The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

“It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.”

Yesterday, former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton cut to the heart of President Donald J. Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House.

Indeed, that might have been the whole point. After saying in July that the ballroom he planned to build would not touch the East Wing, the president tore into the building on Monday, the first workday after about seven million people turned out for the No Kings protests to demonstrate their opposition to his administration.

There are currently no approved plans to rebuild, no permits, no signs of weatherproofing for a construction project begun just before winter, no indication that the history or the paintings or the artifacts in the East Wing were preserved. There is only the destruction of the People’s House.

Today, Luke Broadwater of the New York Times reported that Trump will demolish the entire East Wing. According to a senior administration official, the demolition should be finished by this weekend.

Today the U.S. military struck another vessel the administration claims was smuggling drugs into the U.S., killing two people on board. This is the eighth strike that has been made public; the U.S. strikes have killed at least 34 people. According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, this strike was operating in the eastern Pacific, widening the zone the administration is patrolling for those it claims are enemy combatants, a legal claim that experts widely reject.

Eleanor Watson of CBS News noted that on Sunday, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) told Margaret Brennan of Face the Nation that when administration officials briefed Congress about the strikes, they “had a very hard time explaining to us the rationale, the legal rationale for doing this and the constitutionality of doing it.” The officials informed Congress that they have “a secret list of over 20 narco organizations, drug trafficking cartels,” but they did not share the list with lawmakers.

National security scholar Tom Nichols commented on today’s strike: “The president is establishing the principle that he can order the murder of anyone he deems a threat. And Congress is letting it happen.”

Today the Pentagon announced a new press corps to cover Hegseth and the Defense Department after the traditional pool turned in their press badges rather than agree to publish only material approved by Defense Department officials. Among those who walked out were Hegseth’s former colleagues at the Fox News Channel. The new press corps—all of whom accepted the Pentagon’s censorship—consists of right-wing outlets, including LindellTV, run by “MyPillow” chief executive officer and key election denier Mike Lindell, and podcaster Tim Pool, who was funded by Russia before the 2024 election.

Yesterday, Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported that Trump is demanding the Department of Justice hand over about $230 million to compensate him for investigating the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives and for violating his privacy by searching Mar-a-Lago for classified documents in 2022. Trump filed the claims in 2023 and 2024. His own appointees will decide whether to approve the claims.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote today: “[H]ow do you top ordering your appointees to cut you a check for $230 million taxpayer dollars…. What thing can be more unimaginable and beyond belief than the president just saying, Cut me a check for a quarter billion dollars? What can be weirder than his bulldozing a big chunk of the White House?”

“The real story here is that Trump has been operating as king or dictator for going on a year,” Marshall wrote. “There’s no accountability for anything. No limits, no penalties. So the demands keep spiraling.”

Speaking with Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), Chris Hayes of All In with Chris Hayes admitted that the destruction of the East Wing hit him hard. “There was really something visceral about those images that landed,” he told the senator. “I wonder if you or other colleagues or other people you’re talking to have had that same reaction.”

Murphy answered: “[T]here’s a lot of history that has taken place in the East Wing, and it was just destroyed without any conversation in the American public, without any consent of Congress. It was absolutely illegal…. [T]hat visual is powerful because you are essentially watching the destruction of the rule of law happen as those walls come down. It is just a symbol about how cavalier he is, about every single day acting in new and illegal ways.

“That’s the story with the killings in the Caribbean, as well. The president just doesn’t believe that any law applies to him, that he can destroy federal property, that he can steal from American citizens, that he can kill with impunity, that he can throw anyone in jail.

“We are not living in a functional democracy any longer. It’s not too late to save it, but it is just important to acknowledge that we aren’t on the precipice of losing our democracy. We are losing it every single day. We are not a functional nation with a rule of law any longer, and those toppled walls in the East Wing are a pretty stark reminder of that.”

Marshall, though, noted that Trump’s behavior “opens up opportunities the political opposition can and must exploit.” The president is “increasingly reckless, acting like someone who is free from any consequences or the need for support from anyone beyond his admirers.” But “[t]he reality is that Trump is deeply unpopular.”

Some evidence for that unpopularity today came in the form of Treasury Department sanctions against Russia’s two largest oil companies, which suggest the administration feels it can no longer entirely ignore Republican senators. As Hans Nichols and Stef W. Kight of Axios recalled yesterday, bipartisan majorities in the Senate have been demanding sanctions since July, when Trump put them off by saying he would impose sanctions in 50 days if Russia’s president Vladimir Putin didn’t end his war in Ukraine. Then, in August, Trump invited Putin to Alaska, and Senate Republicans backed off to give the president room to negotiate.

