Coyote Blog

I really thought I would never post this, as I think Kamala Harris is in the dictionary next to "extreme Peter Principle," but she was right when she said that her loss to Trump was the closest Presidential loss this century, at least when looking at the popular vote.  John Hinderaker tries to argue otherwise:

I suppose Harris was referring to the irrelevant “popular vote,” but her claim isn’t true there, either. By far the closest of the seven elections in terms of popular vote was 2000, where the margin was only around 500,000 votes. By that yardstick, the 2024 election was a distant second, with Trump’s margin over Harris being around 2,300,000 votes.

Sorry, but the year 2000 is not in this century.  It was the last year of the last century.  Yes, I know this has already been litigated around Y2K in the court of public opinion and my side mostly lost because we just pissed everyone off who wanted to celebrate a round number, but that does not mean I am wrong.

When you were born, you started out as age 0.  After one month you were age 1/12 a year.  At your first birthday you were one year old.  On your hundredth birthday you have lived exactly a century.  People analogize the calendar to this, but they are wrong.

The reason is that there was no year 0 on our calendar.  The first day after BC times (or BCE if you are up on modern academic jargon) was January 1 of the year 1.  That means that the post-BCE world was not one year old until January 1 in the year 2.   The era turned one but we call it year 2.   The first decade did not end until December 31 in the year 10, and January 1, 11 was the beginning of the next decade.  The first century did not end until December 31 in the year 100 and the second century began on January 1, 101.  In the same way, this century (and millennium) began January 1, 2001 (queue:  Also Sprach Zarathustra).

Now, I am pretty sure this was NOT Harris's reasoning but I really, really hope she adopts it because I would love to see her try to explain it in an interview.

The hostages appear to have been released from Gaza, which is a huge step forward after 2 years of violence.  Not only is this a joy for their families, but it also likely makes ongoing violence in Gaza much harder for both parties.  I had initially thought Trump was making progress by being the "crazy man" in the negotiation who might do anything (sort of like trying to play poker with a 16-year-old).   And a lot of the Left is likely to continue to treat it that way.  But from everything I have read in the last few days, Trump's team did a lot of hard diplomacy all over the Arab world, carefully corralling every potential Hamas supporter and getting them all to tell Hamas it was time to settle (here and here for example).

This should not be surprising -- Trump showed a similar facility with negotiating in the Arab world in his first term with the Abraham Accords and really did not get enough credit for it.

So tomorrow Trump will likely tick me off again but for today he should be thanked for his work on this deal.

Postscript: and no, great work negotiating this peace deal does not convince me he has some super-brain master plan behind the tariffs

I don't know who this is, but this X post by Cynical Publius has been quoted by a number of Conservative sites.  This represents a VERY common attitude among Conservatives and deserves to be quoted in depth.  In regards to the prosecution of Letitia James he writes:

You see, for many years now Democrats have believed that they could do basically whatever they wanted to Republicans, whilst Republicans were still bound by the Old Rules of comity and respect.

Those were the New Rules. (Hat tip, Kurt Schlichter.). They thought we would never adopt the New Rules.

We did.

The James indictment says to Democrats: “You no longer can assume that we will let you do whatever you want to us. We will do to you what you did to us. And we will be merciless until you prove you will never do it again.”

The particular beauty of the James indictment is that she brought the most scurrilous and ridiculous of charges against Trump, while the record shows that James clearly committed the basic federal crimes she has been charged with.

Here’s the other thing. Federal laws are so complex and capacious that pretty much every one of us breaks a federal law every few months without knowing that we did. There has long been a tacit understanding in this regard that politicians would not take advantage of this with regard to mere “footfaults” on nonsense laws. But Democrats decide to abandon that too. New Rules. That we now follow. Suck on it, Democrats. You get what you paid for.

(But to repeat; James charged Trump with nonsense; Trump charged James with a verifiable crime.)

That last part is likely true, though it is not clear that very many people are prosecuted for it.  It is certainly NOT true for the Comey prosecution, which as currently charged is a total crock [update:  this is not to say that Comey is guilty of abuse of power charges -- it is simply to say that the current charges are cr*p].

Whatever the case, Mr. Publius appears to be working from the assumption that getting tough on the Left with actions like this is the only way to de-escalate all the lawfare -- I suppose the logic being that bullies back down when challenged and forced to face accountability.  This is clearer in some of the comments to the post:

This is the FAFO (f*ck around, find out) stance being taken by many Republicans, reflecting the decision-making rules of playground and bar fights. But for all that we overuse fight analogies when referring to politics, the correct behaviors in a Constitutional Republic which emphasizes the rule of law are different than in a bar fight.  Precedents really do matter, and even more so precedents that are repeated and reinforced by the political opposition get set in stone.  Mr. Publius is correct in saying that any person is likely guilty of something given the web of detailed, illogical, and self-contradictory Federal and state laws and regulations.  That is all the more reason to avoid degenerating into tit for tat lawfare as this legal environment makes lawfare all too easy -- against most anyone.  Our out of control regulatory state creates an environment like a dry overgrown southern California ravine on a hot day during a drought.  The Biden administration started some fires but ultimately they were contained -- Republicans should remember that despite everything (maybe because of all the lawfare end the sympathy and anger it engendered) their guy was elected.  The response now should be to exercise great care until the fire danger is reduced.  Instead, Republicans want to whip out the flamethrower.

I get called a simp or a cuck or worse for wishing turn back the clock on lawfare.  But historically we revere people who did just that.  The best examples of this occurring are from the early history of the US, such as in the election of 1800 when Jefferson just edged out Aaron Burr in a contentious election.  I am sure the Federalists were mighty pissed at Mr. Jefferson -- hell, their anger still resonates today in an extremely popular modern Broadway musical -- but they honorably turned over power to their hated rival. Looking farther back into history, Mr. Publius has adopted a nom de plume presumably from on interest in Roman civilization, or at least in how our founders admired the Roman republic.  But he needs to go back and re-study how the Roman republic died, a victim of 150 years of steadily escalating precedents that eroded the norms of the old republic.  I suggested in the online comments he might want to change his online name to "Graccus" to acknowledge the similar path he is pointing towards in this country.

Or perhaps even better historical examples are the famous blood feuds like between the Hatfields and the McCoys.  At what point in this feud do you think that retaliation and escalation by one party "taught the other a lesson" or caused the other to back down and de-escalate?   Never, which is why such feuds ended only when everyone was dead.

But an even better way to refute this Mr. Publius's position is to, for a moment, accept the author's premises about the Democrats.   There is an old political joke that goes like this:

This is sort of funny, but there is actually a better meta joke associated with this I will come back to in the postscript.  But I think we can confidently ascribe this position to the author Publius and to many other Republicans.  They are convinced that the Democrats are evil and that Republicans are well-intended but stupid because they always let Democrats get away with everything and are always to civilized to really fight back.  Just read the comment thread above.

But let's assume this is true for the moment.  If the Democrats are really always historically evil and law-breaking, what the hell makes one think that being more bare-knuckled is going to change them?  If they are evil, are you really expecting them to say "hey, you got me, we went too far, let's dial it back" or are they just going to respond by going to 11 the next time?  The author's strategy fails based on his own assumptions.  Unless his strategy is to turn the US into a banana republic.

Postscript:  The meta joke embedded in the joke quoted above is that believing this statement is one of the few bipartisan political beliefs that exist.  Republicans and Democrats BOTH will agree to this statement with a smile ... with the one small difference that Democrats will assume it was written by one of their own and thus that Republicans are the evil party and Democrats are the stupid party that play the game too genteelly.  And both the Republican and the Democrat presented with this passage would be shocked and outraged that their opposition would believe its the other way around.

