Category: Situational Awareness

Posts about the situation we are in–the good facts, the bad facts, and the terrible facts. Facts that, if taken on board, will let us “know ourselves, know the other side” and go on to win those hundred battles.

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The Confessions of David Brooks

David Brooks (The Atlantic), I SHOULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING: When I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, there were two types of people: those who cared earnestly about ideals, and those who wanted only to shock the left. The reactionary fringe has won.

Brooks writes (some choice passages underlined for emphasis),

Charles de Gaulle began his war memoirs with this sentence: “All my life I have had a certain idea about France.” Well, all my life I have had a certain idea about America. I have thought of America as a deeply flawed nation that is nonetheless a force for tremendous good in the world. From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and beyond, Americans fought for freedom and human dignity and against tyranny; we promoted democracy, funded the Marshall Plan, and saved millions of people across Africa from HIV and AIDS. When we caused harm—Vietnam, Iraq—it was because of our overconfidence and naivete, not evil intentions.Until January 20, 2025, I didn’t realize how much of my very identity was built on this faith in my country’s goodness—on the idea that we Americans are partners in a grand and heroic enterprise, that our daily lives are ennobled by service to that cause. Since January 20, as I have watched America behave vilely—toward our friends in Canada and Mexico, toward our friends in Europe, toward the heroes in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office—I’ve had trouble describing the anguish I’ve experienced. Grief? Shock? Like I’m living through some sort of hallucination? Maybe the best description for what I’m feeling is moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful.

George Orwell is a useful guide to what we’re witnessing. He understood that it is possible for people to seek power without having any vision of the good. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” an apparatchik says in 1984. “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.” How is power demonstrated? By making others suffer. Orwell’s character continues: “Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.”

Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s budget director, sounds like he walked straight out of 1984. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” he said of federal workers, speaking at an event in 2023. “We want to put them in trauma.”

Since coming back to the White House, Trump has caused suffering among Ukrainians, suffering among immigrants who have lived here for decades, suffering among some of the best people I know. Many of my friends in Washington are evangelical Christians who found their vocation in public service—fighting sex trafficking, serving the world’s poor, protecting America from foreign threats, doing biomedical research to cure disease. They are trying to live lives consistent with the gospel of mercy and love. Trump has devastated their work. He isn’t just declaring war on “wokeness”; he’s declaring war on Christian service—on any kind of service, really.

If there is an underlying philosophy driving Trump, it is this: Morality is for suckers. The strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must. This is the logic of bullies everywhere. And if there is a consistent strategy, it is this: Day after day, the administration works to create a world where ruthless people can thrive. That means destroying any institution or arrangement that might check the strongman’s power. The rule of law, domestic or international, restrains power, so it must be eviscerated. Inspectors general, judge advocate general officers, oversight mechanisms, and watchdog agencies are a potential restraint on power, so they must be fired or neutered. The truth itself is a restraint on power, so it must be abandoned. Lying becomes the language of the state. …

We used to live in a world where ideologies clashed, but ideologies don’t seem to matter anymore. The strongman understanding of power is on the march. Power is like money: the more the better. Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the rest of the world’s authoritarians are forming an axis of ruthlessness before our eyes. Trumpism has become a form of nihilism that is devouring everything in its path.

The pathetic thing is that I didn’t see this coming even though I’ve been living around these people my whole adult life. I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, when I worked in turn at National Review, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page. There were two kinds of people in our movement back then, the conservatives and the reactionaries. We conservatives earnestly read Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Edmund Burke. The reactionaries just wanted to shock the left. We conservatives oriented our lives around writing for intellectual magazines; the reactionaries were attracted to TV and radio. We were on the political right but had many liberal friends; they had contempt for anyone not on the anti-establishment right. They were not pro-conservative—they were anti-left. I have come to appreciate that this is an important difference. …

A prominent publisher of right-wing authors once told me that the way to sell conservative books is not to write a good book—it’s to write a book that will offend the left, thereby causing the reactionaries to rally to your side and buy it. That led to books with titles such as The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, and to Ann Coulter’s entire career. Owning the libs became a lucrative strategy.

