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/
President Donald Trump holds a “Foreign Trade Barriers” document as he delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., April 2, 2025. (photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)
“Lies and victimhood make evil possible.” — quote attributed to Dennis Prager
Well, maybe not evil, or maybe so, but lies and victimhood are certainly not a recipe for success. The Left has long been in the grip of victimhood. It’s the base alloy for its DEI, CRT, critical legal theory, and all its “systematic” ideologies that have plagued us since they became Democratic Party dogma in the 20th and into the 21st centuries. Now, the Right has its own version in MAGA. And as John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival sang, “I see a bad moon rising”.
Why the pessimism? The Right morphed from being a correction to the Left’s manias to a thoroughgoing embrace of one of their big ones, victimhood. It’s in the MAGA title – Make America Great Again – meaning that America is a victim of a dizzying array of charlatans and miscreants, foreign and domestic. It’s a recurring script, pathetic as it may be, nothing new in the history of the world.
In that sense, we are busy making ourselves not “exceptional”. It’s not inevitable. We choose to be that way by electing leaders and absorbing their dark frame of mind. Donald Trump’s tariff war on the world is a play on this depressing display of American victimhood.
What’s more, it is based on falsehoods. The villain is said to be free trade, whether under the initials NAFTA or TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) or GATT or WTO, and we are said to be chumps, patsies, and victims in the story. Yet, for allegedly being fools, we are outpacing the rest of the world. Trump’s “Great Again” schtick actually misses the boat, and is working feverishly to have us join the rest of the G7 in missing the boat.
Let’s count the ways. The UK, Germany, and Japan have flatlined in GDP growth for at least 5 years or more (three decades for Japan). China’s 30-year spurt of phenomenal growth is levelling off, which is not surprising since they started from essentially zero; they’re export reliant economy is highly cyclical; and the central planning of industrial policy is famous for spectacular highs followed by spectacular lows, like a meth addict. The Soviet Union had 80 years of it and it imploded in the course of a week in 1991.
As for “Great Again”, we are already great and getting greater as the others languish. So says The Economist in its October 2024 report titled, “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust” (see #1). How so? At the start of NAFTA, we were about 40% of total GDP of the G7 countries. Today, we’re 50%. Globally, we were 21% of the world’s economy in 2012; today finds us at 26%.
Personal measures of wealth show us to be unsurpassed. Back to The Economist (see #1 and #2), “Average wages in America’s poorest state, Mississippi, are higher than the averages in Britain, Canada and Germany.” We’re also more productive per worker. Canada’s is 70% of ours. China is a third (and falling). If this makes us “chumps”, we should pray for the condition to continue.
So, Trump’s answer is a tariff war on the world and more caterwauling about our victimhood. Go figure. On April 2, he marched up to the microphone waving a piece of agitprop titled “Foreign Trade Barriers” as if any of it matters. Ironically, these alleged foreign government manipulations of trade haven’t made them any richer as we sailed past them. “Foreign Trade Barriers” is irrelevant in the big yacht race of life.
Trump and MAGA world can’t accept the fact that our economy is different, as different as our 1890 economy was from colonial times. Ag shrunk dramatically as a slice of the American economy back then, so an 1890 Trump and Peter Navarro (Trump’s sage of trade) would be running around pushing William T. Sherman’s “40 acres and a mule” as a plank in their “Make America Great Again” campaign. To heck with Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Ford; and to heck with 21st-century Navarro’s craze for manufacturing. It would have been stillborn if this dynamic duo had their way at the dawn of American global economic dominance.
Peter Navarro at the White House
21st-century America isn’t a manufacturing basket case. The value of our manufacturing is larger today than it was 1990. We just employ fewer people as we manufacture more higher-end goods. As Rich Lowry puts it in his piece (see #2), “As we have lost jobs in manufacturing (5 million since 1990), we’ve picked them up in services (nearly 12 million) and in transportation and logistics (more than 3 million).” More tech and aerospace and less textiles and shoes. Those service jobs don’t concentrate around the burger-flipper sector. If they did, they’d be the most expensive burger-flippers since Ray Kroc, since the birth of the Whopper, that is Wagyu-paddied Whoppers.
Trade barriers or no, the proof is in the pudding. But Navarro doesn’t eat pudding, at least not the kind of pudding produced by our economy.
Navarro, Trump’s buddy in protectionism, has always been a loud advocate of central planning, government management of economic activity, in its reincarnation in Democrat neo-socialist “industrial policy”, and more. Before he joined the Trump circus, Navarro was part of the emerging California Democrat “establishment” in the 1990s that would come to dominate the state down to the present day.
By 1998, the Democrat tone for California was set in the words of people like Navarro (see #4). Eco-manias and growth-control was the zeitgeist of his campaigns for elective offices in San Diego in the 1990s. He headed an activist group called “Prevent Los Angelization Now (PLAN)”, of San Diego, and pushed almost any measure at hand to restrict the housing supply, such as preventing migration into the city, growth-control ordinances, tight controls on sewer and water hookups, fees, fees, and more fees, etc. It’s a familiar story that began in Petaluma in the 1960s and spread up and down the state’s populous coastal plain.
Navarro was hip deep in branding the word “developer” as something akin to “child molester”. Without his type of apparatchiks at the helm of local government power, according to Navarro, developers “will leave air pollution, overcrowded schools, underpoliced streets, sewer systems bursting at their seams, and traffic jams that can (and often do in California) make grown men cry.”
Today, Californians are crying, despondent over their inability to afford shelter and having to flee to other states not so beholden to the California Navarros. California has a serious housing shortage, duhhh! Getting approval to nail two studs together is a nightmare in the state. Decades of hostility to supply has attracted some roosting chickens. The chronically constrained supply has propelled the median rent in the state to $2,850, 33% higher than the national average (see #5).
Navarro’s legacy is Democrat Assemblyman Corey Jackson of Riverside. Jackson recently proposed a bill that would allow college students to sleep in their cars because many can’t afford California rent (see #7). People that think like Navarro have engineered a housing market that has relegated students to their cars. Expect student parking lots to resemble homeless encampments. What Navarro helped to bring about in California, he promises for the entire nation when Trump assigned to him the role of influencer to tinker around in the nation’s economic relations with the world.
