A blog in defense of western civilization by Roger Graf
Author: RogerG
I am a retired teacher and coach, Social Science Department chairman, community college instructor in Physical and Human Geography. I have attended 4 colleges with relevant degrees and certificates in History, Religious Studies/Philosophy, Education, and Planning and Community Development. I am also a 3rd generation native Californian, now refugee living in northwest Montana.
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?
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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
Trump brings in Chick-Fil-A manager to negotiate peace between Russia, Ukraine. The latest from the Babylon Bee news service. I thought you might want to know. I guess that his buddy, Steve Witkoff, was “you’re fired!” Question, though: Is it an improvement?
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”.
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.
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/
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
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.
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.
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
I’ve described Trump II (47) as Joe Biden’s second term based on Trump’s threats of prosecutions of businesses who might have to raise prices to survive the increased costs from his tariffs, something straight out of the Biden/Elizabeth Warren/AOC/Gavin Newsom playbook of 2021 to 2024. Recall “price gouging”, especially you Californians? Trump is not done shape-shifting. He mutated from a Reagan conservative in much of his first term to the occasional Biden of Trump II, and now full Ross Perot.
So, my first prognosis of Trump II, as Biden II, was correct in part, and then he peeled away his mask exposing his inner Ross Perot in his second time at the plate. Trump is finally getting the opportunity to implement Ross Perot’s spiel of the 1990s (see #1). It’s where he was all along. What we see in Trump II, the real Trump, is more of Perot’s Reform Party of the 1990s with its predilection for isolationism and protectionism, a general antipathy to foreign relations, and much less constrained by the influence of Republican Reaganism in Trump I.
That 1980s Reaganism, though, worked. A government committed to letting the economy work and a foreign policy determined to protect our allies and confront our adversaries sparked an economic wave that subsequent recessions, financial crises, and successive Leviathan-loving Democrats couldn’t fully suppress, and an era of relative international calm with the rollback of communism and the eventual fall of the USSR.
When Trump I followed the Reagan script, he and we succeeded. Red lines were enforced with swift actions. The Congressional Review Act deregulations of the 2017 Republican Congress and major tax cuts led to a second economic wave, only to be sidelined by a virus let loose from a ChiCom lab. By the time of the 2020 election, his own coarse behavior and the shutdowns turned Trump into a foul-smelling pariah to many swing voters. Many decided to give a declining octogenarian a try. Instead, the voters quickly got in 2021-2024 a radical-left culture war targeting children, the family, biology, education, the nation’s history, chaotic immigration, and bloated budgets, inflation, and an assault on energy and transportation.
It turned out once again that the coarse nose-pinching pariah became preferable by 2024 to an administration intent on aligning our lives to the wishes of a college sociology faculty. Back in 2020, I doubt if many people forecasted a left-wing war on their way of life. Now, in 2024, few expected a global tariff war or a foreign policy resuscitated from 1940, from Lindbergh’s America First Committee, in attempts to revive Obama’s Iran nuclear deal and the zeal for a deal, any deal, with Russia even if it meant humiliating and abandoning the first victim of blatant aggression on the continent of Europe not seen since the Third Reich.
To be clear, though, this latest round of electoral betrayal didn’t come from the right. It came out of Trumpism, a hodgepodge of opinions that mostly paralleled those of Ross Perot in the 1990s. The 1990s locked Trump into his current frame of mind. Perot had it in for George H.W. Bush, opposing Gulf War I and NAFTA. Negotiations creating a North America trading bloc, what later came to be called NAFTA, started with Reagan and proceeded through HW and finally concluded under Bill Clinton. In a 1992 presidential debate between HW, Clinton, and Perot, it’s clear that the Perot rhetoric of 1992 is the Trump rhetoric of 2024. Perot lambasted NAFTA as creating “a giant sucking sound going south” (see #2). Trump’s hot air about other countries “ripping us off” is a recycling of the rhetoric. For people as simple-minded as Perot and Trump, a “trade deficit” is a national expense, a debit from the nation’s nest egg going to starving foreign peasants willing to work for a pittance, thus that “giant sucking sound”.
It’s a child’s view of the world. They use “trade deficit” to describe a transaction whenever currency is exchanged for goods, which is what happens in international markets and between us and the supermarket down the street. By this slipshod reasoning, a “trade deficit” is likely to culminate every time a deal is struck with a Vietnamese clothing manufacturer or between us and Safeway. Life is filled with those horrifying “trade deficits”.
Many MAGA “elites”, the thought leaders of the movement, are consumed in hostility to imports, just like their orange man skipper. They are captivated by the abstract calculation of GDP, in the subtraction of imports in the formula, as if imports reduce a people’s economic well-being. There’s more to the story. Imports are subtracted to void double-counting since they are already an element in the “consumption” component (C) in the equation GDP=C+I+G+X, X being trade, the exports minus imports.