Which brings us back to the case in question.  Let's generalize the last line in the Publius post above as "the charges against our guy were a politically-motivated crock, while our charges against their guy are just and fair."  Both R's and D's believe this absolutely from their perspective right now.  Their lawfare is righteous, the other guy's is evil.  So how is escalation of the lawfare going to achieve anything except a degeneration into banana republic politics?

Postscript #2:  I am not a Republican so I am probably not an appropriate source of advice to them.  But the Republican opportunity in my mind is to drive a wedge between mainstream traditional Democrats and the increasingly crazy, sometimes violent far-Left progressives.  This is something Trump seems pretty good at, when he can avoid chasing some new squirrel.  But I can tell you that one thing mainstream traditional Diane-Rehm-listening Democrats are NOT going to like is anything that feels like undermining the rule of law.  Republican bare-knuckle lawfare is not going to sit well, and is going to drive them into the arms of the crazies, no matter whether the Republicans think Democrats "started it" or not.  Republicans are actually winning the PR battle on the shutdown (first time in my whole life that has happened) and Trump has been pretty good at painting Democrats into defending extreme positions on 80-20 issues.  Taking immigration as an example -- where I am a strong supporter of increasing immigration limits so this is frustrating to me -- Progressives have made the whole immigration cause about protecting a few named, obvious felons from deportation.  And thus losing the PR battle.

Against this backdrop of Progressive own-goals, arresting violent rioters and serial felons will likely get grudging approval even among some Democrats; putting Comey in jail for contempt of Congress is only going to feel good to Republicans and can do nothing but hurt their popularity in the middle.

I am not sure I remember too much from my high school philosophy class, other than the lesson that I probably would not be actively pursuing a career in philosophy.  But I remember one discussion about displaying one's rebellious nature by doing the exact opposite of whatever an unfavored person said.  The teacher made the point that if you always did the exact opposite of what person X says, then you are just as much ruled by X as any of X's most cultish followers.  In such a case you have completely abdicated your agency to X.

I took the lesson from that, which I still try to follow to this day, that you have to process people's actions and ideas one by one.  Certainly this is not to say that there is no room for trust and reputation.  If  I have found myself agreeing with someone historically and they have been proved right on certain topics time and again, I am going to give their next statement a lot of credence -- but I am still going to mentally challenge it to some extent.  And for individuals, this sort of reputational trust can vary by topic.  If my wife gives me a read on a person, I am going to assume she is correct; if she opines on navigation issues when we are walking around an unfamiliar city, I am going to treat that with a lot more skepticism.

Most will have guessed where I am going with this -- the opposition to Trump has reached this point of zero agency.   Smart people I know will mock everything Trump says, even if it is something they would normally agree with or at least entertain.  People who are extraordinarily skeptical of all medication suddenly think that concerns about Tylenol during pregnancy are totally absurd.  The whole Tylenol story is actually pretty interesting -- a Harvard dean's imprimatur seems to tick the credentialism box that was so prominent in COVID, but a look at the quality of the research and the money involved tends to make one very skeptical.  And of course a lot of what RFK says makes me skeptical.  The whole story is a really interesting, including appeals-to-authority issues we had during COVID, only with the parties reversed.  But no one really looks because if Trump said it, it must be mocked.

This tendency of the Left to throw away all agency when it comes to evaluating policy during this Administration is a target of great mockery on the Right.  Memes such as the one below are everywhere.

I have been thinking about all this because I have been trying to figure out why I have zero energy to blog of late.  Every time I sit down to the keyboard, I am exhausted in advance.  And I think the reason is (for me) the immense effort to parse current politics on a case-by-case basis and communicate it in a way that people will read rather than going ballistic because I didn't pass a belief conformity test in the first paragraph.  I once told someone that I feel like the last person in America who can opine on Trump's actions case-by-base, though of course that is an exaggeration (and something of an affectation I admit).

You can read through these pages and see that I have written that Trump's trade policy is dead wrong, his attempted expansions of Presidential power are dangerous as hell, his need for petty revenge and his love of trolling the media online are beneath the dignity of a President.  But write one thing like, "The Russian collusion charges ... turned out to be complete inventions of the opposition party" and all the agency-less litmus testers ask me why I am always defending the guy.  Crazy.  By the way, I will say it and be done with it -- the Russian collusion story was BS, it smelled like BS from the beginning, and was actually a scandal in that it was clearly engineered by the opposition party.  And it likely had more to do with Trump's 2024 election than any other single factor [other than Biden's dementia] because the unfairness of it energized his supporters.  Russia collusion was Wile E Coyote Acme rocket of political issues, reliably blowing up in Democrat's faces.

For me, the worst manifestation of all this is seeing people actively cheering setbacks in Trump-led peace processes (eg Ukraine, Gaza).  Are you guys f*cking crazy?  I understand being skeptical of Trump's international actions, though to be honest I have not seen him do much internationally that is better or worse than other recent Presidents.  For example, yes he lawlessly blew up that suspected drug ship (to absolutely no benefit that I can see) but Obama and Bush droned Middle Easterners over and over.  Be that as it may, if someone can stop the killing on reasonable terms in either of these areas, they have my total support.

Last week I spent a bit of time looking at the indictment of James Comey (not hard, it's barely a page long).  At first I thought I must be missing some pages.  The indictment is for lying when Comey told Congress that he had not "authorized" an employee to leak the Hillary Clinton investigation to the WSJ.  But everyone agrees, apparently even the prosecutors, that Comey did not even know about the leak or intention to leak before it happened.  It looked to me like the whole case was built on the argument that Comey "authorized" the leak by not opposing it after he found out about it.  Could that really be the case? Seriously, that is flimsier than even some of the NY prosecutions of Trump.  As it turns out, to their credit, a number of prominent Conservatives are rallying to mock the indictment.

I get it that Trump and his supporters have some reasons to be frustrated by events over the past 8 years or so.  The Russian collusion charges that turned out to be complete inventions of the opposition party.  The prosecutions by the NY AG for (at best) borderline victimless crimes for which no one in history had ever been previously prosecuted.  The over-prosecution of rank-and-file January 6 protestor-rioters. The "election denier" prosecutions in multiple states that look a lot like attacks on political speech (particularly when similar statements made by Democrats in 2016 went un-prosecuted).

But there are two possible responses to this frustration:

1. Hold public hearings to publicize the evidence of any wrongdoing.  Fire people in law enforcement who violated the rules or abused their position.  Work hard to change the rules, controls, and accountability mechanisms so it is much harder for such abuses to be duplicated in the future.  And trust the process to work (after all, Trump overcame most all the various legal proceedings against him).
2. Go the opposition one better by doing all the same stuff, just harder

Approach number 1 holds out some hope of de-escalating abusive practices in the system and prevent further degeneration into banana-republic style political retribution after every election.  Approach number 2 is fraught with risks of spiraling out of control and creating precedents that Democrats will gleefully use when inevitably back in power.

Of course, Trump and his FAFO (f*ck around, find out) crowd have chosen #2.  They strongly believe that the far Left is violent and lawless and that Republicans have historically been far too genteel in how they play politics and that only by extreme responses can they get, uh... I don't know what.   Do they expect the Left to back down?  If Trump's supporters are characterizing the Left accurately, by Trump's own assumptions it is unlikely the Left will back down.  Republicans are risking a further devolution of the American polity -- is it for revenge only?  For the feelz of it?  What is the endgame they envision, or do they even have goal here other than watching the other side burn?