Of course, the left made it easy for them. The left really did purge conservatives from universities and other cultural power centers. The left really did valorize a “meritocratic” caste system that privileged the children of the affluent and screwed the working class. The left really did pontificate to their unenlightened moral inferiors on everything from gender to the environment. The left really did create a stifling orthodoxy that stamped out dissent. If you tell half the country that their voices don’t matter, then the voiceless are going to flip over the table. …

The MAGA elite rode to power on working-class votes, but—trust me, I know some of them—they don’t care about the working class. Trump and his crew could have taken office with actual plans to make life better for working-class Americans. An administration that cared about the working class would seek to address its problems, such as the fact that the poorest Americans die an average of 10 to 15 years younger than their higher-income counterparts, or that by sixth grade, many of the children in the poorest school districts have fallen four grade levels behind those in the richest. An administration that cared about these people would have offered a bipartisan industrial policy to create working-class jobs.

These faux populists have no interest in that. Instead of helping workers, they focus on civil war with their left-wing fellow elites. During Trump’s first months in office, one of their highest priorities has been to destroy the places where they think liberal elites work—the scientific community, the foreign-aid community, the Kennedy Center, the Department of Education, universities.

It turns out that when you mix narcissism and nihilism, you create an acid that corrodes every belief system it touches.

This Trumpian cocktail has eaten away at Christianity, a faith oriented around the marginalized. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the poor in spirit. The poor are closer to God than the rich. Again and again, Jesus explicitly renounced worldly power.

But if Trumpism has a central tenet, it is untrammeled lust for worldly power. In Trumpian circles, many people ostentatiously identify as Christians but don’t talk about Jesus very much; they have crosses on their chest but Nietzsche in their heart—or, to be more precise, a high-school sophomore’s version of Nietzsche.

To Nietzsche, all of those Christian pieties about justice, peace, love, and civility are constraints that the weak erect to emasculate the strong. In this view, Nietzscheanism is a morality for winners. It worships the pagan virtues: power, courage, glory, will, self-assertion. The Nietzschean Übermenschen—which Trump and Musk clearly believe themselves to be—offer the promise of domination over those sick sentimentalists who practice compassion.

Two decades ago, Michael Gerson, a graduate of Wheaton College, a prominent evangelical institution, helped George W. Bush start the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which has saved 25 million lives in Africa and elsewhere. I traveled with Gerson to Namibia, Mozambique, and South Africa, where dying people had recovered and returned to their families, and were leading active lives. It was a proud moment to be an American. Vought—Trump’s budget director, who also graduated from Wheaton—championed the evisceration of PEPFAR, which has now been set in motion by executive order, effectively sentencing thousands to death. Project 2025, of which Vought was a principal architect, helped lay the groundwork for the dismantling of USAID; its gutting appears to have ended a program to supply malaria protection to 53 million people and cut emergency food packages for starving children. Twenty years is a short time in which to have traveled the long moral distance from Gerson to Vought.

Trumpian nihilism has eviscerated conservatism. The people in this administration are not conservatives. They are the opposite of conservatives. Conservatives once believed in steady but incremental reform; Elon Musk believes in rash and instantaneous disruption. Conservatives once believed that moral norms restrain and civilize us, habituating us to virtue; Trumpism trashes moral norms in every direction, riding forward on a tide of adultery, abuse, cruelty, immaturity, grift, and corruption. Conservatives once believed in constitutional government and the Madisonian separation of powers; Trump bulldozes checks and balances, declaiming on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Reagan promoted democracy abroad because he thought it the political system most consistent with human dignity; the Trump administration couldn’t care less about promoting democracy—or about human dignity.

How does this end? Will anyone on the right finally stand up to the Trumpian onslaught? Will our institutions withstand the nihilist assault? Is America on the verge of ruin?

In February, about a month into Trump’s second term, I spoke at a gathering of conservatives in London called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. Some of the speakers were pure populist (Vivek Ramaswamy, Mike Johnson, and Nigel Farage). But others were center-right or not neatly ideological (Niall Ferguson, Bishop Robert Barron, and my Atlantic colleague Arthur C. Brooks).