From this, the movement’s devotees point to a hollowed-out Rust Belt, to the “deaths of despair”, and almost any other measure of social decay as proof of a “subtraction” from our national inheritance, the alleged impact of imports. The tactic makes it easy to blame others and not consider what we did to ourselves. Little thought is devoted to the role of our extortionate labor unions or our discouraging tax rates at all levels or the vast expansion of the regulatory Leviathan that made the upper Midwest uncompetitive with the rest of the world, and the American South! Historically, one can scout the flight of American manufacturing from the Northeast (late 18th to early 19th centuries) to the Midwest (19th to the middle 20th) to the South of today in the unrelenting search for hospitable economic climes.
Though, it must be said that the adolescent thinking works well in the realm of politics. Politics does not exist if there isn’t a government to exploit, or enlisted to serve a group’s self-serving definition of the national interest. Self-interest does not take a holiday within the corridors of power. In fact, it is heightened. Narrow interests have a field day when government is getting ready to inject itself into another facet of life. It is true whether we are talking about mammoth infrastructure bills or the onset of a tariff war. Watch as these highly motivated scavengers scramble for as much of the public carcass as they can get. What comes out the other end is far removed from anyone’s conception of our Constitution’s public welfare.
Throughout the 2024 presidential contest, Trump and Biden, and then Harris, were running for the presidency of Pennsylvania in the words of the economist Dominic Pino (see #4). Why? No need for advanced physics here. They needed Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes, and were stumbling over each other to pander to the powerful steel workers union. Trump had more “outsider” credibility to suck up to them, and had the additional advantage of a brawling background of protectionist pimping, the Ross Perot thing. That’s how the protectionist sausage is made. It’s the nature of politics, of government. It’s the angling to hitch government power to a narrow group’s covetousness at the expense of the everyone else not in position to be heard.
Trump’s vision for America
This is not the self-interest of individuals in a free market, where people are free to walk away. It’s the self-interest of special interest groups to make economic war on rivals using state power. Under the aegis of government, there is no freedom to walk away. Our hegemonic labor unions love nothing better than to use government’s whip against their labor competitors – foreign and American non-union workers (88% of all U.S. workers) – and the better to insulate these labor monopolists from economic accountability for their excesses.
Case in point is the 2024 dockworkers’ strike. Historically, American organized labor married the federal government back in the 1930s (and some state governments sometime before) with Davis-Bacon (1931) and the National Labor Relations Act (1935). The mandate to pay union wages for government work, under the jargon of “prevailing wage”, and a union’s power to corral all workers at a place of employment put government in the hip pocket of these avaricious interests. More pay and less accountability on the job are at the top of the group’s list of demands. The dockworkers’ ILWU has no appetite for efficiency, innovation, and automation, only an interest in more pay, bennies, and featherbedding. Thus, the country that gave to the planet the world wide web has ports more antiquated than Mexico’s.
Elizabeth, NJ – October 1, 2024 – ILA member, Dave “The Rave” Hallerman encourages fellow longshoremen to chant and show union support. Members of the International Longshoreman’s Association gather at Port Elizabeth to support a strike after contract talks broke down.
This is the reality of protectionism. Yet, protectionism is lauded as the pragmatic choice and free trade an idealist’s dream. Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s trade negotiator in Trump I, wrote that free trade is “mythical” and “never existed except in the minds of academics” (see #5). This logic ignores the mud wrestling of political decision making that produces the protectionist policies. Right now, the chief proponents of this blinkered thought process are Trump and Vance. They and their MAGA courtiers, inveigh against “deindustrialization” and the need for “self-sufficiency”. Vance trots off to Europe in March and spouts an attack on free trade, among other things (see #3). Of course, he fails to acknowledge that the government in its free-for-all jostling of parasitical interests will define these terms and the means to address them. Forget about a true national interest. And they assume that free trade is “mythical” and “fair trade” (?) is the practical alternative, as if amazingly sanitized of self-serving political manipulation. Who’s naïve here?
Welcome to the mind of Ross Perot updated in the thoughts and deeds of Donald Trump, his sidekick J.D. Vance, and their MAGA cadre of influencers.
No doubt, this “populism” has a fervent inward demeanor. It applies to foreign policy as well as trade. Foreign relations that cannot be reduced to widget totals and dollars and cents are suspect in the Perot/MAGA psyche. A world made safe for our people and our civilization has less purchase with this crowd. It leads to absolutely disgraceful national policy vis-à-vis the world.