Postscript:  All of the above is also true in the realm of speech and cancel culture.  Conservatives have clearly born the brunt of cancel culture and speech limitations over the last 10-20 years (just as the Left bore the brunt in the 1950s and 1960s).  The Kimmel firing was a great example of Trump's ability to score an own-goal when he has the lead.  The initial reaction to Kimmel's reality-defying statement created sympathy for the Conservative cause, at least until Trump's FCC head lawlessly issued threats to ABC's broadcast licenses, threats echoed later by Trump himself.  Suddenly a story that that should have been about Kimmel's absurd statement and falling ratings became about the Trump Administration's lawlessness.  Had this Administration just STFU, the Leftish late night hosts would have continued their downward spiral and been an object lesson to programmers that maybe they do not want to program for just 30% of their audience.

I am sure Republicans want to send a message about cancel culture but Executive threats are just not going to work.  Of the hundreds of media articles on the whole Kimmel mess, I did not see a single one (excepting the explicitly Conservative press) that mentions Roseanne Barr or Gina Carano.  Using retribution to highlight past injustices is not going to work when the media will not acknowledge or mention past injustices -- in the media Republican retribution is portrayed instead as a first strike.

I will leave the last words on this to Ted Cruz, someone I think is very smart but with whom I often disagree.  This is from the WSJ

Mr. Carr “says, ‘We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way,’” Mr. Cruz told his listeners, quoting Mr. Carr. “That’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

The Senator added that he’s no fan of Mr. Kimmel, but he warned conservatives that government power abused in this way won’t hurt only the left. “What [Mr. Carr] said there is dangerous as hell,” Mr. Cruz continued. “It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it.”

Exactly right.  I am not sure that Trump's supporters understand the damage they may be doing to our political environment (and if you are reading this and saying "the other side started it", then you don't get it either), but they are also damaging their future selves.  Remember Coyote's Law.

Postscript #2:  I will offer Republicans a piece of advice I often give to other business people: If you are in a dispute with another person or entity, be satisfied if you get what you want.  Do not hold out for sorrow or contrition because you are never, ever going to get them to feel guilt or honestly admit error.

Postscript #3: In thinking about it, the Comey prosecution is similar to some of the Trump prosecutions in that in both cases, I think the prosecutions are effectively acting as proxies for suspected real crimes committed that no one could prove.  Almost everyone discuss this with (depending on if they are Red or Blue team) will say about one or the other that a certain prosecution may be weak but the person is clearly dirty.  Sorry, but this is not how the US legal system is supposed to work.  I grew up in the South when it was still possible that a cop who killed/arrested/prosecuted/jailed a black man for something they did not do could argue that "yeah, but I am sure he was guilty of something."

Postscript #4:  I will remind everyone that both parties equally think the other party is lawless and their own party is too genteel. I have many times seen writers of the Left and Right lament this about their sides in writing on the same day.   I guarantee anyone from the Left reading what I wrote above about Republicans thinking themselves too genteel are saying "Republicans are the violent, lawless ones, not us!"

For a few halcyon days after the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk, Trump and Republicans were actually getting a bit of sympathy and probably had an opening to reframe some of the political discourse.  But in true Trumpian style, the Administration has gone to 11 in their over-reaction to some Lefties being, let's say, less than sad at Kirk's death.  I get it that Trump and his followers are (probably rightly) grouchy about some of the BS prosecutions of Trump and his supporters over the last 8 years, not to mention the mostly fabricated Russia collusion impeachment.  But Trump seems to have found his moment for vengeance and anyone who calls for him to turn the other cheek on some of this stuff gets labelled a cuck.

Here is what I have catalogued so far:

• AG Pam Bondi fans the flames of public confusion by reinforcing the myth that there is somehow a First Amendment exception for hate speech
• After years of defending cake-bakers who get prosecuted for not making a cake for a gay wedding, Republicans are getting their revenge by threatening prosecution of (and getting fired) an Office Depot employee (also here)  who wouldn't print some Charlie Kirk memorial material
• Sec. of State Marco Rubio announced that they were revoking Visas of immigrants who said bad things about Charlie Kirk
• Under pressure from the FTC (really outright threats), ABC has suspended Jimmy Kimmel for what were admittedly incorrect and inflammatory statements about Kirk's killer.  ABC probably was on a path to axing Kimmel over ratings anyway, but the FTC pressure is absolutely unethical
• Trump is ready to name Antifa a terrorist organization.  I can't stand the Antifa thugs but this is a really slippery slope where it is easy to start naming opposition groups as terrorists.  Besides, is Antifa even an organization, or a label that people adopt?
• Unrelated to Kirk, Trump also launched another large and looney defamation suit.  Note that in my view this was not written to win, but to force a settlement.  Being sued personally by the man who is also your chief regulator is a brutal position to be in, just ask CBS who had to knuckle under previously.
• I am almost sure there was something else, but it is late.  I will update when I remember.

I will say again what I have said before -- Republicans are acting like they will be in power forever -- but they won't.  Remember Coyote's Law.  At some point their political opposition will be in power and all these precedents will come back to bite them.  Particularly in this case because almost every one of these is an authoritarian power that Republicans fought under Democratic administrations.  As mentioned before, Republican's defended cake bakers (and pharmacists and many others) against laws mandating they provide services against their conscience.  Republicans have fought against laws based on making hate speech illegal, laws that are dragging the Brits down the toilet as we speak.  It was Republicans who fought to get rid of equal time in broadcasting and stopped the FTC from bludgeoning Conservative talk radio hosts.  Republicans have fought for years against having their mainstream groups labelled as white supremacist terrorists by the SPLC (I believe the SPLC so designated Charlie Kirk's organization).   Not sure if they have had same issues with Visas, but they sure as hell will as Democrats will find a way to evict Conservative immigrants in retribution (looking at you Elon).

Dear Republicans,

I am sorry I have not had time to write sooner, and I only have time for a short missive.  But I want you to know that you are NOT going to like living with the precedents that Trump is setting right now for Presidential power.

I know you have convinced yourselves that you will be in power forever.  Believe me, I know -- the Democrats thought the same thing after 2020 and even more so after the 2022 election.  And I know some of the court challenges at the margin have been nutty -- the injunction against Congress legislatively cutting funding to certain organizations was completely baseless, for example.  These crazy court challenges at the bleeding edge have allowed you to convince yourselves -- wrongly -- that all of Trump's actions are perfectly normal and legal and all the legal actions are unjustified.   You will not like future administrations firing Republican commissioners from typically bipartisan organizations.  You will not like Presidents setting tariff rates (or by extension other tax rates) at will.  You will not like a Federal Reserve that is a lapdog to the current administration (perhaps the only thing that can make the Fed worse than it is already).  You will not like Presidential powers that trump state and local governments on even the smallest details.

You all need to relearn Coyote's Law -- never give the government (or particularly the President) powers you do not want your worst enemy to wield, because sure as hell your worst enemy will be in charge some day.  Yes, I know previous administrations pushed the envelope on Presidential power.  Unfortunately, when faced with an opposition party in the prior administration that took a bad precedent from level 4 to an 8, both parties will likely NOT respond by de-escalating but by pushing the 8 up to 11.

A few updates on Trump's continuing tariff saga:

RNG

I challenge any human being to decipher any sort of rational (even an irrational but consistent) algorithm behind Trump's tariffs.  Every day it is another random number superseding the prior random number.  It is economic policy by whim.

Cronyism

Today Trump slapped a 100% tariff (see RNG point above) on semiconductor imports.  It is difficult to comprehend a worse policy for the American economy had the President been dedicated to crashing things here on purpose.  Consistently he slaps huge tariffs on commodity manufacturing inputs (chips, steel, aluminum) that are critical for the high-value-added products that are made in this country.

