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The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal reports on yet further evidence that nearly all of Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports are being paid, indeed, by Americans. A slice:

No matter how often President Trump insists his tariffs are taxing foreigners to enrich the U.S., economic studies keep showing that Americans actually pay the bill. On Thursday it was the New York Federal Reserve’s turn. In an analysis on the bank’s website, four researchers write that last year “nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on U.S. firms and consumers.”

They reach that conclusion by examining import data, to see whether foreign suppliers cut their prices in response to Mr. Trump’s added tariff costs. Over the first eight months of 2025, “94 percent of the tariff incidence was borne by the U.S.,” the analysis says, meaning “a 10 percent tariff caused only a 0.6 percentage point decline in foreign export prices.”

This outcome drifted as the year wore on, but only slightly: The figures for November suggest the tariffs had “an 86 percent pass-through to U.S. import prices,” the researchers say. “Our results show that the bulk of the tariff incidence continues to fall on U.S. firms and consumers. These findings are consistent with two other studies that report high pass-through of tariffs to U.S. import prices.”

This is a problem for both shoppers and Republicans, including Mr. Trump. Even if tariffs aren’t generally inflationary, they’re taxes that can push up prices on specific imported items, as well as on the products of the protected domestic competitors. Recent inflation reports, including the one that came out Friday, show some notable jumps, such as for furniture and bedding, which in January was up 4%, year over year.

Adam Miller tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Part of my job is approving tariff invoices billed to the small manufacturing firm where I work. These tariffs are passed on to our customers (industrial utilities like electric power generation and water treatment facilities), who undoubtedly pass them on to consumers.

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board draws an important lesson for us Americans from the Russian government’s authoritarian crackdown on social media. Two slices:

The Russian government’s decision this week to ban WhatsApp and throttle Telegram is not a surprise for an authoritarian regime. Yet it also serves as a cautionary tale for westerners clamoring to regulate social media companies.

…..

The very concept of “disinformation” implies the state gets to decide who may speak, to whom and on what terms. The machinery of control is the same, and more often than not, it’s used to protect a regime. This is the beginning of a road that ends where Russia now is.

C. Jarrett Dieterle decries Mayor Mamdani’s war on delivery apps. Here’s his conclusion:

Mamdani’s war on gig is getting a lot of press. But beyond the flashy headlines, it’s clear that both workers and consumers are likely to suffer.

Jeffrey Miron shares new research that finds that minimum-wage legislation inflicts more harm on black workers than it does on white workers. [DBx: As my late, great colleague Walter Williams often said: If the Imperial Wizard of the KKK were to make a list of that evil organization’s most-preferred government policies, minimum-wage legislation would be at or near the top. It’s sad that so many economically clueless progressives – many of whom, ironically, boast PhDs in economics – allow their addiction to social-desirability bias to blind them to the economic realities of government legislation that prices many low-skilled workers out of jobs in the formal economy, or that otherwise reduces the attractiveness of these workers’ employment options. These progressives would not argue that, say, legislated minimum prices for automobiles would improve the economic prospects of sellers of used cars. Yet they make an economically identical argument in favor of legislated minimum prices for human labor.]

David Inserra criticizes the Federal Trade Commission for using the power of the state to suppress free expression in the guise of protecting free expression. A slice:

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson recently addressed a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook to suggest that the Apple News product may be in violation of the FTC Act.

Apple’s crime?

Its Apple News product, which curates news from a variety of sources, has “systematically promoted articles from left-wing news outlets and suppressed news articles from more conservative publications,” including recently not featuring “a single article from any American conservative-leaning news sources.”

The FTC’s allegations of bias, even if true, are ultimately irrelevant. The FTC has no authority to regulate the speech that Apple News chooses to curate. This is core First Amendment territory that even the FTC is forced to acknowledge. Ferguson writes that the “First Amendment protects the speech of Big Tech Firms” and that the “FTC is not the speech police; we do not have the authority to require Apple or any other firm to take affirmative positions on any political issue, nor to curate new articles based on the perceived ideological or political viewpoint of the article or publication.”

If Chair Ferguson stopped there, perhaps we could appreciate that the FTC recognized its limits and its respect for the First Amendment’s protections for platforms to exercise editorial control over the speech they collate and organize.