The Ukraine imbroglio brought out the worst in the MAGA ecosystem, Trump, and his people. Now in the seat of power, eager to fulfill Trump’s boast of “I’ll settle the war in 24 hours”, the Trump consiglieri quickly launched a bashing of the . . . victim, the only leverage at their disposal to effectuate a deal, any deal. In an April meeting in the White House, Trump and Vance berated Zelensky over highly contentious charges of corruption and waste of American aid. On Truth Social, Trump could not resist lambasting Zelensky as a dictator, and nary a word about the real thug in the deadly game, Putin. The waterboarding of Ukraine was intensified with threats of cutting off aid and ceasing intelligence sharing. You want to talk about a world turned upside down?
It is often repeated that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Wrong! It is “peace”, peace at any price, divorced from moral judgment, and repeatedly bloviating on the loss of life and destruction as if there is nothing to die for, not freedom, nor independence, nor honor. It is disgraceful. It is all that Trump talks about whenever the subject of Ukraine arises. It sounds like cover to hide the self-centered zeal to get a “win” no matter the cost to our nation’s reputation or the safety and security of a people fighting remain free.
Do not think for a moment that other nations fail to notice the treachery, this abandonment of honor for dishonor, of virtue for ignominy. It will be hard for them not to look upon us with greater cynicism, making our job of building alliances more difficult. We are turning our back on America as the shining city on a hill, as a beacon of a free and democratic moral order.
America’s premiere place in the world cannot be dismissed in the banal caterwauling about an American “world policeman”. The descent into national solipsism has extended into the silencing of our national voice in support of beleaguered peoples in China, North Korea, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc., by regimes not content with tyrannizing their own people but striving to threaten others within their reach. The administration’s wielding of the meat axe on all operations of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Martí, Radio Farda (Iran), Radio Free Asia, et al, is typical Trump, using a 150mm howitzer to silence the occasional fly of wokeism. The world’s miscreants are dancing a jig from Moscow to Beijing to Teheran to Pyongyang to Havanna.
Pres. Ronald Reagan making an address on Voice of America
Trump in his executive order cripples all the USAGM operations to the “minimum presence and function required by law”. So much for the Constitution’s Article II command that the president “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”. So much for “faithfully”. So much for the $860 million that Congress has appropriated for the agency this year. Keri Lake, appointed as “senior adviser” to the agency, and her people have issued a suicide note for the program in describing USAGM as “not salvageable”, and further, “From top-to-bottom this agency is a giant rot and burden to the American taxpayer—a national security risk for this nation—and irretrievably broken.” (see #7)
What’s MAGA’s main complaint? Left-wing bias. According to a senior Trump aid, “[USAGM] serves as the Voice for Radical America and has pushed divisive propaganda for years now.” If so, Mr. President, do your job and administer the program by removing the malefactors and their baleful influence, and manage the program more in line with our foreign policy imperatives.
In a continuum from Ross Perot to Donald Trump, a reboot of isolationism has taken hold. An America of outward responsibilities and moral clarity comes in a distant second to America First, aka America Alone. A great deal of naïveté is necessary to have an America Alone and not have the world crumbling down around you. In the 1920s, a general popular reluctance to engage the world was replaced with the fantasies of outlawing war (Kellogg-Briand Treaty) and disarmament-lite (Washington Naval Treaty). It did not take much longer than a decade before Hitler tore up the Versailles Treaty and the Wehrmacht went on a growth spurt, ditto for Italy, and Japan was laying the keel for the two largest battleships in history (Musashi, Yamato). The Third Reich, New Roman Empire, and Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere were on the march. The vacuum of naïveté is filled with aggression, and much worse.
What is Trump’s reaction to naked aggression? It goes something like this: they don’t attack us, we don’t care; we’ll bring “peace” by punishing the victim; and we’ll close down our efforts to bring uncensored voices to subject peoples because they upset the tender sensibilities of authoritarians.
One thing remains true about Donald Trump. Frankly, if there is not anything in it for him, like a Nobel Peace Prize, he does not seem to care. It is shameful.
This whole ignoble scene taking place before our eyes can be summed up in the presence of Laura Loomer around Donald Trump. She has peddled rantings about 9/11 being an inside job. She is a provocateur drawing attention to herself and specializing in dark conspiracies. She is to MAGA what Dylan Mulvaney is to the woke Left. She marches to the White House and shortly thereafter (April 3) Trump fires six National Security Council staffers. Like the dark web, there appears to be a dark Right that has privileged access to our president, a Right consumed in dark cabals whose number stretches into infinity.
Donald Trump fist bumps with Laura Loomer.
A person like Laura Loomer has access because we have a president who dabbles in the political occult. It is a legacy of Ross Perot.
