NATIONAL REVIEW
FEB 28, 2025 |
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◼ What did we work on last week? Read on.
◼ President Trump's push to end the war in Ukraine has led U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron to strengthen their commitment to European and Ukrainian security. The British will increase defense spending to 2.5 percent of GDP by 2027 and to 3 percent within a decade. The French and the British leaders have both floated the possibility of deploying their own nations' armies to Ukraine as a postwar bulwark against further Russian aggression. Good. But Trump has only barely walked back his dishonorable statements that Volodymyr Zelensky is a dictator. "Did I say that?" Trump said to a reporter on Thursday when asked to clarify his comments. "I can't believe I said that. Next question." Any day now, the president is ready to boast about a soon-to-be-finalized minerals deal with Ukraine in exchange for continued U.S. support. But it's not clear that the rare earth minerals in Ukraine will be economically viable for exploitation anytime soon—and some of the deposits lie in Russian-controlled areas. And this is not to mention the craven U.S. diplomatic efforts at the United Nations, where the United States backed a resolution that called for the end of the conflict but did not blame the Kremlin for the invasion. The U.K., France, and other U.S. allies in the General Assembly passed a resolution identifying Russia as the aggressor it is. America voted no, joining a gleeful Russia, Belarus, and North Korea. Worse still is Trump's credulity when it comes to the Russian dictator. "I've known him for a long time now and I don't believe he's going to violate his word," Trump said of Vladimir Putin. Did he say that? We can't believe he said that.
◼ House Republicans narrowly passed a budget resolution, the first step in what promises to be a difficult road to enact the party's legislative agenda. Next the Senate will have to pass its own resolution, and the two versions will have to be reconciled into one on which both chambers agree. Only after that will the much harder work of filling in policy details begin. The resolution is necessary to set up a reconciliation process, which will enable Republicans to avoid the filibuster and pass major parts of their tax and spending agenda through the Senate with a simple majority. The document also set the broad parameters for their agenda: $4.5 trillion worth of tax cuts and $2 trillion worth of cuts to spending. While Democrats are shrieking that the spending cuts would be draconian, the instructions that the House has given are modest: too modest, if the goal is to change the long-run trajectory of the federal debt. The federal government is projected to spend $86 trillion from now through fiscal year 2034, the period affected by the reconciliation bill, under which that sum would barely be shaved—to $84 trillion. Republicans need to use their trifecta to enact major spending cuts alongside keeping the 2017 tax cuts in place. They're still a long, long way from making that happen.
◼ The latest DOGE controversy is an email sent to all federal workers asking them to explain what they did all week. As has become customary, this demand produced waves of unwarranted hysteria, but also more sober-minded concerns that Elon Musk and his team are undermining a good cause by proceeding sloppily. It is wholly reasonable to ask employees about their productivity, and to expect them to check their email. (A 2021 report by the Department of Health and Human Services concluded that 25 percent of the HHS workforce didn't even log in to remote work systems in the months after being assigned to work from home the previous year.) DOGE, however, seems not to have properly informed the heads of all the departments and agencies, resulting in some Trump appointees, including FBI Director Kash Patel and the leaders of other national security agencies, instructing employees not to comply. Musk threatened to terminate any employee who failed to respond, but that threat was communicated publicly by a post on X, not in the workplace. A better approach would have involved department heads in the task of identifying superfluous employees. Disruption can only get you so far.
◼ Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth dismissed Charles Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with the chief of naval operations and the Air Force vice chief of staff. Retired Air Force Lieutenant General Dan Caine has been has nominated to replace Brown. The moves outraged the Beltway and drew accusations that Trump was bringing politics into the Pentagon. After the Biden administration's tenure, the charges are preposterous. An elected president has every right to exercise his constitutional authority as commander in chief to select his senior military advisers and relieve those he may view as underperforming or unsuited to the moment. Caine's nomination will be evaluated by the Senate, which should consider his record and qualification with seriousness and sobriety.
◼ Patel was narrowly confirmed, 51–49, as the FBI director. He is a loyalist whom Trump sees as embodying his determination to reform the agency. Trump and Patel both view it as the locus of Democrats' recent lawfare. Whether Patel's appointment is a good or bad thing will depend on whether he refocuses the bureau on its core competency, crime fighting (rather than foreign counterintelligence), or whether "reform" becomes a euphemism for retributive lawfare waged against Trump's political adversaries. That, in turn, will hinge on whether the new director is the Patel of his confirmation hearing (thoughtful, earnest, and committed to the mission) or the Patel of his memoir, Government Gangsters (a bombastic MAGA performance artist, complete with an enemies list). A bad sign is that Patel's deputy director will be the podcast provocateur Dan Bongino—who, like Patel, parrots Trump's conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen. Patel had reportedly made a commitment to bureau veterans and senators that he would install a veteran FBI agent as deputy. Bongino, a former New York City cop and Secret Service agent, has never worked for the FBI—but has said it is "irredeemably corrupt." Let's hope that he hopes that he's wrong. |
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◼ Trump directed the Department of Commerce to investigate putting tariffs on copper. Such investigations are largely shams, a perfunctory step in the law that unlocks unilateral power for the president to tax imports. Copper tariffs are yet another example of why "sophisticated" cases for protectionism do not align with reality. Taxing manufacturing inputs, such as copper, raises costs for manufacturers, reducing those precious manufacturing jobs that politicians always want to protect. Expect proponents to shout "China!" as justification, even though U.S. copper imports from China are negligible. The largest foreign source by far is Chile, a free country (thank you, CIA) with which the U.S. has had a bilateral trade agreement since 2004. Trade-balance obsessives don't have a case, either: The U.S. has a modest trade surplus with Chile. Because of trade restrictions, U.S. manufacturers already pay above the world price for steel, aluminum, sugar, and other inputs. Adding copper to the list makes the U.S. less competitive and encourages businesses to locate production elsewhere.