But Chair Ferguson did not stop there. Instead, the Chair attempts an end run around the First Amendment by accusing Apple News’ curation practices of violating the FTC Act for being an unfair or deceptive trade practice. But this attack is predicated on a highly flawed theory that somehow the FTC has the ability to determine when the curation and moderation decisions of platforms are “unfair or deceptive.”

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… is from page 63 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:

Promoting competition as a process is the opposite of promoting the survival of existing competitors. Unless and until public policy clearly and fully recognizes that fact, fanciful crusades and sinister theories will drive public policy toward the computer industry.

DBx: Yes. And nearly 30 years after these words were written, fanciful antitrust crusades and sinister ‘competition’ theories – such as those peddled by the likes of Lina Khan and embraced by many Trump administration antitrusters – continue to plague the American economy.

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Ed Crane is remembered by the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal. A slice:

He rightly concluded that before you can change American politics you have to win the battle of ideas. So in 1977 he helped to found Cato, first as a small operation out of San Francisco, then growing it over several decades into a formidable think-tank promoting free-market principles and policies until his retirement in 2012. He was, if we may use an oxymoron, a libertarian builder.

In 1981 Crane moved Cato to the belly of the beast: Washington, D.C., where it continues to torment statists and elites who assume they know what’s best for everyone else. Cato isn’t as large as many other policy shops, but it continues to punch above its weight in engaging scholars, newsmen and politicians in the great ideas of the free economy. This mission is even more important now that both major political parties lack notable champions for free-market principles.

Also remembering Ed Crane is the Atlas Foundation. A slice:

A charismatic speaker, eloquent writer, and visionary leader, Ed played a greater role than perhaps any other in building a base of financial supporters who have prioritized the ideas of liberty. His involvement in the Presidential campaign of Libertarian Party candidate Ed Clark in 1980 allowed Ed Crane to develop a national network of generous friends of liberty, whose enthusiasm would go on to power the Cato Institute’s ascension to a top tier think tank in American life.

Ed’s vision extended far beyond any single organization. He believed deeply in a vibrant ecosystem of institutions advancing liberty from different angles, in different countries, and with distinct but complementary approaches. In that spirit, he was a valued friend and supporter of Atlas Network. His generosity toward our work manifested itself most dramatically when he helped arrange a transfer of programs and personnel, led by Tom Palmer, and funding to support them, in late 2008, to jumpstart Atlas Network’s evolution into a truly global enterprise.

Ed’s wife Kristina Crane began a long association with Atlas Network at this time, and our team has continued to benefit from her steadfast commitment to advancing liberty worldwide. Kristina’s dedication has reflected the same belief that animated Ed’s life: that the principles of liberty are universal and that they must be nurtured through strong, independent institutions that resist political fashions and partisan pressures.

The freedom movement is, at its core, a community of individuals who devote their lives to expanding opportunity and preserving the dignity of the human person. Ed Crane was among the most influential of his generation. The institutions he built, the leaders he mentored, and the ideas he championed will continue to shape debates for decades to come.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, is – rightly – not starry-eyed about government regulation.

Jack Nicastro is – rightly – appalled by the FTC chairman’s threatening letter to Apple’s Tim Cook: “Chairman Andrew Ferguson continues the Federal Trade Commission’s crusade against free speech with an official letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook.” A slice:

Deliberately withholding certain perspectives from the public may not be especially ethical, but the First Amendment allows Apple to platform whatever it pleases.

Scott Lincicome responds – with this superb letter in the Wall Street Journal – to Peter Navarro’s evidence-free assertion that foreigners pay the bulk of Trump’s tariffs:

Peter Navarro’s “Foreign Countries Bear the Burden of Tariffs” (Letters, Feb. 11) on foreigners indirectly paying U.S. tariffs is correct in theory yet detached from reality.

If the U.S. actually had the market power he describes, foreign exporters would in many cases lower their prices to keep selling their goods here, thus offsetting the tariffs’ domestic costs. In practice, however, the U.S. hasn’t been hegemonic in global markets for many years, thanks to the proliferation of regional supply chains and growing economies outside our borders.

