◼ Donald Trump says kids may have to make do with fewer toys because of his trade war, and it’s lucky for Republicans they can’t vote.
◼ Trump has set a new standard for a president’s first 100 days. His successors may well promise to replicate his frenetic activity. What we’ve gotten from Trump so far is a mixed bag. The unalloyed goods: reversing the Biden agenda, ending the border crisis, sanity on transgender issues, consequential moves against DEI and race-conscious policies, hitting the Houthis, speaking forthrightly about the Gaza war. The directionally correct, if poorly executed: DOGE, gang deportations, the fight with Harvard. The indefensible: targeting law firms and individuals for purposes of revenge, blaming Ukraine for the Russian invasion. And the terrible: the trade war that threatens the economy and his presidency. Perhaps most disturbing in the first 100 days has been Trump’s penchant for personal rule achieved by stretching grants of power by Congress to their limits and beyond. We should all be grateful that Kamala Harris is largely forgotten. But it has been a wild ride to this point, and there are many more ups and downs ahead.
◼ The GDP data for the three months just passed are an unusually unreliable guide to what lies ahead. Imports had an enormous surge in the first quarter as importers shipped in supplies before the tariff ratchet turned further. Something similar lies behind purchases of capital equipment and strong car sales, the latter a standout amid relatively subdued consumer spending growth (1.8 percent). Fast-forwarding spending, or stockpiling, is like pulling down the shutters ahead of a hurricane. The data suggest that businesses and consumers anticipate that this particular hurricane may be much worse than they originally feared. It is not what the dawn of a “golden age” is meant to look like.
◼ UPS plans to close 73 buildings and eliminate 20,000 jobs this year. In its earnings call, CEO Carol Tomé said the company aims to reduce its costs by $3.5 billion in 2025 and, by the middle of next year, to halve its volume of Amazon deliveries, many of which have been unprofitable. Most of the layoffs will be of employees who sort and deliver packages and are represented by the Teamsters, whose president, Sean O’Brien, said that UPS was breaking a commitment to create 30,000 union jobs. A spokesman for the company denied it. Adding to the gloomy outlook is increased competition from smaller carriers and direct delivery by Walmart, Target, and other retailers. The headwinds also affect UPS’s main competitor, FedEx, which recently announced layoffs and closures in several locations across the U.S. Commenting on the impact of new tariffs, Tomé, clear-eyed, noted that “the world hasn’t been faced with such enormous potential impacts to trade in more than 100 years.”
◼ After a report that Amazon was planning to show the cost of any Trump tariff as a separate line item for prices on its site, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was quick to complain. With Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent standing by her side, she denounced the move as a “hostile and political act.” Amazon clarified that it had only been considering detailing some tariff charges on Amazon Haul, a part of its website dedicated to selling ultracheap items, but had decided not to go ahead after an irritated President Trump got on the phone to Jeff Bezos. High tariff regimes, as we are seeing, can lead to unhealthily close involvement by government in a company’s business. We were also disappointed that Trump did not appear to take more pride in his tariff regime. Setting out the full cost of a tariff is a good way to encourage consumers to buy American. Isn’t that what the president wants?
◼ The conventional wisdom said that National Security Adviser Mike Waltz would be ousted after a decent interval for his precipitating role in the Signal debacle, and the conventional wisdom was right. The hawkish former Republican congressman was a good, stabilizing voice in a White House susceptible to isolationist influence and Trump’s own whims. But the fat-fingered Signal chat was a major embarrassment and Waltz, who was distrusted and targeted by restrainers from the outset, saw his standing erode further. A couple of weeks ago, the provocateur Laura Loomer forced the firing of some of his aides. Wounded and exposed, Waltz was inevitably hunted down on the bureaucratic Serengeti. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will be his replacement in the interim while keeping his other jobs. Trump could do worse in his eventual pick for national security adviser than either Waltz or Rubio, and we fear he will. Waltz will now be ambassador to the U.N., its use as a punishment being an apt illustration of the position’s futility.
◼ The Department of Justice indicted Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan for obstruction after she helped an illegal alien try to evade arrest by federal agents at her Milwaukee courthouse. It should be an open-and-shut case: Judge Dugan was advised that the feds were outside her courtroom waiting to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican who reentered the U.S. after being deported a dozen years ago (a felony that makes him administratively deportable without court proceedings). He was in Dugan’s court on criminal charges of beating two victims, who were in court for plea discussions. While federal agents met with the courthouse’s chief judge to discuss arrest logistics, Dugan escorted Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer through a jury-room corridor inaccessible to the public, so he could try to evade arrest, but an agent saw him and chased him down. Alas, the matter is complicated: Under state sanctuary policies, the feds may not commandeer state officials to enforce immigration law; officials need not assist but may not impede. And the Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity ruling in favor of Trump casts doubt on whether officials, like Dugan, can be prosecuted for abusive actions arguably within the scope of their duties. At any trial of Dugan, the jury of her peers would be Milwaukeeans—the folks who voted for sanctuary policies.
◼ “The most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the World,” said the announcement. “Only for the TOP 220 $TRUMP Meme Coin Holders.” On May 22, such holders will have an “intimate private dinner” with President Trump, followed by a tour of the White House. If this smells to you like corruption—your nose is working fine. Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr. has cofounded a club in Washington, D.C. Its name is “Executive Branch.” The membership fee is half a million and there is a waiting list. Other cofounders are sons of Steve Witkoff, the presidential envoy. “The Swamp,” they used to call it.
