Hell, I'm surprised he doesn't offer to sign a treaty with Russia so the two can carve up the world together.
On the Fox News Channel this morning, Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett said: “President Trump has a long run vision of a golden age of America and we’re working really, really hard to get it out there in time. But I can't give you any forward-looking guidance on what's gonna happen this week. The president has got a heck of a lot of analysis before him, and he's gonna make the right choice, I'm sure.”
The National Economic Council is the primary group the president uses to develop domestic and international economic policy, so the fact that Hassett appears to have no idea what’s coming is concerning. Trump has declared April 2 “Liberation Day” because he will announce big new tariffs, posting on his social media site on March 21: “For DECADES we have been ripped off and abused by every nation in the World, both friend and foe. Now it is finally time for the Good Ol’ USA to get some of that MONEY and RESPECT, BACK. GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!”
Other Trump regime officials appear similarly uninformed about Trump’s plans. Fox News Channel personality Shannon Bream asked Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, what to say to consumers who worry that tariffs are going to raise prices, he answered: “Trust in Trump.” He then claimed that “tariffs are tax cuts,” which makes sense only if he means that tariffs, which raise prices on consumers, might provide enough revenue for the government to enable Republicans to justify tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations.
Trump campaigned on the promise to “immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One,” but his tariffs have already helped to push inflation upward. Josh Dawsey and Ryan Felton of the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Trump warned the chief executive officers of “some of the country’s top auto manufacturers not to raise prices because of the 25% tariffs he has just put on cars and car parts, telling them that the tariffs are good for them.
On Saturday, Trump denied he had made such a request and told NBC News’s Kristen Welker that “I couldn’t care less if they raise prices, because people are going to start buying American cars.”
“I couldn’t care less,” he repeated. “I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are going to buy American-made cars. We have plenty.” A White House aide told NBC News that the president was referring to foreign car prices.
And then there is Friday’s story that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been taking not only his brother but also his wife along with him to “meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed.” Katherine Long, Max Colchester, Daniel Michaels, and Lindsay Wise of the Wall Street Journal note that her inclusion in such meetings is unusual. Jennifer Hegseth also accompanied Hegseth to his private meetings with senators during the process of his Senate confirmation, “making it awkward to ask questions about allegations related to infidelity and sexual misconduct.”
Both Trump and Hegseth have made it their goal to purge the United States of what they call “Marxism” and what Hegseth calls “woke sh*t”: that is, the racial, gender, and religious diversity that Americans have embraced since World War II. That means taking the government the country has built over the past 80 years down to the ground and rebuilding it as they imagine it was before, with men like them in charge.
The Trump regime is the result of at least 45 years of Republican rhetoric that undermined the idea of a government that worked for the good of everyone by claiming that such a government was “socialism” or “Marxism.” That argument had nothing to do with actual Marxism, which called for the people to take over farms and factories, and everything to do with America’s peculiar history.
During the Civil War of the 1860s, the Republicans in Congress both ended human enslavement in the U.S. except as punishment for crime and invented the nation’s first system of national taxation, including the income tax. After the war, racist former Confederates in the South refused to accept the idea that Black Americans were equal to their white neighbors and tried to force formerly enslaved people into subservience. To stop that from happening, Americans in 1868 added the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, putting the weight of the federal government behind equal rights. In 1870, Americans added to the Constitution the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing the right of Black men to vote. Also in 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to prosecute those in the South who continued to persecute their Black neighbors on grounds of race.
In response, former Confederates in 1871 began to maintain—falsely—that they had never objected to Black rights on racial grounds. What they opposed, they said, was that poor Black men, impoverished because of their time in slavery, had the right to vote. Those men would, they said, vote for services like roads and schools and hospitals, and such services could be paid for only through tax levies on propertied Americans who overwhelmingly were white men. Thus, permitting Black men to vote meant “socialism” that would destroy the United States. To restore true American values, former Confederates and their northern counterparts insisted, Black Americans must be shut out of a voice in government.