Given the relatively low and declining U.S. share of global merchandise trade, economists predicted in 2024 that producers abroad would respond to U.S. tariffs not by lowering their prices here but by diverting trade elsewhere and forcing Americans to bear the tariffs’ costs. This is exactly what’s happened. China, for example, saw its U.S. exports decline in 2025 yet had strong overall export growth and a record trade surplus thanks to higher sales in other markets.

U.S. nonfuel import prices, which include discounts and rebates but exclude tariffs, would show major declines if exporters were eating Mr. Trump’s tariffs, but they were slightly up in 2025.

Many studies—not only from Harvard and the Kiel Institute, which Mr. Navarro blithely dismisses, but also the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, the Tax Foundation, economists Gita Gopinath and Brent Neiman, and Goldman-Sachs, among others—have examined real-world transactions and found that U.S. companies and consumers are bearing almost all the tariff burden via higher retail prices or input costs. There are exceptions, but the data confirm they’re not the rule.

Mr. Navarro needn’t, however, read wonky economics papers to see that Americans are paying Mr. Trump’s tariffs (and the higher prices for U.S.-made alternatives that tariffs encourage). Instead, he could ask the thousands of American business owners and farmers who say they’re suffering under the weight of Mr. Trump’s ill-conceived trade wars. They have voiced these concerns in shareholder earnings calls, media interviews, court challenges, bankruptcy filings, regulatory comments and town hall meetings. Hundreds of small-business owners from across the country have even formed a coalition called “We Pay the Tariffs.” These good folks would jump at the chance to go to the White House and tell Mr. Navarro who, exactly, is paying these taxes—if, that is, they had enough lobbying clout to get through the front door.

Jennifer Huddleston and Christopher Gardner argue persuasively that government should not ban AI chatbots.

Timothy Taylor warns of rising U.S. government indebtedness. Here’s his conclusion:

The costs of excessive federal debt are gradually becoming apparent in various ways. The inflation spike a few years ago was, in part, driven by the spike in federal deficits. The arguments between the Trump administration and the Federal Reserve over interest rate policy are driven, in part, by the recognition that high federal interest payments are crowding out other possibilities for greater spending or tax cuts. Concerns over large US trade deficits are created, in part, because the very large US budget deficits are creating an ongoing surge of US demand for imports. Concerns over slow rates of US economic growth are driven, in part, by concerns that high federal borrowing is crowding out some opportunities for private-sector investment. The current trajectory of federal deficits and debt seems sustainable for awhile longer, in the sense that it doesn’t seem likely to cause a near-term crisis, but that doesn’t make it a desirable path for the US economy to follow.

Jeff Eisenach sheds no tears for the demise of the pre-transformation Washington Post. A slice:

The journalism practiced by the Post in recent years has mainly been of the sort lately taught in journalism schools. Woke, ideological, biased—a loyal ally of the Democratic party. It told us Russia-gate was real, ignored Joe Biden’s decline, hewed unquestioningly to the establishment line on Covid, and reportedly had at least a dozen reporters covering climate change, all reporting the same deeply flawed story as “settled science.” The death of that sort of journalism is something to celebrate, not mourn.

Bob Graboyes shares some interesting trivia about U.S. vice-presidents.

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… is from page 84 of the American jurist James Coolidge Carter’s profound, yet unfortunately neglected, (posthumous) 1907 book, Law: Its Origin, Growth and Function [original emphasis]:

A judicial precedent is not law per se, but evidence of it only. The real law is custom.

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Here’s a letter to my long-time “Proud Trump man” correspondent, Nolan McKinney.

Mr. McKinney:

You “laughed out loud” at Phil Gramm’s and my suggestion that Trump’s second-term tariffs helped cause jobs to grow at a much slower pace in 2025 – the first year of his second term, one filled with tariff hikes – than in 2017, the first year of his first term, before tariffs were raised. You credit your amusement to the fact that “the President is aggressive at deporting illegal immigrants which steal American jobs.” The slower job growth in 2025, you insist, “only happened because of the immigration crackdown.”

LOL!

If the jobs once held by deported immigrants were indeed ‘stolen’ from Americans, then the removal of immigrants from those jobs would have caused Americans to fill those same jobs, resulting in no slowdown in employment growth. But there has in fact been a huge slowdown in employment growth, which means – if you’re correct that this slowdown in employment growth was caused by the mass deportation of immigrants – that immigrants were not ‘stealing’ jobs from Americans.