In some ways, it was like the conservative conferences I’ve been attending for decades. I listened to a woman from Senegal talking about trying to make her country’s culture more entrepreneurial. I met the head of a charter school in the Bronx that focuses on character formation. But in other ways, this conference was startlingly different.

In my own talk, I sympathized with the populist critique of what has gone wrong in Western societies. But I shared with the audience my dark view of President Trump. Unsurprisingly, a large segment of the audience booed vigorously. One man screamed that I was a traitor and stormed out. But many other people cheered. Even in conservative precincts infected by reactionary MAGA-ism, some people are evidently tired of Trumpian brutality.

As the conference went on, I noticed a contest of metaphors. The true conservatives used metaphors of growth or spiritual recovery. Society is an organism that needs healing, or it is a social fabric that needs to be rewoven. A poet named Joshua Luke Smith said we needed to be the seeds of regrowth, to plant the trees for future generations. His incantation was beatitudinal: “Remember the poor. Remember the poor.”

But others relied on military metaphors. We are in the midst of civilizational war. “They”—the wokesters, the radical Muslims, the left—are destroying our culture. There were allusions to the final epochal battles in The Lord of the Rings. The implication was that Sauron is leading his Orc hordes to destroy us. We are the heroic remnant. We must crush or be crushed.

The warriors tend to think people like me are soft and naive. I tend to think they are catastrophizing narcissists. When I look at Trump acolytes, I see a swarm of Neville Chamberlains who think they’re Winston Churchill.

I understand the seductive power of a demagogue who tells you that the people who look down on you are evil. I understand the seductive power of being told that your civilization is on the verge of total collapse, and that everything around you is degeneracy and ruin. This message gives you a kind of terrifying thrill: The stakes are apocalyptic. Your life has meaning and urgency. Everything is broken; let’s burn it all down.

I understand why people who feel alienated would want to follow the leader who speaks about domination and combat, not the one who speaks about healing and cooperation. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve read Edmund Burke or the Gospel of Matthew—it’s still tempting to throw away all of your beliefs to support the leader who promises to be “your retribution.”

America may well enter a period of democratic decay and international isolation. It takes decades to develop strong alliances, and to build the structures and customs of democracy—and only weeks to decimate them, as we’ve now seen. And yet I find myself confident that America will survive this crisis. Many nations, including our own, have gone through worse and bloodier crises and recovered. In Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis, the historian and scientist Jared Diamond provides case studies—Japan in the late 19th century, Finland and Germany after World War II, Indonesia after the 1960s, Chile and Australia during and after the ’70s—of countries that came back stronger after crisis, collapse, or defeat. To these examples, I’d add Britain in the 1830s and ’40s, and the 1980s, and South Korea in the 1980s. Some of these countries (such as Japan) endured war; others (Chile) endured mass torture and “disappearances”; still others (Britain and Australia) endured social decay and national decline. All of them eventually healed and came back.

America itself has already been through numerous periods of rupture and repair. Some people think we’re living through a period of unprecedented tumult, but the Civil War and the Great Depression were much worse. So were the late 1960s—assassinations, riots, a failed war, surging crime rates, a society coming apart. From January 1969 until April 1970, there were 4,330 bombings in the U.S., or about nine a day. But by the 1980s and ’90s—after getting through Watergate, stagflation, and the Carter-era “malaise” of the ’70s—we had recovered. As brutal and disruptive as the tumult of the late 1960s was, it helped the country shake off some of its persistent racism and sexism, and made possible a freer and more individualistic ethos.

But the most salient historical parallel might be the America of the 1830s. Andrew Jackson is the American president who most resembles Trump—power-hungry, rash, narcissistic, driven by animosity. He was known by his opponents as “King Andrew” for his expansions of executive power. “The man we have made our President has made himself our despot, and the Constitution now lies a heap of ruins at his feet,” Senator Asher Robbins of Rhode Island said. “When the way to his object lies through the Constitution, the Constitution has not the strength of a cobweb to restrain him from breaking through it.” Jackson brazenly defied the Supreme Court on a ruling about Cherokee Nation territory (a defiance, it should be noted, that Vice President Vance has explicitly endorsed). “Though we live under the form of a republic,” Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story wrote, “we are in fact under the absolute rule of a single man.”