It’s not that Trump is unaware of Navarro’s inclinations. He agrees with Navarro. Trump and Navarro have a childlike zero-sum view of the world. Bill Fulton, former head of San Diego planning, noticed the symmetry between Trump’s view of trade and slow-growthers like Navarro (see #3): “More development creates losers as well as winners, so you’d better box out the bad development or at least make those developers pay through the nose.” A rising tide raising all boats, or a growing pie that unavoidably means bigger slices for everyone, is inconceivable to someone like Navarro. Thanks to Trump, Navarro has the opportunity to muck up the nation’s economy like he helped to do for the housing supply in California.
Steve Bannon
And he’s doing it along with another fellow traveler in MAGA world, Steve Bannon. Navarro wants to centrally plan trade with his beloved tariffs. Bannon wants to bash the rich with tax increases. Here’s Bannon (see #6):
“That’s why it’s so important to not extend the tax cuts for the wealthy and actually do more tax cuts for working class people. We do this, that is a fundamental shift politically that will cement in the foundational elements for a 1932-type realignment.”
Update to Steve Bannon (see #8): the top 20% of income earners pay 83.6% of federal income taxes. As for the bottom rungs straying into the middle and working classes, the bottom 20% only get money out of the system. Their income tax rate is negative, -4.3%. The next 20% from the bottom pays essentially 0% at 0.1%. What does Bannon want, out and out income confiscation? That would place him in the company of Lenin.
Why not just vote for Democrats? MAGA is associated with the wrong party. Bannon believes, like Navarro, like Democrats, that government can micromanage us into utopia. Bannon opines on the tips, overtime, and Social Security pandering while bashing other Republicans as follows, “He’s [Trump] furthering the economics of working-class and middle-class America, and it cements the fact that the Republicans are not the country club Republicans of the Bush junta.” So, according to Bannon and any other socialist who has graced the public stage, government is the fount of all good things, and no need to pull the rug back on a ravaged housing supply and American economy as they feed The Wealth of Nations and Reaganomics into the shredder.
Such is the nature of Populism. It is the repository of crackpots, of anyone who wishes to steer government bennies to favored victims, while making real victims of those seen in a lesser light. Now we see the real home of zero-sum and it is in city hall, the state capitol, Washington, D.C., and the myriads of agencies and government offices scattered across the fruited plain. A favored few demographics are rewarded at the expense of the vast millions. None of it works, and results in the loaded U-Hauls exiting California and thousands thrown out of work by enterprises starved for capital and nonfunctioning supply chains.
Senator Russell B. Long put it best when he said in 1973, “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax the fellow behind the tree.” Welcome to the Populism of Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, and the erratic and incoherent Donald J. Trump.
It’s more than Populism that ties them together. It’s the pathetic wallowing in victimhood. It blinds a person to a reality that isn’t as dismal as these lunkheads make it out to be. It heaps blame on others and diminishes personal responsibility. In a nutshell, it is as Dennis Prager put it, “Lies and victimhood make evil possible.”
Yes, the pity party is getting tiresome.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust”, Simon Rabinovitch and Henry Curr, The Economist, October 14, 2024, at https://www.economist.com/special-report/2024/10/14/the-american-economy-has-left-other-rich-countries-in-the-dust
2. Thanks to Rich Lowry for bringing these insights to my attention in “Guess What? We’re Already Rich”, National Review, 4/15/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/04/guess-what-were-already-rich/
3. “How San Diego’s housing wars helped Peter Navarro shape Trump’s trade wars”, Andrew Keatts, Anxios, 4/15/2025, at https://www.axios.com/local/san-diego/2025/04/15/san-diego-housing-war-peter-navarro-trump-trade-war-tariff
4. Check out Peter Navarro’s own words in his “Peter Navarro fights Lynn Schenk, Susan Golding, Nancy Casady to run for Congress”, authored in 1998 during his run for Congress, at https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1998/apr/23/san-diego-confidential/
5. “Rent drives up California’s cost of living”, Lynn La, Cal Matters, 8/2/2024, at https://calmatters.org/newsletter/california-cost-of-living-rent-increases/
6. “Republicans Weigh Raising Taxes on Highest Earners”, Audrey Fahlberg, National Review, 4/15/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/republicans-weigh-raising-taxes-on-highest-earners/
7. “California Bill Proposes Letting Students Sleep in Cars On Campus”, KFI 640 AM, 4/14/2025, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/california-bill-proposes-letting-students-sleep-in-cars-on-campus/ar-AA1CTKhM
8. “Is it True the Rich Don’t Pull Their Weight When it Comes to Paying Taxes?”, Amelia Kuntzman and Sara Wagoner, Economic Policy Innovation Center, 4/14/2025, at https://epicforamerica.org/federal-budget/is-it-true-the-rich-dont-pull-their-weight-when-it-comes-to-paying-taxes/
9 Much thanks to Dominic Pino at National Review for his socioeconomic breakdown of tax receipts in “Top 40 Percent of Earners Pay Nearly All Federal Income Taxes” at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/top-40-percent-of-earners-pay-nearly-all-federal-income-taxes/
President Donald Trump reacts as he delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., April 2, 2025. (photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)
In a career in the public eye, Donald Trump hasn’t hesitated to brag about his IQ. In 2013, he posted on Twitter (see #1), “Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.” He’s repeated it often enough to not dismiss it as just a joke.
Which brings to mind Stephen Hawking’s quip about IQ braggarts (see #3): “People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.”
