- Rationales for tariffs against Canada and Mexico: perhaps Trump just hates Canadian decency, how his rationales keep changing, and in any case they’re foolish;
- With my thoughts about two possible motivations;
- How Trump is losing the 21st century: by alienating friends, destroying the business environment, and undermining science and research;
- How Trump is undoing the revitalization of US society set by FDR;
- About the backlash to globalization;
- And brief items about white men, town halls, and education.
Trump doesn’t seem to have reasons for doing anything except for childish petulance.
Paul Krugman, 4 Mar 2025: Trump Hates Canada for its Decency, subtitled “The president lacks basic decency, and loathes people who do”
Krugman remarks on various newspapers trying to understand the rationale for Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
You can see the writers struggling, because this is a profoundly self-destructive move — it will impose huge, possibly devastating costs on U.S. manufacturing, while significantly raising the cost of living — without any visible justification. Yet the conventions of mainstream journalism make it hard to say directly that the president’s actions are just vindictive and senseless.
To its credit, the New York Times analysis comes closest, acknowledging that for some reason Trump personally loathes Canada, a nation most of the world stereotypes as “nice.” Obviously not every Canadian is a nice person. But Canadians are relatively courteous on average, and the country’s social and economic policies are relatively decent by international standards.
And it seems clear to me that Trump hates them for their decency.
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One problem seems to be that every time the subject comes up, Trump has a different rationale.
Vox, Eric Levitz, 4 Mar 2025: Trump doesn’t seem to know why he launched a giant trade war, subtitled “The president’s reasons for imposing tariffs on Canada and Mexico keep changing (and none make sense).”
Why has the US president chosen to upend trade relations on the North American continent? The stakes of this question are high, since it could determine how long Trump’s massive tariffs remain in effect. Unfortunately, the president himself does not seem to know the answer.
In recent weeks, Trump has provided five different — and contradictory — justifications for his tariffs on Mexico and Canada, none of which make much sense.
The five are: 1, to secure America’s borders; 2, to force companies to relocate production in the US; 3, to force Canada and Mexico to modestly revise the terms of their trade with the US; 4, to coerce Canada into becoming the 51st state; 5, to raise revenue (so perhaps to pay for lowering taxes).
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Another view.
The Atlantic, Rogé Karma, 4 Mar 2025: Trump’s Most Inexplicable Decision Yet, subtitled “The tariffs are real, and they are spectacularly foolish.”
If you were setting out to design a trade policy that would harm the American economy while undermining political support for its leadership, you might come up with something like the tariffs that Donald Trump just imposed on Canada, China, and Mexico.
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All of these support two running themes, that we’ve seen evidence for over and over, and which are not incompatible:
1, Trump is an idiot, but he blusters good: he’s a con man;
2, Trump and his cronies are agents of a foreign adversary bent on taking down the US.
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Stepping back a bit.
Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, 4 Mar 2025: How to lose the 21st century, in three easy steps, subtitled “Trump is throwing away what could have been the next great American century.”
More than anything else, President Donald Trump loves winning. Yet he has already positioned America to lose the 21st century, in three simple steps:
- Alienate your friends.
- Destroy your business environment.
- Slaughter your golden goose (i.e., science and research).
Trump most vividly demonstrated Step 1 with his Oval Office tantrum against a war-torn ally. But it also includes his gratuitous insults of our friends; abrupt termination of programs tackling global public health menaces (including some that the United States caused); and threats to punish our closest trading partners, with no clear objective.All that soft power the United States accumulated over the past century is vaporizing. This means no friends to support us against our adversaries, whether rogue nations or terrorist groups. Ticking off our allies also means ticking off some of our best customers, who will turn to economic competitors. In some cases, these customers are outright boycotting U.S. products.
She goes about her second and third points. On the third:
The world-renowned National Institutes of Health is pushing out senior scientists and ending scientific training programs, such as its elite postbaccalaureate program for STEM students. Elsewhere, Trump has purged experts from the National Science Foundation and agencies studying weather, agriculture and education.