But Jackson made the classic mistake of the populist: He overreached. Fueled by personal hostility toward elites, he destroyed the Second Bank of the United States, an early precursor to the Federal Reserve System, and helped spark an economic depression that ruined the administration of his chosen successor, Martin Van Buren.In response to Jackson, the Whig Party arose in the 1830s to create a new political and social order. Devoutly anti-authoritarian, the Whigs were a cultural, civic, and political force all at once. They emphasized both traditional morality and progressive improvements. They agitated for prison reform and for keeping the Sabbath, for more women’s participation in politics and for a strong military, for government-funded public schools and for pro-business government policies. They were opposed to Jackson’s monstrous Indian Removal Act, and to the Democratic Party’s reactionary, white-supremacist social vision. Whereas Jacksonian Democrats emphasized negative liberty—get your hands off me—the Whigs, who would turn into the early Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, emphasized positive liberty, empowering Americans to live bigger, better lives with things such as expanded economic credit, free public education, and stronger legal protections including due process and property rights.

Though we’ve come to call the early-to-mid-19th century the Age of Jackson, the historian Daniel Walker Howe notes that it was not Jackson but the Whigs who created the America we know today. “As economic modernizers, as supporters of strong national government, and as humanitarians more receptive than their rivals to talent regardless of race and gender,” Howe writes, the Whigs “facilitated the transformation of the United States from a collection of parochial agricultural communities into a cosmopolitan nation integrated by commerce, industry, information, and voluntary associations as well as by political ties.” Looking back, Howe concludes, we can see that even though they were not the dominant party of their time, the Whigs “were the party of America’s future.” To begin its recovery from Trumpism, America needs its next Whig moment.

Yes, we have reached a point of traumatic rupture. A demagogue has come to power and is ripping everything down. But what’s likely to happen is that the demagogue will start making mistakes, because incompetence is built into the nihilistic project. Nihilists can only destroy, not build. Authoritarian nihilism is inherently stupid. I don’t mean that Trumpists have low IQs. I mean they do things that run directly against their own interests. They are pathologically self-destructive. When you create an administration in which one man has all the power and everybody else has to flatter his voracious ego, stupidity results. Authoritarians are also morally stupid. Humility, prudence, and honesty are not just nice virtues to have—they are practical tools that produce good outcomes. When you replace them with greed, lust, hypocrisy, and dishonesty, terrible things happen.

The DOGE children are doubtless brilliant in certain ways, but they know as much about government as I know about rocketry. They announced an $8 billion cut to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement contract—though if they had read their own documents correctly, they would have realized that the cut was less than $8 million. They eliminated workers from the National Nuclear Security Administration, apparently without realizing that this agency controls nuclear security, and had to undo some of those cuts shortly thereafter. Trump seems to be trying to give a bunch of Sam Bankman-Frieds access to America’s nuclear arsenal and IRS records. What could go wrong?

When Trump creates an unnecessary crisis, it’s unlikely to be a small one. The proverbial “adults in the room” who contained crises in Trump’s first term are gone. Whatever the second-term crisis—runaway inflation? a global trade war? a cratered economy and plummeting stock market? an out-of-control conflict in China? botched pandemic management? a true hijacking of the Constitution precipitated by defiance of the courts?—it is likely to crater his support and shift historical momentum.

But although Trumpism’s collapse is a necessary condition for national recovery, it is not a sufficient one. Its demise must be followed by the hard work necessary to achieve true civic and political renewal.

Progress is not always a smooth or merry ride. For a few decades, nations live according to one paradigm. Then it stops working and gets destroyed. When the time comes to build a new paradigm, progressives talk about economic redistribution; conservatives talk about cultural and civic repair. History shows that you need both: Recovery from national crisis demands comprehensive reinvention at all levels of society. If you look back across the centuries, you find that this process requires several interconnected efforts.