The fact of the matter is, no one, not even Donald Trump, knows his IQ. I can only conclude from his abundant public utterings that this is no “genius” at work. He may have some competence in a particular narrow field, but he is ill-informed or filled with coarse opinions outside of it. Typical of this form of Trump-speak is today’s jewel (4/7/2025) from Truth Social (see #4):
“Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION, and the long time abused USA is bringing in Billions of Dollars a week from the abusing countries on Tariffs that are already in place. This is despite the fact that the biggest abuser of them all, China, whose markets are crashing, just raised its Tariffs by 34%, on top of its long term ridiculously high Tariffs (Plus!), not acknowledging my warning for abusing countries not to retaliate. They’ve made enough, for decades, taking advantage of the Good OL’ USA! Our past ‘leaders’ are to blame for allowing this, and so much else, to happen to our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Here’s a few takeaways. This is no “genius” at work. Declaring victory in his trade war against the world is a bit premature, only 4 days after he declared economic war on the world. Interesting side note: Where’s Congress as the president on his lonesome declares a trade war against the planet?
The purpose of tariffs is to punish foreigners and American consumers, not to rake in “Billions of Dollars” for subsidy boondoggles or to make the tax cuts and the tax-free tips, overtime, and Social Security pandering pencil-out for the Congressional Budget Office. As is likely, the overall economy will take a hit when the economic casualties from the trade war roll in: all tax revenue starts to slide, and business and personal spending begins to crater. Not more money but less is in the offing.
Littered throughout in this piece from the “genius” is the pathetic complaints of the constantly aggrieved, America as a victim of the entire world. If this came from one of my children, after the tantrum, I’d send the kid to their room after a serious come-to-Jesus moment. Instead, we make the guy president.
It says a lot about us, or does it? People vote for a person for any number of reasons. Nowhere, not in any pollsters’ surveys were tariffs on the list of most serious concerns of voters. It is for Trump, and they are a key to his understanding of the world. We weren’t necessarily bamboozled. We heard the tariff talk, but relegated it to the back of our mind, reminding ourselves of the pre-pandemic Trump I and the wreckage left by the Dems. We didn’t vote for Trump wreckage.
Trump may think himself a “genius”. Instead, what we got was your average, run-of-the-mill big blowhard. I’ve experienced such people throughout my life. You’ll find them in locker rooms, bars, among friends and family. We just happen to have one in the Oval Office. And he’s making us look pathetic. MAGA must be replaced with MAPA, Make America Pathetic Afterward.
RogerG
Sources:
1. This Trump IQ braggadocio can be found on X at https://x.com/realdonaldtrump/status/332308211321425920
2. More occasions for Trump’s bragging can be read at “Donald Trump’s IQ obsession, in 22 quotes”, Chris Cillizza, CNN, 10/10/2017, at https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/10/politics/donald-trump-tillerson-iq/index.html
3. The Hawking quote can be read at https://www.socratic-method.com/quote-meanings/stephen-hawking-people-who-boast-about-their-i-q-are-losers
4. This example of Trump braggadocio can be read from his Truth Social account at https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114296287858068040
5. Thanks for the insights from the inestimable Jim Geraghty of National Review at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/why-team-trump-is-so-gung-ho-about-tariffs/
Then-President-elect Donald Trump walks with Then-President Joe Biden at the White House on the inauguration day of Donald Trump’s second presidential term in Washington, D.C., January 20, 2025. (photo: Nathan Howard/Reuters)
Remember the Biden Left’s attempt to paste “greed”, “price gouging”, “greedflation”, and “price fixing” on the broad price jumps during his time in office? Biden’s head of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, threatened FTC investigations and prosecutions for the assumed price gouging. Well, the little girl in front of the snowy tv screen in the movie “Poltergeist” put it best when she said, “They’re baaaack!” What’s baaaack? The Biden-type threats of investigations and prosecutions of American businesses for legitimately responding to price signals, this time by Trump and his people.
The scrambling by American businesses to reconstruct their elaborate supply chains and respond to Trump-induced demand pressures for wholly American-made goods and services will force our enterprises into a completely untenable position. Prices will have to rise, sometimes quite dramatically, to recover the costs of this increased burden or face serious economic injury. Businesses are in the jaws of the vice: crippling costs and Trump threats.
So, here comes the Bidenesque threats. On X, Andrew Ferguson, Trump’s FTC Chairman, posted this:
“President Trump is reorienting our nation’s economy to put Americans first. As we adjust to the new economic order, the @FTC will be watching closely to make sure American companies are vigorously competing on prices. These necessary tariffs should not be interpreted as a green light for price fixing or any other unlawful behavior. We will always protect American consumers.” (See #1)
Notice the continuity of jargon – “price fixing”? Notice the central planning instinct – “new economic order”?
Andrew Ferguson, FTC ChairmanLina Khan, Biden’s FTC Chair
And this on top of Trump’s earlier verbal dagger directed at auto CEOs to not raise prices in the wake of his auto tariffs. It came through a conference call with auto execs in early March (see #3).
Trump and his people are unintentionally acknowledging that his beloved tariffs are economic disasters. He may succeed for a time in dampening prices in sheer totalitarian intimidation, but the severe costs of monumental dislocation will ooze out anyway. Don’t expect “onshoring” to save our bacon. It may occur to some extent but it won’t make up for the massive losses throughout the broad reach of the economy. Save 1,000 jobs by sacrificing 75,000. GDP won’t grow in spite of the “onshoring”. It will fall and then stagnate. That’s the lesson of the 1930s.
On one thing, Trump was completely honest when he said, “I couldn’t care less if they [the auto companies] raise prices . . . .” It’s the mindset of a central planner. Do you think for a moment that Stalin cared about the individual Russian peasant or worker in his collectivization of agriculture into communes (“kolkhozes”) and the “Industrialization” of his Five Year Plans? Trump’s response is what one should expect from the emotionless gaze of the zealous ideologue with great power. Trump is a doctrinaire utopian, and that puts him in the same league with the eco-totalitarians of the Green New Deal.
You didn’t know it – me included – but you may have voted for Ross Perot (reincarnated, of course) and his Reform Party when you checked Trump’s box on the ballot. The tariff fetish was central to Perot and his Reform Party, and that’s where we found Trump in the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s where we find him today.
Trump and Ross Perot
Yep, Trump is a “disruptor”, as Lenin and Stalin were before him. The 20th century was littered with them. Sadly, it seems to come with so-called “change-agents” of whatever stripe.