That rhetoric resurfaced after World War II. In that era, the vast majority of Americans embraced a government that worked for everyone by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights. But those Republicans eager to avoid regulation and taxation reached back to Reconstruction to insist that a government that worked in the interest of all Americans was redistributing wealth from hardworking Americans to undeserving minorities and women. Restoring true American values, they said, meant making sure that “Marxists” and minorities could not influence politics, especially after the 1965 Voting Rights Act restored voting rights to Black Americans and people of color.
That rhetoric that tied racism and taxes elected Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980, and it has since metastasized until the top seven donors to the 2024 political cycle together gave almost a billion dollars to Republicans, with Elon Musk alone contributing more than $291 million. The list, compiled by Open Secrets, shows that Democratic donors don’t kick in until number eight on the list, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who gave slightly more than $64 million to Democrats. George Soros, the Republicans’ supervillain, didn’t make the top 25. As those wealthy donors wish, the Trump administration is shredding the post–World War II government and has prioritized tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
Trump’s government is also firing women, Black and Brown Americans, and gender minorities from public positions and working to erase them from our history. MAGA Republicans have fired up their base against immigrants they claim are “invading” the United States, an exaggerated vision in which White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, for example, claims that “[w]e were invaded and occupied. Entire neighborhoods were conquered. Entire towns were subjugated. Our treasury was in the plundered. [sic]”
That wildly exaggerated vision has enabled Republicans to justify throwing overboard the due process on which American rights are based. On Friday, Representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN) told booing constituents: “You violated the rules, you are not entitled to due process.” In fact, in the United States, the due process of law is what establishes whether someone has violated the “rules,” otherwise known as the law.
Just how profoundly the administration is violating civil rights came through today when news broke of an “Alien Enemies Act Validation Guide” obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The guide lays out a point system by which officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can determine if an immigrant is eligible for rendition to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador. The guide tags people as members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang if they reach 8 points on a point system in which officers determine what seems to them a “gang tattoo” or a gang sign, or interact with those ICE says are gang members.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that nearly all of the criteria on the list are subjective, which helps to explain why so many people who are apparently unaffiliated with TdA were swept up in the rendition. “With this checklist,” Reichlin-Melnick writes, “ICE can declare any Venezuelan an ‘Alien Enemy’ without ANY concrete evidence—based solely on an ICE officer's interpretation of tattoos and hand signs which may be completely innocent or the bad luck of having a roommate ICE thinks is TDA.”
The MAGA Republicans’ worldview is the same as that of the Confederates who preceded them: some people are better than others and have the right to rule. It is no coincidence that Trump recently called for the restoration of Confederate statues. But if that worldview is correct, then getting rid of President Joe Biden’s inclusive economy and hiring practices and putting white men in charge of everything should mean exactly what Trump is promising: a golden age of America.
Instead, the strong economy the Biden administration created is tumbling, and Trump administration officials seem to have no plan to stop it except to “Trust in Trump.” The officers in charge of keeping the nation safe have instead broken the law in an epic fail demonstrating that they have no foreign policy plan except military strikes highlighted with emojis. They appear to disdain national security procedures.
And the Signal scandal appears to have been just the tip of the iceberg. Tonight, Alexander Ward, Josh Dawsey, and Meridith McGraw of the Wall Street Journal reported that two U.S. officials told them that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz “has created and hosted multiple other sensitive national-security conversations on Signal with cabinet members.”
When the former Confederates called for cutting Black men out of the vote in the 1870s by insisting their votes would usher in socialism, Americans didn’t know whether a government elected by a wider range of Americans than in the past would thrive. In 2025 we have experienced not only 80 years of a government that created a strong economy and a stable world as it worked for all Americans. We have also experienced the four years recently past, in which the Biden administration demonstrated that such a government worked. It left us with a booming economy and strong national security that the Trump regime is now mangling.