But leave that aside, what particularly caught my eye is this:

Trump announced he would impose a 100% tariff on chip and semiconductor imports, but would exempt companies moving production back to the United States

Apple seems headed for the first exemption, which they also received in Trump's first term and his tariffs then.  Why Apple?  One could argue that Apple has some of the highest gross margins of any manufacturer in the US and is perhaps most able to bear the tariffs.  But this has nothing to do with fairness, it has to do with cronyism and political pull.  Say what you will about all of the companies one thinks of as political manipulators, but no one holds a candle to Apple.  They have used their size and clout and money to manipulate dozens of state and local governments all the way up to things like international tax law.  In this case, the are apparently going to get an exemption because of the "promise" to invest lots of money in US manufacturing:

With CEO Tim Cook standing next to him in the Oval Office as the president announced a fresh (and very laughable) $100 billion investment plan by Apple which it would then add to the $500 billion already pledged over the next 4 years (which is ridiculous since Apple spent $43 billion in capex in the past 4 years and generated less than $100 billion in net income in its best year)...

Apple had previously pledged to spend $500 billion in the US over the next four years, an acceleration over its prior investments and previously announced plans, adding about $39 billion in spending and an additional 1,000 jobs annually. The announcement will bring Apple’s cumulative commitment to $600 billion, and appears to be an ad hoc bundling of pretty much everything on the income and cash flow statements, including CoGS, SG&A, CapEx, buybacks and so on. The previously-planned $500 billion was said to include work on a new server manufacturing facility in Houston, a supplier academy in Michigan and additional spending with its existing suppliers in the country.

Why does this sound familiar?  Oh yes, because Foxconn made the exact same promise 8 years ago to build a huge plant in Wisconsin in exchange for dodging the Trump tariff hammer:

Initially, Foxconn was to build a Generation 10.5 facility that would manufacture large LCD screens. The project was to be an investment of up to $10 billion that would deliver up to 13,000 jobs.

The state legislature passed a $2.85 billion tax incentive package that required Foxconn to meet certain hiring and capital investment benchmarks during the next 10 years in order to receive the tax credits.

The company also received a $150 million break in sales taxes, bringing the total state package to $3 billion.

The village of Mount Pleasant and Racine County were put in charge of paying property owners for the land and upgrading the infrastructure.

How did this work out?  Basically they bailed and terminated most of the project once Trump was out of office.  Instead of 13,000 employees there were barely 1000 and less than a billion dollar was spent, a good portion of that government rather than private money.  Elon Musk did pretty much the same thing in New York, abandoning most all of his job creation and investment promises.

The same thing has happened all the time -- corporation grabs current government regulatory benefits in exchange for promises of investment sometime in the future.

Absolutely no one should take this sort of thing credulously.  This is a crony giveaway to a power corporation, and nothing else.  It is Apple getting preferred treatment in exchange for giving Trump a nice press release item.  I would be shocked if the final number is even 5% of these promises.

Premature Optimism

I see this sort of thing coming from a lot of (formerly) economics-rational Conservatives but it is really disappointing to see it from the WSJ news (not opinion) section:

Six months into the experiment, with more tariff announcements likely in the coming days, the economy hasn’t crashed. Inflation has ticked up but not soared. Consumers aren’t finding empty shelves.

Republicans are doing a victory dance in the aftermath of CBS's settling Trump's lawsuit over CBS's editing of their Kamala Harris interview.

I ran a public hospitality business with over 10 million visitors a year, so it is almost inevitable that we would get sued from time to time.  At this point I can't remember the exact numbers but we probably had 10 serious suits in 20 years, all of which were over some injury sustained in a public campground or marina we operated.  You know how many of these I honestly believe we had any liability whatsoever?  0%.  You know how many of these we (or rather the insurance company) settled?  100%.  There are many reasons a company might settle a case in which they feel they have no guilt, but two are:  1)  Lawyers and litigation are expensive -- it costs $500-$2000 just to get an attorney to pick up the phone for the first time; and 2) unlike criminal juries, who I think are pretty fair, civil juries cannot be counted on to give a fair verdict.  In particular, faced with a sympathetic injured plaintiff and a faceless company covered by an insurance policy, certain juries will give an award to the plaintiff almost no matter what the cause and effect.  If you think of it as a "bad outcomes award" rather than a "liability award," you can get closer to the thinking of some juries.  Not all juries mind you, but enough to scare companies from going to trial.

I will give you an example from years and years ago in LA County.  A little girl drowned swimming in a lake we operated and her family sued us for failure to warn of the danger.  The frustrating part was that there was no way to photograph the location of her tragic death without getting the "no swimming" sign in the frame.  Faced with this evidence, the complaint was soon amended to say the girl drowned wading in the lake, not swimming, and that the sign said nothing about wading.   This seems crazy, but our lawyers were adamant that we did not want to try this case in LA County with the sympathetic grieving parents of a little Hispanic girl.  So the insurance company settled for something like $2 million.

I would urge you to consider the CBS settlement in this context.  Because they have these same problems, plus one more.  The cost of litigation would be high, easily in the millions for this kind of case even if they win (there is no loser pays in the US).  And just as Trump often drew juries from hostile pools for some of his civil cases, one could easily imagine the MAGA mirror image in a CBS trial.

But as I said, CBS had one more problem -- Trump is their regulator via multiple agencies.  Not only does he have substantial influence at the FCC, which heavily regulates broadcast TV, but also at the SEC, FTC, and Justice Department who could easily wreck the current buyout and restructuring being undertaken by CBS's parent company.  There are billions of dollars at stake in those deals, and I am positive in this context the lawyers told CBS management to give Trump his $16 million gratuity and move on.

There is a lot that is wrong here on both sides.  CBS was absolutely abdicating its responsibility to help the country understand its candidates for President, and the hiding of Harris's unreadiness for office is of a piece with the same work CBS did in hiding Biden's deteriorating condition.  But their video editing wasn't strictly illegal and really is not much different from what 60 minutes has been doing legally for decades, though usually the editing is the other way around to create a gotcha for some corporate executive.

But given his position as regulator in chief of CBS, this private lawsuit is just wrong, wrong, wrong.  If something was illegal, fine, send in the FCC or FTC (or FEC).   But trying to extract a personal financial settlement over a charge of dubious legal merit from a company he is regulating is barely different from a protection racket or even solicitation of bribery.

update:  this has some interesting backstory.  Don't tell me it does not look like bribery.  Apparently even the participants were worried about it looking like bribery:

The bribery issues arose because Redstone is in desperate need of cash since inheriting the Paramount media empire from her late father, the media mogul Sumner Redstone and the settlement of the lawsuit is inextricably tied to the deal getting completed since Trump’s regulators must approve the merger.

Since Redstone would receive around $2 billion once the deal is done, any sizable payment could be seen as a bribe to get the Federal Communications Commission’s green light.

The (slightly more) ethical approach was to drop the suit the moment he took and hand it off as an investigation to his regulatory agencies.

Why so few posts?  Because the current political environment is exhausting.  On many issues the major players are half right and half wrong, but no one wants to hear that.  The crowds are either all-in on Trump or all-in on the opposition and trying to point out nuance is both unwelcome and more time-consuming than the news cycle allows.  A few examples:

• On immigration, I think the sane majority would like to see bad actors and gang-bangers sent back to their home countries, but have little stomach for uprooting the 10-year resident construction laborer and his family in the middle of the night and sending them away.  Trump wants to send them all away, even the peaceful and productive.  Sanctuary cities like LA want to protect everyone, even the violent gang-bangers.
• With universities like Harvard, it is long past time to enforce some discipline on spending and stop knuckling under the the "its all science, go away peons" elitism.  But institutions like Harvard still contribute a lot to this country and Trump's actions often smack of vendetta rather than thoughtful policy.
• Everyone with a uniform opinion that court injunctions of the Trump administration are universally correct or universally wrong are all misguided.  It is a total mixed bag.  Trump, as with tariffs, has grossly overstepped his statutory authority and IMO it was correct to stop him.  In other areas, like laying off administration employees, it is astounding to me that the judiciary can be of the opinion he can't fire anyone.