RogerG
Sources:
1. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson’s threat can be found on X at https://x.com/AFergusonFTC/status/1907864397822787768
2. Thanks to Andrew Stuttaford for alerting me to Ferguson’s X post in “Tariff Tales: Borrowing from the Biden Playbook?” in National Review’s The Corner of 4/5/2025 at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/tariff-tales-borrowing-from-the-biden-playbook/
3. “Trump Warned U.S. Automakers Not to Raise Prices in Response to Tariffs”, Josh Dawsey and Ryan Felton, Wall Street Journal, 3/27/2025, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-warned-us-automakers-not-to-raise-prices-in-response-to-tariffs/ar-AA1BOeKQ
Trump and his tariff executive order, April 2025Clash between Trump supporters and the radical Left in Washington, D.C., December 2020
Shakespeare wrote “Julius Caesar” around the turn of the century, 1599 or 1600. In a story that loosely shadows the rise and fall of Julius Caesar, the Bard of Avon presents a tale of hubris, sycophancy, cowardice, and vengeance. The timeline went from “crossing the Rubicon” to the “Ides of March” – “Et tu, Brute” – “Even you, Brutus”. The real story is one of overweening ambition for fame, glory, and power, a chief feature of the politics of the late Roman Republic. The Roman Senate had begun to neuter itself in destructive and self-negating factions. When it finally rose up, it was too late. In the end, after the ascension of Augustus, the empty shell of the republican form was kept, but the reality was an empire with an emperor, an emperator, an autocrat.
Was the rise and fall of Julius Caesar really the end of the republic? Actually, it could rightly be argued that the crisis had been building over the prior century in occasional civil wars and dictatorships. So, a single break point can be difficult to perceive. Murkiness is a constant problem in historical analysis. Nonetheless, a well-trodden path is discernable, and a superficial facade of government took shape. Are we there yet?
Emperor Augutus presiding over the Roman Senate
Appearances matter, but are false. Stalin’s Constitution of 1936 was an exemplar of consensual governance and personal rights, in print form only. The reality was clearly different, as exemplified by the NKVD, purges, and a vast gulag archipelago. Adolph Hitler ruled under the emergency provisions of Article 48 of the democratic Weimar Constitution. He had no other constitution. He combined the executive offices of chancellor and president unto himself under an Article 48 “emergency” (the 1933 Reichstag fire, the “Jewish Menace”, the “Red Menace”, etc.) and he was off and running. Are we there yet?
“Emergencies” abound in these scenarios, and are frequently conjured, or grossly exaggerated, for political gain. Is America following a similar arc? Our arc could be said to have begun with the rise of a political movement, Progressivism, with a lot of late 19th century Populism thrown into the mix. The “messiness” of real consensual government with its localism, smelly back rooms, federalism, separation of powers, and checks and balances was thought to be in need of streamlining by a strong chief executive and his administration of “experts”. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson laid out the rationale and FDR raised it to an art form, followed by a host of Democrats from JFK and his “best and brightest” (mostly Ivy League grads), LBJ, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, to Joe Biden. And, now, the Republicans add their own entrant to the list in the person of Donald Trump.
Congress delegated the tariff power to the president in “emergencies” – the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) – and sealed their fate by allowing him to define it. The seed was sown and our arc proceeded. A prior Republican president toyed with emergency-autocracy – Nixon and his wage-and-price controls in the “Nixon Shock” of 1971 – but none operated with such brashness and bravado, completely ignoring the legislative branch, as Donald Trump did in his edict of across-the-board tax increases, his tariff taxes on the world, literally the world. It’s breathtaking.
Congress is only left with a veto. But Congress is a shell of its former self, as the Roman Senate was in confronting Sulla or Julius Caesar. One faction, Trump’s fellow Republicans, have mostly fallen into Trump sycophancy (Caesar sycophancy?) and will prevent Congress from reasserting its Constitutional powers. A few Senate Republicans bucked the toadyism and voted with the minority Democrats to approve a resolution opposing the prior tariff edict on Canada. The House leadership, all Republicans, stonewalled the move to condemn Trump’s imperial decree. Thus, the proposal was relegated to irrelevancy. Evenly divided between Caesaristic sycophancy and neo-Marxism, Congress has cancelled itself.
The irony of it all is that the Democrats are not a responsible alternative. The picture resembles the street scenes of Berlin in 1920s Weimar Germany. Patriotic German war vets faced off against the Bolshevik-inspired Reds in street battles. Many vets were drawn to ultra-right rhetoric and its mythology of victimhood about the war (WWI) while the Reds were excited for headway in the international proletarian revolution. Today, the choice facing Americans is between neo-Marxism (the Democrats) and a mythology of perpetual American victimhood (the Trump Republicans).
The German Freikorps of the Right in 1920s BerlinThe Roter Frontkämpfer-Bund, the paramilitary of the Reds in Berlin, June 1927
The victimhood angle of the ultra-right in Germany – the “stab in the back” legend – strikingly parallels the trade victimhood of the Trump Right. Victimhood sold well in 1917 Russia, 1920s and 30s Germany, and apparently so in America of the 21st century’s third decade. Victimhood is embraced by both the left and right. Both have their competing oppressor/oppressed schticks.
History provides examples of these various appeals devolving into the leadership of a single person, the so-called cult of personality. The leader alone (Marx, Lenin, il Duce, etc.) are thought to possess the unique gifts of foresight to establish the “truth” and the “path forward”. Power accumulates in the hands of the leader and a select few around him. He is acclaimed to be the embodiment of wisdom.
Roman emperors carried the title of Augustus – exalted, venerable. Emperor was the reality, but they were construed to be the wise guarantors of the “rights” and “prosperity of the people”, and the nation’s “protector”. Their power need have no constitutional writ, but these suzerains still felt compelled to maintain the illusion of a republic.
