Weekly Links (Midweek Edition) 02/05/2025
Some personal comments to start:
a) Trump supporters are driven by the apocalyptic paranoid vision of a country in decline, seen as turning into (to borrow a phrase from a friend) a "DEI NetZero Decolonizing Multigender Transgender Antizionist Marxist Pronoun-Focused dystopia." This, for many of them, justifies a radical revolution using, if necessary, extra-constitutional mechanisms. Never mind that the U.S. economy is the envy of the world, that many of those "woke" phenomena are already past their peak, and that any program or policy changes viewed by the voting population as needing reform could and should be carried out in a legal fashion by Congress or the courts, not by executive fiat.
b) It's possible that the most binding constraint on Trump's actions will turn out to be investor reaction, as reflected in the movements of the stock and bond markets. Investors of the world, unite; You have nothing to lose except your wealth.
Now to the links --
1) What is Trump actually trying to do? I am unsure how to make sense of his flurry of EOs and wild pronouncements. They are hard to fit into any rational decision framework. Is he just thrashing about and tossing smoke bombs of confusion to demonstrate that he's as powerful as the foreign autocrats he so much admires? To demonstrate that he's firmly in charge and the opposition is powerless? Or is the confusion a cover for the initial steps in a dismantling of democratic, constitutional institutions, as many believe? Should we be seriously alarmed or are we suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome? Andy Craig, for one, thinks a coup is starting.
Tom Edsall profiles the man who, much more than Elon Musk, will be charged with carrying out Trump's desire to dismantle or completely reorganize the Federal government, Russell Vought, incoming director of the OMB, called by Edsall "Trump's Thomas Cromwell" (for all you Hilary Mantel fans).
Francis Fukuyama issues a sharp warning about the consequences of the administration's revival of "Schedule F," an executive order that strips lage parts of the federal bureaucracy of their civil service status. He sees it as a key weapon in the hands of "one of the most lawless presidencies in American history," and concludes: "In my book Political Order and Political Decay, I wrote about how difficult it is to create modern, impersonal, high-capacity states. There is always pressure for “re-patrimonialization,” that is, the regress of a modern impersonal bureaucracy into a patrimonial one run by friends and family of the ruler. The United States is experiencing re-patrimonialization as we speak: citizens freely debating laws are replaced by supplicants begging the king to favor their interests. MAGA world, for some reason, thinks that this constitutes a return to constitutional first principles."
2) Moving over to the tariff question, Paul Krugman argues that zigzagging on tariffs is disastrous for business planning and expectations, while Musk's merry men could do huge damage as they seize control in the Treasury's payments system.
Rajiv Sethi interprets the tariff reversals as an exercise in leverage, a tactic described famously in Thomas Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict. Much more damage will result from the cutoffs in vital global health programs, which will severely affect U.S. soft power.
3) Dan Drezner explains how the U.S. is rapidly and deeply alienating its northern neighbor and draws an analogy with how Russia gradually pushed Ukraine toward the West.
4) In the contest for "the worst thing Trump has done so far," Dylan Matthews nominates the ending (or pausing? Who knows) of aid for overseas health programs. It could cause, he says, the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/397992/trump-usaid-foreign-aid-pepfar-musk-doge
5) The history of the "war on drugs" is one of repeated failures to stop the supply from crossing U.S. borders. Demand is so strong that it incentivizes suppliers and smugglers to constantly find new ways to overcome all barriers. Brandan Buck says, "President Trump was elected in 2024 partly on his promise of ending 'America’s endless wars.' The Trump administration says it doesn’t want new wars, boldly declaring that '[w]e will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.' While it is too early to judge his sincerity or ability to do so, in the early weeks of his second term it appears like the Trump administration is poised to breathe new life into America’s original 'endless war,' that of the war on drugs."
https://www.cato.org/blog/one-endless-war-another-trumps-new-military-frontier-mexico
Tariffs are completely inappropriate as a supposed weapon against drug trafficking, given their disconnect from the goal and the huge economic damage they would cause. Trump's fentanyl excuse for tariffs just doesn't hold water.
https://theconversation.com/why-trumps-tariffs-cant-solve-americas-fentanyl-crisis-245978
In addition, tariffs would, in fact, make the problem worse by either making fentanyl cheaper for users or raising profitability for the producers.
https://www.aei.org/economics/trumps-tariffs-would-make-fentanyl-cheaper/
6) Does Trump have any kind of coherent foreign policy, based on a consistent and well-supported view of the world, or is he just lashing out in a macho power display? Rutgers historian Jennifer Mittelstadt finds an explanation in the revival of a "lost tradition" called "sovereigntism."
7) Immigration expert David Bier outlines in detail all the actions Trump has already taken in that policy area and what he plans to do in the future.
8) More than once in the past, political observers have predicted that one or the other party would become durably dominant because of demographic changes in the voting population, whether involving age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or education (Kevin Phillips in 1969 on the GOP/John Judis and Ruy Teixeira in 2002 on the Democrats). But despite the demographic shifts having taken place as predicted, the electorate remains very closely divided. Four economists explain why: The parties adjusted their platforms to follow the demographics. A great study.
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/why-2024-us-election-and-so-many-others-were-so-hard-predict