First, a national shift in values. In the late 19th century, for example, as the country went through the wrenching process of industrialization, America was traumatized by severe recessions and mass urban poverty. In response, social Darwinism gave way to the social-gospel movement. Social Darwinism, associated with thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, valorized survival of the fittest and claimed that the poor are poor because of inferior abilities. The social-gospel movement, associated with theologians such as Walter Rauschenbusch, emphasized the systemic causes of poverty, including the Gilded Age’s concentration of corporate power. By the early 20th century, most mainline Protestant denominations had signed on to the Social Creed of the Churches, which called for, among other things, the abolition of child labor and the creation of disability insurance.

Second, nations that hang together through crisis have a strong national identity—they return to their roots. They have a leader who replaces the amoralism of the nihilists, or, say, the immorality of slavery, with a strong redefinition of the nation’s moral mission, the way Lincoln redefined America at Gettysburg.

Third, a civic renaissance. After the social gospel took root, Americans in the 1890s and early 1900s launched and participated in a series of social movements and civic organizations: United Way, the NAACP, the Sierra Club, the settlement-house movement, the American Legion.

Fourth, a national reassessment. As Jared Diamond notes, nations that turn around don’t catastrophize. Rather, they develop a clear-eyed view of what’s working and not working, and they pursue careful, selective change. According to Diamond’s research, the leaders of successful reform movements also take responsibility for their part in the crisis. For instance, Germany’s leaders accepted responsibility for the country’s Nazi past; Finland’s leaders took responsibility for an unrealistic foreign policy before World War II, when they had to deal with a looming Soviet Union on their border; and Australia’s leaders took responsibility in the 1970s for a political culture and foreign policy that had become overly dependent on Britain.

Fifth, a surge of political reform. In 1830s and ’40s Britain—racked by social chaos, bank failures, a severe depression, riots, and crushing wealth inequality—Prime Minister Robert Peel, a leader of great moral rectitude, built the modern police force, reduced tariffs, pushed railway legislation that literally laid the tracks for British industrialization, and helped pass the Factory Act of 1844, which regulated workplaces. In early-20th-century America, Progressives produced a comparable flurry of effective reforms that pulled the country out of its industrialization crisis.

Part of political reform is an expansion of the circle of power. What that would require in America today is, among other things, a broad effort to include working-class and conservative voices in what have traditionally been cultural bastions of elite progressivism—universities, the nonprofit sector, the civil service, the mainstream media.

Finally, economic expansion. Economic growth can salve many wounds. Pursuing a so-called abundance agenda—a set of policies aimed at reducing government regulation and increasing investment in innovation, and expanding the supply of housing, energy, and health care—is the most promising way to achieve that expansion.

In the long term, Trumpism is doomed. Power without prudence and humility invariably fails. Nations, like people, change not when times are good but in response to pain. At a moment when Trumpism seems to be devouring everything, the temptation is to believe that this time is different.

But history doesn’t stop moving. Even now, as I travel around the country, I see the forces of repair gathering in neighborhoods and communities. If you’re part of an organization that builds trust across class, you’re fighting Trumpism. If you’re a Democrat jettisoning insular faculty-lounge progressivism in favor of a Whig-like working-class abundance agenda, you’re fighting Trumpism. If you are standing up for a moral code of tolerance and pluralism that can hold America together, you’re fighting Trumpism.

Over time, changes in values lead to changes in relationships, which lead to changes in civic life, which eventually lead to changes in policy and then in the general trajectory of the nation. It starts slow, but as the Book of Job says, the sparks will fly upward.

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Stable Genius Imposes Tariffs on Penguins

Jonathan Chait (The Atlantic), Trump Has Already Botched His Own Bad Tariff Plan: Once you’ve said you might negotiate, nobody is going to believe you when you change your mmind and say you’ll never negotiate.

To summarize: Trump has two alternative strategies. One is to “reshore” American manufacturing. But that would require, at a minimum, that investors believe that the draconian tariffs are going to last a long time. The other is to negotiate country-by-country deals resulting in more favorable terms for American exporters.

