Editor: There can be no doubt that Stephens self-presents as a political moralist via Harold Macmillan, and that the birth of a diatribe has begun. Stephens as a Neo-Con and student of Leo Strauss, political fabulism is home territory, that synchs naturally with the party line of Trump as beyond the pale, the outlier in this political melodrama! Strauss and Trump are not just sympatico, but are fellow travelers, which renders Stephens commentary inert, yet he clings to it as sevisable in the political moment. The final paragraphs of Mr. Stephens comentary is a crowd scene, from that 21 inch screen black & white world of yester-year.
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Trump is Trump. Let’s think of him on his own terms.
Democrats wondering how to oppose Trump most effectively might consider the following. Drop the dictator comparisons. Rehearse the above facts. Promise normality and offer plans to regain it. And remember that no matter how malignant he may be, there’s no better opponent than a face-plant president stumbling over his untied laces.
Editor: It’s more like a incompetent pastish of Harold Lloyd !
Has Political Observer strayed into the most pressing question of the Historical Moment? Also, does Huntington’s ‘Who Are We’ offer an echo of Douthat in another key?
Editor: Mr. Douthat explores the perifery of this vexing question in two essay:
Headline: An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.
April 19, 2025
Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete. But the age of digital revolution — the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence — threatens an especially comprehensive cull. It’s forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a “bottleneck” — a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction.
When college students struggle to read passages longer than a phone-size paragraph and Hollywood struggles to compete with YouTube and TikTok, that’s the bottleneck putting the squeeze on traditional artistic forms like novels and movies.
When daily newspapers and mainline Protestant denominations and Elks Lodges fade into irrelevance, when sit-down restaurants and shopping malls and colleges begin to trace the same descending arc, that’s the bottleneck tightening around the old forms of suburban middle-class existence.
When moderates and centrists look around and wonder why the world isn’t going their way, why the future seems to belong to weird bespoke radicalisms, to Luigi Mangione admirers and World War II revisionists, that’s the bottleneck crushing the old forms of consensus politics, the low-key ways of relating to political debates.
When young people don’t date or marry or start families, that’s the bottleneck coming for the most basic human institutions of all.
And when, because people don’t pair off and reproduce, nations age and diminish and die away, when depopulation sweeps East Asia and Latin America and Europe, as it will — that’s the last squeeze, the tightest part of the bottleneck, the literal die-off.
The idea that the internet carries a scythe is familiar — think of Blockbuster Video, the pay phone and other early victims of the digital transition. But the scale of the potential extinction still isn’t adequately appreciated.
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Headline: More Babies, Please
Dec. 1, 2012
IN the eternally recurring debates about whether some rival great power will knock the United States off its global perch, there has always been one excellent reason to bet on a second American century: We have more babies than the competition.
It’s a near-universal law that modernity reduces fertility. But compared with the swiftly aging nations of East Asia and Western Europe, the American birthrate has proved consistently resilient, hovering around the level required to keep a population stable or growing over the long run.
America’s demographic edge has a variety of sources: our famous religiosity, our vast interior and wide-open spaces (and the four-bedroom detached houses they make possible), our willingness to welcome immigrants (who tend to have higher birthrates than the native-born).
And it clearly is an edge. Today’s babies are tomorrow’s taxpayers and workers and entrepreneurs, and relatively youthful populations speed economic growth and keep spending commitments affordable. Thanks to our relative demographic dynamism, the America of 50 years hence may not only have more workers per retiree than countries like Japan and Germany, but also have more than emerging powers like China and Brazil.
If, that is, our dynamism persists. But that’s no longer a sure thing. American fertility plunged with the stock market in 2008, and it hasn’t recovered. Last week, the Pew Research Center reported that U.S. birthrates hit the lowest rate ever recorded in 2011, with just 63 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. (The rate was 71 per 1,000 in 1990.) For the first time in recent memory, Americans are having fewer babies than the French or British.
The plunge might be temporary. American fertility plummeted during the Great Depression, and more recent downturns have produced modest dips as well. This time, the birthrate has fallen fastest among foreign-born Americans, and particularly among Hispanics, who saw huge amounts of wealth evaporate with the housing bust. Many people may simply be postponing childbearing until better times return, and a few years of swift growth could produce a miniature baby boom.
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Editor: Does Mr. Douthat’s essays express a kind of cultural/political propinquity to Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ of December 5, 2005 ?
“You can distinguish the intellect and the will. The medievals believed in the weakness of the will but the power of the intellect. Modern people tend to believe in the power of the will and the weakness of the intellect.”