RogerG
Sources:
1. For a conservative critique of Perot’s trade claims, turn to “Setting the Record Straight: Evaluating Ross Perot’s Allegations Against the NAFTA”, Michael Wilson, The Heritage Foundation, 9/30/1993, at https://www.heritage.org/trade/report/setting-the-record-straight-evaluating-ross-perots-allegationsagainst-the-nafta. Today’s Trump-loving incarnation of the Heritage Foundation is busy eating those words.
2. 1992 presidential debate in “NAFTA 20TH ANNIV – PEROT GIANT SUCKING SOUND”, CNN, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3LvZAZ-HV4
3. The affection for protectionism is resplendent in both Trump and Vance. Trump’s most beautiful word in the English language is “tariff”. Vance speaks in Europe and clashes with conservative writers over the alleged beauties of protectionism, euphemistically referred to as “fair trade”, in bombasts on X at https://x.com/TimesBChanging/status/1906201911453171977. Dan McClaughlin in “Sorry, Mr. Vance, Things Are Not the Same as People” in National Review, lays out the buffoonery In Vance’s thinking at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/03/sorry-mr-vance-things-are-not-the-same-as-people/.
4. Much thanks to Dominic Pino in “Free Trade Is How You Live Your Life”, National Review Magazine, May 2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/05/free-trade-is-how-you-live-your-life/
5. “The Free Trade Folly”, Robert Lighthizer, The American Compass, at https://americancompass.org/rebuilding-american-capitalism/productive-markets/the-free-trade-folly/
6. If you have the stomach for it, watch the entire 1993 Ross Perot/Al Gore debate on CNN’s Larry King Live and you will see Perot mannerisms in the current edition of Trump alongside the Trump spiel on free trade in the person of Perot. You’ll also notice the Perot pandering to organized labor like Trump. It can be viewed at https://youtu.be/0fi8OOAKuGQ?si=NnjfldhZK0VDLj7h.
7. “Trump orders the dismantling of government-funded, ‘propaganda’-peddling media outlet”, Emma Colton, Fox News, 3/16/2025, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-orders-dismantling-government-funded-left-wing-media-outlet-voa?msockid=287a0b967a9564c61c991f537b2f65ee
8. “Voice of America goes silent as Trump signs executive order gutting network’s parent agency”, Ariel Zilber, New York Post, 3/27/2025, at https://nypost.com/2025/03/17/media/voice-of-america-goes-silent-as-trump-guts-networks-parent-agency/
9. “Federal judge blocks Trump administration from dismantling Voice of America”, Michael Kunzelman and Rebecca Boone, AP, 4/22/2025, at https://apnews.com/article/voice-of-america-trump-f30c48df0c16de622ec5fd99ee6c627c
Legend has it, probably apocryphal, that George Washington’s Continental Army band played “The World Turned Upside Down” during the surrender ceremony of the British army after the Battle of Yorktown. A tune that was written to mock the Puritan parliament’s suppression of traditional Christmas festivities in the 1640s ended up expressing a historical truism: Give it enough time and things flip. For instance, the markers that defined the Left now are true of the Right and vice versa. It is profoundly true in this brief interlude called the Trump era.
Trump has abetted the rise of a sixties peacenik faction of the Right. The logic and thoughts of the Soixante-Huitards – radical Left, anti-War protesters who massed in Europe and America during 1968, the “peaceniks” – have resurfaced on today’s Right. The most recent example of the phenomena appeared a month ago on Joe Rogan’s podcast in a debate between Douglas Murray and Dave Smith. Watch it below, all nearly 3 hours of it.
If I closed my eyes, I could swear that I was hearing Tom Hayden or Abbie Hoffman or Rudi Dutschke (of “the long march through the institutions” fame) in the person of Dave Smith, the self-described libertarian and Donald Trump enthusiast. It’s de-ja-vu all over again, in an alternative universe.
Collage of the Sixties Radical Left
The confusion between generations that the situation engenders was aptly fictionalized in Rob Long’s tale of an imaginary surveillance transcript of two Harvard undergrads discussing their latest plans for an anti-Trump protest.
Rob Long
In it, they unwittingly sound like Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan leaving their conservative fathers dumbfounded by their lefty sons’ embrace of free trade and Friedman in their outcry against Trump and MAGA. Here’s Long’s depiction:
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Harvard University Undergraduate Surveillance ICE UNIT 7
BEGIN EXTRACT 09:33:02 04.04.25
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: So I was thinking, for the anti-Trump rally, we come at them with something powerful and progressive, like “From the River to the Sea, World Trade Should Be Free,” you know, something like that.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: That’s amazing. And I have some posters with, like, that guy’s face on it, who’s that guy again?
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Milton Friedman?
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Yeah!
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Awesome. We need a bunch of those.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: This is going to be an amazing demonstration. We’ve got the free trade stuff, and the Friedman guy stuff, we just need some other stuff . . .
