Quotulatiousness

October 11, 2025

Antifa declared a foreign terrorist organization

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR claims a win from his earlier analysis posts on Antifa in the United States:

For those of you who have been tracking my intelligence analysis posts about Antifa, I now get to claim a correct prediction.

The President of the United States has declared Antifa a foreign terrorist organization.

Providing aid to an FTO is a crime (18 U.S.C. § 2339B). This declaration unlocks the legal tools required to go after Antifa’s funding network and allies, both foreign and domestic.

Those of you who are watching as USAID was unmasked as a left-wing slush fund won’t have any trouble understanding how the funding network functions. Allies of revolutionary Communism and nihilism at large charitable foundations direct money to smaller foundations which act as pass-throughs to others. After enough layers of this to maintain deniability (because the federal statute specifies “knowingly”), direct enablers of terrorism collect the money and use to fund things like a bullet ripping through Charlie Kirk’s neck.

There’s some rake-off along the way, of course. Can’t have all those elite failsons and faildaughters going without sinecures, after all. They have expensive habits to maintain.

Following the FTO declaration, the government can now gin up a case for seizing the assets of anybody in the funding chain, all the way back to the initial donors. The usual doctrine that “knowingly” extends to those who should have known, and who willfully failed to perform due diligence in order to avoid criminal exposure, applies here. Precedent for this was well established by organized-crime prosecutions 50 years ago; it’s why we have RICO laws.

It remains to be seen how much political will there is to actually bring down this hammer. In the maximal scenario,

(1) Trump issues a loud public warning to all charitable donors that they’d better cut ties to any organization that doesn’t provide them with full transparency about where the money is going.

(2) Left-wing dark money outfits like Arabella and the Tides Foundation get sent formal spoliation-of-evidence warnings, followed swiftly with audits by people with zero sense of humor.

I wish I were confident that all of this is going to happen. There’s going to be a lot of obstruction from Democrats and screaming by the media — the people who keep telling you that Antifa doesn’t exist because they want to keep their army of brownshirts intact. The administration could lose its nerve.

But at least it’s possible now. The political conditions for it are better than they have been in my entire lifetime.

Update: Fixed messed-up URL.

September 27, 2025

NATO – the alliance of paper tigers?

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Italy, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In UnHerd, Edward Luttwak suggests that despite President Trump calling the Russians “paper tigers”, the non-US members of the NATO alliance could more appropriately be described that way:

It’s been an open secret for decades that Canada’s NATO contributions are more rhetoric than reality, but it’s true of many of the European NATO allies, too.

… simply raising defence spending will not turn Europe’s states into genuinely effective military powers. For one thing, the GDP criterion is much too vague to mean much. Finland, for instance, spends only 2.4% of its GDP on defence and yet can mobilise some 250,000 determined soldiers. Other Nato members, which spend much more than the Finns, obtain far less for their money.

Moreover, focusing on GDP instead of force requirements — so many battalions, artillery regiments, fighter squadrons — is nothing but an invitation to cheat, an opportunity lustily taken up across the continent. The latest Spanish submarine, for instance, is not imported for €1 billion or so from Thyssen-Krupp, which supplies navies around the world with competent, well-proven submarines. Instead, it was proudly designed and built at the Navantia state-owned Spanish shipyard: for €3.8 billion, roughly the cost of a much bigger French nuclear-powered submarine. As a feeble justification for that absurdly high cost, Spain’s defence minister cited a supposedly advanced air-recirculation system — so greatly advanced, in fact, that it is not actually ready, and will not be installed even in the submarine’s next iteration.

Soon, though, Italy will outdo Spain’s platinum submarine: by including a new bridge to Sicily, set to cost some €13.5 billion, into its 2% of GDP Nato spending quota. The government’s excuse is that some 3,000 Italian troops may need to cross the Strait of Messina were the Italian army ever to be fully mobilised. But it would be much cheaper to fly them individually, each trooper in his own luxurious private jet. Even without the bridge, meanwhile, Italy’s cheating on the 2% target is bad enough. Most notably, much of the Italian Navy’s spending goes towards warships made by Italy’s state-owned Fincantieri shipyard. But there is not enough money for the fuel and maintenance expenses to operate more than half of them, meaning another industrial subsidy is camouflaged as defence spending. All the while, Italy refuses to increase its defence budget beyond the very modest target of 2% — which it has yet to meet.

As for Germany, three and half years since the start of the Ukraine war, with ever more ambitious rearmament plans loudly promised, the total number of personnel in uniform has actually slightly decreased. And, aside from beginning a multi-billion euro purchase on an Israeli missile-defence system, nothing much has happened. Despite its high demand in Ukraine, even the battle tank, that German specialty, is being produced in very, very small numbers: so low that the annual output could be lost in a morning of combat. In May 2023, indeed, a meagre 18 Leopard tanks were ordered to replace older models lost in Ukraine. The expected delivery date? Between 2025 and 2026! Then, in July, Germany purchased a further 105 advanced Leopard 2A8s. That is the number needed to equip a single brigade, the German force stationed in Lithuania — and they are expected to arrive in 2030!

The sad truth, then, is that Germany has yet to start working in earnest to correct the extreme neglect inflicted on its armed forces during the long Merkel premiership, when she kept saying that “even if we had the money we would not know how to spend it”. All the while, German helicopters lacked rotors and tanks lacked engines. The exceedingly slow recovery of the German army is especially frustrating because Nato is not actually short of air or naval forces. What it lacks are ground forces, soldiers more simply, or rather soldiers actually willing to fight. Having added Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to the alliance, tiny countries with outsized defence needs, the alliance faces a severe troop deficit across the entire Baltic sector. The troops so far sent by Nato allies, such as visiting Alpini battalions from Italy, cannot improve the maths.

