………One of the biggest differences between Donald Trump and other politicians is that Trump does what others only talk about.
It’s become a popular sport to dig up video clips from lefty politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, and Barack Obama, who once upon a time said things about subjects like trade, tariffs, government spending, and immigration that sound a lot like Donald Trump or Elon Musk today. Here, for example, is Obama on the subject of rooting out “wasteful spending” in “a systematic way.” Here he is on immigration.
People who say, “Oh, they’re just hypocrites,” are, I believe, misunderstanding the situation. It’s possible—even likely—that hypocrisy comes into the equation. More important is their assessment of political reality.
…….Most politicians accept the political chessboard they inherit. They are prepared to make moves—even dramatic ones—on the given field of play. They are unwilling or unable to change or challenge that field.
……..Donald Trump is different. He does what others say is impossible. Some commentator (I forget who) recently employed a quip attributed to Winston Churchill about Trump. Churchill is supposed to have said that U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was “the only bull I know who carries his china shop with him.” Apparently, Churchill did not say that. But it is a memorable image, and one can understand why someone would apply it to Donald Trump. He has been in office fewer than 100 days, yet look at the disruptions he has instigated. On his first day, he abolished all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs throughout the federal government. He also forbade simply renaming those programs in order to carry on their racist, inequitable work by subterfuge. He insisted that universities jettison their coddling of racist and anti-Semitic policies as a condition for receiving federal money. As of this writing, hundreds of millions of dollars have been withheld from Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and other elite institutions for failing to abide by this directive. He tapped Elon Musk to help him identify and eliminate waste and fraud in the government. The revelations are stunning. It’s almost as if the U.S. government had evolved into a machine to serve politicians at the taxpayer’s expense.
This last week, Trump got around to one of the main things he campaigned on, his “favorite word,” tariffs. The stock market cratered, the establishment recoiled like a scrotum in icy water, and the acrid scent of panic was everywhere. I wrote about the tariffs the morning of what Trump called “Liberation Day” before the market opened. I expected market tumult but was taken aback by the ferocity of the market reaction.
Still, I continue to believe that we should give Trump’s strong medicine a chance to work. I think that the commentator Tanvi Ratner is correct: the tariffs “aren’t a trade tweak,” she wrote, “they’re the first move in a full-spectrum reset.” As the stock market declines, investors flee to treasury bonds, forcing the yield on those bonds lower. This year, almost $10 trillion will need to be refinanced. Every basis point that the yield declines translates into a billion-dollar annual savings in loan repayment. Thus, a 0.5% drop, she points out, would save $500 billion over a decade. As of this writing, the yield has declined about 0.7 points. That’s a lot of money saved.
As a friend of mine observed, Trump’s tariffs are less a matter of economic policy than they are a matter of statecraft. Just a few days ago, Scott Bessent, Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury, discussed Trump’s strategy in an interview with Tucker Carlson. Their ultimate aim, he said, is to strengthen the middle class by helping to get spending under control and by equalizing the international economic playing field. Will it work? Time—and it won’t be a lot of time—will tell. I think that the investor Bill Ackman was spot on in his recent post on X. “Trump’s strategy is not without risk,” he noted, “but I wouldn’t bet against him. The more that markets support the President and his strategy, the higher the probability that he succeeds, so a stable hand on the trading wheel is a patriotic one.”
President Trump campaigned on national and border security, enforcing immigration laws, common sense decisions, getting rid of the CRT/DEI indoctrination in schools and the workplace, restoring warrior ethos in the military, and putting America first.