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Someone in the steering committee meeting suggested, like, an RFK Jr. slam? Like, Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Big Pharma’s the Way to Go.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Not loving it.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: We can workshop some more. But I think we need to make a statement supporting our allies at Novartis and Bristol Myers Squibb.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Totally.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Any other allies we should support? Should we have a team carrying signs in solidarity with Walmart? They’re on the front lines of this trade stuff.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Good instinct. Let’s keep it diverse. Let the teams know we don’t want to be just anti-Trump. That just gets us negative coverage. We need to keep it on the key progressive issues, like free trade and military intervention.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Right. We made that clear in the planning meeting.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Yeah. Us too. Let’s keep it issue-based. That’s what’s going to have impact.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Right. But some of these issues? It’s like, I’m a senior and I could swear that my freshman year in my Intro Poli Sci class we were against free trade, because it was just a tool of the global patriarchal elite.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Yeah, I was in that class, too. Plus, were you in World Health Systems in Crisis? I’m pretty sure everything RFK Jr. is saying now was in our textbook. In fact, I know it was because I used some of his stuff about seed oils in my final paper.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: And in my freshman year Survey of Modern Geopolitical Strategy we were told that when two countries have a border dispute we’re not supposed to intervene.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Yeah. Does that mean I should tell the Ukraine team to pick another issue?
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: No, no. No. I mean, no, right? It’s just weird how everything changed. And it seems like some of the stuff we’re now in favor of is . . .
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Stuff my dad was saying a few years ago?
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Right! Exactly! My dad was always telling me that tariffs are taxes and taxes are bad.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Oh, that’s a good one! I’ll tell them to make up some posters with that one!
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Yeah. Yeah. It’s just that . . . it feels very strange to be agreeing with my Republican father. About politics and economics and stuff.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Agree with him? But he’s a Republican! He’s a Trumper!
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: No, actually he’s not. He’s not anything, I don’t think. Anymore. It’s kind of sad, actually. He just sits in the den with a lost expression on his face. When I showed him my Free Trade Now! tattoo he asked if it hurt and when I said no he asked where I got it.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Hey, look. Yes, things are a little upside down right now, but you said it yourself! We’re at Harvard! We’re not supposed to think about this stuff, we’re supposed to lead!
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: You’re right. You’re right.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: And you’re lucky your dad’s a banker. Mine is a college professor. All of this Gaza stuff hit him really hard. He didn’t know which side he was supposed to be on. We had to have him institutionalized.
END EXTRACT
** Rob Long, “The Long View”, National Review, June 2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/06/document-extract-surveillance-transcript/
****************
Again, the Dave Smith and Douglas Murray debate on the Joe Rogan Experience is linked below. Enjoy.
* Please watch the interview with Jennifer Hernandez, environmental law and land use expert and former chair of Holland & Knight’s West Coast Land Use and Environmental Group, for insights into the California housing crisis. You’ll be captivated by what she has to say.
*************
I am a native Californian and was a resident until retirement (2015). Why did I leave? Yes, I did not like the now entrenched and hard-core collectivism of the state. The lurch to the left, and in many cases the far Left, and the one-party monopoly on power, were serious problems for me. But then it dawned on me that all of it was popularly chosen. I was actually fleeing the state’s electorate.
These electoral choices had real world, smack-you-in-the-face repercussions. On many subsequent trips to the coast in the course of my long life in the state (mostly raised in Santa Maria), I noticed something that is really evident to some extent across the country, but is hyper-visible in California. The $70,000 sports car, homes, and the trails on the bluffs above the crashing waves are occupied by the grey-haired. Far more recuperations from hip surgery are evident than the paddle of little feet and strollers. Much of the area is a retirement home writ large.
The ritzy enclaves have a few scattered elementary schools, but I don’t know why. Grey hairs have declining fertility. The young ones are a rarity. Then it dawned on me. The state has chosen, through long-established popular consent, feudalism and its manorialism. Governance is feudal with a ruling and privileged generational “nobility” in a one-party state, and socially and geographically it is markedly divided into exclusive zones protected by gates and walls in some cases and a bevy of law, red tape, regulations, and a labyrinth of agencies in most others – the manorialism. The upshot is a favoritism for those who already have theirs – the Ins – and a suppression of the dreams of the striving – the Outs. Age wise, on the ground, it shows as the grey-haired in their seaside villas and in the driver’s seat of the $70,000 Corvette, while crumbs are left for blue-collars and the young with families.
Frankly, I couldn’t stomach it any longer. It’s more than political. It’s immoral. Each election was an episode of bashing my head against the wall. Nothing changed, and only got worse. Self-harm is not part of my psyche; so, I fled the state’s electorate.