Update, 30 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

Canada’s supply management cartels benefit “an affluent few, burdening the poorest, and creating needless friction with allies and trading partners”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Reason, J.D. Tuccille explains to an American audience why Donald Trump has been playing hardball with Canada on trade issues:

President Donald Trump justifies his enthusiasm for prohibitively high tariffs by insisting the U.S. is being “ripped off” by other countries. It’s a strange argument, since people only trade with one another if they see benefit in the deal. But the president is right to complain that other governments impose trade barriers of their own that are often every bit as burdensome as the high taxes Americans pay on imports. If foreign officials honestly wish to restore something like free trade, they should emphasize dropping their own barriers in return for lower U.S. levies. Case in point: Canada, which sends three-quarters of its exports across its southern border but imposes damaging restrictions on imports.

In a February proclamation of trade war on the world, Trump announced, “the United States will no longer tolerate being ripped off” and complained that “our trading partners keep their markets closed to U.S. exports”. The first part of that claim is silly. But the second part has a kernel of truth.

A glimpse at that truth came in June when Trump angrily posted that Canada “has just announced that they are putting a Digital Services Tax on our American Technology Companies” and, as a result, “we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada”.

The threat had the desired impact. Canada rescinded the tax immediately before it was supposed to take effect. While nominally targeted at all large tech companies, in practice that meant American companies and everybody knew it, since U.S. firms dominate the industry.

But that was only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Canada’s trade barriers. Also in June, international trade attorney Lawrence Herman, a senior fellow at Canada’s C.D. Howe Institute, bemoaned proposed legislation in the Canadian parliament that he characterized as “yet another regrettable effort to enshrine Canada’s Soviet-style supply management system in the statute books.”

He added, “the bill would prohibit any increase in imports of supply-managed goods – dairy products, eggs and poultry – under current or future trade agreements”.

The legislation about which Herman complained has since become law.

[…]

More skeptically, Fraser Institute senior fellow Fred McMahon notes, “supply management is uniquely Canadian. No other country has such a system. And for good reason. It’s odious policy, favouring an affluent few, burdening the poorest, and creating needless friction with allies and trading partners.”

McMahon elaborates that the supply management process is controlled by agricultural management boards which “employ a variety of tools, including quotas and tariffs, and a large bureaucracy to block international and interprovincial trade and deprive Canadians of choice in dairy, eggs and poultry”.

But as we’ve seen so many times over the years, it disproportionally benefits Quebec, and the Liberals desperately need those Quebec votes to stay in power, so the government would rather destroy the national economy rather than give up on our Stalinist supply management cartels.

Dislike of Trump prompts the CBC to spread faulty medical advice

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s a long-running joke that US progressives — and the legacy media, BIRM — are programmed to respond to anything Donald Trump says by doing the exact opposite of what he says:

The CBC apparently felt the need to do the meme:

It was not controversial for news outlets like CBC to report in 2016, and later 2021, on new medical research raising concerns about the impact of Tylenol use on pregnancy and fetal development. But in 2025, those studies (among others) have become the basis for a new cautionary approach by the U.S. government that critics and media are trying to debunk.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that, as part of a bigger strategy in quelling autism, it would be issuing a “physician notice and begin the process to initiate a safety label change for acetaminophen”.

President Donald Trump relayed this to the press, stating the medication “can be associated with a very increased risk of autism”.

“So taking Tylenol is not good, all right? I’ll say it; it’s not good. For this reason, they are strongly recommending that women limit Tylenol use during pregnancy unless medically necessary. That’s, for instance, in cases of extremely high fever that you feel you can’t tough it out.”

[…]

The statement was reported in the mainstream news — including CBC, which found Canadian doctors who seemed to support the cautionary approach. The impression from these experts was that this wasn’t cause for panic and that more evidence was needed, but it was an occasion for discussion. The advice back then? Take the smallest amount for the shortest period of time, and don’t use it as a first resort to managing pain, which is consistent with the U.S. guidance.

Indeed, no major figure in this story is advocating for total avoidance because unmitigated pain and fever are bad for pregnancy, and in small amounts, Tylenol seems to be fine. That said, the manufacturer doesn’t recommend it for pregnant women (which they can’t really do without extensive testing, even if doctors generally consider it safe for mothers in minimized amounts when medically indicated).

More recently, a review of other studies by a team including Harvard University’s public health dean found similar “evidence of an association” between the drug and neurodevelopmental conditions. The dean released a statement saying that the “association is strongest when acetaminophen is taken for four weeks or longer”. That should be uncontroversial, because nobody is supposed to take Tylenol for that long, pregnant or not.

But perhaps, as the Babylon Bee suggests, it’s all Trumpian 4D Chess:

September 19, 2025

What’s the next thing to be devoured on Trump’s menu? Ah, Antifa it is …

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Again leaning heavily on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR has several posts on Donald Trump’s announcement that Antifa is in his crosshairs:

Next comes the part where every NGO/nonprofit implicated in funding a major terrorist organization gets a proctological exam by people with no sense of humor at all.

As I have emphasized several times in the last week: the long game in taking down a terrorist network is to smash its funding chain.

ESR’s analysis begins thusly:

Antifa has just been declared a “major terrorist organization”. Putting on my intelligence-analyst hat again, I’m going to examine its strategic options in the new political and legal conditions following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

I’m going to start with a briefing on what Antifa is and what it does.

A reminder: Antifa is not a unitary conspiracy. It’s a cluster of horizontally-networked cells, some visible aboveground, some semi-covert, possibly some that are fully underground. By design it doesn’t have a central command.

So we’re really asking what range of behaviors Antifa cells normally choose, or can choose.

Before we can explore that we have to identify what Antifa is for and how it fits into the political ecology of the U.S.

None of what I’m about to tell you is speculation. It can be verified by reading Antifa’s propaganda and watching its behavior.

Antifa is an organization of Communists and Left-Anarchists; thus the red and black flags in the main Antifa logo. Its ultimate goal is a violent anti-capitalist revolution that will destroy American constitutional government. The Communists and Left Anarchists have agreed to argue about the shape of what comes afterwards after the revolution.

In practice, Antifa acts as willing street muscle for a range of associated Communist and Socialist organizations, most notably the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), CPUSA (Communist Party of the USA), the SWP (Socialist Workers Party), and various SWP splinter groups.