Each strategy is highly problematic in its own right.

But, in addition, the two strategies are mutually inconsistent.

Bottom line: Confusion worse confounded. Idiocy cubed.

Wall Street Journal, China Wanted to Negotiate With Trump. Now It’s Arming for Another Trade War.

The Journal knows a lot of the senior people in China. And it knows even more of the people who know the senior people in China. Long article. Deeply reported. 

Bottom line (for me): China expected negotiations, beginning with Trump’s inauguration. China wanted negotiations. China got stiff-armed by the Trump Administration. Xi had no real option but the retaliate. The standoff with China is going to last a long time. 

Politico Magazine, Why Trump May Get Away With His Tariff Trauma: Other countries encounter the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ as they weigh how to respond.

Helpful article. Poor headline. Poor, because the actual topic of the article is why a lot of countries are not immediately retaliating, but are instead about reaching out to Trump to try to negotiate. 

There’s no paywall at Politico, so read it for yourself. My own take, for what it’s worth: Yeah, I get the “prisoner’s dilemma” issue. But I also suspect that a lot of foreign leaders are thinking that the tariffs are going to be so hard on American consumers and businesses of all sizes, and hence on Republican politicians, that, over the medium term, the tariffs are going to go away regardless of who does or does not negotiate.

Plus which: most foreign leaders actually studied economics back in college. So they know that imposing tit-for-tat tariffs harms their own economies. 

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Why We Respond to the Authoritarian Project the Way We Do: The Fundamental Explanation

Erwin Chemerinsky (Washington Post), Trump is targeting law firms and academia. Why don’t they speak up?

Lawrence H. Summers (N.Y. Times), If Powerful Places Like Harvard Don’t Stand Up to Trump, Who Can?

Dean Chemerinsky is a distinguished constitutional scholar and dean of the law school at U.C. Berkeley. Prof. Summers is many things, including former Secretary of the Treasury and former president of Harvard University. Each of them bemoans the failure of many rich law firms, and many prestigious universities, to stand up to Trump.

And good for them. Let us all bemoan the cowardice. 

And let the record reflect that I, Ronald W. Davis, who attended Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia, hereby bemoan Harvard’s and Columbia’s failure to stand firm. And I hereby celebrate the position of Princeton’s president. I hope and expect he and the university will continue to stand firm, and, if they do, when Annual Giving rolls around, I will do the right thing. As, I believe, will my fellow alumni. 

At the same time, I suggest that we all spend about 2% of our time bemoaning this or that and the remaining 98% of our time in hard-headed analysis and strategizing. And, here in the real world—not the one we wish we lived in—I suggest that for most people, most of the time, the most salient questions are

Is the authoritarian project going to take root, in which case I and my organization had best accommodate to it? 

Or is the authoritarian project going down the shitter, in which case I and my organization can just keep our heads down and wait it out?

To help answer those questions, you might want to look to the town halls, the election results on Tuesday, and the condition of the financial markets this afternoon.

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“Authoritarian Leaders are Most Dangerous When They’re Popular”

Jonathan Chait, The Good News About Trump’s Tariffs: Authoritarian leaders are most dangerous when they’re popular. Wrecking the economy is unlikely to broaden Trump’s support.

Jonathan Chait used to write for New York magazine and how he’s with The Atlantic. In my opinion, he’s often very good. I think his piece from yesterday afternoon is outstanding. Like the chicken who crossed to the middle of the street, he truly lays it on the line:

All Donald Trump had to do was start telling people the economy was good now. Take over in the middle of an economic expansion and then, without changing the underlying trend line, convince the country that you created prosperity. That’s what he did when he won his first term, and it is what Democrats expected and feared he would do this time.

But Trump couldn’t do the easy and obvious thing, apparently because he did not view his first term as a success. He considered it a failure, and blamed the failure on the coterie of aides, bureaucrats, and congressional allies who talked him out of his instincts, or ignored them. The second term has been Full Trump, as even his most delusional or abusive whims are translated immediately into policy without regard to democratic norms, the law, the Constitution, public opinion, or the hand-wringing of his party.