Last week, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) signaled he was ready to move forward, and lawmakers and aides told the press the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would pass three bills to increase pressure on Russia. One would label Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, one would impose economic penalties on China for its support of Russia, and the third would transfer Russian assets frozen in the U.S. to Ukraine.

Today the administration announced its own, much more limited, sanctions.

On Monday the White House was forced to withdraw Trump’s nomination for Paul Ingrassia to head the Office of Special Counsel, a watchdog agency. Republican senators said they would not confirm him after the publication of texts in which Ingrassia said he has “a Nazi streak in me.” Ingrassia still works for the administration but will not move to the head of the Office of Special Counsel.

Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen wrote on Meidas+, “The Senate—this 119th Congress, which has spent nine months acting like an annex of the West Wing—finally pushed back. This is the same chamber that greenlit Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services and Pete Hegseth at Defense, both appointments that made career staffers consider early retirement.”

But, he continued, “some line was finally crossed. Maybe it was the word ‘Nazi.’ Maybe it was the timing,” coming as it did just days after the exposure of another group of young Republicans texting Nazi talk. “Maybe Thune—a man who’s built his career on calculated restraint—decided he wasn’t going to be remembered as the Senate leader who confirmed the guy with the Nazi jokes,” Cohen wrote. “Whatever the reason, the…rubber stamp hesitated.”

So we'll get now news from the new Pentagon press corps:
Gateway Pundit, the National Pulse, Human Events, podcaster Tim Pool, the Just the News website founded by journalist John Solomon, Frontlines by Turning Point USA and LindellTV, run by “MyPillow” CEO Mike Lindell.

hightor wrote:

I can't wait for the next president to replant the Rose Garden, tear down the ballroom, and level this stupid arch. Hell, there's a precedent, too – Reagan took Carter's solar panels off the White House roof.

I don't understand any of these Trump moves. They replanted the Rose garden and made it look like the shrubs around Lenin's tomb. They robbed the American people of the Kennedy Center and Trump made himself the 'leader'? So what's going to happen, are we going to have to see multiple versions of groups singing their version of "YMCA". The man can't even comb his hair, how the hell is he going to recognize any sort of talent.

Julia Ainsley and Didi Martinez of NBC News reported today that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s rush to get new recruits onto the street has meant they have pushed into their training program more than 200 people who have disqualifying criminal backgrounds, fail drug testing, or don’t meet the academic or physical requirements.

The budget reconciliation measure the Republicans passed in July—the one they call the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”—included more than $170 billion over four years for immigration and border security. The law tripled ICE’s annual budget, giving it “more than the annual expenditures on police by state and local governments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia combined,” according to Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy law and policy institute.

Part of that money was to hire about 10,000 deportation officers. As O’Herron notes, a 2017 report by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General found that to hire 10,000 officers would require vetting 500,000 applicants. Currently, law enforcement agencies have been having trouble finding enough applicants. O’Herron notes that ICE can bypass the usual requirements for federal employees, but in the past, when the government tried to hire 5,000 Customs and Border Patrol officers quickly, the result was dramatically higher corruption rates, including for bribery by trafficking and smuggling operations.

In August, ICE began to offer a $50,000 signing bonus and got rid of its age limits. To fill the ranks, Ainsley and Martinez note, ICE has already shortened its training program from 13 weeks to 6. They report that nearly half of those dismissed from ICE over the past three months could not pass an open-book exam. Others could not run 1.5 miles in less than 14 minutes, 25 seconds, or do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups.

Sociologist Ian Carillo called attention to a 2020 article by political scientists Adam Scharpf and Christian Glässel looking into why secret police agents are often “surprisingly mediocre in skill and intellect.” By examining the 4,287 officers who served in autocratic Argentina from 1975 to 1983, they discovered that the ranks of secret police are filled by those who perform poorly in merit-based systems. Facing firing for their poor performance, they turn to more burdensome secret police work.

Today Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker established the “Illinois Accountability Commission” to compile evidence against federal agents who have harassed, intimidated, brutalized, and detained American citizens and legal residents in Illinois. “None of this is about crime or safety,” Pritzker said. “If it were, there would be coordination with local law enforcement and judicial warrants…. Under normal circumstances,” he said, “federal agency supervisors and inspectors general would enforce proper legal procedures and protocols and hold accountable those who violate them.” But Trump has fired 17 inspectors general and installed cronies at the Department of Justice, while MAGA congress members refuse to hold hearings or conduct oversight. Administration officials are acting as if they are “immune from investigation or accountability,” Pritzker said “They are not.”

