.

A healthy economy normally experiences growth, but Trump apologists are ecstatic about treading water. Trump central planning managed to turn an economy that perennially outperforms Europe and Japan into Europe and Japan. It’s even worse. Europe is outperforming us. The economist Dominic Pino crunched the numbers of a $1,000 investment in the S&P 500 and Dow from November 6, 2024 to the second week of May 2025 and compared it to the same input in the stock markets of the U.K., France, Italy, Spain, and Germany. They beat us (see #1). Make America Great Again (MAGA) should be refashioned into Make America Like Europe (MALE).

Of course, none of this matters much to the true believer. Turning economics into politics, or theology in the case of the true believer, is not only bad economics but it isn’t even economics.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “U.S. Stocks Continue to Underperform European Stocks”, Dominic Pino, National Review, 5/16/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/u-s-stocks-continue-to-underperform-european-stocks/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth