• They say the best TACOs are made in Trump Tower.
• President Trump’s tariff policy—declaring bogus national emergencies as a pretense to unilaterally author tax policy on all imports under the authority of a law that has never before been used to implement tariffs—was always unconstitutional. Congress should have acted against Trump’s usurpation of legislative authority, but it failed to do so. Big businesses that would have faced the most harm should have taken the administration to court, but they were more interested in cozying up to Trump than challenging him. So the task of holding the executive branch accountable fell to small businesses represented by libertarian public-interest law firms. One of those lawsuits, brought by Liberty Justice Center, succeeded at the U.S. Court of International Trade, with three judges, including one appointed by Reagan and one appointed by Trump, ruling unanimously that Trump’s tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act were unconstitutional. The court used the major questions doctrine and nondelegation doctrine as part of its justification, and it cited the Supreme Court case that overturned Chevron deference in its decision. The decision has been temporarily stayed pending appeal. But it’s heartening to see that in the face of a massive power grab by the president, Americans can still go to court, point to the Constitution, and win.
◼ If you had told people ten years ago that in 2025, the president of the United States would be casually issuing orders to a specific corporation while threatening unconstitutional taxation for failure to comply, and then asked them to guess which party that president was a member of, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would answer, “the Republican Party.” Yet Donald Trump has done just that with his musings directed at Apple about iPhone production. He threatened 25 percent tariffs on iPhones if Apple didn’t move production stateside. Apple ought to be able to make its phones on Mars if it decides that makes business sense. One of the nice things about the United States is that the government doesn’t tell businesses how they must be run. And one of the nice things about Republicans winning elections is supposed to be having a president who believes that.
◼ Trump may finally be losing patience with Vladimir Putin, who has, of course, done nothing to deserve the accommodation and occasional praise he has received from his U.S. counterpart. Trump has expressed shock that Putin is bombing Ukrainian cities, but it isn’t exactly breaking news that Putin is brutalizing Ukraine in an attempt to break it. If Trump is going to forge a Ukraine peace deal worth having, he will need leverage over Putin, which means more sanctions and especially the continued provision of arms to Ukraine without the kind of restrictions Biden put on their use. Trump is now talking tough about the Kremlin. Now he has to demonstrate that he’s not a paper tiger with a Truth Social account.
◼ Harvard and the Trump administration have each finally met an adversary too big to push around. America’s richest university never really considered how much it depends on government policy, including lavish federal research funding, federal student aid, and a permissive immigration regime for the foreign students—who make up a third of the university’s student body and often subsidize the rest by paying more. Progressives also never thought through how the many tools they devised for using government leverage against private institutions—including threatening tax exemptions, as the Supreme Court allowed on dubious grounds in Bob Jones University v. United States (1983)—could be used against universities that engage in race discrimination for the “right” reasons, cultivate a political monoculture among the faculty, and permit campus mobs to terrorize minority groups who are out of progressive favor (Jews). Now, Trump is trying to strip Harvard of everything—tax exemption, federal funding, and visas for foreign students already enrolled. While the comeuppance for Harvard is admittedly delicious, the president is abusing powers he ought not to have, and Harvard has deep enough pockets to fight him in court.
◼ The “One Big Beautiful Bill” has many flaws (“big” and “beautiful” are usually at odds when it comes to bills) but the House deserves three cheers for moving to defund Planned Parenthood. The abortion giant—which has expanded its business into gender-reassignment while scaling back the few real health services it once offered—has for years received lavish funding through Medicaid. States have spent years suing to remove Planned Parenthood from their Medicaid programs, a challenge that is finally before the Supreme Court. But Congress had the power all along to do so. The House bill left in place a modest exception for abortions in the case of rape or incest, which would still be funded. Republican senators Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) object, but neither has yet threatened to vote against the bill on this basis. This, not executive fiat, is how cutting government is supposed to work. It’s also an example of how traditional conservatives can find common ground with MAGA. Abortion advocates love to say “my body, my choice,” but somehow, that always becomes “my choice, your money.” Good for the House for choosing life instead.