Nonetheless, Trump is digging into the position that some people are better than others and have the right to rule. Today he told NBC News that he is considering a third presidential term, although that is explicitly unconstitutional. “I’m not joking,” he said, “There are methods which you could do it.”
Flashy hotels and upmarket restaurants now dominate the center of Budapest, a city once better known for its shabby facades. New monuments have sprung up in the center of town too. One of them, a pastiche of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., mourns Hungary’s lost 19th-century empire. Instead of war dead, the names of formerly “Hungarian” places—cities and villages that are now in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland—are engraved in long granite walls, solemnly memorialized with an eternal flame.
But the nationalist kitsch and tourist traps hide a different reality. Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.
Tourists in central Budapest don’t see this decline. But neither, apparently, does the American right. For although he has no critical mineral wealth to give away and not much of an army, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, plays an outsize role in the American political debate. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Orbán held multiple meetings with Donald Trump. In May 2022, a pro-Orbán think tank hosted CPAC, the right-wing conference, in Budapest, and three months later, Orbán went to Texas to speak at the CPAC Dallas conference. Last year, at the third edition of CPAC Hungary, a Republican congressman described the country as “one of the most successful models as a leader for conservative principles and governance.” In a video message, Steve Bannon called Hungary “an inspiration to the world.” Notwithstanding his own institution’s analysis of Hungarian governance, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation has also described modern Hungary “not just as a model for modern statecraft, but the model.”
What is this Hungarian model they so admire? Mostly, it has nothing to do with modern statecraft. Instead it’s a very old, very familiar blueprint for autocratic takeover, one that has been deployed by right-wing and left-wing leaders alike, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Hugo Chávez. After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages. During the coronavirus pandemic he gave himself emergency powers, which he has kept ever since. He has aligned himself openly with Russia and China, serving as a mouthpiece for Russian foreign policy at EU meetings and allowing opaque Chinese investments in his country.
This autocratic takeover is precisely what Bannon, Roberts, and others admire, and are indeed seeking to carry out in the U.S. right now. The destruction of the civil service is already under way, pressure on the press and universities has begun, and thoughts of changing the Constitution are in the air. But proponents of these ideas rarely talk about what happened to the Hungarian economy, and to ordinary Hungarians, after they were implemented there. Nor do they explore the contradictions between Orbán’s rhetoric and the reality of his policies. Orbán talks a lot about blocking immigration, for example, but at one point his government issued visas to any non-EU citizen who bought 300,000 euros’ worth of government bonds from mysterious and mostly offshore companies.
He rhapsodizes about family values, even though his government spends among the lowest amounts per capita on health care in the EU, controls access to IVF, and notoriously decided to pardon a man who covered up sexual abuse in children’s homes.
Orbán also talks a lot about “the people” while using his near-absolute power not to build Hungarian prosperity but to enrich a small group of wealthy businessmen, some of whom are members of his family. In Budapest, these oligarchs are sometimes called NER, or NER-people, or NERistan—nicknames that come from Nemzeti Együttműködés Rendszere or System of National Cooperation, the Orwellian name that Orbán gave to his political system—and they benefit directly from their proximity to the leader. Direkt36, one of the few remaining investigative-journalism teams in Hungary, recently made a documentary, The Dynasty, showing, for example, how competitions for state- and EU-funded contracts, starting in about 2010, were deliberately designed so that Elios Innovatív, an energy company co-owned by Orbán’s son-in-law István Tiborcz, would win them. The EU eventually looked into 35 contracts and found serious irregularities in many of them, as well as evidence of a conflict of interest. (In a 2018 statement, Elios said that it had followed legal regulations, which is no doubt true; the whole point of this system is that it is legal.)
