What the Trump administration is doing here is pure thuggery, lawfare of the most shameless and self-disgracing sort. What defense does MAGA wish to offer for Trump threatening to indict the chairman of the Fed on fake charges because he won’t cut interest rates like Trump demands? Trump cannot legally remove Powell from his position except “for cause,” and so here he is, directing his Justice Department to manufacture a “cause” he can use to threaten Powell. I can hear the constant refrain of online Trump supporters ringing in my ears: “I voted for this.” Did you, really? Did you vote for this?
Let us pause also to note the hilarity (seemingly almost intentional, as if to emphasize the near-Shakespearean insolence of office) of Trump threatening to indict Powell over purportedly mishandling the “renovations of historic buildings.” Donald Trump literally just demolished the East Wing without any sort of review, and then illegally slapped his name on the Kennedy Center to end the year. And bragged about how nobody could stop him from doing it! Does the administration see this irony? Maybe Trump does not, but those surrounding him surely do — and I’m halfway convinced that this aspect of things is an “intentional flex,” what they enjoy about their current amoral exercise of power more than anything else. We can do whatever we want, use any tool we wish, because we’re in charge now. (This power-tripping attitude comes through with crystalline purity in the public rhetoric of Trump’s most prominent underlings, such as Stephen Miller.)
It’s frightening to see a methodology shaping up in the Trump DOJ’s nakedly political indictments. This is now the second time they have moved against a disliked political figure by sifting through random Senate testimony to find something they can hang a flimsy indictment on. It is precisely the brand of injustice we all learned to revile from the Stalinist era: “Show me the man, and I will find you the crime.” The fact that all this pressure is so shamelessly out in the open — and greeted with distractable indifference from the media and Trump’s increasingly coarsened supporters — feels like a degradation of American politics, and a quietly slow-rolling, endlessly accumulating civic and social tragedy. The cost of the politics of this era will be felt long after Trump is gone. I fear we will never get the poison fully out of our blood.
Stefan Bartl decries the malignant expansion of national-government executive-branch power in the United States. Two slices:
On April 2, or “Liberation Day,” tariffs captured much of 2025 as the administration sought to upend decades-long trading practices under the promise of bringing manufacturing back to the United States. In a return to an old-school mercantilist instinct, broad tariffs were imposed on imports to leverage the size of the U.S. economy against trading partners and supposedly spark domestic production, especially in nostalgic sectors such as steel and autos.
According to FRED, both domestic auto production and employment in manufacturing continue to decrease. At the same time, prices have risen sharply over the past year. From March to September of last year, the Producer Price Index (PPI) for Metals and Metal Products rose roughly by 10 points, from 132 to 143. In autos, Fitch Ratings places the 60-plus-day auto-loan delinquency rate at a record high, with new car prices averaging more than $50,000 for the first time.
Taken together, tariffs have taxed consumers while failing to deliver the promised production gains — manufacturing, in effect, a kind of policy-made madness. In addition, affordability is now casting a long shadow over the economy, especially when tariffs are applied to goods the United States has little or no capacity to produce at scale, such as bananas and coffee, revealing the bluntness of broad-based tariff policy and a poor understanding of America’s own production capacities.
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If America wants a genuine golden age, it will not be issued by Executive Order, it will be rebuilt by restoring the limits that make self-government possible.
David Bier reports that “noncitizens were underrepresented in welfare fraud convictions in 2024.”
Radley Balko details the nightmare that is now immigration ‘enforcement’ under Trump.
Remember when President Trump called Kamala Harris a Communist because she supported price controls? Well, who’s the Commie now? On Friday the President endorsed a proposal by comrades Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to cap credit card interest rates at 10%.
“We will no longer let the American Public be ripped off by Credit Card Companies that are charging Interest Rates of 20 to 30%, and even more,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social in teeing up a 10% interest-rate cap. Like Joe Biden, Mr. Trump thinks he can command the economic tides.
In case he slept through Finance 101: Credit-card rates are set by markets. They are based largely on the Federal Reserve’s benchmark interest rate and borrower risk. Restricting rates will limit access to credit for lower-income Americans. That’s what price controls do: They limit supply.
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Studies have also found that lenders restricted credit in states like Arkansas and Illinois after they capped interest rates. When lower-income Americans are regulated out of the card market, they may turn to payday loans that charge even higher rates.
Cap advocates note that some fintech Buy Now Pay Later services don’t charge interest. But many of these services automatically draft payments from customer bank accounts, which can result in overdraft fees. If borrowers prefer these services, so be it.
In any case, innovation and competition in credit markets are an argument against government price-fixing. One risk is that Mr. Trump bullies Republicans in Congress into backing legislation from Mr. Sanders to impose a 10% rate cap. Missouri Republican Josh Hawley has co-sponsored the bill, and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has introduced companion legislation.
Matt Johnson eviscerates Patrick Deneen’s clueless attempt to discredit liberalism. (HT to someone on Facebook whose name I – please forgive me – now forget.) A slice:
Liberal institutions are built on the realities of human nature: “What is government itself,” James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, “but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” Madison’s acknowledgment of the darker aspects of human nature informed the architecture of the most successful governing document from a liberal perspective that the world has ever seen: the U.S. Constitution. It’s what led him to argue that, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition” in the form of separated powers that check and balance each other.
As Deneen sees it, liberalism is “more insidious” than fascism and communism because it hides its “intention of shaping the souls under its rule.” He argues that liberalism was the “first political architecture that proposed transforming all aspects of human life to conform to a preconceived political plan.” In fact, liberalism exists to peacefully manage conflict between many competing political plans. It allows people under it to hold whatever views they want—Marxism, libertarianism, evangelicalism, atheism—so long as they observe the rule of law and refrain from forcing their views on others.
Deneen argues that one of liberalism’s core “anthropological assumptions” is the “human separation from and opposition to nature.” But the major Enlightenment philosophers who fashioned the foundations of liberal thought held the opposite view—they grounded liberal rights and duties in human nature. John Locke (one of Deneen’s liberal bogeymen) argued that the right to life, liberty, and property is based on natural law. The Declaration of Independence begins with a Lockean affirmation of natural rights.
This picture created by Phil Magness is worth several thousand words:
The highest political standards are not the ones we personally find most appealing. Rather, truly having reason to embrace anything as a political ideal starts by observing that conflict resolution is an exercise in the art of compromise. A politically ideal community is habitable partly because no one’s moral ideal ever sweeps the field.
There is no more alarming symptom in modern politics than the tendency of party leaders to bid against one another in the distribution of public favours, and of Ministers to use public funds for the distribution of bounties and favours to sectional interests. In these policies we sometimes see the unscrupulous demagogue seeking to catch votes, or to obtain contributions to a party fund. Sometimes this sort of philanthropy comes from those feelings of pity or charity which draw pennies from our pocket when we encounter the sturdy beggar or the persistent organ-grinder. Unfortunately, while private charity comes in pennies from the private pocket, the public charity of our openhanded, free and easy ministers flows in millions of pounds sterling from the public purse, and is reflected in heavy additions to taxation, in a rise of prices, and in a depreciation of the public credit.
Much of what are called “social problems” consists of the fact that intellectuals have theories that do not fit the real world. From this they conclude that it is the real world which is wrong and needs changing.