According to Thiel, the worst mistake made by Enlightenment was sweeping crucial questions under the carpet. To forget about the turbulent years of religious wars and social unrest, the “Age of Reason“ abandoned the important question of human nature or the power of faith.
Thiel, in “The Straussian Moment“ highlighted the ineffable trait of the Enlightenment of not being brave enough to ask hard questions, bringing up the figures of crucial philosophers, for example, John Locke.
“In the place of human nature, Locke leaves us with an unknowable “X.” This awareness of ignorance provides the low but solid ground on which the American Founding takes place. The human “X” may have certain wants and preferences, but nobody is in an authoritative position from which to challenge those desires.’
John Locke is one of the most influential philosophers and a key figure of the Enlightenment. His modern “liberal“ thoughts deeply influenced the Founding Fathers of the USA and gave fresh air, spreading the grasp of optimism around Europe. Locke pioneered the ideas of natural law or social contract.
Locke, among other Enlightenment philosophers, developed a concept of the social contract. According to their concept, the government was created through the consent of the people to be ruled by the majority. Social contract theory provides a rationale justification for the notion that legitimate state power should be derived from the consent of the majority of society.
And by Thiel’s explanation, the concept of the social contract is the central lie of the Enlightenment that allows avoiding asking hard questions about human nature, white-washing problematic and often violent character of human beings. Peter Thiel considers social contract as the main myth:
“The enlightenment always white-washes violence. There are many things we can’t think about under enlightenment reasoning, and one of them is violence itself. If you go to the anthropological myth of the enlightenment, it’s the myth of the social contract. So what happens when everybody is at everybody else’s throat? The enlightenment says that everybody in the middle of the crisis sits down, has a nice legal chat, and draws up a social contract. And maybe that’s the founding myth — the central lie — of the Enlightenment. Girard says something very different must have happened. When everybody is at everybody’s throat, the violence doesn’t just resolve itself, and maybe it gets channeled against a single scapegoat where the war of all against all became a war of all against one and somehow gets resolved in a very violent way. “
According to Thiel, the end of humanity would be marked by the definitive abandonment of all the hard questions, but there would no longer be any conflict.
In the beginning there was agony. Under the empires of old, the strong did what they willed and the weak suffered what they must.
But over the centuries, people built the sinews of civilization: Constitutions to restrain power, international alliances to promote peace, legal systems to peacefully settle disputes, scientific institutions to cure disease, news outlets to advance public understanding, charitable organizations to ease suffering, businesses to build wealth and spread prosperity, and universities to preserve, transmit and advance the glories of our way of life. These institutions make our lives sweet, loving and creative, rather than nasty, brutish and short.
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Editor: collecting ready-made cliche’s is Mr. Brooke strong suit ‘The Collapse’ being his entance into ‘New York Times World’. But The Reader confronts in this 1124 word essay is these political actors:
NATO, Perkins Coie, Harvard, Columbia, Big Ten,Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, (Think of the civil rights movement at Selma.), “Upheaval,” Jared Diamond.
But note Mr. Brook’s self-descritpion in his final paragraph, that reeks of placing himself above and or beyond the frey, that somehow retains political credibility, in Brooks’ self-conception?
I’m really not a movement guy. I don’t naturally march in demonstrations or attend rallies that I’m not covering as a journalist. But this is what America needs right now. Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Paul D. Ryan and his self-proclaimed “young guns” in the House Republican leadership traversed the country in 2010 harnessing the energy of the Tea Party movement that would sweep them to power that November. But in failing to confront the most divisive forces of the movement, they may have set their party up for its current crisis.
Some of those insurgent winners from that year would eventually turn on the leaders one by one, setting in motion the downfall of Rep. Eric Cantor — just as Republicans were attempting to cobble together a modest immigration measure — then blocking the ascent of Rep. Kevin McCarthy after they had deposed John A. Boehner as the speaker of the House.
Now the Tea Party’s ultimate creation, Donald J. Trump, may be coming for the last young gun unscathed, Ryan.
“Paul Ryan, I don’t know him well, but I’m sure I’m going to get along great with him,” Trump said as he stormed through Super Tuesday and sealed his front-runner status. “And if I don’t, he’s going to have to pay a big price.”
Weeks before that, Trump blamed Ryan in part for Republicans losing the White House in 2012.
Facing forces he inadvertently helped unleash, Ryan finds himself confronting a potentially agonizing choice — both moral and intellectual — between the values he has spent his career promoting and the man who stands ready to repudiate them.