“Socialism is the feudalism of the 19th century”, a quote loosely attributed to thinkers far afield as Adam Smith and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (see #1). A modern reformulation of the quote would read, “Socialism is the feudalism of California of the 21st century.” A heavily socialized economy, and oriented political system, produce a few winners (Ins) who have constructed the means to protect what they have acquired and enjoy at the expense of the Outs, the young seeking upward mobility.
At the top of the list of causes is the infatuation with environmentalism, a freezing in amber of the natural setting, with its continual invention of new eco-crusades such as climate change. Agencies, regulations, laws and lawsuits are exploited to preserve their playground by targeting the biggest threat, new housing. It’s been happening for decades.
The Boomers went from the Summer of Love and Dead Heads to nest eggs, great hiking opportunities, and fireplaces beside bay windows overlooking the ocean. The fallout was a housing shortage for the most vulnerable, the young who need the economy to grow to make room for them. That’s not compatible with the vision of the good life as defined by the eco-fatuations of the one-party state’s political constituencies: white-collar public sector unions; the keyboard demography (in Hernandez’s words) of entertainment, the education establishment, financial services, administration of all kinds, and Silicon Valley; and the litany of government-loving and ever-evolving transgressive victims’ groups who are closely allied to the above. Mom and dad and kids, and people who make things in the trades, have no place in this world. They are an afterthought.
A civilizational legacy is similarly an afterthought. No realistic consideration is given to the needs of future generations. The kids are ignored. The way that life is constructed in the state resembles a looting expedition. Use it up; let it crumble; I won’t be around anyway. Sucking it up so the young have opportunity and the simple necessities like shelter is inconceivable for those who already have theirs.
It’s not that this generational California aristocracy doesn’t care; it’s that they don’t know how to care. Their beloved command society which created the mess, and is geared to preserving their assets, is now directed to solve the housing crisis by of course . . . command. They actually think that more commands, diktats, will grant to the serfs what they need and not threaten their loot and position. Stack the plebes in “five-over-ones” (five floors above the parking) in $1 million units at a cost of $8,500 in monthly rent, all made “affordable” by subsidies, in a few plots limited to “transit corridors”. Commanding “affordable housing” doesn’t mean that it happens. No one can afford it, not the taxpayers nor the beneficiaries. It’s a joke. Don’t think for a moment about pruning the eco-zealotry or the NIMBY access to the Leviathan and their supportive nest of eco-vipers.
The return of a housing free market would be a godsend. Standing athwart is the enemy of free markets, big government. In an all-expansive state government, such as in California, the rats scurry about exploiting cracks and openings in the mammoth governmental maze to halt development, forever on the lookout to quash their hated “sprawl”, or anything that can endanger their property values or vistas. This is popular sovereignty, of a sort, but one with an open hostility to property rights. Their notion of property rights is their property and their “right” to extend a sphere of control that encompasses miles beyond their deed.
They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and it shows in ungodly housing prices, which is great for them but an impenetrable iron curtain for anyone stretching to reach for the next rungs to the good life, usually the young or anyone with insufficient funds to break into the exclusive club. Besides being a boon for U-Haul, this colossal regulatory contrivance is symptomatic of a solipsistic personality (very self-centered or selfish), a character flaw, written into the mode of governance. Imagine that, a character flaw as a governing principle.
The maiming of the housing supply is only one avenue for solipsism to sprout. It’s no secret that the huge majorities in the state are elated about not giving the young the slightest chance for a slice of the American dream by preventing them from exiting the womb in the first place. Abortion is wildly popular. But honestly, post Dobbs, the inner abortionist has been unleashed almost everywhere, even in red states (Montana, Ohio, etc.). However, a special ecstasy for it thrives in California. They’ve proudly legislated themselves as a “sanctuary” for ending unborn life.
Not only that, they are an official “sanctuary” for the young who managed to avoid the suction tube at the start of their life to mutilate themselves in “sex transition”. Those governing super majorities actually believe that they can outlaw chromosomes, or at least by law declare them subordinate to an adolescent’s erratic emotional state. It’s breathtaking, and shocking, shocking for parents made powerless in the face of government functionaries who are empowered to nurse and coddle the vulnerable and impressionable behind the backs of those who brought them into the world.
The whole state appears to be in an open state of war against the young, or anyone in those family-formation years clawing a path to the good life. The state is a bloody gauntlet for the young and blue collars, the Outs. And guess who is holding the clubs? Why, of course, it is the Ins. It’s more than a collectivistic state. It’s a solipsistic one. The two go hand in hand.