Antifa also takes strategic direction from the left wing of the Democratic Party. My readers can make their own judgments about whether there is anything remaining in the Democratic Party other than a left wing; the answer to that question is not relevant to the rest of this analysis.

An important point is that the links between the Democratic party and Antifa are personal and deniable. They probably do not run through the Democratic National Committee. A good place for counter-terror analysts to look (and I’m sure Palantir already has this mapped) would be the politicians known as “the Squad” and their close associates.

The strategic sub-goal that was being executed when Charlie Kirk was shot was the creation of a climate of fear that would inhibit public speech by conservatives. This is an explicit goal of Antifa direct action.

Antifa’s funding is deliberately obscure. Before USAID was dismantled, a significant percentage of it was probably coming from the American taxpayer through several layers of shadowy NGOs.

It is very likely that one way or another most of its money comes from low-profile liberal dark money groups such as Arabella, the Tides Foundation, and the Open Societies Foundations.

The effectiveness of Antifa as a political actor has always depended on its ability to act as a terror instrument for left-wing American politicians while maintaining deniability that the politicians’ rhetorical hate-targeting of opponents ever cashes out as violent action.

The first major constraint on Antifa’s future behavior is that this deniability is going to be much more difficult to maintain from now on. Because while the deliberate diffusion of its structure makes legal proof that something called “Antifa” shot Charlie Kirk difficult, it also made Antifa affiliation of any left-wing assassin impossible to effectively deny.

In my next post, I will examine the consequences of this shift.

Continuing the discussion:

Mafia families don’t have membership cards.

Why am I bringing this up now? Because one attempt to head off the hammer coming down on Antifa that we’re hearing from its aboveground allies is that Antifa doesn’t exist.

It’s just an idea. There’s no central command. No common funding. No membership cards. No way to tell who’s a member and who isn’t.

The reductio ad absurdum of this bullshit is to point out that, following the argument, the Mafia cannot possibly exist. Which would be interesting news to all the people it murdered.

Historical note: there was a period when the Mafia was structurally different from Antifa in that it had a Boss of All Bosses, but the position was abolished by assassination in 1931.

In reality, when you’re dealing with a criminal or terrorist conspiracy that doesn’t have membership cards, you identify members of it the same way that other members do: by their willingness to cooperate with each other on shared projects.

And sometimes, by their participation in shared bonding rituals like a Cosa Nostra initiation ceremony or a “bash the fash” demonstration.

None of this is difficult, and it’s exactly the kind of situation that the RICO (Racketeering and Corrupt Influence) laws were written to address.

From Trump’s public statements, I’m guessing that they’re going to go right past RICO to a Foreign Terrorist Organization designation.

This won’t be difficult either. If you have any doubt that at least some Antifa chapters are funded by Chinese Communist money, you really need to get out more.

The announcement clearly didn’t come out of the blue:

Still wearing my intel-analyst hat, and have realized something.

Trump’s announcement that Antifa is being designated a “major terrorist organization” doesn’t make any sense unless law enforcement is already holding evidence that the assassination of Charlie Kirk was an Antifa op.

Otherwise, the risk of political blowback from that announcement would be way too high. Trump can be erratic, but he’s cunning about stuff like this and obviously has a shrewd sense of what he can get away with.

So, yep. The most likely scenario was the correct one. The hoofbeats really were horses, not zebras. Everybody still in denial about this is destined for more pain.

And back to the analysis:

“antifa 8973ag” by cantfightthetendies is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Continuing my analysis of Antifa’s strategic options following the Charlie Kirk assassination. These have changed yet again — narrowed considerably — following President Trump’s declaration yesterday.

The Federal Government has legal instruments that it can employ. The RICO (Racketeering and Corrupt Influence) laws were specifically designed to attack a different headless network of horizontally connected nodes — organized crime. The fact that Antifa doesn’t have membership cards or a unitary command structure isn’t even going to slow the Feds down.

I think that it’s likely the Feds will designate Antifa a foreign terrorist organization, zeroing in on Chinese Communist funding of some Antifa chapters. This will allow the direct use of the CIA, which is normally heavily restricted from operations on American soil.

Nothing Antifa itself can do as an organization will be able to prevent or deflect a massive multi-agency investigation. It is very likely that Palantir already has their core membership identified and their communications channels mapped. Fusion centers will be capturing an unknown but probably large percentage of Antifa message traffic.

(They’ll be helped by the fact that Antifa’s communications security is terrible — it uses Discord for most comms, which is strictly amateur-hour. To be fair, the inner membership is likely to be savvy enough to be using Signal.)

Antifa’s only hope is pressure by its aboveground allies in politics and media. The cells with intelligent leaders will understand that they must cease all direct actions in order to avoid putting those allies in any position of appearing to support assassinations.

Unfortunately for Antifa, in order for hunkering down to work, every single cell has to have leadership that is both strategically patient and capable of restraining its more mentally unstable footsoldiers.

A related problem is that subversive and terrorist organizations that don’t act tend to develop morale problems. A certain minimum level of satisfying violence is required to keep their troops engaged.

Antifa probably has a worse issue here than the average terrorist organization because they recruit so heavily from sexual deviants and borderline mental cases who are likely to have other MBD-related issues including impulsivity and high time preference.

Over time, external pressure for Antifa to look easy for its aboveground allies to defend will remain steady or increase. This is especially so if the Democratic Party line remains Joe Biden’s “Antifa is just an idea”.

At the same time, internal pressure for direct action will increase. Antifa’s survival may depend on how long it is able to manage that pressure.

Antifa needs the investigation to be stalled out and paralyzed by Democratic lawfare before its stupidest cells do something too public and violent for its allied mainstream media to willfully ignore or suppress.

Longer-term, if Antifa survives, it faces a different problem. It dreams of revolution, but is only capable of operating on the sufferance of a general public that largely dismisses it as a LARP for nose-ringed freakazoids. Having committed a gaudy murder of an Everyman figure, it is not likely to get that sufferance back.