At this point, the system falls victim to Hayek’s “knowledge problem”. Like all accurate insights into the human condition, it is rooted in human nature and thus a warning for all time. It’s a testament on how a professed victimhood can lead to a real and widespread victimhood. The movement’s scheme of centralized economic decision-making can’t work. Real functional knowledge is naturally dispersed among millions of actors in a free market. When that freedom is replaced by the “wisdom” of the one or a few, whether it be a politburo, a Soviet Gosplan, or handpicked toadies in the Council of Economic Advisers to reorder the entire world’s trading system, the wheels come off the cart. We’ve seen this play out time and time again. Well, here we go again.
Friedrich Hayek
The light hand of negotiations and trade deals is replaced by the heavy hand of Trump’s tariff Frankenstein. Your friends become cynical of you, and your enemies remain as they were, with a few more joining their ranks.
An examination of Trump’s tariff monster makes this clear. Who gets hit by Trump’s tariff truncheon? Everybody, friends and foes alike; well, no, not everybody, nor evenly. Friends get especially slammed because they are friends. We trade with them a lot and therefore they run the risk of having a “trade surplus” with us. The economic munchkins running the tariff show in Trump ll are fixated on “trade deficits” and “trade surpluses”. They are all that matters to these blinkered apparatchiks.
Their magic tariff formula is based on our “trade deficit” with that country, with a 10% floor, not that nation’s tariffs. So, the much-ballyhooed reciprocity argument is made mute. Others in the media, such as Hugh Hewitt, try to act as shaman of Trump’s brain like an ancient seer reading a flock birds before a battle, trying their best to make sense of Trump’s recklessness. Reciprocity was one angle. Then it was Trump implementing the Art of the Deal. When that couldn’t hold water, national security against the threat of the CCP jumped to the top of the shrinking list of rationales. Then the tariffs targeted the world, with or without the CCP, with no guarantee that they’ll be dropped, or if they’re negotiable.
That leaves my pet theory for Trump’s tariff fetish. Look no further than Trump’s 1990s dalliance with the Perot/Buchanan Reform Party and their fixation on Perot’s “great sucking sound” (jobs lost to Mexico). Vance alluded to it – self-sufficiency – in his recent verbal fusillade directed at RedState blogger Bonchie. The word for national self-sufficiency is autarky. The ancient, primitive drive for national or tribal self-sufficiency – autarky – has fueled the lust for conquest and empire for thousands of years. The peaceful trade to fill national or tribal needs and wants is seen as less ennobling than the thrill of military subjugation. The Mongols headed south to conquer China, then the Hun bands headed west to lay waste to Russia and the Hungarian plain, threatening the Roman Empire. Operation Barbarossa in June of 1941 was emblematic of autarky in the form of “lebensraum”. 19th century colonialism rode on its back. Don’t trade, seize, and in that way achieve self-sufficiency.
Attila and his Huns in their drive for autarky
For Trump, take the Panama Canal and Greenland, intimidate Canada into being a client state, and punish American consumers for preferring foreign goods while simultaneously terrorizing American firms from their overseas economic arrangements. Bring everybody home and lock up the country while expanding its territorial reach. Attila would be envious.
Autarky is a fool’s errand. Poor countries are self-sufficient. They never develop; they are stunted. Development requires freedom, not an empowered few implementing the errant beliefs of a hubristic leader and his claque. America under Trump is forsaking the decades-long web of peaceful and voluntary trade arrangements for the diktats of what has quickly come to resemble an imperial court. The spectacle would have been familiar to anyone given access to Attila’s tent.
The metamorphosis of the Right is shocking to behold. Former free traders when Reagan was around have morphed into full-blown protectionists in the reign of Trump. Take talk show host Hugh Hewitt. Yesterday, he announced his fealty to protectionism (4/3/2025), eliminating all pretense. The arguments are the same, old and worn out as those of 17th century French mercantilists (refuted by Adam Smith) and the central planners of the 1980s Democrats’ “industrial policy” (in opposition to Reagan’s tax cuts, free markets, and free trade). The Republican Hewitt is now a 1980s Democrat, or an acolyte of Louis XIV’s First Minster of State, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
The operative catalyst of the flip-flop is the presence of Donald Trump. A mania builds around a person and others quickly fall in line. The Right and its media web are as busy discrediting themselves in their fealty as the legacy media in their fawning support of the Democrat Left.
Warning! Choose wisely the horse to hitch your wagon.
The big question remains. Are we now ruled by an imperator, a person powerful enough to dismantle with a single stroke of his pen the long-established and peaceful economic arrangements of millions of people? Are our choices limited to Caesarism or neo-Marxism? It seems to be so. It’s the 1920s Berlin street confrontations of extremists all over again. In such circumstances, can the republic long survive? I am beginning to have my doubts.
I am starting to be convinced that DOGE should investigate public education, and many of the private schools to boot. Results are abysmal. We rank at the bottom of international educational measures for developed countries.
Falsehoods originating long before our birth are allowed to persist uncorrected. If education is enlightenment, then what we do is far from it. Misconceptions are understandable regarding policies and programs whose history is only weakly discerned. At this point, the falsehoods take on a life of their own and stretches into folklore.
No better example can be found than the folklore surrounding Social Security. It is assumed to be like a regular pension with contributions, investments, later payouts, and a cash-out option. I follow on social media “The Other 98%” page and found this rip-roaring delusion:
“Repeat after me: Social Security is our money, that we earned by working and paying into the fund – EACH paycheck and not an ‘entitlement’!”
But repeat after me: No, it is not treated as your money, and it is an “entitlement”. Fact.
Try this experiment: go into your local Social Security office and request the return of your contributions. It is an option with any other pension, like a teacher’s pension. After initial puzzlement, the clerk will inform you that it is impossible. Why? Your contributions have already passed into the checks of current retirees. The only way for you to receive any money from the program is to qualify and then wait for your monthly allotment to arrive in your bank account like any recipient.
The requirement of qualifying is what makes it an “entitlement”. You collect benefits when you meet the law’s qualifications. In other words, you are “entitled”, entitled by law.