Sincerely,
Don

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The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal rightly applauds the Environmental Protection Agency:

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday at long last repealed Barack Obama’s so-called endangerment finding that declared greenhouse gas emissions a threat to public health and safety. Cue the apocalyptic warnings unhinged from reality. What progressives really fear is that they won’t be able to dictate the energy supplies, cars and appliances that Americans can buy.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal also rightly criticizes the Federal Trade Commission:

Lina Khan may have left to advise Zohran Mamdani in New York, but her ghost still animates the Federal Trade Commission under new Chair Andrew Ferguson. That explains how the agency has now drawn a First Amendment challenge for allegedly targeting a media outfit.

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The FTC justifies its action on grounds that NewsGuard is itself engaging in censorship. Mr. Ferguson has said NewsGuard “led collusive ad boycotts—possibly in violation of our antitrust laws—to censor the speech of conservative and independent media in the United States.”

But Mr. Ferguson misreads the law in going after NewsGuard, a private outfit. The First Amendment protects private actors against censorship by the government.

We’re not fans of media rating shops, since they typically have their own mostly leftward biases. PolitiFact is Exhibit A. NewsGuard’s James Warren once sent us an importuning query objecting to something in an op-ed we had published. But we thought it was a matter of opinion and ignored Mr. Warren, a former political columnist.

Alex Tabarrok’s high hopes that a Trump FDA would be more freedom-oriented than under past administrations have been dashed. Here’s his conclusion:

An administration that promised medical freedom is delivering medical nationalism: fewer options, less innovation, and a clear signal to every company considering pharmaceutical investment that the rules can change after the game is played. And this isn’t a one-product story. mRNA is a general-purpose platform with spillovers across infectious disease and vaccines for cancer; if the U.S. turns mRNA into a political third rail, the investment, talent, and manufacturing will migrate elsewhere. America built this capability, and we’re now choosing to export it—along with the health benefits.

Arnold Kling nicely sums up a significant reality: “The post-liberal right is smugly ignorant of economics.”

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, argues that ill-consequences will arrive more quickly than in the past from the U.S. government’s failure to seriously rein in entitlement spending.

Speaking of excessive government spending and of the dangers of deficit financing, Dominik Lett reports on the Congressional Budget Office’s recent warning of ballooning budget deficits.

Here’s the abstract from a new paper by Brian Albrecht, Alex Tabarrok, and Mark Whitmeyer:

Price controls kill the incentive for arbitrage. We prove a Chaos Theorem: under a binding price ceiling, suppliers are indifferent across destinations, so arbitrarily small cost differences can determine the entire allocation. The economy tips to corner outcomes in which some markets are fully served while others are starved; small parameter changes flip the identity of the corners, generating discontinuous welfare jumps. These corner allocations create a distinct source of cross-market misallocation, separate from the aggregate quantity loss (the Harberger triangle) and from within-market misallocation emphasized in prior work. They also create an identification problem: welfare depends on demand far from the observed equilibrium. We derive sharp bounds on misallocation that require no parametric assumptions. In an efficient allocation, shadow prices are equalized across markets; combined with the adding-up constraint, this collapses the infinite-dimensional welfare problem to a one-dimensional search over a common shadow price, with extremal losses achieved by piecewise-linear demand schedules. Calibrating the bounds to stationlevel AAA survey data from the 1973–74 U.S. gasoline crisis, misallocation losses range from roughly 1 to 9 times the Harberger triangle.

Jimmy Alfonso Licon explains that “immigration arrest quotas undermine ICE’s mission.” A slice:

The logic is straightforward. Violent criminals, gang leaders, and professional smugglers are difficult to locate and expensive to apprehend, often relying on networks of other people to help them evade detection. Pursuing such criminal organizations requires investigations, coordination across jurisdictions, surveillance, and uncertain outcomes, making it easy for agents to come up empty-handed. By contrast, unauthorized immigrants who are otherwise law-abiding are comparatively easy to find. They have fixed residences, work regular jobs, and their children often attend the local school.cMany are already interacting with the state through legal channels, including standard immigration check-ins.