Meanwhile, Trump’s immigration policies will cut off our international talent pipeline, which has been America’s not-so-secret weapon in building a dominant knowledge sector. In fact, Trump has prohibited some government-employed U.S. researchers from even coauthoring research with international scholars, such as those at the World Health Organization.
“If these types of policies continue, the U.S. will lose its role as a leader in science,” said Petra Moser, an economic historian who has studied scientific collaboration and how prior immigration restrictions reduced the productivity of American-born scientists. “Science overall will lose — the U.S. more so than the rest of the world, because people will stop coming here and go elsewhere.”
Indeed, some other countries are licking their chops at the talent Trump is driving away.
Again, do Trump voters realize what they’ve done? I suspect most of them don’t, and don’t care. All that sciency stuff is irrelevant to them. They think. See again conclusion of the O’Connor/Weatherall book, here.
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Stepping further back. Outward.
The New Yorker, David Remnick, 1 Mar 2025: Trump’s Disgrace, subtitled “While F.D.R. set a modern standard for the revitalization of a society, Trump seems determined to prove how quickly he can spark its undoing.”
It was one thing to anticipate this prolonged political moment; it has been, these past weeks, quite another to live it. Each day is its own fresh hell, bringing ever more outrageous news from an autocrat who revels in his contempt for the government he leads, for the foreign allies who deserve our support, and for the Constitution he is sworn to uphold. Since beginning his second term, six weeks ago, Donald Trump has commandeered public attention to such an extent that it is hard to recall that there was ever a time when an American President went about his first weeks in office in a frenzy of activity characterized not by threat, chaos, and corruption but by discipline, competence, and compassion.
Yet there was such a time. On the overcast morning of March 4, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt arrived at the U.S. Capitol to deliver his first Inaugural Address. …
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Stepping even further outward. I’ve speculated before on this global trend — about tribal mentality rejecting a global society. This is what drives MAGA.
Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 4 Mar 2025: “We are seeing the backlash to globalization”: Robert Kaplan says Trump was “inevitable”, subtitled “Bestselling foreign affairs expert: ‘Trump has blemished America’s reputation’ — but liberal democracy will endure”
Donald Trump is America’s first elected autocrat. Seventy-seven million American voters — more than supported the Democrats — chose this outcome. Trump’s MAGA movement is driven by authoritarian populism. Trump is reveling in his role as a disrupting influence who is smashing America’s democratic norms, culture and institutions — and expectations of what is normal and even possible. As much as it enrages his detractors and others who find him contemptible, Donald Trump is a great man of history. There is America before Trump and Trumpism and MAGA and there is America after Trump and Trumpism and MAGA. Donald Trump is a nexus point.
Trumpism and MAGA’s rise to power here in the America is not an isolated phenomenon. It is part of a global turn towards authoritarian populism (and outright fascism and naked authoritarianism).
This revolt against Western-style democracy is driven in part by growing wealth and income inequality, an elite class that is out of touch with the mass public, globalization and the neoliberal order, disruptive technologies such as the internet and social media (which have made propagandizing and manipulating the public much easier through disinformation and misinformation), future shock and other challenges to the existing social order.
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Quick links from the lunatic fringe.
JMG, 3 Mar 2025: Walsh: Every Good Thing Was Created By White Men
He is dumb as a rock.
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Politico, 4 Mar 2025: No more in-person town halls, NRCC chief tells House Republicans, subtitled “Rep. Richard Hudson issued the edict after a spate of testy episodes.”
Even voters in red state are upset by what Trump and Musk are doing. (This isn’t what they voted for.)
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JMG, 4 Mar 2025: McMahon Signals End To Dept Of Ed: “Final Mission”
Here I have to quote.
My vision is aligned with the President’s: to send education back to the states and empower all parents to choose an excellent education for their children.
As a mother and grandmother, I know there is nobody more qualified than a parent to make educational decisions for their children.
Yes, if you’re living in a little house on the prairie, and don’t want your children to learn anything that you don’t know. If you want to keep your children in your cultural or religious bubble. But education is like paying taxes: it’s what you do in order to live in a civilized society, in which everyone contributes toward a greater good that no one family, or community, could achieve by itself.