The commission will create an official public record of “[e]very instance of abuse, or law-breaking, or…violations of rights.” While “states have limited abilities against federal immunity,” Pritzker said, “we must remind everyone that…[t]here will come a time where people of good faith are empowered to uphold the law. When the time comes, Illinois will have the testimony and the records needed to pursue justice to its fullest extent.”

Dictators also enforce loyalty by protecting those who have been found guilty of crimes in the nation’s nonpartisan justice system. Last week Trump commuted the sentence of former representative George Santos (R-NY), ending his seven-year sentence for fraud with just three months served and removing his obligation to pay $373,749.97 to the victims of his crimes. Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,600 people, far more than most presidents do in four years.

Those convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol received most of the president’s clemency, but former assistant U.S. attorney Jeffrey Toobin notes in an essay for the New York Times that Trump has been free with pardons or commutations for criminal supporters. Toobin notes Trump’s social media post after commuting Santos’s sentence: “Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!”

Today, Trump announced a pardon for Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange, who pleaded guilty in 2023 to money laundering, paid a $50 million fine, and served nearly four months in prison. His company paid a $4.3 billion penalty. Gram Slattery and Chris Prentice of Reuters note that in May, Binance accepted the stablecoin USD1, put out by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto venture, as payment for an investment in Binance made by an investment firm from Abu Dhabi. The deal enables World Liberty Financial to keep any profits from the $2 billion investment, likely worth tens of millions of dollars a year, and it significantly boosted the venture.

Trump’s full and unconditional pardon enables Zhao to return to the business. On social media, Zhao posted that he was “deeply grateful for today’s pardon and to President Trump for upholding America’s commitment to fairness, innovation, and justice.” He added: “Will do everything we can to help make America the Capital of Crypto.”

This afternoon, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Trump about the pardon and whether it had anything to do with Zhao’s involvement in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture.

“Which one? Who is that?.... The recent one? Yes, the? I believe we’re talking about the same person because I do pardon a lot of people. I don’t know, he was recommended by a lot of people. A lot of people say that—are you talking about the crypto person?—A lot of people say that he wasn’t guilty of anything. He served four months in jail, and they say that he was not guilty of anything, that what he did, well, you don’t know much about crypto. You know nothing about, you know nothing about nothing. You’re fake news. But let me just tell you that he was somebody that, as I was told, I don’t know him, I don’t believe I’ve ever met him. But I’ve been told a lot of support. He had a lot of support, and they said that what he did is not even a crime. It wasn’t a crime, that he was persecuted by the Biden administration, uh, and so, I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people.”

The White House today released a list of those donating to Trump’s ballroom that he intends will replace the now-demolished East Wing of the White House. The list includes the Altria Group Inc., Amazon, Apple, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., Caterpillar Inc., Coinbase, Comcast Corporation, J. Pepe and Emilia Fanjul, Hard Rock International, Google, HP Inc., Lockheed Martin, Meta Platforms, Micron Technology, Microsoft, NextEra Energy Inc., Palantir Technologies Inc., Ripple, Reynolds American, T-Mobile, Tether America, Union Pacific Railroad, Adelson Family Foundation, Stefan E. Brodie, Betty Wold Johnson Foundation, Charles and Marissa Cascarilla, Edward and Shari Glazer, Harold Hamm, Benjamin Leon Jr., The Lutnick Family, The Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation, Stephen A. Schwarzman, Konstantin Sokolov, Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher, Paolo Tiramani, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss.

Economist Robert Reich notes that the list includes “Google, whose CEO thanked Trump for [the] ‘resolution’ of an antitrust case[;] Palantir, which has lucrative contracts with ICE[; and] Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, who would profit from Trump’s regulatory rollbacks for private equity.” Reich commented: “Pay-to-play.”

By definition, those who could not make it in a merit-based system and who are dependent on the good will of an authoritarian leader have neither the skill nor the priorities to deliver good government for the country.

Today economist Paul Krugman noted that the administration’s $20 billion gambit to save Trump ally Javier Milei’s government in Argentina, with another $20 billion in the works, is a visceral wake-up call for parts of rural America in a way that cuts to social welfare programs have not been, despite the fact that rural areas depend on those programs more than urban areas do. Now Trump is talking about importing beef from Argentina. Farmers were already upset that Trump’s tariff war ended Chinese imports of U.S. soybeans; now ranchers are outraged at Trump’s focus on Argentina rather than on Americans.