September 17, 2025

“It would be a grave error to scrap NORAD”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.L. Granatstein makes the case that abandoning NORAD in a fit of pique over the antics of the Bad Orange Man would be worse for Canadian national defence interests and might not even be noticed in Washington DC:

There are beginning murmurings that Canada should get out of the North American Aerospace Defence agreement (NORAD). Given the Trump administration’s hostile tone — its 51st state suggestions, its tariffs, and its growing concerns with Arctic defence — the United States has become a difficult partner and a threat to Canadian sovereignty. But would this be a sensible decision for Ottawa to make?

Not at all. In the first place, NORAD is a joint alliance to defend North America against Russian, Chinese, or other potential attackers. Canada provides aircraft, radars, personnel, and expertise to this role that serves our national interests. It would be a grave error to scrap NORAD and to take on the role of defending our part of North America on our own. It would also be hugely expensive.

The problem, however, is that the Trump administration is right: Canada is, in fact, not doing enough today to defend our portion of North America and protect our sovereignty in the region.

The Royal Canadian Air Force has 1980s vintage CF-18s flying patrols and occasional larger surveillance aircraft monitoring traffic in Arctic waters; there are snowmobile and ATV patrols of Canadian Rangers armed with rifles; and a few army exercises in the north each year. The Royal Canadian Navy has a half dozen new Arctic Offshore Patrol Vessels that have limited utility in Arctic waters and are very lightly armed, and the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) has only one 66-year-old icebreaker capable of clearing thick ice. The CCG is now under the authority of the Department of National Defence, but its members, unlike those in the Canadian Armed Forces, are unionized, and its vessels are unarmed. This could be a problem in a conflict.

Yes, Ottawa has promised to do more. The Trudeau government agreed to the $38.6 billion NORAD Modernization Plan, which includes the new Northern Approaches Surveillance System featuring the Arctic Over-the-Horizon Radar and a Polar Over-the-Horizon Radar, enhancing early warning and threat tracking from the North for air and maritime threats. These systems will not be fully operational until the 2040s.

There’s more, but it’s behind the paywall.

September 7, 2025

Long before the “Bad Orange Man”, there was “T.R.”

Filed under: Books, Government, History, Media, Politics, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Coolidge Review, Amity Shlaes points out some strong similarities between Donald Trump’s career and that of the Bull Moose himself, Theodore Roosevelt:

Though a century apart—TR served from 1901 to 1909 — these two chief executives have favored the same modus operandi: using unpredictability to amass power. And the record of Theodore Rex, as Edmund Morris titled his TR biography, bodes ill for both the economy and the Republican Party.

The Trump-TR Parallels

But to the similarities. They start, for both men, pre–White House. As Trump did, TR staged his pre-presidential efforts as much with an eye to public recognition as to sustained reform or strengthening institutions.

Whenever TR stumbled, he pivoted to a new venture and publicized it like mad, though the medium in those days was the printed word, not season after season on The Apprentice. Before the cognoscenti had even absorbed the meaning of the young Roosevelt’s humiliating fourth-place score in a key 1886 New York City mayoral contest, for example, TR was off to the Badlands, memorializing his ranching experiences in dispatches and books such as Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail.

As Trump does, TR routinely alienated GOP grandees, circumventing them to get ahead. As Trump has, TR skillfully cultivated the media — so skillfully that members of Congress were left trying catch up with whatever shifts in public opinion resulted from the politician’s press alliances. TR’s Rupert Murdoch was the widely syndicated William Allen White of Kansas’s influential Emporia Gazette. TR’s equivalent of Fox News was the New York Journal, whose owner, William Randolph Hearst, drummed a steady beat of support when Roosevelt called for war against Spain.

Today, Murdoch must be scratching his head over what his showcasing Trump has wrought, especially now that Trump decided to sue both Murdoch and his Wall Street Journal. White, too, found that he had second thoughts about his decision to back TR: “Roosevelt bit me and I went mad,” White reportedly told a colleague.

[…]

BULLY

The occupant of what he labeled the Bully Pulpit — “bully” as in “excellent” — proved a literal bully as well.

As president, TR perpetually unnerved fellow Republicans, pivoting back to domestic politics. As Trump has, TR cast his campaigns in moral terms rather than economic ones. Where Trump launched his tariff war, TR made war against trusts, large combinations of companies. Relying more on whim than statute, Roosevelt segregated trusts into “good trusts” and “bad trusts”.

TR targeted an invincible-looking industry that, in those days, mattered as much as the interstate highways, or the internet, do today: railroads. James Hill’s Great Northern Railway took over a struggling competitor, Northern Pacific. Roosevelt asked Hanna what he made of the combined entity, Great Northern Securities. Hanna replied that it was “the very best thing possible for the future of the whole Northwest territory”. Roosevelt nonetheless sicced the Justice Department on the Great Northern.

J. Pierpont Morgan, a participant in the beleaguered deal, called on the president to inquire, as desperate steel importers these days do from time to time, whether their attorneys might work out the matter behind the scenes.

No.

Next, the disconcerted Morgan asked whether other investments of the House of Morgan might be assailed. Roosevelt’s reply captures the chill of arbitrary leadership. The administration would not go after the other Morgan companies, he said — unless “they have done something we regard as wrong”.

As Edmund Morris reports in Theodore Rex, to observers such as French ambassador Jules Jusserand, Roosevelt seemed “more powerful than a king”. That power suited many voters fine, which is why Roosevelt won so headily when he ran for office on his own in 1904.

Of course TR, like Trump, occasionally supported laws that aligned with his impulses. One example is the Elkins Act of 1903, which made it illegal for railroads to charge different freight rates for different customers. This shallow effort to achieve market “fairness” deprived the railroads of a standard business tool: the ability to provides discounts to those who buy the product in larger quantities. Shares in railroads promptly dropped more than 20 percent, a shift that undermined TR’s premise of railroad invincibility.

August 23, 2025

“Trump … sees transshipment and nearshoring as sneaky workarounds”

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Jake Scott explains Donald Trump’s latest anti-trade moves:

President Donald Trump’s executive order of July 31st, effective August 7th, has upended global trade dynamics in a single stroke. Slapping a 40% tariff on all “transshipped goods” — products rerouted through third countries to dodge US duties — this is merely the natural development of his evolving protectionist agenda.