“If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party,” Ryan said this week, directing rare fire at Trump, though not by name, “there can be no evasion and no games. They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry.”
On Wednesday, Ryan’s office was contacted by Trump’s campaign, but the two men did not speak, said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Ryan. “We expect the speaker to be in touch with all the remaining candidates soon to discuss our efforts to build a bold conservative policy agenda for 2017,” he said.
To Democrats, and some Republicans, Ryan and the Republican leadership have a quandary of their own making. Republican lawmakers and candidates often averted their gaze when questions were raised about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate and religion. They tolerated breaches of decorum, such as Rep. Joe Wilson’s cry of “You lie” during a presidential address, and even made light of the man who brought many of those alleged conspiracies to the fore: Trump.
“The party repeatedly made myopic decisions, tolerating the intolerable views of a segment of the party unwilling to accept that problem-solving is complicated,” said Tony Fratto, a Republican consultant who served in the George W. Bush administration. “The short game was winning some midterms. The cost was creating an incoherent and unsustainable coalition.”
Democrats are now seizing on this trajectory, and trying to tie all Republican incumbents, even Ryan, to the legacy.
“Donald Trump is appealing to some of the darkest forces in America,” Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “It’s time for Republicans to stop the Frankenstein they created.”
Many Republicans reject that analysis, especially when it comes to Ryan. His aides answer questions of Obama’s birth and presidential eligibility with a form letter that includes a copy of the president’s birth certificate. “I certainly understand the importance of this issue,” the letter says, “and I hope you find the information useful.”
Instead, they pin Trump’s rise on their own failures to deliver on campaign promises, like the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the defunding of Planned Parenthood, and the broad shrinking of government. That helped spawn the anger propelling Trump.
“People were not totally upfront in saying as long as President Obama is in the White House, we need to be realistic about our goals,” said Brian Walsh, a former official at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “I think that contributed to the anger and disenchantment with leadership.”
While Ryan politely rejected the birth inquiries, others did not.
Asked in 2011 on the NBC program “Meet the Press” about the birth certificate conspiracy, and House members still promoting it, Boehner responded, “It really is not our job to tell the American people what to believe and what to think.” Asked on the same program about such “crazy talk,” Cantor replied, “I don’t think it’s, it’s nice to call anyone crazy, OK?”
“In Trump’s America, the Guessing Game Never Ends”
What is our policy toward Iran? Are the tariffs on or off? If they’re on—what countries are they on? And are they permanent? What’s actually going on? As a newsletter writer, it is my job to know these things, and yet when I walked to work this morning I saw a little French Bulldog peeing on the sidewalk, and I looked in his bulging bug eyes and figured he could predict the Trump administration’s next moves as well as I could.
And maybe he could. Today in our pages, Matthew Continetti says that I—like a lot of people—am thinking about the Trump administration the wrong way. Why? Because, according to Matt, we’re “looking for conceptual frameworks and policy Svengalis. None exist. In Trump’s White House, strategy documents are suggestions. Personnel is not policy. Trump is the policy.”
Editor : Its been a while since I’ve seen the name Matthew Continetti in any context, but his association with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is no surprise!
Why Does Trump’s Iran Policy Look Like Obama’s?
Over the weekend, just before Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff met with Iranian leaders in Oman, he told The Wall Street Journal that the goal was to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, but that the “red line” is that the country can’t have nuclear weapons.
That may sound unremarkable enough. But as Eli Lake argues today, it represents a sea change in Trump’s Iran policy. And he thinks it’s an ominous sign when it comes to the kind of deal we might be about to strike with Tehran.
Editor : The Reader only need confront the first paragraph, and the use of the term ‘Activist Judges’… to follow next is the Ronald Reagan favorite ‘Welfare Queens’ ? to confront Mr. Colvile’s not so latent xenophobia!
Week after week, the reports fill the papers. “Migrant avoids deportation because he lost his phone.” “Pakistani paedophile allowed to stay in UK because he is an alcoholic.” “Rapist’s criminal record is so bad he can’t be deported.” “Criminal’s deportation case halted over son’s dislike for chicken nuggets.” “Afghan woman can’t be deported because she has back pain.”
Even allowing for a certain level of journalistic exaggeration, we clearly find it harder than we should to kick out those who shouldn’t be here. So what’s gone wrong?