◼ Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that he hopes that friendship with AI-powered “digital companions,” superpowered chatbots, will become destigmatized. That may be hard to accomplish, given early reports that the rollout will include chatbots engaging in romantic roleplay and talking about sex with users, even children, perhaps using the voices of Disney characters. At least we do not have to worry that Meta’s plans will eventually have horrific consequences; they are present right at the start.
◼ Even if Canadians have not been taking Trump literally when he promises to make their country the “cherished 51st state,” they have been taking him seriously. He personally played an enormous role in returning an incompetent and ideologically bankrupt Liberal Party to power, after a campaign in which Prime Minister Mark Carney made himself the anti-Trump. Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre couldn’t adjust to Trump’s truly bizarre late intervention. The deceptive part of Canadian politics is that a majority-left country can look more competitive than it is because of the existence of minor parties. What Trump did was unify the Canadian left. In the end, the ultimate responsibility for Canada’s direction lies with its own voters. They have chosen to do the same thing once again. That they let themselves get baited into it by Trump is no excuse and won’t lead to any better outcomes.
◼ Spain and Portugal endured a blackout that began Monday afternoon and ended only Tuesday morning, with some parts of France affected as well; in an instant, the region lost seven and a half Hoover Dams’ worth of electricity. At least three deaths were attributed to the outage. Perhaps even more ominously, as of this writing, authorities have no explanation for the outage. The Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica issued a statement declaring that it was “not caused by a cyberattack, human error, or by any unusual meteorological or atmospheric phenomenon.” Spain’s Audiencia Nacional, the central criminal court, wasn’t quite so assuaged, and opened an investigation. Spain’s environment minister, Sara Aagesen, was quick to insist that the country’s reliance on renewable energy had nothing to do with the event—a conclusion that seems premature at best. “Spain and Portugal were running their grid with a generation mix that relied heavily on the weather—for more than 75 percent of output,” Bloomberg News noted. “Few of the old-fashioned generators powered by gas, nuclear, and hydraulic force, which are key to ensuring a stable grid, were running.” Given that the reputation of the green energy revolution is at stake, it would be understandable if the world’s environmentalists are secretly hoping it was Russian hackers or some other malevolent actors.
◼ The conclave to elect a successor to Pope Francis will begin on May 7. Already the preliminary sessions are full of intrigue. The disgraced Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who stymied financial reform under the late Cardinal George Pell, initially sought to join the conclave before it was revealed that Pope Francis had expressly forbade his participation. Cardinal Joseph Zen has made the trip to Rome. While he cannot vote, at age 93, it is likely that his brother cardinals will be curious to hear his strident and persuasive criticism of the deal that the Vatican made with the Chinese Communist Party over matters of ecclesiastical governance. That could threaten the electability of one early front-runner, Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin. The early reporting from Vaticanistas is wildly contradictory and speculative, in part because many of the men Francis appointed to the College of Cardinals are relatively unknown to one another or in Rome. As always, there is a chance that the college may search for a caretaker but find they have selected a man with ambitions of his own (as happened with John XXIII). Prominent among the names of papabili who are often described as progressive are Cardinals Luis Antonio Tagle (of the Philippines) and Matteo Zuppi (of Bologna), along with Parolin; among the more conservative are Cardinals Péter Erdő (Hungary), Cardinal Wim Eijk (the Netherlands), and even Cardinal Robert Sarah (Guinea). Also in the mix is Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, noted for his judicious leadership of the Catholic community in the Holy Land in fraught circumstances.
◼ A headline: “Ukraine journalist who died in Russian captivity was tortured and had her organs removed, joint media report says.” There is a lot more than that, of course, and it is very hard to take. We will say two things: Her name was Viktoriia Roshchyna. Have no illusions about Putin’s Russia.
◼ Such is the entertainment value of the National Football League that even its usually prosaic draft process can become a national soap opera. In April, football fans across the nation watched as Shedeur Sanders, the former quarterback for the University of Colorado Boulder, dropped out of the first round, then the second, then the third and fourth, only to be taken in the fifth round as a backup by the Cleveland Browns. Sanders’s fall was all the more engrossing because it coincided with the transmission of live shots of the aspirant and his entourage standing against a customized “hype” set that had been purpose-built for the event. The contrast between that backdrop—which featured the word “Legendary” alongside Sanders’s personal dollar-sign logo—and his diminishing fortunes in the rankings proved too much for the media to pass up. As the reporting bore out, the contrast was not incidental. It seems to have been precisely because Sanders had portrayed himself as God’s gift to football that he was passed over so many times. At one point, things turned unnecessarily cruel, when the son of a New York Jets coach staged a prank call that raised—and then dashed—Sanders’s hopes. This was uncalled for, and it deserved to be punished (as it was). But circuses attract clowns, and the lesson for future hopefuls must surely be to avoid becoming the ringmaster.
◼ David Horowitz had a long political journey. He was born in New York in 1939. His family was communist. So was he, in his early life. He had a very good education in English at Columbia and Berkeley. One of his first books was about Shakespeare. Eventually, he left the Old Left for the New. Indeed, he was one of the founders of the New Left. He broke, however, and would describe his experiences in an excellent memoir: Radical Son (1996). On the right, he went through a variety of stages. Before an audience of the Cato Institute, he once said, “I’m a Hayekian in my heart.” The former leftist warrior became a MAGA warrior—one of the fiercest. He characterized the 2020 election as “the greatest political crime in the history of the country.” On January 6, he tweeted, “The protesters inside the Capitol are heroes.” Over the course of 60 years, he wrote about 60 books. One of the best is A Crack in the Heart, about the life and death of his daughter Sarah. David Horowitz has died at 86. R.I.P.