Just a week after the order, the move is a clear shot at China’s sprawling manufacturing empire, which has long exploited methods like transshipment and “nearshoring” to skirt American tariffs in general, and Trump’s tariff policies in particular.

While applied globally, China stands to take the biggest hit (and likely already is), with its vast factory networks and knack for rerouting goods through Southeast Asia, Mexico, and beyond. This isn’t just a tariff hike; it’s a calculated escalation in Trump’s ongoing crusade to reshape US trade policy and the global economy in the United States’ favor. But ripple effects that bruise consumers are already visible — and this move is likely to strain relationships with key allies as well.

The new tariffs build on Trump’s first-term strategy — so extensive that it now has a Wikipedia entry — when he wielded America’s economic heft like a sledgehammer to renegotiate or smash trade deals he deemed unfair. Back then, Chinese firms sidestepped US tariffs by setting up shop in countries like Vietnam and Mexico, funneling goods through these hubs to mask their origins.

This nearshoring strategy buoyed many economies that had pre-existing arrangements with the United States or were treated more favorably than China, such as Canada and Latin American nations. It is also seen as a natural part of globalization: shipping parts from where they are constructed (like China), assembling them in developing nations (like Mexico), and then exporting to high-value markets (like the United States). Nearshoring has a long history, but the fragility of extended global supply chains was exposed in the Covid pandemic; since then, manufacturers have sought to mitigate their damage.

The US trade deficit with China (roughly $295 billion) has long been a sore point for Trump, who sees transshipment and nearshoring as sneaky workarounds. The 40% duty on these goods, layered atop existing tariffs, aims to plug this loophole. As Stephen Olson, a former US trade negotiator, noted in the New York Times, China will likely view this as a direct attempt to “box them in”, potentially souring already tense talks.

August 8, 2025

China’s short- to medium-term reaction to Trump’s tariffs

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Reason, Liz Wolfe outlines some of the reasons China has not been suffering under the tariffs President Trump has levied on them over the last few months (unlike, say, Canada):

President Donald Trump and PRC President Xi Jinping at the G20 Japan Summit in Osaka, 29 June, 2019.
Cropped from an official White House photo by Shealah Craighead via Wikimedia Commons.

Total Chinese exports surged in July … but not to us. Compared to July 2024, Chinese exports were up 7.2 percent last month. “Its exports to Southeast Asia and Africa, key regions for reshipment to the United States, rose more than twice as fast as its overall exports”, per The New York Times‘ reading of the data. “China’s exports to the European Union, its main alternative to the American market, were also up very strongly.”

Specifically, “data released Thursday by the customs authorities showed the pickup was driven by strong growth in shipments to the European Union, Southeast Asia, Australia, Hong Kong and other markets, which more than made up for the fourth month of double-digit declines in US purchases”, reports Bloomberg.

Predictably, even the threat of tariffs has been enough to dampen trade. Remember, Washington and Beijing are still operating under a 90-day truce — set to expire on August 12, though it could be extended if a new agreement is reached — that holds off the imposition of higher tariff levels, namely, the tit-for-tat tariff increases that both countries had threatened. The truce also staves off export controls on certain critical rare-earth minerals and items that fall into the technology category. But still, current tariff levels mean a baseline 30 percent tariff on Chinese imports, which has been enough to depress trade.

For those in the Trump administration who are worried about trade deficits in particular, I suppose the good news is that we’ve made progress there: “For the last several decades, China has been selling as much as $4 worth of goods to the United States for each $1 of American goods that it buys”, reports The New York Times. Following China’s admission into the World Trade Organization, the trade deficit rose. Now, “tariffs have begun to reduce the imbalance. The United States announced on Tuesday that its overall trade deficit had narrowed in June to $60.2 billion, the smallest in nearly two years.”

It’s not clear why Trump administration officials, and the president himself, are so worried about trade deficits as something to eliminate for their own sake. We are dependent on Chinese goods to a rather substantial degree, which would pose a problem in the event of war with China (which is why the previous administration focused on improving our semiconductor manufacturing capabilities back in 2022). But you can just as easily make the case that it’s the vast volume of trade between the two countries — the deeply intertwined economies so reliant on each other (despite China’s claims of autarky and, more amusingly, communism) — that are incentivizing continued decent relations.

A few factors are at play that might help to explain why you likely haven’t felt a drastic increase in prices just yet. First, since there’s been a long lead-up to this trade war, many larger importers have stockpiled product over the last few months, so shortages haven’t been felt yet — they’ve just been selling off product they’ve been storing. Second, China has already managed to divert some stages of manufacturing to other countries—namely Vietnam — and some larger companies already have factories up and running in other Southeast Asian countries to avoid the “made in China” or “shipped from China” labeling. Expect more transshipping and manufacturing-locale creativity as a means of throwing customs officials off the scent.

August 5, 2025

Will the courts take away Tariff-master Trump’s favourite toy?

Filed under: Government, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

President Donald Trump’s second term in office has been dominated by his capricious and seemingly random deployment of tariffs as a bludgeon to intimidate and coerce America’s allies and enemies alike. In Reason, J.D. Tuccille considers the possibility of the courts taking away the one tool Trump has been using to get his own way in trade negotiations:

Everybody with a brain knows that tariffs are taxes. And they know that tariffs imposed on goods imported to the United States are largely paid by American businesses and consumers. The big question is whether tariffs unilaterally imposed by President Donald Trump under creative interpretations of emergency executive powers will withstand a federal court challenge. So far, the signs are promising for those hoping that a law intended to rein in the power of the presidency will not be read to permit the president to set trade policy of his own accord.

As CBS News reported this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. heard “oral arguments on Thursday in V.O.S. Selections v. Trump, a case brought by five small business owners and 12 states who allege they have been harmed by President Trump’s import taxes. V.O.S., the lead plaintiff in the case, is a New-York based wine importer.”

Representing the plaintiffs is the free-market Liberty Justice Center, along with co-counsel Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University’s Scalia Law School. The plaintiffs are challenging the Trump administration’s invocation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as the basis for the “Liberation Day” tariffs on much of the world as well as related tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China.