RGraf
Sources:
1. A general history of the statement is explored in Britannica at “Feudalism: Development in the 19th and 20th centuries” at https://www.britannica.com/topic/feudalism/Development-in-the-19th-and-20th-centuries
Who’s Leszek Balcerowicz? He was Poland’s Finance Minister in the country’s first non-communist government, then served twice as Deputy Prime Minister (1989–1991, 1997–2001) and as Chairman of the National Bank of Poland (2001–2007). He and his wife of 47 years, Ewa Balcerowicz, are economists. He oversaw Poland’s economic reforms from communist collectivism to free markets and democratic capitalism. By all accounts, it worked, while it failed in Russia, possibly owing to Russia’s penchant for sclerotic autocracy and state-empowered cronyism (let’s leave that for another time).
Why bring him up? He is the counterpoint to Trump and his bunch, the Fox News stable grafted onto the executive branch. I doubt seriously that Americans voted for isolationism and protectionism. Tariffs and withdrawal from the world didn’t show up in any polls of the public prior to November 4. Yet, those are what we are getting. Reluctance to defend the international order is evident in stories of Trump’s people pressuring Israel not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities and some voices in the administration expressing a willingness to cut Ukraine and NATO adrift. Protectionism is the sole remaining root for Trump’s tariff war on the world after every other explanation is reduced to incoherence. Balcerowicz’s story is a fresh breath of sanity in our domestic maelstrom of security and economic claptrap.
Balcerowicz faced a tall order in 1989 with the collapse of Poland’s communist regime. Collectivism, once begun, is like drug addiction. The recovery is hell, but eventually a healthier person is restored. Free market “shock therapy” was initiated, tough times ensued, Poland stuck with it, and today Poland is rivalling Japan in per capita income. It’s a lesson well worth remembering as we lurch toward Trump-inspired collectivist protectionism.
Heck, we can’t even reform our bankrupting entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) without a political bloodbath. Trump promises to do nothing about them, and is trying to centrally plan his autarkic economy through his “most beautiful word in the English language”, tariffs. Businesses are watching as their decades-long economic arrangements are hammered into rubble and markets tumble.
A marked contrast is Poland. Per capita (per person) GDP is a good measure of economic health. In 1990 it was Brazil-sized at $12,810, $4,000 behind Mexico’s. In 2023 it stands at $43,585, a mere $2,500 short of Japan’s (see #1). Japan, once the darling of industrial-policy Democrats with its state-management in The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), and an unacknowledged centerpiece of Trump’s economic outlook, has flatlined for three decades. Demographically, it is in the midst of social suicide with a 1.20 fertility rate, and now with an economy to match. Trump is eager to repeat the performance with his own MITI run out of the White House and his executive orders, something akin to imperial decrees.
Oh, 2026 is the year that Poland is projected to surpass Japan in per person wealth. Barring Trump dragging the world’s economy into the toilet, aka 1930, the future looks bright for a country near the front lines abutting Putin’s horde. Not so for us.
Poland shows the way forward, not Donald Trump. If only the Republicans had the guts to study the career of Leszek Balcerowicz. Instead, as they play footsie with Donald Trump, the tumbling securities markets forecast dark clouds. Sure, bear and bull markets do not always presage a nation’s future fortunes, but sometimes they do. All the elements of serious economic disruption are present: massive government meddling, Trump’s demand for irresponsible monetary policy to cover his tracks, shattered business relationships, mammoth uncertainty, and the beginning of the pullback of capital. If capital goes into hiding, we’re in serious trouble, Great Depression territory.
In the runup to our near future expect the demagoguery of all the Wall Street vs. Main Street blather to take center stage. The class warfare of J.D. Vance links rhetorical arms with AOC/Bernie Sanders. Is it all that inconceivable for our Vice-President to show up at AOC’s next “Fight Oligarchy” rally? One has to wonder. They might have to change the title to “Fight Wall Street”. Mmmmm, “Occupy Wall Street”? Are we there yet?
A simple economic lesson will be taught to our President and his palace coterie, while the rest of us live it. Wall Street and Main Street are as intertwined as Ford and its supply chain. They can’t occupy insular realms, bubbles, silos. A withholding of capital sets off dominoes that careen onto Main Street. Investors seek to avoid Trump-driven risks by not exposing their wealth (capital) to his whims. Following the inevitable chain of events, less capital means less maintenance and growth of enterprises which translates into less business for the diner and hardware store on Main Street.
It’s a lesson well understood by any economist worth their salt. Thank goodness Poland trusted theirs, led by Leszek Balcerowicz, and stayed the course. We, in America, would rather hitch our wagon to our erratic president, and his merry band of Fox News alumni, all adhering to his faulty presumptions. It’s great for Poland, bad for us.
RGraf
Sources:
1. Thanks to Dominic Pino of National Review for these insights in “The Stat: 2026” in National Review Magazine, May 2025, p.9.