That is why Trump’s second term poses a far more dire threat to the republic than his first did. But it is also why his second term is at risk of catastrophic failure. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than Trump’s insistence on sabotaging the U.S. economy by imposing massive tariffs.

This afternoon, in an event the administration hyped as “Liberation Day,” Trump unveiled his long-teased plan to impose reciprocal trade restrictions on every country that puts up barriers to American exports. Although at least some economists would defend some kinds of tariff policies—such as those targeted at egregious trade-violating countries, or those designed to protect a handful of strategic industries—Trump has careened into an across-the-board version that will do little but raise prices and invite reprisal against American exports. As an indication of the mad-king dynamic at play, the new plan imposes a 20 percent tariff on the European Union, partly in retaliation against the bloc’s value-added tax system—even though the VAT applies equally to imports and domestic goods and is therefore not a trade barrier at all. U.S. stocks, which have fallen for weeks in anticipation of the tariffs, plunged even more sharply after Trump’s announcement.

Trump would not be the first president to encounter economic turbulence. But he might become the first one to kill off a healthy economy through an almost universally foreseeable unforced error. The best explanation for why Trump is intent on imposing tariffs is that he genuinely believes they are a source of free money supplied by residents of foreign countries, and nobody can tell him otherwise. (Tariffs are taxes on imports, which economists agree are paid mostly by domestic consumers in the form of higher prices.)

He has compounded the unavoidable damage to business confidence of any large tariff scheme by floating his intention for months while waffling over the details, paralyzing business investment. Even taken on its own terms, a successful version of Trump’s plan would require wrenching dislocations in the global economy. The United States would need to create new industries to replace the imports it is walling off, and this investment would require businesses to believe not only that Trump won’t reverse himself but also that the tariffs he imposes are likely to stay in place after January 20, 2029.

If businesses don’t believe that Trump will stick with his tariffs, the investment required to spur a domestic industrial revival won’t materialize. But if they do believe him, the markets will crash, because Trump’s tariff scheme will, by the estimation of the economists that investors listen to, produce substantially lower growth.

Probably the likeliest outcome is an in-between muddling through, with slower growth and higher inflation. Even Trump’s gestures toward sweeping tariffs have already made the economy wobble and lifted inflationary expectations. At this point, getting back to the steady growth and cooling inflation Trump inherited will require a great deal of luck.

Why didn’t anyone around Trump talk him out of this mistake? Because the second Trump administration has dedicated itself to filtering out the kinds of advisers who thwarted some of his most authoritarian first-term instincts, as well as his most economically dangerous ones. The current version of the national Republican Party, by contrast, is dedicated to the proposition recently articulated by one of Elon Musk’s baseball caps: Trump was right about everything.

In this atmosphere, questioning Trump’s instincts is seen as a form of disloyalty, and Trump has made painfully evident what awaits the disloyal. As The Washington Post reports, “Business leaders have been reluctant to publicly express concerns, say people familiar with discussions between the White House and leading companies, lest they lose their seats at the table or become a target for the president’s attacks.” Asked recently about the prospect of tariffs, House Speaker Mike Johnson revealingly said, “Look, you have to trust the president’s instincts on the economy”—a phrase containing the same kind of double meaning (have to) as Don Corleone’s offer he can’t refuse.

This dynamic allows Trump to do whatever he wants, no doubt to his delight. But the political consequences for his administration and his party could be ruinous. Public-opinion polling on Trump’s economic management, which has always been the floor that has held him up in the face of widespread public dislike for his character, has tumbled. This has happened without Americans feeling the full effects of his trade war. Once they start experiencing widespread higher prices and slower growth, the bottom could fall out.

A Fox News host recently lectured the audience that it should accept sacrifice for Trump’s tariffs just as the country would sacrifice to win a war. Hard-core Trump fanatics may subscribe to this reasoning, but the crucial bloc of persuadable voters who approved of Trump because they saw him as a business genius are unlikely to follow along. They don’t see a trade war as necessary. Two decades ago, public opinion was roughly balancedbetween seeing foreign trade as a threat and an opportunity. Today, more than four-fifths of Americans see foreign trade as an opportunity, against a mere 14 percent who see it, like Trump does, as a threat.