A few other thoughts before I likely join the ostrich party and stick my head in the sand and ignore this all:

• I have written for years that I do not understand why well-meaning folks on the Left do not devote more time to government efficiency and spending issues.  For a couple of reasons.  First, every bit of waste is money that could have been spent towards policy goals.  Second, waste undermines public support for the type of programs (eg SNAP) that they support. For years the grandfather of DOGE was William Proxmire, a Democrat from the Wisconsin progressive tradition.  But there seems to be zero interest on the Left in spending accountability, as demonstrated by the huge opposition to DOGE.
• Both parties are violating coyote's law, establishing precedents the WILL NOT LIKE when the other party uses them.  R's played the find-a-judge game a bit in the Biden administration but you can be sure they will be all-in on the game next D administration.  And of course Trump is establishing Presidential power precedents that the next D president will LOVE to use.
• National injunctions are generally ridiculous and need to be reformed.  I say this having benefitted from several in my business life.  I am out of my business but for years under Obama and Biden the Administrations kept imposing minimum wages on recreation concessionaires that ended up being enjoined for years and years, only to be allowed when they finally had their day in court (and overturned a few months later by a Trump EO).
• In my mind there is no nuance -- Trump is all wrong on tariffs.  They are bad even if other countries have high tariffs on us.

I have made no secret of my opposition to Trump's tariffs.  They are absolutely terrible economic policy, though that is a legislative and political issue and not one to be addressed by courts.  What was an issue for courts was whether the President actually had the authority to unilaterally issue such sweeping tariffs.  I and many others questioned that authority from day one:

The power to set tariff's is enshrined in the Constitution (that document Republicans used to care about) as a power of Congress. Weak-kneed and lazy Congresses have delegated some of this power to President's, but only very narrowly. The picture is complicated and illegal actions by the President can be hard to review in court. But looking at the 4-6 major delegations to the President of tariff authority, it is difficult to see that any of them apply simultaneously to every country on Earth and every single product manufactured anywhere. Certainly there is no precedent for them being enacted by the President on anything but a far far narrower basis (eg steel from China).

A three-judge panel from the US Court of International Trade (which I will confess I never heard of but apparently has jurisdiction over such issues) made up of two R-appointed judges and one D-appointed judge unanimously overturned the tariffs and issued a permanent injunction against them.

The Constitution assigns Congress the exclusive powers to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises," and to "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations." U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cls. 1, 3. The question in the two cases before the court is whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 ("IEEPA") delegates these powers to the President in the form of authority to impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country he court does not read IEEPA to confer such unbounded authority and sets aside the challenged tariffs imposed thereunder.

Good.  I believe that some of the various injunctions against Trump actions are weak and will likely get overturned -- they seem to be more legislative actions than legal ones -- but this one in my mind is rock solid.  I thought Biden's unilaterally forgiving a trillion dollars in student loans was pretty lawless but if anything Trump's "liberation day" tariffs may have been even less legally justified.

Many Republicans have gone all-in on publicly eschewing everything they previously believed in to support Trump on these tariffs, and many have got to be breathing a silent sigh of relief that the court did their work for them in shutting this down.  Though kudos to Rand Paul who is the only major Republican that stuck to his principals and attempted legislative overrides.

Speaking of Republican reactions, I have been particularly irritated at the reality defiance of those who claim that the recent rise in the stock market and consumer confidence are a vote of confidence in Trump.  Here is an example from the previously-willing-to-challenge-Trump folks at Powerline.

For the last four months, essentially every “news” outlet has devoted pretty much every news story to trying to undermine the Trump administration. Among other things, they have tried to persuade us that the economic sky is falling because of President Trump’s policies–whatever those policies may be, and whether or not they have even been implemented. This has made consumers a little nervous, but not nervous enough.

Thus, the May consumer confidence numbers came in today, and they are awesome....

That is why the stock markets are up sharply today.

This is absurd.  The stock market and consumer confidence both crashed - hard - with the imposition of Trump's tariff's.  They have risen each time Trump has backed off, delayed, or scaled back these tariffs.  The market will almost certainly rise again today on the news of the court case.  I guess that is a political strategy of sorts -- announce economy-stomping actions early, watch the market and public confidence tumble, and then take credit for the improvement when you roll back the terrible actions.  This is the equivalent to banging your head on the wall because it feels good when you stop.

For two decades, the US military base at Guantanamo Bay has been a preferred spot to indefinitely detain individuals the US government does not like, mostly accused terrorists.  In most cases these are folks the government would like to imprison for life but whom they don't want to have tried in the US, either because they don't really want to try to prove their accusations or due to public backlash against repatriating some admittedly bad folks.  Whatever the reasons, the net effect is a Constitution-free zone where things we take for granted like due process and habeas corpus don't obtain.

President Obama and his supporters disliked the situation enough to try to reduce the Gitmo population, but he was not willing to bear the political cost of "soft-on-terror" accusations that inevitably come from certain quarters whenever it is suggested someone incarcerated for over 10 years should have access to due process and a fair trial.  Trump on the other hand seems to love the Constitution-free zone, notwithstanding the hypocrisy of this following years of criticism of the Department of Justice for incarcerating certain January 6 rioters without trial.  At the beginning of his term he publicly told the folks down in Gitmo to get ready for 50,000 new inmates, seeing it as a place he could expatriate immigrants (initially presumed to be the illegal ones but since then immigrants with valid green cards and student visas but engaging in un-loved speech).

But apparently he has found an even better place -- the CECOT prison in El Salvador.  We are seeing now that this is one step even beyond Gitmo -- while judges seem to have only limited reach into Gitmo, they do have some.  But they have no reach into El Salvador.

Trump is telling the Salvadoran President that once he is done with illegal immigrants, he is going to start sending "homegrown" criminals.  Via Reason:

President Donald Trump met with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office yesterday and said his innermost thoughts out loud: "Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places [like the CECOT prison]. It's not big enough."

"Yeah, we've got space," Bukele responded. Administration officials chuckled in the background. "I'm talking about violent people," Trump had said a few minutes earlier. "I'm talking about really bad people."

"We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking, that are absolute monsters," said Trump.

Attorney General Pam Bondi is reportedly considering legal mechanisms by which Trump could send American citizens to El Salvador's infamous Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo.

I struggle to find any historical precedent for this craziness.  Bottany Bay and Georgia come to mind, but those were still under the administrative control of the government that was shipping out criminals.

One of the appeals of Trump has been that he has no equity in the system, and thus is willing to challenge the entrenched mess much of government has become.  And if Trump had stuck with DOGE and tweaking government bureaucrats, I would have been entertained.  But the downside of having no equity in the system (combined I think with his age) is that rules and precedents are as meaningful to him as the rules of war are to a guerilla fighter.  I don't think he give a sh*t about setting bad precedents and this is an absolutely awful precedent.

I know there are many Trump supporters that will disagree with me and cheer him on.  They are frustrated with cities that give violent crime a pass and I am sympathetic.  But perhaps this is one way to explain the problem to them:  I believe that President Biden's justice department went overboard on prosecution, over-sentencing, and incarceration of January 6 rioters/protesters.  But if President Biden had decided to follow this Salvadoran incarceration idea himself, then likely there would be hundreds, maybe thousands of Trump supporters sitting in a Salvadoran prison and there would be zero Republicans could do about it now.  Trump loves Salvadoran incarceration because no pardon and no judge can touch them, but the same would be true if his January 6 supporters had been sent down there too.  Trump's pardons would all have been moot, because pardoned or not it would be as hard to get them back out of CECOT as it is to get innocent US citizens out of Putin's political-hostage prisons.  One of the reasons we are extremely careful with the death penalty (and why I think it should be banned all together) is that there is no appeal or reversal possible once a person is executed.  We are facing the same situation with shipments to El Salvador, and unfortunately Trump considers that a feature not a bug.