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Editor: The Reader might wonder about the British Empire and how it strip-mined its Colonial Possesions over centuries: that is carefully elided from the Mr. Covle’s rant, about the undeservig grifters on the dole. It could be argued that those on the dole are the watershed of that Empire, and its criminal eterprise refracted though time? Mr. Colevile is a Thaterite of a certain political class, in sum an Oxbridger whose veration of The Iron Lady is toxic! Should The Reader pay due attention to Mr. Colvile’s arguments?
Well, Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, thinks much of the blame lies with lawyers like Greg Ó Ceallaigh. Ó Ceallaigh is a crusading KC, who supports the abolition of the Illegal Migration Act, has called Tory politicians “terrible crooks” and tweeted in 2012 that the party “need to be dealt with as you would deal with the Nazis, cancer or lava”. But he also moonlights as a migration judge.
I’m not suggesting Ó Ceallaigh’s judicial verdicts are driven by his politics, though he has certainly contributed to the catalogue above. (“Covid made me commit crime, claims drug dealer spared deportation”.) But it is definitely true that the people who become migration judges tend to be migration lawyers — and that such lawyers generally got into the field to protect migrants’ rights, not borders.
Indeed, asylum and migration is widely accepted to be one of the most left-wing parts of an increasingly left-wing profession. In surveys by The Lawyer, the magazine’s readers voted overwhelmingly for the Lib Dems in 2019, and even more overwhelmingly for Labour in 2024.
Editor : Mr. Colevile presents Greg Ó Ceallaigh in a Dickensian shadow, in his utter mendacity and ‘left-wing politics’. But reader notice how the cast of characters grows into a 885 word tyrade, against a set of bad political actors in the Colvile Political Imagination! A sampler of the miscreants exhaustes the readers patience , so let me be parsimonious in my selection!
1) A few months ago, every living lord chief justice co-authored a report on prisons policy, urging more leniency and lamenting the fact that idiot politicians, egged on by the media, kept pushing for tougher sentencing.
2) The nutrient neutrality scandal has seen tens of thousands of houses blocked by a disastrously strict interpretation of habitat regulations. And the government has yet to explain why we are legally obliged to give up the Chagos islands, let alone hand billions to Mauritius for the privilege.
3) When the row over “two-tier justice” broke out, the chairman of the Sentencing Council sent the justice secretary an astonishingly high-handed letter, warning that the judiciary accepted sentencing guidelines only because they were written by the judiciary, and that for “sentencing guidelines of whatever kind …
4) Similarly, when Kemi Badenoch and Sir Keir Starmer agreed it was utterly wrong for a Gazan family to be granted asylum under a scheme reserved for Ukrainians, the lady chief justice said the lack of respect for judicial independence left her “deeply troubled”.
5)As are many of his closest friends — including Philippe Sands, who has driven the Chagos case, and the attorney-general, Lord Hermer.
6)That might seem like a commendable blow for equality. But the more you dig into the equal pay rules, the less that argument convinces.
7)The clothing firm Next, for example, was punished for paying warehouse workers more than retail staff because those jobs were male and female-coded — even though it did not pay a single woman less than a man for doing the same job, and almost half of its warehouse workers were female.
8)The same legal constraints have seen the NHS grade all staff according to an impossibly complicated formula that creates arbitrary equivalence between completely different roles.
9)For example, the evidence in the Next case was very clear that there is more demand for warehouse workers than retail staff, that pay for such roles is higher, and that the firm had begged staff in its stores to shift over.
10)Rather than reflecting reality, the equal pay regime has become a charter for trade unions to milk employers. And I’ve explained it at such length because Labour is hugely expanding its scope.
11)It gives unions the right to enter workplaces where they aren’t recognised, and forces firms to give union “equality representatives” time off to attend to those duties.
12)Ministers will also activate the long-dormant “socioeconomic duty” within the Equality Act, which means every single decision made by the state must be evaluated according to its impact on disadvantage. And all of this will be policed by legal case after legal case.
13)During the Tory leadership contest, Tom Tugendhat argued that Britain is increasingly subject not to the rule of law but the rule of lawyers. That’s been great for the legal profession — but not so much for the rest of us. And sadly, the lawyers around the cabinet table are set to make things very much worse.
Editor: Though my attempt at parsimony, may have been limited by Mr. Colvile’s Thatcherite Historical Sweep, the reader is given key passages from which to reach the essentials, if that is what they be?