◼ Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins wrote in the Wall Street Journal about how the federal government will bring down the price of eggs. It's a relief to have an administration that doesn't view price hikes as a conspiracy by corporations that somehow become more greedy and less greedy as prices change. Rollins notes that prices are higher owing to avian flu, which has resulted in the deaths of 166 million hens since 2022. She acknowledges that imports reduce prices, something her boss in the White House needs to hear. Two of the reasons why the egg market is brittle is that it is centrally managed by the federal government and is ordinarily entirely domestic. At the same time that Rollins said the government would allow imports, she also promised $1 billion in new government spending, partly to increase safety measures and partly to bail out farmers. In a certain respect, socialism in agriculture seems inevitable, although New Zealand, where agriculture plays a larger role in the economy, has been almost entirely free-market after it repealed subsidies and trade restrictions in the 1980s. Regardless, we should all be grateful that other markets aren't like the one for eggs, and remember that when politicians talk of the glories of a protected domestic market, they're promising to create more scrambled situations like this one. |
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◼ Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, announced that henceforth its editorial pages would promote "personal liberties and free markets." The prevailing reaction among progressives was to hyperventilate about his truckling to Trump. But Bezos's new chosen metric would support both praise and criticism of Trump. And how to secure liberty and ensure that markets work well for the people they serve is subject to debate. That should leave plenty to discuss in a lively publication—or so we have found for nearly 70 years.
◼ Germany's general election went largely as expected. The center-right CDU/CSU won an unimpressive plurality. The AfD, a populist-right party with significant elements that deserve the much-abused label of "far right," doubled its share of the vote to come in second. (The main surprise was a late surge by Die Linke, a direct political descendant of East Germany's former ruling communist party.) Partnering with the AfD is taboo. As a result, Germany's next government is likely to be an ideologically incoherent coalition between the CDU/CSU (with its leader, Friedrich Merz, as chancellor) and the third-place center-left SPD of outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz. Merz, no Merkel, is willing to rein in immigration and net zero, two worthwhile moves that might reverse the AfD's rise, but will the SPD agree to them? Especially with Trump in the White House, the new German government must spend more on defense. But if that means easing the country's constitutionally embedded debt brake (and it may), the AfD and Die Linke (both of which are Putin-friendly), acting together, could block it; Merz, however well intentioned, may not be able to overcome them. Germany is sliding toward a political and economic crisis—which is not a sentence that should make anyone rest easy.
◼ When a Chilean telescope spotted Asteroid 2024 YR4 passing near Earth in December, scientists quickly realized that there was a small chance, about 3 percent, that the hurtling football-field-sized rock could strike our planet on a future orbit around the Sun. They even had a date for Armageddon: December 22, 2032. But now, scientists at NASA say that new calculations show that the chance of a direct strike has dropped to 0.0017 percent. Okay, but you're still telling us there's a chance?
◼ Self-described misogynists and dual U.S.-U.K. citizens Andrew and Tristan Tate, who had been under house arrest in Romania, traveled to Florida this week after the Romanian government lifted a travel ban against them. The ban went into place in 2022 after the brothers were charged with human trafficking and forming an organized crime group. The Tates deny all charges. Andrew, who has amassed a huge following among young men, believes that men must find purpose through materialism, sexual promiscuity, and power. Men, he thinks, are "enslaved" by the "Matrix," a conspiratorial cabal of government bureaucrats, media outlets, and bankers, designed to make men weak. A former kickboxer, he thinks that women should not be eligible to vote. He has said that women who put themselves "in a position to be raped" must "bear some responsibility" and that, if a woman accused him of cheating, he would "bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck." Speculation that Trump administration officials asked Romania to lift the brothers' restrictions (the Tates are Trump supporters, and there is a current of sympathy in MAGA world toward the Tates) is growing though unconfirmed. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who was not aware this was happening until it happened, sent a strong message: "Florida is not a place where you're welcome with that type of conduct," he said. No place in America should be, except prison.
◼ "I once sang 'Love for Sale,'" about prostitution, and did so with such depth that "a Lutheran minister asked me to sing it at his church the next Sunday," Roberta Flack said in an interview in 1991. "And I did." A musical prodigy, a classical pianist who played for the church choir and graduated from Howard University at age 19, she taught school until in her mid-thirties she began performing full-time for clubs in metropolitan Washington, D.C. In 1969, she recorded "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"; in 1972, Clint Eastwood used it in a film he directed, and the song took off, selling more than a million copies and catapulting her to overnight stardom. Her hits "Killing Me Softly with His Song" (1973) and "Feel Like Makin' Love" (1974) followed fast, animated by her strong, gentle voice, expressive of great yearning but at the same time disciplined, understated, and clear—"blissful," as admirers of her work are wont to describe it. She won five Grammy Awards. Grace and kindness marked her presence onstage and off. Dead at 88. R.I.P. |
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19 West 44th Street, Ste. 1701
New York, NY, 10036 |
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