Trump responded by insulting them: “The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States, including a 50% Tariff on Brazil. If it weren’t for me, they would be doing just as they’ve done for the past 20 years—Terrible! It would be nice if they would understand that….”

But someone in the White House must have paid attention to yesterday’s news that a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PPRI), a nonpartisan independent research organization, found that 56% of Americans agree that “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy,” while only 41% see him as “a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness.”

Today, after threats to send what he called a “surge”—a military term—of agents to San Francisco, Trump announced he had changed his mind. Trump attributed his change of course to “friends of mine who live in the area.”

On November 4, 2025, California voters will go to the polls to vote on Proposition 50, which would redraw the state’s congressional map to create more Democratic-dominated districts until 2030 in response to Texas’s new Republican-skewed maps.

ICE agents storming the streets of San Francisco two weeks before the vote would likely have added votes in favor of Prop 50.

What do you expect smaller, weaker nations to do?

Americans voted for Trump, you can't blame the rest of the world for not acting.

The entire ******* world has got to stop this guy while his overreach is still short of fatal.

Or not.


That is always a choice.

What do you expect smaller, weaker nations to do?

President Trump said late Thursday that he was terminating negotiations with Canada over the high tariffs that he imposed on its steel, auto parts and other major exports, adding new uncertainty to the relationship with America’s second-biggest trading partner.

On Truth Social, the president said he was ending all trade negotiations with Canada because of a video ad, paid for by the province of Ontario, that featured former President Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about tariffs.

“TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A.,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED.”

Mr. Trump claimed that the ad was fake and said that it had been placed “to interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court,” which is currently considering a legal challenge to many of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

But the quotes are drawn from a radio address that Mr. Reagan gave in April of 1987, in which he urged Congress not to pursue protectionist policies against Japan and gave a blistering critique of the economic effects of tariffs. Although quotes are taken from different parts of Mr. Reagan’s speech, there is no indication that they have been altered.

It was unclear if the president had spoken to Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada or anyone in the Canadian government before announcing that he was canceling trade talks. Mr. Carney’s office and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. But Mr. Trump’s Thursday missive was not the first indication that he had noticed the ad.

“I see foreign countries now, that we are doing really well with, taking ads, ‘Don’t go with tariffs,’” Mr. Trump told reporters in the White House on Tuesday. “They’re taking ads. I saw an ad last night from Canada.”

“If I was Canada I’d take that same ad also,” he added.

On Thursday, though, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute said in a statement posted on social media that the Ontario ad had used “selective” audio and video from Mr. Reagan’s address. “The ad misrepresents the Presidential Radio Address,” the statement said, without clarifying how.

It was that statement that apparently prompted Mr. Trump to post on Truth Social that he was ending the talks with Canada.

“The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs,” Mr. Trump wrote.

Mr. Trump has taken an aggressive stance toward Canada, which is a source of many U.S. imports and a destination for many American exports. He has imposed a 35 percent tariff on some of its most critical exports and has repeatedly suggested that Canada should be the 51st U.S. state.

Canadian sentiment toward the United States has soured drastically over the past several months because of the Trump administration’s moves. This latest development comes as the Toronto Blue Jays prepare to face off at home against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the first game of the World Series on Friday, a major moment of pride for Canadians rallying around their flag.

It is unclear where Mr. Trump’s latest statement leaves the two countries’ relationship. The United States, Canada and Mexico have been preparing for a review of their shared free trade agreement, which is scheduled to be completed by next summer.

Mr. Carney visited Mr. Trump at the White House earlier this month for the second time, but the cordial meeting yielded no breakthrough in talks. Mr. Carney, who has said that Canada’s old relationship with the United States is over, said in a major economic policy address this week that he wanted to double Canada’s exports to destinations other than the United States over the next decade.

The ad that Mr. Trump mentioned in his post was taken out by the government of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province and a key nexus of economic cooperation with the United States.

The government of Ontario said it had spent 75 million Canadian dollars, about $53.5 million, to broadcast the ad. It began airing in the United States last week during a Blue Jays game against the Seattle Mariners, and it was scheduled to continue to air over the following two weeks.

“When someone says, ‘Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,’ it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products,” Mr. Reagan is heard to say in the ad, over various images of economic activity. But, he warns, tariffs cause damage. “Markets shrink and collapse,” Mr. Reagan says, “industries shut down and millions of people lose their jobs.”