1. Is this the most destructive Federal economic action in my 63-year lifetime? I am trying to think about the competition for this title. Certainly Nixon's wage and price controls would be up there in the top 5. The banking regulations that treated mortgages as preferred risk-free bank capital might be on the list. Perhaps we would include something like Biden's attempt to forgive a trillion dollars in student loans. There was some COVID craziness, including lockdowns and eviction moratoriums. But even looking at this collective Mt Rushmore of economic fail, I still think Trump's tariffs are at or near the top. This is as dumb as even the worst ideas of folks like AOC who the Republicans mock.
2. How is this possibly Constitutional? Article 1 Section 8 gives Congress sole "Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises" and "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives." I understand the spineless Congresses have delegated all sorts of powers to the Executive Branch, but good God there has to be some sort of limit. Where is that nationwide injunction when you need it? This is as a good a case as any for the courts to test both Executive taxation power, limits to delegation of authority, and the general use of emergency powers.

The tariffs also bring to mind several ironies:

1. Trump called it "liberation day" but the actual day we celebrate liberation is the day the Declaration of Independence was signed. That document explains the King's injustices, including: "[the King] has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:...For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world [and] For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent" Can't find any exceptions for emergencies in this document or in the Constitution.**
2. Republicans have spent 5 years (rightly) complaining about the exercise of emergency powers when the person who gets the power also gets to declare an emergency. And now they have topped anything Biden ever did with COVID emergency powers
3. In economics, independence is the road to poverty. The most economically independent people in the world are the isolated primitive tribes in the Amazon. This stuff is not hard, we have understood it since David Ricardo was writing over 200 years ago. We literally understood how trade created value before we had invented the telegraph or the railroad or knew that germs caused diseases. We understood it before Iodine was discovered. My post on aluminum tariffs helped show the value of trade.
4. This almost goes without saying, but after campaigning on inflation, Trump is directly adding to inflation. Back of the envelope, given that imports are about 16% of GDP, then a 25% average tariff on imports adds something like 4% to prices. Immediately inflation rates for this year go from 3% to 7%, and I am fairly certain this simplistic approach underestimates the problem. A family member works in the finance department of a well-known low-margin retailer and said that they were absolutely going to have to pass through tariffs and spent today working on the numbers. Sure, Trump is going to identify a few high-profile companies to name and shame for raising prices to pretend that companies should not be passing through these costs, but this is -- ironically again -- exactly as ignorant as Elizabeth Warren blaming grocer greed for food price increases, something that Republicans mocked by the way.***

I only have the time, and frankly the stomach, to put down these few quick thoughts on this one. More later.

Update: From Pat Toomey vis Powerline, this is as good of an explanation as I have seen for the theory in Trump's head that is driving tariff actions. This explains pretty well the calculathttps://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/04/toomey-on-trumps-tariffs.phpion of the tariffs, which appear to be more correlated with individual trade deficits than current reciprocal tariffs

This, I’m afraid, is going to take us down a bad path, Dominic. I think that we’re going to experience more aggressive tariffs than a lot of people think, because the president really believes that — what he really wants to go after is the trade deficits. What he really objects to, and from all of my arguments with him, I’m convinced that he believes — and if you listen to his language — he believes that if you have a trade deficit with another country, that is the measure of the amount that country steals from you. And that of course disregards that we get something when we purchase products from other countries, but this is the way he views it. He thinks that the Canadians are ripping us off, because we buy some more goods from them than they buy from us (by the way, the difference is fully explained by oil imports that are quite useful and important to us). But this is where we are. We’re going to have relearn this lesson. I do think the markets are going to respond very poorly, if I’m right and on April 2 we discover we’re having a more aggressive round of tariffs than we expect.

We are really in trouble. This is really next-level ignorance.

** Postscript: Tariffs rather than immigration is the topic of the day, but I was reminded in perusing the Declaration of Independence for this post that it also says this: "He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither"

***Postscript #2: The reason this likely underestimates inflation is because it does not take into account domestic producers raising their prices to partially match the price increases of their foreign competitors

Trump has proposed -- and depending on the time of day -- is actively planning to put large tariffs on aluminum imports (25% in the last version I saw). The implication is that there is some unfairness that has other countries producing a product we should be making domestically. Typically the argument is that the other governments are somehow subsidizing the product unfairly. Personally, I have never understood this argument -- as a US consumer I am perfectly happy to have taxpayers of another country subsidize my purchases. It turns out aluminum is a great example to look at because it is very clear why it is produced where it is.

First, let's look at where aluminum is produced, via wikipedia (perhaps taking Chinese reported production statistics with a grain of salt).

Some of this makes sense, but UAE? Bahrain?? Wtf? Let's explain:

Aluminum is produced pretty much the same way today as it was when the mass production process was first invented in the late 19th century -- using a LOT of electricity. Essentially, aluminum oxide from the raw bauxite ore is separated into pure aluminum and oxygen through an electrolysis process. I am not an expert, but estimates I have seen place electricity costs at 30-40% of the entire cost of aluminum. It takes something like 17,000 kWh of electricity to make one ton of aluminum. At some level you can think of a block of aluminum as a block of solid electricity**.

If you look at the top aluminum producers above, there is only a partial correlation with the top bauxite ore producers. That is because aluminum is generally not produced next to the bauxite mine but wherever the cheapest possible electricity can be found. The US historically produced a lot of aluminum, much of it in two places -- the Pacific Northwest and around Tennessee. You know why? Because these are the two largest areas of hydropower production, generally the cheapest source of electricity (its also why these were the two areas favored for early uranium separation). As US electricity costs have risen (and as we have actually reduced our total hydro power production under environmental pressure), aluminum production has moved to other countries.

Every one of the top six producers, excepting Canada, have electricity prices less than half those in the US. That is why Bahrain and UAE are on the list -- the are effectively converting their excess natural gas that might be wasted or flared to aluminum via electricity. Canada's electricity prices are also well under the US's though not as low as half, but Canada has a lot of very cheap hydropower in their eastern provinces and that keeps their aluminum industry viable.

It would be great to import 5-cent per kWh electricity from Bahrain, but there is no viable technological way to do that. So we do it the next best way -- we import cheap aluminum. This is a great example of why tariffs are absolute madness. Why would we possibly NOT want to take advantage of such fundamentally lower production costs in other countries for such a critical raw material?

The only possible political argument for doing so is that the government might wish to rebuild the US aluminum industry. But there is absolutely no way that is going to happen, for at least two reasons:

• Given the amount of electricity in the production costs of aluminum, to bring production to the US where electricity costs are more than 2x those of other producing countries would be to accept at least a 50% cost disadvantage, which is not going to be undone by a 25% tariff.
• But the more important point is this: No one in their right mind is going to invest based on the promise of tariffs that Trump himself changes almost daily and that will likely be politically undone long before any new plant is paid for, or even built. A new aluminum plant costs in the billions of dollars and it would be crazy to invest based on fleeting political promises. [OK, I freely admit that there do seem to be investors willing to make huge investments on the basis of what were likely fleeting political promises of government support -- solar, wind, EV's all come to mind. But "enticing investors to destroy capital" is not a very compelling reason to support subsidies and tariffs.]

If President Trump wants to rebuild the American aluminum industry, the best way would be to take actions that would free up regulations and mandates so that we could reduce the cost of electricity.

** Postscript: This is why aluminum is one of the very few items that it makes economic sense to recycle with current technology. Aluminum made from recycled scrap takes something like 1/20th the electricity of aluminum from the raw ore.