Now, what about the claim that it is your money? Yes, it once was, till your employer, as required by law, took it away to be combined with his in the form of FICA, in like manner as income tax withholding. It is recorded by the Social Security Administration and then shipped off to a retiree. See, a Social Security pension operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. Yes, pay-as-you-go. Money goes in, money goes out. Like any tax, money that was once yours is now owned by the government (the Social Security Administration) and delivered into the possession of a qualifying recipient.
Pay-as-you-go explains the befuddlement of the government employee and the reason that it was once your money but not now. A retiree during your work life can now pay rent. The same opportunity will present itself to you when you qualify for the entitlement. Current workers pay for current retirees.
That was the nature of the program from the beginning. The Social Security Act passed in 1935, the collection of taxes began in 1937, and the receipt of benefits started in 1940. The first generation of recipients paid at most 3 years of taxes before qualifying, which is too little time for them to be just “getting their money back”. The pattern was set from this point on. Nobody is getting their money back. They are getting somebody else’s money.
Harsh but true. The whole scheme relies on a generational imbalance of many more contributing workers than recipients. The number of contributing workers per recipient may have been as high as 100 in 1940. By 1945, it was down to around 40 and has fallen ever since (see attached graph). Today, it hovers between 2 and 3. The burden to support one retiree falls on 3 people instead of 40. In other words, taxes must skyrocket or the national debt balloons. One has happened (tax increases) and the other is happening (inflation of the national debt).
Just looking at one year, 2020, Social Security ran up a deficit of $65 billion. By 2030, it is estimated to be $300 billion in arrears (see attached graph). The number is much bigger than a matter of waste, fraud, abuse, and illegals. We have a birth dearth. A fertility rate of 1.7 will not cut it. And people live longer to receive benefits. A generational pay-as-you-go gambit is only sacrificing the opportunities of your grandchildren as the growing national debt absorbs the capital for their future.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and nutritional assistance account for 65% of the federal budget. Defense garners 13%. Since 65% of the federal budget are entitlements – qualify and you get – there is no set amount for them. Payments on the national debt add another 16%. Their spending is on autopilot.
Defense is discretionary and requires a limit. Work this out in your head. So, what is essential to government’s reason for existence is constrained by a limit, and what is not is on autopilot with no limit.
Since people will holler bloody murder if there is talk of reforming the entitlements, that will leave only two options to avoid a 1970’s Argentina-style repudiation of debt. One is to not avoid it and let the debt balloon by wallowing in folklore. The other is to gut defense and ask government employees to work for free.
The thinking of “The Other 98%” is a national suicide pact.
RogerG
Sources:
1. A great primer on the federal budget can be found in “CATO Handbook for Policymakers: Social Security”, Michael Tanner, CATO, 2022, at https://www.cato.org/cato-handbook-policymakers/cato-handbook-policymakers-9th-edition-2022/social-security
Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, in 2024
All 435 members of the House of Representatives and 35 Senate seats are exposed in the 2026 midterm election. What will the political climate look like after another two years of Donald Trump? Midterms are not kind to incumbents, possibly due to the regular foot-in-mouth disease that breaks out at the dawn of a new administration. It provides additional advantages to an out-party motivated and keen to score hits. The blowback from the gaffe is compounded if it is an affront to the movement’s success in the first place.
Obama had his “… it’s not surprising … they [people in flyover country] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them ….” He added to his list of blunders with the howler, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it”, which the reliably left-of-center PolitiFact honored with its 2013 Lie of the Year (see #1). It is much more than gaffes, but they work to illuminate policy goofs.
No wonder the Tea Party entered history, and in the 2010 midterms Democrats surrendered their 79-seat majority in the House and 14-seat advantage in the Senate to a Republican majority of 59 seats and whittled a Democrat edge in the Senate to 4. Republicans swept into control of more statehouses and governor’s mansions during the time of the Obama wrecking ball. The mouth has consequences.
Speed forward to 2025 and Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, is tasting his toes with, “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” Certainly, that one is easy to demagogue, and Democrats will, but it is not as if he did not take the sock off and contort himself into position. The jump in the prices of everything – and state-sponsored teenage genital mutilation, XY girls in XX girls’ sports, and the Third World moving into the country en masse without restraint – was an affront in voters’ minds November 2024.
Bessent was twisting himself in knots to justify Trump’s tariffs. When an incoherent idea meets the spoken word, get ready for the speaker to be reminded of the need to wash their feet. Tariffs have inflation written all over them, unless they are mitigated by the economic growth hormones of deregulation, tax cuts, sane energy policy, and cheaper financial capital. How much will they limit the damage? Hard to say. Timing and reactions abroad matter a lot.
Trump acknowledges in a rhetorical sleight of hand the harm of the tariff poison. In his speech to Congress, he pandered to farmers and then asked them to bear with him because he knows their exports will be the first to be targeted in retaliation. He asked the rest of the economy to bear with him as well. The foreign reaction to his tariffs was swift. Justin Trudeau of Canada announced (see #2), “Our tariffs will remain in place until the U.S. trade action is withdrawn, and should U.S. tariffs not cease, we are in active and ongoing discussions with provinces and territories to pursue several non-tariff measures.” Mexico and China responded likewise.
Markets did not react any better. The S&P 500, Dow Jones, and Nasdaq Composite fell dramatically on the news (see #2). With Trump injecting himself into trade relationships, it is bad for business, which means it is bad for workers and everyone with a retirement plan. Instability and government intervention are bad, bad.
Why must we cut Trump some slack? Price increases are on the way; that is how tariffs work. So, get ready, Trump’s chief complaint against Biden, inflation, will be magically turned into a blessing by those who flipped like a light switch on the cue of their Pied Piper.
Crony capitalism is not the answer. Government goodies in the form of handouts to highly organized special interests mean costs imposed on everybody else. Trump shovels bennies to the United Steelworkers or the United Auto Workers but nonunion competitors are left to languish, with the consumer left to scramble to balance the checkbook.
Mancur Olson
The acclaimed economist Mancur Olson staked his academic reputation to his discernment of the socio-economic physics of the naturally skewed incentives to raid the public trough because rewards are targeted but costs are diffuse (see #3). A tightly organized interest (for instance, a large business entity and its allied labor magnificos) will beat out broader and thus more scattered interests (such as competitors and business and personal consumers). Welcome to the Trump mind. He is all into it.