A Law Intended To Trim Presidential Power, Not Expand It

The plaintiffs maintain that “under that law, the President may invoke emergency economic powers only after declaring a national emergency in response to an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat’ to national security, foreign policy, or the U.S. economy originating outside of the United States. The lawsuit argues that the Administration’s justification — a trade deficit in goods — is neither an emergency nor an unusual or extraordinary threat.”

What’s interesting is that Congress passed IEEPA not to expand presidential power, but to restrict it. According to a 2024 Congressional Research Service report, “following committee investigations that discovered that the United States had been in a state of emergency for more than 40 years, Congress passed the National Emergencies Act (NEA) in 1976 and IEEPA in 1977. The pair of statutes placed new limits on presidential emergency powers”. Under these laws, presidents are required to assess emergencies on an annual basis, extend them if necessary, and report on their status to Congress.

“Some experts argue that the renewal process has become pro forma“, the report acknowledges. “History shows that national emergencies invoking IEEPA often last nearly a decade, although some have lasted significantly longer — the first state of emergency declared under the NEA and IEEPA, which was declared in response to the taking of U.S. embassy staff as hostages by Iran in 1979, is in its fifth decade.”

August 2, 2025

“[T]he United States is an imperial power … it does not give foreign nations free rides and unearned favours”

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack, eugyppius discusses the European situation in a time of seemingly random and capricious tariffs from the Trump administration:

Europe in 1899, when the continent contained multiple world powers, before the rise of non-European power.

Whenever I talk about things like tariffs, Trump supporters appear in my comments to tell me that Europe has gotten a free ride for long enough and that it is time we learned to pay our way. I find it a little frustrating to read this, because in Europe it does not feel like we are getting a free ride at all. In fact it seems like the opposite: The most common complaint on the populist German right is that our political class refuses to represent our interests and will not stop carrying water for the Americans.

I recognise that I’ll never be able to put this right, but it’s worth trying, because it is important to understand the world as it is. The truth is that the United States is an imperial power. Generally speaking, it does not give foreign nations free rides and it does not hand out unearned favours. There is however a lot of confusion here, because hardly anybody bothers to describe honestly the geopolitical strategy pursued by the United States or the nature of the American empire. Western liberalism cannot conceptualise imperial politics, and while empire generally benefits political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, it is not necessarily or always in the interests of ordinary Americans or ordinary Europeans, which is yet another reason not to talk about it.

The Americans and the British before them expended enormous effort to preempt the emergence of a dominant power on the European Continent that might challenge their successive naval empires. They fought two world wars to stop Germany from becoming just such a power. This great struggle ended in 1945 with Western Europe as a fully subjugated imperial province. Since then, the Americans have coordinated the NATO alliance and guaranteed the security of European countries not out of charity, but because Europe is their provincial possession. As a rule, they have not wanted Europe to assume full responsibility for its own defence, because a world in which America no longer guarantees the security of Europe is a world in which Europe is no longer an American province. It’s that simple.

To fend off the Soviets, the Americans nevertheless rebuilt and rearmed the nations of Western Europe. Everyone involved in this project had to come up with a way to allow the Germans to become a dominant economic power again, without displacing the United States or provoking the hostilities of wary postwar neighbours like France. One solution here was the European Union, which promoted economic interdependency as a counterweight to nationalist concerns. Another solution came at the cultural level, where Germany sought to allay European anxieties over possible Teutonic aggression by developing a national cult of historical guilt for World War II, which steadily blossomed into a full-blown civic religion. This exercise in self-effacement has grown more and not less extreme over time, in part as a response to nervousness about the consequences of German reunification. Many voices on the right like to portray Germans as victims of an externally imposed guilt regime, but the truth is that we did most of this to ourselves. The German left in particular has profited from and encouraged this mindset from the beginning.

German political self-effacement had one unexpected feature, in that it proved to be contagious. Within a generation of 1945, many of the victorious allied powers were striving to develop their own historical guilt cults after the German example, in each case centred around a national original sin like slavery or colonialism. Just as the German political class found it expedient to foreground collective European concerns at the expense of a more narrowly construed German nationalism, so did the broader West develop an overarching obsession with global issues and the plight of the developing world. This has caused the proliferation of a lot of silly people in our political culture, a lot of profoundly stupid organisations, and at least two cancerous ideological systems in the form of climatism and migrationism. We have had a nearly incalculable gift in the form of 80 years of peace, which may yet be offset by the equally incalculable costs of the lunacies this peace has encouraged.

Canada’s PM “… has a job which, like that of most politicians, requires low intelligence and moral vacuousness”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Essays in Idleness, David Warren explains why Canadian political leadership is so desperately uninspiring … except to our enemies and ill-wishers:

The Canadian prime minister — currently Mr Mark Carney — has a job which, like that of most politicians, requires low intelligence and moral vacuousness. At his cleverest he may exhibit a species of rat cunning. His views on Israel and the Middle East are quite uninteresting, for no rat cunning is required. He simply observes that an anti-Semitic policy is necessary, now that Muslim immigration exceeds the Jewish vote.

Not one good thing has come out of the Liberal Party since Louis St-Laurent was defeated in 1957. He, at least, achieved mediocrity. But what can we do? Canada’s population is one with the Liberals.

What happened on October 7th, 2023 — the slaughter of huge numbers of mostly unarmed Jews when Palestinians got outside the Gaza perimeter — can happen again and again. It will happen as long as Palestinians are, from childhood, taught or brainwashed to kill Jews throughout their education and social systems. I also protest against the disproportionate Israeli response. I think the Israelis have been much too restrained.

My model for “Palestine” would be Germany, or Japan. These formerly vicious nations became harmlessly bourgeois after they unconditionally surrendered to the United States and allies. It is ludicrous to think we should have offered them a peace deal, instead.

Damian Penny points out the sad truth that we get more obstinate even in support of a terrible idea when someone tries to bully us out of it:

… I find myself torn between being frustrated with my own government and simultaneously outraged by another government trying to bully us out of a policy decision with which I disagree.