Mr. Reagan gave the 1987 radio address from Camp David before a visit by the Japanese prime minister to Washington. At the time, anger had been growing in the United States over Japan’s ballooning trade surplus, but politicians like Mr. Reagan continued to believe in the benefits of free trade.

Mr. Reagan had just placed some tariffs on Japanese products in response to Japan’s failure to abide by a trade agreement over semiconductors. But he urged Congress not to restrict his options by issuing more protectionist measures. And he decried the economic effects of tariffs, saying that over time, they would make protected industries less competitive and set off trade wars that would destroy American jobs.

Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, introduced the ad on Oct. 16, writing in a Facebook post on his official page that “we’ll never stop making the case against American tariffs on Canada.”

In a speech two days earlier, talking about what had motivated him to take out the ad, Mr. Ford said he had listened to the Reagan speech and thought, “Let’s take Ronald Reagan’s words and let’s blast it to the American people.”

Quote:

What do you expect smaller, weaker nations to do?

His policies have really done economic damage to Canada. And when Canadians point this out and criticize his policies he gets very angry and vindictive:

Trump Says He’s Cutting Off Trade Negotiations With Canada


The president said he was motivated by an ad, paid for by the province of Ontario, that featured Ronald Reagan criticizing tariffs in a 1987 radio address.

Quote:

President Trump said late Thursday that he was terminating negotiations with Canada over the high tariffs that he imposed on its steel, auto parts and other major exports, adding new uncertainty to the relationship with America’s second-biggest trading partner.

On Truth Social, the president said he was ending all trade negotiations with Canada because of a video ad, paid for by the province of Ontario, that featured former President Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about tariffs.

Yeah...he responded to world events like a 10 year old. Kind of an improvement on his part. Usually he responds like a 7 or 9 year older.

Frank Apisa wrote:

The entire ******* world has got to stop this guy while his overreach is still short of fatal.

Or not.


That is always a choice.

Unfortunately, Trump's ‘protection money’ extortion tactics continue to be effective.
Other countries, most of them at least, therefore see no way to protest effectively. Hopefully, this will change.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has canceled House business again next week, meaning that over the last 17 weeks, the House of Representatives will have worked on Capitol Hill for just 20 days. It also means that the House will not be back at work before November 1, when at least twenty-five states have said they will not be able to provide the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits more than 42 million Americans rely on to put food on the table.

Jennifer Ludden of NPR notes that about one of every eight Americans gets an average of $187 a month in food assistance. Most of those who use SNAP are children, older Americans, veterans, people with disabilities, and working people, chief executive officer Joel Berg of Hunger Free America told Ludden. “If the SNAP program shuts down, we will have the most mass hunger suffering we’ve had in America since the Great Depression.”

Republicans are trying to convince Americans that the Democrats are responsible for the pain of the shutdown. At the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service website, a banner reads: “Due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown, this government website will not be updated during the funding lapse. President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people.”

In addition to being an open violation of the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits the use of government resources for partisan purposes, this statement badly misrepresents what’s going on in Washington, D.C. President Donald J. Trump is refusing even to talk with Democrats, let alone negotiate to reopen the government, and Republican lawmakers are following his lead. He and MAGA Republicans are trying to muscle Senate Democrats into passing the continuing resolution the House passed on September 19 before they left town.

For their part, the Democrats are refusing to agree to fund the government until the Republicans work with them to extend the premium tax credits that support access to the Affordable Care Act marketplace for healthcare insurance. In their “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” of July, Republicans extended tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations but permitted the premium tax credits to expire. Democrats have also asked for Congress to put back into Medicaid the $1 trillion the Republicans took out of it in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

According to the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit healthcare research foundation, the loss of the premium tax credits will cause nearly 5 million people to lose their health insurance in 2026. The cost of premiums will force healthy Americans out of the pool as they decide to drop their coverage, sending premium prices skyrocketing for millions more. The Commonwealth Fund also projects that the loss of the premium tax credits will cost almost 340,000 jobs, including about 154,000 in healthcare-related industries and 185,000 in other sectors. Those losses will cause a $2.5 billion decline in local and state tax revenues.

Trump is trying to make the impasse between the parties about the shutdown, but that obscures the actual fight at hand. What is at stake is the theory behind the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act: the destruction of the modern American government that was put in place in the 1930s by Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and expanded from then until 1981 under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Today’s fight is about the cuts made by billionaire Elon Musk as head of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” and cuts made after Musk left the administration by Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought.