Add it all up and one is left to wonder, can our leaders get any more incoherent?
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Lie of the Year: ‘If you like your health care plan, you can keep it’”, PolitiFact, at https://www.politifact.com/article/2013/dec/12/lie-year-if-you-like-your-health-care-plan-keep-it/
2. “Trump trade war intensifies as tariffs go into place”, Ian Swanson, et al, The Hill, 3/4/2025, at https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5174579-donald-trump-trade-war-intensifies/
3. Look to Mancur Olson’s seminal work, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, 1965. An exploration of the topic can be found in “The Power of Special Interests”, John Samples, CATO Institute, Fall 2010, at https://www.cato.org/regulation/fall-2010/book-review-lobbying-policy-change-case-gridlock
A good source for a sensible treatment of current issues is hard to come by these days. Major news organizations are either divided into Trump-love or Trump-hate camps. Trump-hate overwhelms the programming on MSNBC, NPR, and legacy media. Fox News and the new counter-media – Breitbart, Townhall, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, talk radio, a portion of the podcast world, etc. – carries the flag for Trump-love. So, what is really happening when everything is seen through the lens of Trump-love or Trump-hate? If one of those is your only window to the outside world, reality will be distorted because it is so tightly filtered and shaped to either worship or harm Trump.
I recommend the GoodFellows podcast of the Hoover Institute, hosted by Bill Whalen, as an antidote to this blinkered stridency of, for example, the celebrity hosts of Fox News. Whalen hosts three regular contributors, John Cochrane (economist), H.R. McMaster (national security), and Sir Niall Ferguson (historian), and a guest. In the most recent episode, “The Great X Debate, with Matt Continetti: Vance v. Ferguson, Trump Diplomacy, DOGE, and Hackman” of 2/28/2025 (below), the guest was Matthew Continetti of the American Enterprise Institute and the Commentary podcast. Please sit back and watch the 57-minute podcast. It takes commentary and analysis out of the cage-fighting arenas.
This latest installment mostly focused on the Zelenskyy-Trump/Vance dustup on Friday, 2/28. These are just a few of my takeaways with all not in agreement and from a variety of perspectives:
• The Ukraine War is unwinnable for Ukraine. False. The weaknesses of the Russian military were borne out in the fighting. The combined forces of the U.S. and our NATO allies could stop Rusia in weeks if we had the will.
• The economies of Russia, China, and Iran are in a troubled state.
• The U.S. is weak, no longer capable of worldwide predominance. False. McMaster and Cochrane rebut this banality on the Trump Right (Laura Ingraham, et al). The fallacy is used by sectors of the Right to support neo-isolationistic retrenchment.
• The Trump of term #1 is different from the Trump of term #2. This time around, the people who surround him are more likely to feed and accept his ill-founded propensities. Most advisors are neo-isolationists from the MAGA eco-system. The foreign policy and trade issues will likely be viewed through this prism. Ferguson says Trump wants to be a trade-war president, not a war president.
More can be gleaned.
The podcast is a soothing alternative to the partisan bombast of the more popular but compromised outlets. You may not agree with them, but you will come out with the mental gears turning. You may discover a whole world outside the celebrity pundits of talk radio, MSNBC, and Fox News.
Pres. Trump at his 2025 State of the Union Address with VP Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson behind
I watched President Trump’s State of the Union speech last night (3/4/2025) on the Fox News feed. After came the commentary. Brit Hume, the dean of the Fox News commentariat, normally incisive and spot-on, said the speech was one of the best, in so many words. I do not know what he was watching, but I saw a classroom nearly out of control. We have a coming together of a provocative and prickly president and an extremist, disruptive, and disrespectful opposition party. This outcome should be expected when both parties fear and are driven by the mercurial activists in their midst. The result is a scene that comes close to anarchy.
The solemnity of the event is gone. Trump’s speech, inspiring at moments, quickly descended into a MAGA rally with his usual personal invective. Frankly, I think that he was incensed by Democrat behavior in the audience with their interruptions, jargonized protest placards held aloft, and the necessary removal of one among their ranks for defiance of simple adult norms. All of it was reminiscent of the radical-Left, antisemitic student disruptions of guest lecturers on college campuses. How did we get to this state of affairs, even among the governing class, people who should know better?
Democrat representatives hold protest placard aloft in disruption of the State of the Union address
The scene is a sign of the powerful influence of high-strung activists in the bases of both parties. For Republicans, their activist base was in search of a walking middle finger. Policy matters less than a demonstrative display of striking back at so-called “elites”, an in-your-face approach to politics and governance.
Thus, you get a guy who will take you down avenues that you might not want to go. Did people who pulled the lever for Trump vote for tariffs, the ritual humiliation of friends and allies, a foreign and trade policy of America Alone? Or was it an electoral majority gathering around a reversal of the chaos of gender confusion, prices gone amok, crowds of foreigners jumping the border and flooding the interior of the country, crime and nasty public spaces, extremist eco-crusades that are turning people’s lives upside down, identity-mongering at the expense of merit, and humiliations abroad? Trump promises to end the worst of it, but brings in tow a penchant for isolationism, protectionism, gaudy exhibitionism in matters of minor import like the renaming of places, territorial expansion, and schoolyard bullying. Did voters call for the hooking of this caboose to their train?
The flashy replaces practical policy. For the excitable, Trump is the ticket.
If this was poker, the Democrats see you and raise ten-fold. Their activist base is crazy. Their base’s prescription for the country is national suicide. Maybe that is because they have bought into the basic Marxist premise of a systemically corrupted society that can only be cleansed root and branch. They are in a revolutionary mood to overturn all relations between the sexes, between buyers and sellers, workers and employers, the person and his or her hopes for their spouses and children, and the control of individual choices in the minutest detail. The revolution is a disaster and people can see it, and are revolted by it. But this is what the donkey party’s activist base demands. The excessive and shrill overtake moderation and feet firmly planted on the ground.