When arrest quotas rise, then, it’s no surprise that arrests have accelerated disproportionately among those who are easiest to find and arrest rather than those who pose the greatest threat.cRecent data confirm this pattern.cEnforcement activity has surged, but the majority of arrests involve individualswithout prior criminal convictions,ca distribution consistent with quota-driven optimization rather than threat-based prioritization. And given the career and political incentives behind meeting those quotas, it is what we should expect. This behavior is rational given the incentives; it would be surprising if agents behaved otherwise.

George Will is understandably appalled, if not surprised, by the adolescent boorishness of the current vice-president of the executive branch of the United States government. A slice:

When, during the 2024 campaign, rumors about Haitians eating the pets of Springfield, Ohio, were disseminated, with Vance’s help, this was his response when confronted with the fact that no facts supported the rumors: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” He has a duty to lie because the media are indolent.

Vance has a knack for late — very late — adolescent naughtiness. It is not easy being transgressive in an era when there are few norms remaining to transgress. Undaunted, he tries. Of Europe’s largest war since World War II: “I don’t care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” Very edgy.

Performative politics is almost the only politics on offer nowadays. But must it be a coarseness and flippancy competition?

Let it be said on Vance’s behalf that he refuses to present himself as other than what he is. But before celebrating him for his authenticity, attention should be paid to what he authentically is.

John Tamny remembers Ed Crane.

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… is from page 50 of the 2002 first edition of Geoffrey E. Wood’s Fifty Economic Fallacies Exposed [original emphasis]:

If a country is borrowing abroad, it is not necessarily increasing net overseas indebtedness. That may seem surprising – if a person borrows, his or her debts increase. But even in that case, if he or she has assets, they may be increasing in value more rapidly than the new debts.

DBx: Yep.

Even for that portion of a country’s trade deficit that consists of foreigners’ lending money to residents of the home country – that is, for that portion of a country’s trade deficit that is actual debt – there is no implication that that portion of the trade deficit either is evidence of, or a source of, economic troubles in the home country. There are many economically sound reasons for borrowing money, one of which is to enable businesses to acquire funds, at the lowest possible cost, to expand or to otherwise improve their operations. Successful use of such borrowed funds increases the real net worth of the borrowing businesses.

Of course, excessive borrowing – by households or businesses – is possible, and it does sometimes occur. But there are strong natural checks on such borrowing: Not only do households and businesses themselves have strong incentives to avoid excessive borrowing, lenders have strong incentives to avoid lending to individuals and businesses that are over-extended in their financial obligations.

The big exception to the rule that there’s no reason to worry much about excessive borrowing is supplied by governments (especially those with access to their own central banks). Political incentives encourage existing governments to borrow excessively; they do so because the benefits of government spending today are enjoyed by today’s citizens-taxpayers while the burden of paying for this current spending is loaded onto future citizens-taxpayers, many of whom aren’t yet even born.

Yet even in this case, to the extent that the home-country government borrows from foreigners, the problem isn’t the resulting increase in the home-country’s trade deficit (or shrinkage in its trade surplus); the problem is the excessive spending. The cure for this ailment is to rein in spending (perhaps with a strong balanced-budget constraint) rather than to point to the red-herring of the rising trade deficit as if the cause of today’s excessive spending and growing indebtedness is foreigners’ willingness to lend.

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In Phil Gramm’s and my Washington Post essay on Tuesday we reported that “in 2025, nonfarm employment grew by 0.9 percent, which was notably less than the 1.6 percent increase in 2017.” Given the data available until yesterday, our data here are correct.

But yesterday it was announced that the job-growth figures for 2025 have since been revised downward. Were Phil and I to write the piece now, our point against Trump’s tariffs would be even stronger, as we’d write – using the newly announced revised data – that “in 2025, nonfarm employment grew by 0.5 percent, which was notably less than the 1.6 percent increase in 2017.”

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Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward has a wonderful piece in the New York Times, a core point being that Trump’s continuing abuse of executive power will be abused also by the Democrats when they return to power. Although Trump, of course, is not the first U.S. president to abuse executive power, he is unquestionably and inexcusably accelerating that abuse. The precedent is ominous.

As noted a couple of weeks ago by Daily Kos,

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to adopt the Republican interpretation of power. Apparently, she’s not the only one. It also appears Sen Elizabeth Warren wants to be a Republican as well or, perhaps more accurately, another Donald Trump. In a recent piece done by NOTUS , Sen Warren, Rep Ocasio-Cortez, and other leaders (and potential Presidential candidates) in the Democratic party “…expressed a willingness to use the new tools Trump has carved out, saying that if Republicans can do it, Democrats can too.”

