- How the quality of American life depends on the regulations that Trump and his vandals are discarding;
- Paul Krugman on Trump’s trade war and how they don’t know what they’re doing;
- Dana Milbank on how Trump’s first 100 days are an historic failure;
- Slate’s Fred Kaplan on how “Trump’s Delusional Belief in Himself Has Become the World’s Problem”.
People who don’t understand what we have will miss it when it’s gone. Trump and DOGE are vandals that are ravishing the library and discarding any book that’s too heavy, or too ugly.
NY Times, Coral Davenport, 15 Apr 2025 (in the print paper 17 Apr 2025): Inside Trump’s Plan to Halt Hundreds of Regulations, subtitled “The White House will soon move to rapidly repeal or freeze rules that affect health, food, workplace safety, transportation and more.”
Print title: “Behind the Rush to Discard Rules and Reshape Life”
Long piece with lots of details, best summarized by his pull-quote in the print paper:
“Many people don’t realize how high the American quality of life is because of the competent and stable enforcement of regulations, and if that goes away a lot of lives are at risk,” said Steve Cicala, co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Project on the Economic Analysis of Regulation.
And continuing beyond the pull-quote:
“This affects airplane safety, baby formula safety, the safety of meat, vegetables and packaged foods, the water that you drink, how you get to work safely and whether you’re safe in your workplace.”
Bring back salmonella outbreaks!
The barbarian analogy isn’t perhaps entirely correct. I saw a better overview explanation today, somewhere I didn’t save the link to, perhaps a comment from a Facebook friend. I’ll paraphrase from memory: All the regulations the Trump administration want to repeal are things that make it more difficult for oligarchs to make more money. I could expand, but that’s the gist. Trump and his billionaire pals are only out for themselves. And the rest of us are letting them get away with it. So far.
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I alluded to this recently: China knows what it’s doing, while Trump does not.
Paul Krugman, 16 Apr 2025: Why Trump Will Lose His Trade War, subtitled “His people don’t know what they’re doing or what they want”
Scenes from the trade war:
- In response to Donald Trump’s huge tariffs on Chinese exports, China’s government has suspended exports of rare earth minerals and magnets, both critical to many modern industries and the military
- Trade talks between the United States and the European Union appear to have gone nowhere, with Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s top trade official, reportedly having “struggled to determine America’s aims.”
In other words, the Chinese, unlike the Trump administration, understand what trade and trade wars are about. And the Trumpers, in addition to not knowing what they’re doing, don’t even know what they want.
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And the people who don’t see this are delusional. Or selfish. Or dumb.
Washington Post, Dana Milbank, 18 Apr 2025: Trump is wrapping up 100 days of historic failure, subtitled “America has seen ruinous periods, but never when the president was the one knowingly causing the ruin.”
By any reasonable measure, President Donald Trump’s first 100 days will be judged an epic failure.
He has been a legislative failure. He has signed only five bills into law, none of them major, making this the worst performance at the start of a new president’s term in more than a century.
He has been an economic failure. On his watch, growth has slowed, consumer and business confidence has cratered, and markets have plunged, along with Americans’ wealth. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday that “growth has slowed in the first quarter of this year from last year’s solid pace” and that Trump’s tariffs will result in higher inflation and slower growth.
Milbank goes on with many other failures: foreign-policy, to friends, to foes, to the constitution, in public opinion.
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Similarly.
Slate, Fred Kaplan, 16 Apr 2025: Nobody Quite Knows What’s Going On With U.S. Foreign Policy Right Now, subtitled “We’re all not quite sure how Trump (or any two or three of his top aides) would answer the question, ‘What are U.S. security interests?'”
Homepage headline: “Trump’s Delusional Belief in Himself Has Become the World’s Problem”
It’s a toss-up which is most remarkable: (a) how much of the federal government Donald Trump has altered, in some cases destroyed, a mere three months into his second presidency; (b) how he’s done so while knowing so little about the subjects at hand; or (c) how he still delusionally seems to think he knows quite a lot.
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No time to get to further items today. Perhaps I should abandon this.