I don’t expect most other Canadians to feel so conflicted, however. Trump may not realize it (nor care one bit even if he does understand it) but he just made it more likely that Canadian voters will rally around the flag.

This flag, specifically.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, has the motivational power of your opponent pushing back against you. That social media has given us a new and effective way to yell at and insult each other across partisan lines is part of the reason partisanship has become so much more entrenched in recent years.

And that includes me. During the last election campaign it was when I argued with Liberals on Facebook that I found myself feeling less like a Conservative voter and more like a Conservative militant, and my sparring partners likely felt the same way, only in the opposite direction.

Now, replace political partisanship with nationalism, and the effect becomes that much stronger.

Of course, hardcore supporters of either side won’t be moved. (That Carney is placing any conditions at all on Palestinian statehood, and saying a two-state solution remains the ultimate goal, makes him a filthy Zionist genocidaire as far as that crowd is concerned.) But sometimes it’s easy to forget that most people simply don’t pay as much attention to, and aren’t nearly as emotionally invested in, this conflict as much as we very online types are.

July 29, 2025

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen triumphantly announces EU capitulation to Trump’s demands

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The EU and the United States are finalizing negotiations on bilateral trade issues that basically give Trump everything he wanted with very little in return for the EU’s concessions. It’s almost as if Trump has some kind of experience in negotiating lopsided agreements, isn’t it? I guess von der Leyen didn’t get Mark Carney’s memo on the importance of keeping your eLbOwS uP:

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen “[learning] in real time that weakness and submission do not in fact invite conciliation”

Donald Trump has shown up the European Union. He’s revealed that the world’s largest single market is a paper tiger to be kicked around, with basically no leverage or strength to resist American demands.

All of these supposedly fierce backroom tariff negotiations have yielded an incredibly one-sided deal – really an unparalleled embarrassment. As announced yesterday, the EU promises to invest $600 billion in the U.S. economy and to make $750 billion worth of “strategic purchases” of oil, gas and the like over the next three years. We also promise to buy a bunch of American military equipment. In return for giving the Americans $1.35 trillion, we earn the privilege of a 15% baseline tariff on all of our exports to America and we drop our own tariffs to zero. At least we don’t have to pay the 30% tariffs Trump threatened!

[…]

While von der Leyen was trying weakly to put a happy face on her total failure, Trump gave her what we might call a softer Zelensky treatment. He twisted the knife in the wound, calling out the idiocy of EU wind energy in an extended soliloquy that will surely keep the fact-checkers and the regime deboonkers up late for weeks to come. I transcribe his remarks in full, because the whole moment was wonderful:

    And the other thing I say to Europe, we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States. They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery, our valleys, our beautiful plains. And I’m not talking about airplanes. I’m talking about beautiful plains, the beautiful areas in the United States. And you look up and you see windmills all over the place. It’s a horrible thing. It’s the most expensive form of energy. It’s no good.

    They’re made in China, almost all of them. When they start to rust and rot in eight years, you can’t really turn them off. You can’t bury them. They won’t let you bury the propellers, you know, the props, because they’re a certain type of fiber that doesn’t go well with the land. That’s what they say. The environmentalists say you can’t bury them because the fiber doesn’t go well with the land. In other words, if you bury it, it will harm our soil.

    The whole thing is a con job. It’s very expensive. And in all fairness, Germany tried it and, wind doesn’t work. You need subsidy for wind and energy should not need subsidy. With energy, you make money. You don’t lose money.

    But more important than that is it ruins the landscape. It kills the birds. They’re noisy. You know, you have a certain place in the Massachusetts area that over the last 20 years had one or two whales wash ashore and over the last short period of time they had 18, okay, because it’s driving them loco, it’s driving them crazy. Now, windmills will not come, it’s not going to happen in the United States, and it’s a very expensive …

    I would love to see, I mean, today I’m playing the best course I think in the world, Turnberry, even though I own it, it’s probably the best course in the world, right? And I look over the horizon and I see nine windmills. It’s like right at the end of the 18. I said, “Isn’t that a shame? What a shame.” You have the same thing all over, all over Europe in particular. You have windmills all over the place.

    Some of the countries prohibit it. But, people ought to know that these windmills are very destructive. They’re environmentally unsound. Just the exact opposite. Because the environmentalists, they’re not really environmentalists, they’re political hacks. These are people that, they almost want to harm the country. But you look at these beautiful landscapes all over all, over the the world. Many countries have gotten smart. They will not allow it. They will not. It’s the worst form of energy, the most expensive form of energy. But, windmills should not be allowed. Okay?

All the while von der Leyen had to sit there, absolutely frozen except for a curiously accelerated rate of blinking, as she learned in real time that weakness and submission do not in fact invite conciliation.

In Spiked, Jacob Reynolds agrees that the deal is a humiliation for the European Union:

So this is the famous “trade superpower”. After months of tough talk, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced a trade deal with Donald Trump this week which is nothing short of total capitulation. The Commission has accepted a 15 per cent baseline US tariff on most EU goods, agreed to purchase $750 billion worth of American gas and procure billions more of US military kit. What did Queen Ursula get in return? Nothing.

“VDL”, as she is known in the Brussels Bubble, tried desperately to spin this as a win. Sitting anxiously next to Trump in Scotland last weekend, she recited impressive-sounding numbers – such as the EU and US’s combined 800million consumers and the EU’s $1.7 trillion trade volume – like a nervous student. Trump cut through the spin by greeting the deal as fantastic for US cars and agriculture. He didn’t need to say much else – indeed, it was clear for all to see that there was only one winner in this deal.

For decades, even critics of the EU had to concede that whatever its many economic and democratic shortcomings, it still possessed enormous leverage when it came to trade. At the very least, it was more than capable of defending EU interests in trade deals. Evidently, this is no longer the case. When even the hapless government of Keir Starmer can negotiate a better trade deal with Trump, the problems with the EU should be clear to see. (Tariffs on most UK goods are just 10 per cent.)