Here are two slices from Mangu-Ward’s essay:

On immigration, speech and trade, Americans are living in a libertarian’s nightmare. Masked federal officials are swarming areas far from the border, shooting American citizens and whisking away children in the name of immigration enforcement. Armed National Guardsmen walk the streets of several cities under the banner of vague emergency mandates to maintain law and order. Legal visa holders are being deported for expressing their opinions on Gaza and Charlie Kirk. Tariffs on China have been set at 10, 20, 54, 145 and 30 percent in just the past few months. TikTok, Intel, U.S. Steel and their ownership have become matters in which the president has taken a personal interest — and threatened dire consequences if his wishes are not taken into account.

These stories are examples of a terrifying pattern and an undeniable vindication of the long-held libertarian view that the steady growth in the size of the federal government and executive power would lead to precisely this kind of runaway authoritarianism.

Libertarians have argued that the only way to prevent such abuses is to reduce the power of the federal government — abolish unaccountable federal agencies, scale back the administrative state, cut spending — and to restore the balance of powers by reining in the executive. This path has generally been treated as hopelessly naïve at best and morally suspect at worst.

The major parties have pulled away from the libertarian elements of their coalitions (small-government, free-market types for the Republicans and civil libertarians for the Democrats), preferring instead the instant gratification of grasping power and wielding it as aggressively as possible for the period they hold it. Libertarian voices have gradually gone quiet in the halls of the capital — bullied into silence, primaried out or resigning in despair.

Yet it has never been more obvious that the grab-and-grow approach to power is a destructive and self-defeating way to conduct politics.

…..

But the project of growing executive power has been bipartisan. On speech, officials in the Biden administration leaned on social media platforms to take down what they deemed Covid and election misinformation without explicit action from the F.C.C. The Supreme Court disposed of a case, Murthy v. Missouri, challenging this jawboning, as it is called, leaving the possibility of backdoor censorship wide open.

The executive’s discretionary economic powers — subsidies, stakes in corporations and tariffs — have proved irresistible, too. The administration has spent billions of dollars to take ownership stakes in private companies like Intel and U.S. Steel.

And Mr. Trump’s tariffs — leveled and removed at will and without the participation of Congress, where the Constitution places the primary power — have disrupted and destabilized the global economy and undermined America’s role in it.

While libertarians were hardly alone in championing free trade, what we have been hollering for years is that tariffs are and can only ever be taxes on Americans. To treat them as leverage, war by other means or simply a sign of the president’s displeasure is to fundamentally misuse and misunderstand the nature of a tariff.

Yes.

Trump & Co. are hostile to genuine liberalism – and, hence, hostile to the institutions and norms that promote social cooperation, peace, and prosperity. This reality is plain as day to all but the most MAGA-benighted. But also hostile to genuine liberalism and its fruits are people on the progressive left (whose policy preferences are not as different from those of the MAGA right as partisans in either camp suppose them to be).

It’s not uncommon nowadays to encounter people who criticize libertarians and classical liberals for reminding the world that many of the political enemies of Trump are also enemies of liberalism and the open society. But such reminders – as offered by Mangu-Ward – are necessary lest in our urgency to rid the body politic of one malignant tumor we replace that tumor with another malignant tumor.

Exposing the many misdeeds and dangers of Trump and MAGA is an important task. No less important is exposing the many misdeeds and dangers of the progressive left. Even if we could be certain that the latter is the lesser of these two terrible evils – a possibility to which I’m inclined but not at all sure of – it is a strategic and tactical mistake to suppose that the only task worthy of friends of liberalism today is to criticize Trump and MAGA while treating the progressive political enemies of our MAGA enemy as, if not our actual friends, our trustworthy allies. To criticize the progressive left is not to praise MAGA, to prop-up Trump, or to otherwise support the current administration.

Anyone who is so certain that the likes of Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris pose a significantly lesser danger over the long-run to liberalism than does MAGA as to justify muting criticisms of today’s Democrats and their media cheerleaders in order to focus criticism exclusively on MAGA is, I submit, naive.