That story is just one of many that Hungarians recount to one another, just not in public. The Dynasty also describes the Kisfaludy Tourism Development Programme, which distributed 316 billion Hungarian forints ($860 million) in grants. Two-thirds of those grants went to 0.5 percent of the applicants; almost one-fifth of them went to projects that were, or later became, connected to Tiborcz. Not that Tiborcz is the only recipient of government largesse. Lőrinc Mészáros, at one time the richest man in Hungary, a gas fitter turned entrepreneur who is an old friend of the prime minister’s, once attributed his fortune to “God, luck, and Viktor Orbán.” Other beneficiaries come and go, depending on Orbán’s whim. One Hungarian businessman told me that “you can tell who is in, who is out by seeing whose companies begin growing. If you are in, then your company is growing. If you’re out, your company goes from this big to this small. You see it in a year or two.”
This kind of corruption is, again, mostly legal, because the laws, contracts, and procurement rules are written in such a way as to permit it. Even if this activity were illegal, party-controlled prosecutors would not investigate it. But the scale of the corruption is large enough to distort the rest of the economy. The Hungarian businessman and a Hungarian economist I spoke with—both of whom insisted on anonymity, for fear of retaliation—had separately calculated that NERistan amounts to about 20 percent of the Hungarian economy. That means, as the economist explained to me, that 20 percent of Hungary’s companies operate “not on market principles, not on merit-based principles, but basically on loyalty.” These companies don’t have normal hiring practices or use real business models, because they are designed not for efficiency and profit but for kleptocracy—passing money from the state to their owners.
Not that the regime ever acknowledges the role that the oligarchy plays in the system, or even concedes that Hungary might face a structural crisis. Another Hungarian economist told me that Orbán always predicts “very bright days in the future; success, unimaginable success.”
“Please trust us,” Orbán declared in his annual state-of-the-nation speech in early 2023. “You can bet on it: By the end of the year, we will have inflation in single digits.” In fact, annual average inflation in 2023 was more than 17 percent. In 2024, the government predicted 4 percent growth; the reality was 0.6 percent. Anyone who contradicts this messaging is unlikely to be widely heard. Independent economists are rarely invited to appear on public television, or in any media controlled by the ruling party. In February 2024, the regime created the Sovereignty Protection Office, a sinister body that harasses and smears independent Hungarian organizations. It has redoubled its efforts since the U.S. election and the assault on USAID. The office’s targets include the Hungarian branch of Transparency International, the anti-corruption investigative group, as well as an investigative-news portal, Atlatszo.hu—any entity that could tell the truth about how the country really works.
But the truth is not hard to perceive for anyone who cares to look, because the beneficiaries of this corrupt system are not shy about showing off their wealth. When I mentioned the shiny hotels in central Budapest to a Hungarian friend, he snorted. “Of course, that’s where the NER-people live,” he said. “They want it to look nice.” Also, they own quite a few of them. The Dynasty, the documentary, includes footage of the Hungarian elite partying at clubs and in palaces, and garnered more than 3 million views within a month, a large number in a country of 9.6 million. Thousands of comments underneath the video on YouTube thank the Direkt36 reporters for showing “true reality” not available anywhere else.
In many ways, Hungary is about as different from the U.S. as it is possible to be: small, poor, homogeneous. But I watched the film with a sense of foreboding. As Elon Musk, a government contractor, sets fire to our civil service and makes decisions about the departments that regulate him; as the FBI and the Justice Department are captured by partisans who will never prosecute their colleagues for corruption; as inspectors general are fired and rules about conflicts of interest are ignored, America is spinning quickly in the direction of Hungarian populism, Hungarian politics, and Hungarian justice. But that means Hungarian stagnation, Hungarian corruption, and Hungarian poverty lie in our future too.
Trump labels pro-Palestine protesters accused of vandalising Turnberry as ‘terrorists’
US president says he hopes those responsible for spraying ‘Gaza is not 4 sale’ on his Ayrshire golf course will be ‘treated harshly’
Donald Trump has described members of a pro-Palestine group accused of vandalising his Turnberry golf resort as “terrorists”.