The parties’ leadership, confronting the task of governance, cringe in fear of the strident in their midst. The party leadership is either weak in the face of this mob or panders to it for power, fame, and fortune. Do not be surprised that a deafening, raucous activism produces activistic leaders, people who are habituated to the superficial, irrelevant, and operationally dopey. Trump certainly presents that peril. Democrats have actually delivered the horror.
California’s Los Angeles is a classic in activist-driven misgovernance. Its mayor Karen Bass won the mayoral brass ring for reasons unrelated to an understanding of the practical aspects of managing a city. Her résumé is limited to “community activism” and time in the state legislature and Congress, places where activism prospers. While in Congress, she authored in 2020 the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. It reified in law the Democrat groundswell to defund the police, or reshape public safety into therapy. So, not surprisingly, she gallivants to Accra, Ghana, without a thought devoted to the forecasted 80-mph Santa Ana winds coursing down an environmentalist-protected and overgrown fire-climax watershed waiting for a spark. Down-to-earth experience in dealing with running large-scale enterprises would have come in handy.
View of the January 2025 LA fires
The superficial attributes flow down to her appointments on the city’s fire commission, all known for their union activism and DEI qualities. Kristen Crowley, Bass’s appointed fire chief due to her gender and sexuality, ignored standard fire practice and ceased the monitoring of an earlier fire that was probably the origin of the cataclysm (see #3). Bass chose Janisse Quinones to run the Dept. of Water and Power to “prioritize” “vulnerable communities” and swear to “the goal of 100 percent renewable energy by 2035” (see #3). And a reservoir above Pacific Palisades remained empty to fight the fire. There is no room for more incompetence. Bass exhausted the supply.
The apex of the city’s cultural pyramid is equally dismissive of practicalities. The Los Angeles Times’s endorsement of Bass lauds her “holistic vision” as they pan her opponent, Rick Caruso, for his “luxury malls” and the millions that he contributed to his campaign. After the incineration of parts of the city, a poll conducted in late January shows Caruso besting Bass by 7%, 43% to 36%. As for Bass’s handling of the fires, she is underwater by 17%, 54% to 37% (see #1).
The poll is interesting but still mystifying. For a significant chunk of the LA electorate, apocalyptic fires, intensified by colossal incompetence, still cannot bring them to vote center-right or center anywhere. I suspect that it is because, in the California/LA context, center-Left actually means Left, hard Left anywhere else. And the extremism is not limited to “elites”. It is a populist thing seeping into huge demographies in the state and its urban centers. The shock of the fires will wear off as media come to her defense by catering to the leftist prejudices of this governing supermajority.
Already, streaming platforms are airing stories of the greedy rich, like the Resnicks, seizing water for themselves and leaving LA high and dry (see #2). False, but it appeals. You see, so they say, the hydrants went dry in Pacific Palisades due to the scheming water robber barons of their imagination. California has a deep preference for activists who check the right identity boxes instead of somebody who has a history of successfully making the trains run on time. Give it time and LA and California will revert to its preferred mean of incompetence.
On the activist Right, Trump bashes Zelenskyy and mouths moral equivalence platitudes that would be met with jeers if expressed by Obama, while many in the party lather themselves in hypocrisy as their prior hawkishness evaporates into appeasement. It is “peace through strength” so long as it accords with Trump’s latest outburst. Whatever he says and does, they nod in agreement and rush to the microphones to grovel in worship. It is disgusting.
For many on both sides, the chief motivator appears to be fear of their base. Talk radio hosts craft issues and messages to the talk radio audience under a cloud of anxieties about losing their Trump-crazed listeners. It would be commercial suicide to counter the insanity. Leftist politicians refuse to condemn the worst barbarity, or they divert attention away from the murder of babies, children, men and woman, young and old, the healthy and infirmed, to generate sympathy for those who aided and abetted the savagery. It is stupefyingly breathtaking.
Activism and its activists are making a shambles of our republic. This is what populism looks like. It is the “populism” of the most vocal. In ancient Rome, tyrants and other degenerates in purple were of the populares (Caesar, Caligula, Commodus), the party of the common people (plebes) and in opposition to “elites” (patricians). Populism guaranteed their power. Caligula did all he could to humiliate “elites” such as Senators because it was entertaining to the street. For instance, he commanded the attendance of Senators and their wives to a bacchanalia so he could eye the prettiest women, have his way with them, return to the drinkfest, and boast of the conquests in front of their husbands (according to Suetonius in The Twelve Caesars). Populism elevates the most popular, not the most fit.
Today’s populists can be traced back to them. The rise to the top rung of power was through pandering, demagoguery, and feeding the mob’s desires. In today’s context, the bread and circuses are delivered in the form of DEI favoritism, looting the rich, tariffs that protect my job at the expense of everybody else’s, hosing benefits to your constituents through bankrupting entitlements, eco-extremism to cater to the passions of white-collar urban professionals, unrestrained abortion and a lavish child-care public infrastructure to indulge the lifestyle of single college-educated women, expanding the civil rights state to advance teenage genital mutilation and public school indoctrination and the destruction of the family, etc., etc.
Left populism, Right populism, and activists of both stripes are producing mediocrities, the ineffectual, and failures in public office. We suffer, but we had a hand in choosing them. Where are the adults? There are not any because they cannot survive the activist gauntlet. We are living the consequences of activism gone mad. Enjoy.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Poll: Bass Flops Handling of Wildfires; Caruso Should Be mayor”, Isegura, 810 KSFO, 1/24/2025, at https://www.ksfo.com/2025/01/24/poll-bass-flops-handling-of-wildfires-caruso-should-be-mayor/
2. There’s a host of class warfare videos on YouTube, such as “California’s Water Mismanagement: Billionaire Resnicks Plunder California’s Precious Water! Fire!”, at https://youtu.be/2ryi893yIP8?si=YvDE5a9Nun7JgQ8Y
3. “Wildfire of the Vanities”, Will Swaim of the California Policy Center, National Review Magazine, March 2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/03/wildfire-of-the-vanities-californias-political-model-has-failed/