◼ After shooting dead two staff members of the Israeli Embassy—a young couple, one Israeli, one American—outside the Capital Jewish Museum last week, Elias Rodriguez, whipping out a keffiyeh, shouted, “Free, free Palestine.” He told the police, “I did it for Gaza.” Decent people were horrified by the terroristic murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, killed because they were (assumed to be) Jews. Yet from some quarters have come expressions of support for the killer. A group called Unity of Fields (formerly Palestine Action U.S.) has formed a “Free Elias Rodriguez Organizing Committee,” issuing a statement on X that called the killings a “legitimate act of resistance” and declaring that “Rodriguez’s act was fully justified.” The DSA Liberation Caucus, a faction of the Democratic Socialists of America, hailed this “excellent statement that we are proud to add our name to,” issuing its own call to “free Elias Rodriguez and all political prisoners.” The DSA proper apparently felt compelled to distance itself from the DSA Liberation statement, saying it condemns the murders. The trouble is, we remember that in a statement dated October 7, 2023, the DSA said that “today’s events” were “not unprovoked,” and that “as socialists, we must act.” Should be a fun debate topic for the next party convention.
◼ Two more judges, both Bush 43 appointees, invalidated the president’s extortionate executive orders against law firms. Judges John Bates and Richard Leon found serially unconstitutional the orders by which Trump unilaterally accused, condemned, and imposed an array of ruinous sanctions on, respectively, Jenner & Block and Wilmer Hale et al. They joined Judge Beryl Howell, an Obama appointee, who had nullified Trump’s order against Perkins Coie. The orders were retaliatory: The firms previously employed lawyers involved in criminal investigations of Trump, represented some of his major political foes, and worked on behalf of groups opposed to his effort to reverse his 2020 defeat. The orders violate the First Amendment, which prohibits government officials from exploiting their powers to suppress support for political messages and causes that they dislike. There are many reasons to be revolted by this practice; the most egregious is that it’s a racket. A number of firms have settled, promising to perform hundreds of millions in free legal work for Trump-preferred causes, at which point the president’s allegations vanish. “I agree, they’ve done nothing wrong,” Trump recently said of these firms, “But what the hell, they give me a lot of money considering they’ve done nothing wrong.” Disgraceful.
◼ Even San Francisco parents have their limits. A proposal to experiment with changing the grading system in the famously progressive city’s high schools (“Grading for Equity”) quickly crashed and burned. Had the plan been implemented, homework, classroom participation, attendance, and punctuality would no longer have influenced final grades. Instead, a final exam that students could take multiple times would. A score of 80 percent would be awarded an A, a score as low as 41 a C, and a score of 21 a D. The San Francisco equity plan would have turned education into a political project for demonstrating to the rest of society what equality should look like, instead of an attempt to instill knowledge, virtue, and habits for lifelong learning (though perhaps San Francisco schools were already struggling at this). Grading for equity amounts to willful and moralized deception, including self-deception. Changing the definition of A work to include B work is just obscuring the achievements of the best students and teachers. Passing work that fails is an even worse thing to do for the middling and poor students and teachers who might otherwise be roused to do better, or, in the case of the former, revealed as requiring more dramatic interventions and remedial learning. Schools help children by raising standards, and then building a culture of support that maximizes children’s potential. If San Francisco needs ideas how to do this, it can see us after class.
◼ Thomas Jefferson High School was Virginia’s leading STEM school for years before equity-based admissions tanked the school’s ratings. This month, the Trump administration announced an investigation into the school’s admissions process, which discriminates against Asian students. That investigation isn’t the school’s worst problem. An IRS complaint filed against the school this week alleges that its affiliated nonprofit engaged in a “pay-to-play” scheme with Chinese Communist Party–linked organizations. Thomas Jefferson Partnership Fund, the nonprofit set up in 1999 to help fundraise for the school’s expansion efforts, is a legally separate entity from TJHS, Virginia school administrators say. But that legally separate entity received $3.6 million in shady “donations” from CCP-affiliated organizations in exchange for TJHS’s curriculum, floor plan, and syllabi. China now has dozens of TJHS replicas throughout the country dubbed the “Thomas Schools.” Watchdogs want the nonprofit to be stripped of its tax-exempt status–and to explain why a legally independent nonprofit was allowed to share one of America’s top STEM school’s intellectual property with China.