Even the most ardent Europhiles have found it hard to put a positive spin on the deal. Manfred Weber, leader of the European People’s Party (a coalition of Europe’s legacy centre-right parties) described it as “damage control” and better than not reaching a deal at all. Guy Verhofstadt, former prime minister of Belgium and usually the most maniacal of EU fanboys, slammed the deal as not only “badly negotiated”, but also “scandalous” and a “disaster”, with “not one concession from the American side”. Member states, from Ireland to France, have been similarly unenthusiastic. Yet the brutal truth is that the deal reflects how America views the EU – as strategically weak and politically empty.

Trump has taught the EU a harsh lesson in statecraft. The EU has long relied on its neighbours for energy production. It has long underinvested in defence. And now it throttles its biggest industries with green dogma. This left it with little leverage for the negotiations with the US.

Of course, after Mark Carney being elected on a highly dubious platform of being “the right person to deal with Trump”, this is almost inevitable at this stage:

July 19, 2025

Old and tired: the Overton Window … New and hot: the Trump Door

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Mike Colledge considers how Trump has managed to change the political environment that used to be fairly well described by the Overton Window:

Diagram of the “Overton Window”, based on a concept promoted by Joseph P. Overton (1960–2003), former director of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The term “Overton Window” was coined by colleagues of Joe Overton after his death. In the political theory of the Overton Window, new ideas fall into a range of acceptability to the public, at the edges of which an elected official risks being voted out of office.
Illustration by Hydrargyrum via Wikimedia Commons

The Overton Window, named after Joseph Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, is used to explain how policy ideas gain acceptance and move from idea to policy. The “window”, as Overton saw, could include a wide range of ideas from those with little to no support to those that have matured, gained public traction, and could be supported by the public as legitimate policy options for governments. The “window” was not static. It could — and did — shift, expand, or contract based on social movements, economic pressures, cultural trends, and/or the actions of leaders in the public and private sectors.

Those who wanted to push ideas into the window and gain acceptance and support usually had to spend considerable effort — and sometimes years — promoting and making the case for their cause and moving it into the mainstream. Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth and Greta Thunberg’s ongoing efforts to push for action on climate change are examples of leaders using their profile to push and keep climate change action in Overton’s Window.

Lately, though, it feels like the Overton Window has been replaced by the Trump Door. While Overton observed and studied what was happening, Trump is more of an active participant. Overton provided us with an analytical framework; Trump’s door is more of a tactical approach.

And this is a big change. The world moves much faster than it did in the mid-90s when Overton first created his “window”. The democratization of communications and the speed of communications means anyone can comment, report, or share an opinion instantly (and often without considering the consequences). Increased polarization means that leaders looking to act and to reinforce support for their desired policies do not have to wait for a majority to support a given policy before they act. They merely need a vocal plurality of their own supporters to move forward with an idea.

Trump hasn’t so much smashed the window as he has replaced it with a large swinging Western saloon-style door. He has shown no interest in framing and positioning an issue for the public’s consideration in hopes of building support from a majority. He is throwing ideas into and out of the public-consideration saloon as fast as possible. Some ideas he throws in as distractions. Others he throws in as announcements of his intent regardless of the public’s perspective.

To those of you saying in your head “I don’t think Trump thinks this deeply about what he is doing,” you could be correct. But the net impact of his actions is the creation of a Trump Door that, unlike a window, is not transparent and, again unlike Overton’s Window, is not about building public acceptance. It is a tool to achieve his goals as fast as possible. When obstacles require a shift in policy — given there is no need to engage the public — he simply throws another idea into the saloon.

Trump administration records huge increase in tariff revenues

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Oddly, most of the coverage on the US government’s surge in tariff income fail to emphasize two relevant facts: first, that the money is largely being paid by American consumers and second that it’s a surge driven by the fact that higher tariffs will kick in soon. J.D. Tuccille reports:

I have no idea where I saw this meme, but it makes me laugh

Last Friday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took a victory lap as his department reported an unexpected increase in receipts from tariffs. The revenue undoubtedly came from a surge in imports to the U.S., which led to payments that filled federal coffers. It would seem to be a win for an administration that has staked an awful lot on waging a trade war with the entire planet to (take your pick) redress wrongs done to America, raise revenue for the government, and encourage domestic manufacturing and employment. But that victory lap comes too soon; the tariff windfall more likely represents efforts by U.S. firms to accumulate inventory before tariff rates rise even higher.

[…]

That mention of “higher prices on imported goods paid by US consumers and firms” deserves to be emphasized because it highlights the fact that tariffs are taxes on Americans. Ultimately, most of the burden of high rates is shouldered by companies and individuals within the U.S. As the Tax Foundation’s Alex Durante pointed out in February, “rather than hurting foreign exporters, the economic evidence shows American firms and consumers were hardest hit by the Trump tariffs”.

The Yale Budget Lab agrees, estimating in May that “the price level from all 2025 tariffs rises by 1.7% in the short-run, the equivalent of an average per household consumer loss of $2,800” in 2024 dollars. In particular, the Yale economists found “consumers facing 15% higher shoe prices and 14% higher apparel prices in the short-run”.

Even Walmart, which had vowed to absorb as much as possible of the tariff burden, conceded two months ago that prices would have to rise because of the trade war.

This week, the Federal Reserve Bank’s “beige book” noted that “in all twelve Districts, businesses reported experiencing modest to pronounced input cost pressures related to tariffs” and that “many firms passed on at least a portion of cost increases to consumers through price hikes or surcharges”.

Penn Wharton’s concerns, mentioned above, about “lower economic growth” are shared by the Tax Foundation and by the Yale Budget Project. The Tax Foundation’s Erica York and Alex Durante forecast that the Trump administration’s tariffs would “reduce US GDP by 0.8 percent” before taking foreign retaliation into account. Yale economists see a similar GDP reduction of 0.7 percent.

If the courts issue a final ruling against Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs, that will reduce the negative effects on the economy. But it will also take a chunk out of the revenues the administration expects to collect.

So, Secretary Bessent’s victory lap on tariff revenues was a little premature. And so are hopes that the trade war won’t damage commerce and the U.S. economy.

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