Republicans have embraced the destruction of the modern government, slashing SNAP benefits, Medicaid, cancer research, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), and so on. The Democrats are defending the government that has been in place since the 1930s, focused on leveling the playing field between the very wealthy and ordinary Americans.

Trump is determined to resurrect the pre–New Deal system in the United States and refuses to entertain any notion that his vision will not work. That refusal to be crossed showed over the past twenty-four hours when he exploded over a Canadian advertisement aired last night that quoted an April 25, 1987, speech in which Republican president Ronald Reagan criticized tariffs as “trade barriers” that “hurt every American worker and consumer.”

“High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars,’’ Reagan said in both the speech and the advertisement. “The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers, and less and less competition. So, soon, because of the prices made artificially high by tariffs that subsidize inefficiency and poor management, people stop buying. Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs.”

During the 2024 campaign, Trump insisted that tariffs like those imposed in the late nineteenth century would nurture the economy and fund the government alone, permitting tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. He rejected economists’ assessment that tariffs are paid by consumers and that they would slow economic growth.

Last night, apparently furious at the implied criticism of his tariffs with the words of a Republican icon, as well as the fact that Canadians bypassed him by appealing directly to the American people, Trump announced on social media that “TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A.” He continued: “ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED.” Today he continued to post pro-tariff messages, saying, for example: “THE UNITED STATES IS WEALTHY, POWERFUL, AND NATIONALLY SECURE AGAIN, ALL BECAUSE OF TARIFFS!” and “THE STOCK MARKET IS STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE BECAUSE OF TARIFFS!”

In fact, the government’s inflation report, released today, shows that inflation has climbed to 3%, and the White House says it will likely not release October inflation report because of the government shutdown. At the same time, the administration’s cuts to the government have not created the savings promised: yesterday the U.S. debt passed $38 trillion. This was the fastest accumulation of a trillion dollars of debt outside of the Covid-19 pandemic, with the U.S. hitting $37 trillion in August and $38 trillion just two months later.

Distrust of Trump’s economic vision is showing in polls. As G. Elliot Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers, an Economist/YouGov poll shows that 53% of Americans think the economy is getting worse. The latest Gallup poll shows that Americans now think Democrats, rather than Republicans, are the better party to keep the country prosperous, by a margin of 47% to 43%. This is a shift of 18 points in just over two years.

Trump appears to want the world to conform to his ideology in foreign affairs as well as in the domestic sphere, claiming the ultimate power over life and death without regard to the rule of law. When a reporter asked him yesterday why he didn’t ask Congress for a declaration of war against those South American drug cartels he claims are at war with the United States, Trump answered: “Well, I don’t think we’re gonna necessarily ask for a declaration of war, I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK? We’re going to kill them. You know? They’re going to be, like dead. OK?”

Today Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the military has struck yet another boat in the Caribbean, for a total of ten so far. Six people on the boat died in the strike.

Trump talks about the administration’s strikes on boats in the region as an attempt to stop the importation of drugs into the U.S., but observers suggest the administration is really attempting to encourage Venezuelans to rise up against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Hegseth announced today he was sending the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford and its strike group of five destroyers to the waters off South America. The group will join the growing military buildup in the region. Alayna Treene, Kylie Atwood, and Katie Bo Lillis of CNN reported today that the Trump administration is considering targeting drug routes and cocaine facilities in Venezuela itself.

Today the administration also imposed sanctions on leftist President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, as well as his family and a member of his government, claiming they are participants in the global drug trade.

And yet, for all the administration’s insistence that it can shape the world as it wants, it seems worried about the American people. Yesterday Trump dismissed the No Kings protests of last Saturday, saying the “crowds were not big at all” and claiming the signs were “all made professionally in a printing shop. Looks like on Madison Avenue someplace.” He said: “Some guy is paying for all that stuff…. These people are going crazy, they’re going crazy ‘cause they’re getting paid. ‘Cause there’s no reason for them to be going crazy, but you watch some of them, and they’re professional agitators, and we are finding out who’s paying them. Yeah. We have a lot of information about who they are. You’re gonna be very surprised when you find out.”

And, today the Department of Justice announced it will monitor polling sites in six jurisdictions in the upcoming November 4 elections. The observers will go to California and New Jersey, two Democratic-dominated states that will be holding elections with national consequences.

I'm giggling to myself about Trump not paying the construction company - even if it isn't his money the habit will be hard to break.