The clubhouse at the five-star resort on the west coast of Scotland was graffitied this month and the course was dug up and painted with the words “Gaza is not 4 sale”.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, the US president said he hoped those responsible would be “treated harshly”. He wrote: “I was just informed by Prime Minister Starmer of the United Kingdom, that they caught the terrorists who attacked the beautiful Turnberry, in Scotland. They did serious damage, and will hopefully be treated harshly.
“You cannot let things like this attack happen, and I greatly appreciate the work of Prime Minister Starmer, and UK law enforcement.”
Trump wrongly claimed that three people were in prison as a result of police inquiries.
A 33-year-old man was charged over the incident and appeared at Ayr sheriff court on Monday. Kieran Robson was charged with malicious mischief and made no plea during the brief hearing. He was released on bail pending a further court appearance.
Another man, 75, and a 66-year-old woman were arrested and released pending further inquiries.
The incident took place during a weekend of pro-Palestine protests across the country after Trump prompted international outcry when he suggested the US could “take over” war-ravaged Gaza and “own it”, which critics say amounts to endorsing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Palestine Action supporters posted footage on social media of the words “Gaza is not 4 sale” sprayed on the Ayrshire golf course. The group said its action was a “direct response to the US administration’s stated intent to ethnically cleanse Gaza” after “having laid out plans to ‘clean out the whole thing’ and forcibly displace its population”.
A spokesperson for Trump Turnberry dismissed the incident as a “childish, criminal act”, adding: “Turnberry is a national treasure and will continue to be the number one beacon of luxury and excellence in the world of golf.”
Police Scotland said inquiries into the incident were continuing.
Acyn@Acyn
13h
Reporter: On the tariffs, you’re expected to hit 10-15 countries, is that right?
Trump: No
Reporter: All countries?
Trump: You would start with all countries
Rest of conversation -
REPORTER: On the tariffs, you’re expected to hit 10-15 countries, is that right?
TRUMP: You would start with all countries.
REPORTER: …Wait, all countries?
TRUMP: All of them. Every. Single. One. You go big, you go strong, you let them know America means business. People say, “Sir, that’s too many tariffs.” And I say, “No, actually, it’s not enough tariffs.”
REPORTER: But wouldn’t that just make everything more expensive for Americans?
TRUMP: No, because they pay. They always pay. Other countries love paying us. They can’t help it. It’s like a tax, but a fun tax. A winning tax.
REPORTER: That’s… not how tariffs work.
TRUMP: That’s how they work when I’m in charge. Look, when I put tariffs on China, what happened? They paid. They cried. They begged. They called me, they said, “Sir, please, no more tariffs, we’re running out of money!” But I was tough. I said, “Xi, listen, you gotta stop ripping us off.” And guess what? He respected me. You know why? Because I tariffed him.
REPORTER: But China retaliated with their own tariffs.
TRUMP: Exactly! That’s called negotiation. That’s called the art of the deal. You tariff me, I tariff you harder. Boom. Victory. It’s like chess, but I’m playing 17D chess while they’re still learning checkers.
REPORTER: But this would apply to allies too—Europe, Canada, Japan.
TRUMP: Especially them. Honestly, they’ve been worse than China. China, at least, you expect to get ripped off. But Europe? They pretend to be our friends, then they hit us with sneaky tariffs. Sneaky, very sneaky people. Canada too. They’re always so nice—too nice. Suspiciously nice. Tariff them all, I say!
REPORTER: So the U.S. would be in a trade war with… the entire world?
TRUMP: No, no, no, not a war. A deal. A beautiful deal. We tariff them, they get scared, and then they make a deal. It’s very simple. Very easy. People don’t understand how easy it is.
REPORTER: But if we tariff everyone, wouldn’t countries just stop trading with us?
TRUMP: They can’t! They love us too much! America is like the super hot girlfriend of global trade. They might complain, they might say, “Oh no, we don’t like tariffs,” but at the end of the day? They need us. We hold all the cards. We have the best economy, the best burgers, the best movies, the best everything. They can’t leave us.
March 30