Ford 2021 Bronco SUVs on the assembly line at the Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Mich., June 14, 2021. (photo: Rebecca Cook/Reuters)
Sometime in early 2027, President Trump will probably be impeached . . . again. Why? When the party in power botches things, they’re normally punished at the polls — “It’s the economy, stupid!” Inflation, shortages, business closings, people thrown out of work, recessions/depressions, etc., won’t make for a winning message. That bodes ill for the already impeachment-prone Trump, leaving aside the question of the legitimacy of any effort to remove him from office.
People are already lining up to do the favor, or predicting it. The reliably extremist Democrat Al Green (the one removed for disrupting President Trump’s March 4 speech to Congress) announced in February (see #1), “This president is unfit.” Further in the well of the House he said, “I rise to announce that I will bring articles of impeachment against the president for dastardly deeds proposed and dastardly deeds done.” Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon agrees. Four days after the November 4 election, Bannon augured (see #2),
“Hakeem Jeffries could be, will be, the speaker of the House in two years. And the first thing he will do in the early days of 2027 is move to impeach Donald Trump. Trust me. They’re gonna put $10 billion in back of him [to take the House]. They have nobody else.”
Trump is behaving in ways to prove them right. People vote their pocketbook. It’s more than a cliché. It’s true. Stake out a position that leads to harming the voters’ children and personal fortunes and they will send you packing. Biden and Kamala Harris, et al, are proof of concept. Trump is determined to join them.
I can’t think of a more politically self-destructive act than laying waste to a good portion of the economy just in time for the 2026 midterms. His tariff war – 10% across the board, 25% on our neighbors, potentially sky high on everybody else, and the concomitant uncertainty from all the flip flops – will wreak havoc on everything, maybe with the exception of most food processing. We’ll have food, but to hell with an affordable car, or truck, or SUV, or van, or 18-wheeler, if you can find one. Expect long lines at the grocery store filled with people holding food stamp (SNAP) EBT cards.
To bring home the consequences of the Trump foolishness, let’s just take a look at the rear undercarriage of an “American-made” SUV as it passes from the U.S. to Mexico, to Canada, and back to the U.S. The inputs for just the suspension strut towers go from Pennsylvania to Coahuila, Mexico, to Livonia, Michigan, for final assembly. The differential gearbox begins with aluminum from Quebec, then to casting in Coahuila, then for machining in Ontario, Canada, and then to North Carolina for assembly. The rubber bushings for the control arms starts with synthetic rubber from Monterrey, Mexico, and then to Iowa for their attachment to the control arms. The suspension’s cradle is from Kentucky, and other pieces such as the trailing blades and brackets emanate from Kentucky, Ontario, and Puebla, Mexico.
Assembly of the various parts into a rearend occurs at Vaughan, Ontario, and Detroit. Then it is rushed to Kansas City, Mo., Fort Wayne, Ind., and Windsor, Ontario, etc., for attachment to the final product. Under Trump’s tariff regime, the final product will be hemorrhaging blood from his tariffs. It’s insane.
Why the circuitous route? Doesn’t it seem unnecessarily complicated? Those questions would arise from your typically myopic and autarkic central planner, people like Peter Navarro and Donald Trump. This process pencils out in terms of value-added and cost-benefit according to the people with skin in the game. That’s what a market does when allowed to operate freely.
Why not just disentangle the various paths and make it all occur in the U.S.? Go ahead and try. Uprooting the suppliers and their plants will come at a terrible cost and take years. In the interim, people will be going to the polls to vote against the wreckage. The complexity of disentanglement was nicely expressed by Flavio Volpe, president of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, when he compared it to an omelet: “You can’t unscramble it once it’s done.”
Trump is Don Quixote charging windmills. Biden wanted to shove us into very expensive golf carts masquerading as family sedans. With Trump, even that screwball option may not be available. I don’t know about you but I’m keeping my 10-year-old Tundra and 9-year-old Venza. Buying new ones is likely to be a nightmare. Expect the entire auto industry to pull back as well. Now that’s the making of economic hard times.
Will the Democrats finally succeed in adding Donald Trump’s scalp to their lance this time? Well, as they say, third time is the charm.
RGraf
Sources:
1. “Donald Trump Faces New Impeachment Bid After Speech to Congress”, Martha McHardy, Newsweek, 3/5/2025, at https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-impeachment-al-green-2039765
2. “Steve Bannon Warns of Potential Third Donald Trump Impeachment”, Aila Slisco, Newsweek, 11/8/2024, at https://www.newsweek.com/steve-bannon-warns-potential-third-donald-trump-impeachment-1983079
3. Thanks to Ryan Mills of National Review for his piece “North America’s Auto Supply Chain Took Decades to Build. Trump’s Tariffs Could Crush It” at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/north-americas-auto-supply-chain-took-decades-to-build-trumps-tariffs-could-crush-it/