◼ Understandably irritated by President Trump’s “suggestion” that they should join the U.S., Canadians have been stressing their Canadianness. And so, for the first time since 1977, their head of state delivered the speech that opens a new session of their parliament in person. While King Charles III will never be mistaken for a McKenzie brother, having the great-great-great-great-grandson of George III fulfill this task was not the worst way of demonstrating that Canada has a history that is very different from that of its unruly southern neighbor. The speech itself, which was surely written for Charles in consultation with the Canadian government, was a reminder of Canada’s “unique identity” and a restatement that it was on a path that did not lead to Washington, D.C. The “land affirmation” at the beginning (“We are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg People”) struck a somewhat discordant note. Oh well. Charles meanwhile is now back home, where he may have some explaining to do to the Brythons, Picts, and Gaels.
◼ Harvard has parted ways with behavioral scientist Francesca Gino in the fallout from an inquiry into data falsification in her research. There have been dueling lawsuits. A rising star at Harvard Business School, Gino had been seen as an expert in the fields of honesty and ethical behavior. She also held tenure; and no Harvard professor has been known to have lost tenure since at least the 1940s. No longer a rising star, she may nonetheless be a trend-setter.
◼ Alasdair MacIntyre began his landmark 1981 work After Virtue asking us to imagine an apocalypse. Disasters occur, and science and scientists are blamed; angry nonscientists wipe out nearly all traces of their work. Realizing later they had erred, they attempt to restore science, “but all that they possess are fragments” of prior knowledge. Such was the condition of the modern world, in the judgment of this preeminent philosopher: cut off from true sources of meaning, philosophically uncertain, morally adrift. He spent a prolific academic career–begun in his native United Kingdom, since 1969 carried out in America, and from 1985 onward at the University of Notre Dame—attempting to reanchor modernity by piecing together fragments of the truths he argued that it had discarded, and thereby to restore our ability to live well by something like the classical standard. His consistent sense of the profound brokenness of modern times brought him first to communism. He is not alone in leaving behind the god that failed, and thereafter finding succor in the Catholic faith. But his intellectual and academic achievements in rigorously, if sometimes diffusely, elucidating and challenging virtue ethics and reviving and reapplying Aristotelian and Thomistic thought stand unparalleled. Difficult to categorize politically, he had an abiding discomfort with liberalism, with many of whose precepts and progeny we have quarreled as well, in particular its autonomy monomania. Yet he defined it so expansively as to include—and thus to condemn—some of the foundations of this magazine, and perhaps even of this country. But ethics, philosophy, and modernity are better off for his work, and for his challenges. The work of answering them now belongs to new—doubtless very different—MacIntyres. Dead at 96. R.I.P.
◼ Grace-Marie Turner passed away after a battle with brain cancer. Turner had founded the Galen Institute, a public policy research foundation, in 1995, sensing after the collapse of HillaryCare that there was a need for a think tank that advanced free-market ideas for health care. Both before and after the passage of Obamacare, she recognized that it wasn’t enough for Republicans to oppose Democratic efforts to expand the government role in health care. They needed to present viable alternatives, especially ones that undid the negative effects of previous government interventions. To this end, she worked tirelessly, building alliances, educating the public, and advising lawmakers in Congress, in the executive branch, and in states. Turner advocated incrementally pushing the convoluted U.S. health-care system in a more free-market direction rather than trying to remake it in one giant piece of legislation. Our prayers are with her friends and family. R.I.P.