& Wong Kim Ark is not just an artifact that history has long passed by. The modern Supreme Court, in dicta, has reaffirmed it. In Plyler v. Doe (1982), a 5-4 majority observed that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause forbade states from excluding the children of illegal aliens from public schools. The Justices unanimously agreed, however, that “no plausible distinction for the 14th Amendment’s ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.” Critics of birthright citizenship today can certainly argue that the Court erred in Plyler, just as they can argue that the Court erred in Wong Kim Ark. But they must show that the weight of historical evidence of the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment justifies reversing 140 years of unbroken judicial interpretation. They cannot because the traditional sources of legal meaning run exactly the other way.
The Fourteenth Amendment recognized the traditional American norm of birthright citizenship. No Supreme Court, Congress, or President has acted to the contrary. As head of the executive branch, Trump has the authority to order the agencies to pursue a different interpretation. He can use his discretion to prompt a test case that will swiftly reach the Supreme Court, which will almost certainly affirm Wong Kim Ark. It is hard to see a conservative, originalist Supreme Court rejectingthe traditional American understanding of citizenship held from the time of the Founding, through Reconstruction, to today. But while destabilizing settled constitutional meaning, Trump may suffer severe political costs without doing anything to solve the problems of immigration and the southern border.
John Yoo: The Man Who Would Make the President King
The Trump presidency has been a stress test for maximalist theories of presidential power.
The Trump presidency has been a stress test for maximalist theories of presidential power. Even the narrower versions of unitary executive theory, which hold that the president has an indefeasible right to direct and remove executive branch officers, present vast opportunities for mischief. With those powers, a crooked president can cover up corruption by barking “You’re fired!” to inspectors general who might expose it, or direct federal prosecutors to protect his cronies and screw his enemies. Trump’s efforts in this direction so far have been unsubtle, to say the least, but they reveal how much rests on a bed of unenforceable “norms.” Alexander Hamilton’s argument for “energy in the executive” in Federalist 70 took as a given that we’d have a president vulnerable to “the restraints of public opinion,” not one for whom, as has been said of Trump, “shamelessness is a superpower.”
Yoo’s hardly blind to Trump’s character flaws. He admits his hero Hamilton erred badly in predicting that the office would be filled by “characters preeminent for ability and virtue.” Instead, the 20th century drift toward “quasi-plebiscitary” selection favors the sort of figures Hamilton feared: men with “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity”—a description, Yoo concedes, that “could not have anticipated Donald Trump’s public life in more accurate terms.” But if we’re increasingly likely to get people we can’t trust, might it have been unwise to concentrate so much power in the presidency in the first place?
Hamilton also argued that energy in the executive would provide “steady administration of the laws.” This is, perhaps, another area where the $10 Founding Father could’ve been a lot smarter. The last three presidents have assumed an extraordinary amount of unilateral power to make the laws, as with Trump’s recent decision to conjure up $400 a week in supplemental employment benefits with the stroke of a pen.
Under Yoo’s tutelage, Trump appears poised to take pen-and-phone governance still further. The president is “privately considering a controversial strategy to act without legal authority to enact new federal policies,” Axios reported in July, in a scheme “heavily influenced by John Yoo, the lawyer who wrote the Bush administration’s justification for waterboarding after 9/11.”
The gambit centers on the Supreme Court’s recent decision, in DHS v. Regents of the University of California, blocking Trump’s reversal of Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, itself an arguably illegal use of executive power. The ruling, Yoo lamented in National Review, “makes it easy for presidents to violate the law”—and hard for their successors to undo those violations. In a matter of days, though, Yoo decided Regents was really a blueprint for action and began urging Trump to “weaponize the DACA decision” to enact his own agenda.
One problem with forging new weapons is that you can’t keep them out of the hands of future presidents, some of whom are sure to combine Trump’s shamelessness with actual competence.
Oh, well: The upside is that Yoo’s new theory of executive empowerment scored him an audience with the president. After his Oval Office visit in July, Yoo reported that Trump is “really on top of things,” and, despite what you hear, not all “Nixonian in the bunker and paranoid and dark.” So we’ve got that going for us.
Political Observer ( With apologies to Mark J. Rozell & Mitchel A. Sollenberger !)
Trumpian chicanery renders any attempt at finding motive and reasons, for self-serving political and economic manipultion, are moot? Exploitable Chaos is The Trumpian métier !
Editor: The Financial Times reports on the Trumpian Chaos, and the massive sighes of relief, and the fears of an uncertain future, that cannot be assuaged!
Donald Trump stunned global investors on Wednesday when he announced a 90-day pause in additional tariffs on countries that were willing to negotiate with the US, sending stocks surging as the president backed down from a full-blown trade war.