Just before inauguration day I wrote a post about the state of the world, saying in part:

To a large extent, US moral and intellection leadership post WWII on free speech and free trade has been critical to keeping these concepts alive around the world against the headwinds of authoritarianism.  Now, with a breakdown of support in the US for both, one wonders what future they have.

I held out some small hope that while it was depressing to consider that Trump was likely to further trash the notion of free trade (and he has certainly delivered on this bad promise), Republicans -- after years in the wilderness rightly complaining about government censorship and growing opposition on the Left to free speech -- might, just might, do something to make things a bit better. I thought JD Vance calling out Europe on its deteriorating free speech environment in his Munich speech was great. But its easy to call out other countries on this topic, much harder to remain disciplined in one's own country. It takes a lot of backbone to respect speech from people you really dislike and disagree with. And apparently this administration lacks such a backbone:

It’s been three days since the government arrested and detained Mahmoud Khalil for deportation. This afternoon, the administration finally stated the basis for its actions. Its explanation threatens the free speech of millions of people.

Yesterday, an administration official told The Free Press, “The allegation here is not that [Khalil] was breaking the law.” This was confirmed today by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who announced Khalil is being targeted under a law that she characterized as allowing the secretary of state to personally deem individuals “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America.”

WTF? Is that really a law? Some holdover from the Alien and Sedition acts? I can't believe it would stand up to First Amendment scrutiny and as a minimum any court should demand a LOT more due process before a green card holder was kicked out of the country. Heck had the Biden Administration dug up this particular chestnut they likely would have slapped the label on Trump.

The administration is wielding this standard — deportation for people whose activities could cause “serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” — to arrest and detain an individual graduate student. In explaining how he met this standard, the administration did not allege Khalil committed a crime. But it did explicitly cite the content of his speech,  characterizing it as “anti-American” and “pro-Hamas.” Protesting government policy is protected by the First Amendment, as is rhetorical support for a terrorist group (if not directly coordinated with it, which the government has not alleged here).

Disrupting college classes and harassing students is not protected expression, to be sure, and Leavitt stated that Khalil organized protests that may have done so. But the administration has not detailed Khalil’s specific actions with respect to those protests, so it remains unclear whether Khalil himself violated any campus rules against discriminatory harassment. Whether any such violation justifies detention and deportation is a separate question. In either adjudication, Khalil must be afforded due process. 

Congrats to the Trump Administration for taking a random asshole -- who few have heard of and many would disagree with and probably dislike -- and making him famous and likely far more effective in the future. Its like they never even heard of the Streisand Effect.

So my thin hopes that this Administration might have some positive effect on free speech are likely dashed. But that is no surprise. As I wrote in the article linked a the top:

I am not a Pollyanna -- I see threats and worrying trends in every direction, and will be writing about them.  For example, tomorrow we trade a President with an immense set of flaws for another with an immense set of entirely different flaws.  Perhaps I am not as disappointed as some by recent trends because I have always treated politicians and the media and academia with immense skepticism, so I am less surprised by their obvious failings.  I have always expected people in power -- government, corporations, wherever -- to abuse their power and believe the trick is to wire the system in a way that they cannot do too much damage.  In preparation for blogging again, and looking back over my old writing, one consistent theme I see is a disdain for solutions that boil down to "if only we replace their people with our people."  That's a hopeless approach.  We have flip-flopped the Coke and Pepsi parties in power more times in the last 50 years than we did in 100+ years before that, and its not making things better.  If anything its escalating a tit for tat power grab as each new administration pushes the precedent frontier forward more toward Presidential authoritarian power.  This is not a secret: Trump is bragging about it.

Headlines on Conservative outlets bragged that Trump was already turning the economy around. Breitbart was typical with this headline:

US Manufacturing Expands For Second Month Under Trump, Driven by Stronger Demand and Policy Shifts

In the body of the story they write:

After years of stagnation, the U.S. manufacturing sector is showing renewed strength under President Trump’s leadership. The latest data signal a reversal from the prolonged contraction during Biden’s term. Businesses are responding to policy shifts aimed at strengthening domestic industry, securing supply chains, and encouraging investment. [ed: no evidence is supplied for this last sentence]

This is an example of a the totally irritating genre of media stories that take the form of "President blames his predecessor for bad economic numbers" and "President takes credit for good economic numbers." Politicians' ability to do this, even when the narrative they use reverses month to month, is just amazing. Biden to the end of his Presidency was blaming Trump for every bad economic story and now, barely 42 days into in term, Trump supporters are taking credit for good economic numbers, even those magically created by time-travelling Trump in the first 20 days of January.

This connection between Jan/Feb manufacturing numbers and Trump is dead wrong for two reasons

1. The economy does not work this fast. The economy is a massive river like the Mississippi where changes in flow in Minneapolis won't be seen for quite some time in New Orleans. In particular, manufacturers are producing to orders they received weeks or months ago for customers in turn who likely are responding to orders and demand they saw even further in the past. If they are sourcing from overseas or selling overseas the delay is even longer. And negative things flow through more slowly than positive. I suppose the President on January 20 could order the CEO's of the 3 largest companies in America put up against a wall and shot and we might see the panic in the economic numbers by March 3, but I am not even sure of that.
2. I can say with total confidence -- having been a strategic planner at the top levels of Emerson Electric, Honeywell, and AlliedSignal -- that there are very few manufacturing companies in the last 60 days who have been racing to expand their business. The chaos of Trump's changing tariff demands is making planning impossible. Again, nothing changes quickly and projects in progress have to be finished, but I guarantee no one is starting new capital investments in manufacturing that they can defer. Everyone is frozen. And anyone doing business with the government or who needs Federal approval of permits is totally frozen as well because none of that work is getting done. Even if we give Trump the benefit of the doubt to say his intention is to streamline permitting and approvals, right now it is total gridlock. In government offices right now, it is gridlock where everyone has walked away from their cars. I think it is a total lock that we are going to see a dip in manufacturing investment in the coming months.

Economists have given this chaos the name "regime uncertainty" and among many free market economists exactly this sort of shifting regulatory environment under FDR gets part of the blame for the length of the Great Depression. Alex Tabarrok has more here.

This was originally posted on 2-1-25 but was lost in a  server update. 

Trump's first few weeks have been a mix of good and bad for this libertarian, all against a backdrop of horror at how Imperial the presidency has become.  But as of today, perhaps the most destructive and stupid initiative has begun:

Because we are all tired of those fentanyl-toting Canadians crossing the border illegally.   I mean, we all saw the Proposal and know how all those Canadians are trying to cheat US immigration law.

Seriously, this is beyond awful -- and not just because of the threat of retaliation, though that is real.  Even if all the affected countries roll over and accept these modified tariffs without response, this is still a terrible step for the US.  No matter how Trump and his very very small group of protectionist economist friends sell this, this is a tax on 300 million US consumers to benefit a small group of producers.   I don't have time right now to give an updated lesson on free trade -- that will have to wait for when I am not on vacation.  But I will offer a few ironies:

• After campaigning hard on inflation, Trump is slapping a 10-25% consumption tax on foreign goods.  That is a straight up consumer price increase for a variety of key products including much of the lumber we use to build homes, a lot of our oil and gas, a lot of our grain and beef, and many of our cars and appliances.
• Much of this inflation is going to disproportionately hurt Trump's base.  No one is going to care much if a Hollywood actor has the fair trade coffee they buy at Whole Foods go up in price, but Trump voters are going to see a direct effect of this on prices at Wal-Mart.
• Republicans have spent 4 years (rightly) condemning Federal and State governments for the economic disruptions of COVID lockdowns and restrictions.  While some of the inflation of the last 4 years was due to ridiculously high government deficits, another major cause was the COVID supply chain disruptions.  And now Trump is voluntarily recreating them.