Wall Street equities surged immediately after Trump’s announcement, with the blue-chip S&P 500 closing up 9.5 per cent and the Nasdaq Composite surging more than 12 per cent. It was the best day for the S&P 500 since 2008 and the strongest for the Nasdaq since 2001.
The massive rally in stocks added about $4.3tn to the market value of the S&P 500, according to Financial Times calculations based on FactSet data. The gains reversed some of the heavy losses for US stocks since Trump announced his wide-ranging tariffs a week ago.
However, the president also singled out China for further tariffs, increasing his additional levies on the world’s second-largest economy to 125 per cent, deepening his trade stand-off with the Asian nation.
Trump said in a Truth Social post: “Based on the fact that more than 75 Countries have called . . . to negotiate a solution . . . and that these Countries have not, at my strong suggestion, retaliated in any way, shape, or form against the United States, I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately.”
But China had showed a “lack of respect” by retaliating against US tariffs, Trump added. “I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately.”
The stunning climbdown from the US leader came after a week of turmoil in global markets, with trillions of dollars shed in equity prices around the world, a sharp sell-off in US bonds, and a plunge in oil prices to levels last seen during the coronavirus pandemic.
“This is Trump’s capitulation to markets,” said Andy Brenner at NatAlliance Securities. “He has saved face by keeping tariffs on China.”
A heavy sell-off in US government debt, a bedrock of the global financial system, eased following Trump’s U-turn and a Treasury auction that signalled robust international demand. The 10-year yield, which had been up as much as 0.24 percentage points on Wednesday, ended the New York day up 0.08 percentage points at 4.35 per cent.
Companies that had been beaten down in recent days also posted huge gains on Wednesday. Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Tesla all jumped at least 10 per cent following Trump’s announcement.
Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said the “world is ready” to work with Trump to “fix global trade” but dismissed China as having “chosen the opposite direction”.
Lutnick added on X that he and Treasury secretary Scott Bessent “sat with the President while he wrote one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his Presidency”.
Later on Wednesday, Trump appeared to acknowledge some of the fear in the markets sparked by his trade war.
“Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippie, you know, they were getting . . . a little bit afraid,” he told reporters.
Headline: There’s Nothing Real About Trump’s ‘Real America’
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I’ve been thinking about this case as an emblem of everything that makes Donald Trump’s presidency so vile and destructive, even when I’ve bentoverbackward to give him the benefit of the doubt, and even when I’ve agreed with him on this or that pointofpolicy.
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I have, to borrow a line from Peggy Noonan, a “certain idea of America.” He ain’t it.
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It’s Sojourner Truth asking the suffragists at the 1851 Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, “Ain’t I a woman?
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It’s Lou Gehrig, stricken with A.L.S. in his 30s, calling himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
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It’s Gail Halvorsen, the candy bomber of the Berlin Airlift, parachuting chocolates and gum to the hungry children of the besieged city.
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It’s John McCain refusing an offer to be released before other American P.O.W.s in North Vietnamese captivity — and, 40 years later, publicly rebuking a supporter for calling Barack Obama, his opponent in the 2008 presidential race, “an Arab.”
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It’s Robert F. Kennedy after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another.”
Democratic nobility is also found on a page I keep in my desk drawer, a passenger manifest of the ship that brought my 10-year-old mother to the United States, thanks to the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. Right below my mother’s name and nationality — “Stateless” — there is Jamil Issa Hasan, 26, Jordanian; Bruna Klar, 27, Italian; Martha Kohlhaupt, 41, German; and Gerda Nesselroth, 45, also stateless.
Soon to be Americans all.
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understatement and confidence, decency and expectation, the America of Huck and Jim, Bogart and Hepburn, Shepard and Glenn.
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But I struggle to understand what’s real in JD Vance’s shape-shifting political beliefs or Trump’s meme coins.
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Editor: this selective collection of quotations, in sum these lifeless tableau vivant , are the sighposts of a decorus chatter, that is an attempt to mitigate, excuse the Genocide being perptrated against the Palestinian’s, by the Zionist Faschist State. Onley in high dudgeon can Mr Stephens manage to command, what almost resembles the moral/political high ground!
The United States is a vast and diverse country and an old and resilient democracy that won’t quickly fold into authoritarianism and illiberalism the way Russia or Hungary did. The habits of freedom, 250 years old, still run deep in our bones — deeper than anything this president can ruin over the next few years. But that certain idea of America that once typified us, and for which we were once so admired, is evaporating.