The only small hope I have is that Trump is steeped from his business career in a certain style of brinksmanship bargaining that consists of taking an entirely destructive and irrational position in hopes that they folks on the other side of the table will back down and give him more than he should.  My son won poker tournaments like this because he would do so much crazy stuff that no one at the table wanted to challenge him.  I have always said that I don't think Trump is a particularly good business person -- he has run business after business that has failed.  But he is a good negotiator, and has exited numerous bankruptcies with his creditors giving him far more than one would think was necessary.

So I am sure his supporters would say that this is no different from the Columbia situation, when the Columbian president backed down quickly on not accepting repatriation of Columbian nationals under a storm of Trump threats.  Perhaps.  But even if this stuff is reversed, it is incredibly destructive because it is almost impossible for businesses to plan and make long-term investments when something so fundamental as tariff rates is changing so quickly and arbitrarily.

But there is yet another harm.  I know some folks are exhausted with the idea of American exceptionalism, in part because it has been a 75-year excuse to send our military bumbling around the world intervening in every conflict large and small, frequently overthrowing states only to have the replacement be even worse.

But there is one part of American exceptionalism that is important -- our example and our persuasion is a key support beam in upholding two great benefits for humanity -- free speech and free trade.  Every government official anywhere is a potential tyrant (if you think that is extreme, I would argue that this exact fear was one of the fundamental founding ideas behind our Constitution).  And tyrants want to have their opponents shut up and they want to shift economic activity to reward their supporters.  They love censorship and protectionism.

As such, in every country of the world, there is a tremendous headwind against free speech and free trade.  There is some natural gravity affecting government behavior that if there is not a constant, visible pressure to maintain free speech and free trade, they begin to be undermined.  And at least since 1945, the US has been the primary source of that pressure (one might add the UK to this, at least once upon a time, but looking at them now that is pretty much over).

Over the last 10 years, it has been incredibly depressing to see the US start to lose its commitment to free speech, particularly on the Left which has here-to-fore been the natural home of its defenders.  Trump and his supporters say things that seem like a positive step in returning to free speech, but I am a cynical man and I fear that we may only see censorship shifted to different topics rather than actually eliminated.  Time will tell, and I will have more on that later.

But in the case of trade, it is the Right in the US that has been the natural defender of free trade.  To see the Right not only abandon the defense of free trade, but actually start ramming torpedoes into its sinking carcass, is perhaps the most depressing part of Trump's order.

When Trump took office in 2017, I thought there was a reasonable chance that he would pardon Hillary Clinton.  I thought this was just the sort of schoolyard trick Trump might play -- after all, what better way to tar someone as guilty when they have not even been indicted for anything**. Trump didn't do it.

But now Biden has.  And to his own family.  Wow.

In his last hours of office Biden issued pre-emptive pardons for numerous people who have not even been charged with any crime.  Sort of blanket get out of jail free cards for any federal offense they might be accused of.  The act feels unprecedented, though I remember that President Bush did something similar for Donald Rumsfeld.  But it is certainly unprecedented in its scope.  He pardoned

• General Milley (who called Trump "fascist to the core" and a "wannabe dictator")
• Much of his family, including all his siblings and their spouses.  Republican Congressional investigators believe that Biden family members funneled foreign bribe money to Biden when he was Vice-President.   Certainly their family has extraordinarily complex financial arrangements, sending money to each other through a variety of shell corporations
• The entire J6 committee, which is sort of weird as they already should have immunity through the speech and debate clause
• Anthony Fauci

The legal case most folks are looking at right now is Burdick vs United States  which says that 1) a pardon can be rejected and 2) acceptance of a pardon carries "an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it," though it is disputed whether this latter is a binding precedent.  Getting such an un-asked for blanket pardon certainly seems a mixed blessing.  Think about John Owens, his brother-in-law.  Did anyone have him on their radar before, because NOW they do.

I know some are p*ssed off that they cannot put Liz Cheney or Anthony Fauci in jail.  Personally I am relieved.  The Biden administration set some horrible precedents in prosecution of its enemies, perhaps some of the worst since Nixon.  We are at a tipping point between dialing back on this sort of banana-republic-style political retribution or going into full-on Sicilian vendetta wars.  I have had lots of people disagree with me on this, but I think we need to turn the other cheek here and find intermediate ways to enforce accountability.  Trump's revocation of the security clearances of the folks who made up a Russian conspiracy to discredit the evidence of Hunter Biden's laptop seems like a reasonable approach.

But there is a silver lining to all this that I posted on X the morning the pardons were announced -- without the looming threat of prosecution, there is no room to plead the 5th.  The most interesting person to get under oath to answer questions is going to be Fauci, of course.  I worry that we have not found the boundaries of gain-of-function research and that dangerous research is still going on and being funded by government organizations (most recently I have seen rumors that the Department of Agriculture has been funding gain of function on diseases that affect livestock).  There is so much this guy needs to be asked under oath -- Covid origins, suppression of opposing speech, the vaccine trials, coordination with the teachers unions on school recommendations, etc etc -- that the hearings could last weeks.

Biden's legacy, such that it is, could also be in some danger.  No one is going to prosecute the guy, for the same reason that Hur did not, but there are sure a lot of suspicious financial transactions running back and forth through his family and a myriad of shell companies.

**Postscript:  For those with a short memory, Clinton moved her email to a private server in an attempt avoid FOIA and in so doing probably allowed classified information to sit on a poorly secured computer in her house.  I would have said that neither of these sorts of errors or crimes would reasonably ever be prosecuted (at least at that seniority), that is until I saw FBI agents descend on Mar-a-Lago looking for poorly secured classified documents.  It should be noted that despite the fears of many folks on the Left, Trump did not prosecute Clinton.

As expected, Trump gave notice yesterday to the UN that the US is pulling out of the Paris climate accords.  This marks the second time he has done so, making participation in these accords one of the EO ping pong balls that get swatted back and forth every inauguration day.

The reason this is possible is that supporters of these accords have never submitted the agreement to the Senate for ratification, which would make the terms of the agreement more legally binding and much harder to casually reverse.  Per Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution:

[the President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;

Woodrow Wilson spent a huge amount of time, most of his remaining prestige, and probably his remaining health negotiating the Versailles Treaty, but it was all for nothing in this country because the Senate did not approve the treat, which is why we were never in the League of Nations.**

My understanding is that something like the Paris Climate Accords there is actually a potentially less daunting way to adopt the accords as US law without getting a 2/3 vote in the Senate -- legislation could be crafted with rules mirroring the commitments in the Accords and then passed normally through the House and Senate.

Neither of these courses were pursued by President Obama or President Biden, even when they possessed Congressional majorities.  This is likely because -- whatever their public position is on climate change -- legislators know that adopting economically expensive mandates in an international agreement that are not matched by countries like China and India (see below) is wildly unpopular.  And so the basic approach has been to negotiate and "commit" the US to these agreements by unilateral executive action, and then attempt to use the regulatory tools available to the Administration to attempt to comply. [A more cynical view is that US Presidents have done what every other world leader has done in signing these pacts-- sign them as a virtue-signaling position with no idea of how to meet the commitments and perhaps no real intention of doing so].

Update:  This is really a stunning chart.  We have returned to the same carbon intensity we had before the Civil War.

** It is also why US wine producers, at least until a new treaty with the EU was approved in 2006, could legally use the word "champagne" to describe certain types of sparkling wine.  The history on this is complicated, and goes back further, but essentially the international agreement to not allow any wine outside of the Champagne region of France to use that name was embodied into the Treaty of Versailles, which the US did not ratify.  There is an organization called the CIVC which is essentially the Champagne union that defends the champagne IP, sometimes to ridiculous ends (reminiscent of the NFL and the word "Superbowl.")  I remember they sued Apple over calling a gold/bronze iphone color "champagne".