As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way point out, “Authoritarian leaders do the most damage when they enjoy broad public support.” Dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez have shown that power grabs are easier to pull off when the public is behind your agenda. Trump’s support, however, is already teetering. The more unpopular he becomes, the less his allies and his targets believe he will keep his boot on the opposition’s neck forever, and the less likely they will be to comply with his demands.

The Republican Party’s descent into an authoritarian personality cult poses a mortal threat to American democracy. But it is also the thing that might save it.

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A Time for Choosing: Follow-up on the Financial Times’ Analysis of L’Affaire Paul Weiss

The Financial Times interviewed 35 people who actually know what the hell they’re talking about, and summarized their views. (Most of them spoke anonymously.) I quoted extensively from the FT’s reporting in the immediately preceding post. I would like to add a few points. 

First, while it’s clearly correct to view Trump’s actions against the law firms as thuggish extortion, it is, nevertheless, an odd form of extortion.

It’s as if Joe Bonanno didn’t want money or anything of much economic value—he just wanted you to go out in public and kiss his ring, and then he would leave you alone.

Second, as long as some firms are resisting—and they are—and as long as the courts are standing firm, Trump’s extortion stands on legally shaky ground. That implies several things, including (i) if Trump’s demands become impossible to meet, Paul Weiss can always do a 180, and (ii) if and when it becomes too hot to be seen kissing Trump’s right, Paul Weiss can also do a 180. Not saying they will. Not saying when they will. I’m saying it’s a distinct possibility. 

A propos the question of which side of history you want to choose: Trump and Musk humiliated themselves in the Wisconsin state Supreme Court election; Republican margins drastically diminished in two red districts in Florida; and Trump is about to cause a recession with his tariffs.

Third, for some people, the love of big money is akin to heroin addiction or gambling addiction. For those folks, if forced to choose between keeping their big money and acting dishonorably or giving up some of their money in order to do the right thing, it’s not really a choice. 

For others—as the FT article makes clear—it’s now a choice between making a lot of money while choosing the wrong side of history, versus making somewhat less money but saving your soul. 

Some people will actually want to save their souls. Others will choose the right side when it becomes highly unpopular to pick the wrong side. As is just about to happen.

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“There’s Too Much Fucking Money”

Financial Times, How Trump is exploiting Big Law’s identity crisis: Firms like Paul Weiss have hired star lawyers to expand in dealmaking. Fear of losing business has made them less willing to have a fight with the government

The Financial Times spoke with a large number of knowledgeable folks, and has produced the most insightful reporting that I have seen on l’affaire Paul Weiss. The FT writes,

In the mid-1980s, Arthur Liman was almost certainly the most acclaimed corporate lawyer in America.

As a star dealmaker at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, Liman negotiated on behalf of corporate raiders such as Ron Perelman and defended “junk bond king” Michael Milken in federal court. 

But he also won a reputation as a dedicated part-time public servant. Liman led high-profile investigations into the Attica prison riot in the 1970s and of President Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.

Rising through the ranks at that time was Brad Karp, a Harvard law graduate who joined Paul Weiss in 1985. A quarter-century later, Karp would take the helm of the firm, which has since grown to 1,200 lawyers strong. He explicitly moulded it in Liman’s image: a decisive presence across corporate law practices, with lawyers who carry an ethos of public service, seriousness and sobriety. 

Yet within a few days last month, that carefully constructed edifice was challenged at its core.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order that in effect banned Paul Weiss from appearing in federal courts and cases over claims that its work on progressive causes undermined the judicial system and that its pro-diversity hiring policies were illegal. The edict threatened the survival of Paul Weiss, Karp claimed. 

Paul Weiss is not the only firm to have been targeted by the Trump administration, and judges have since frozen critical parts of similar orders against Jenner & Block, WilmerHale and Perkins Coie for being illegal. 

But rather than litigate, Karp cut a deal with Trump that cancelled the executive order in exchange for concessions including $40mn worth of pro bono legal services on issues important to the president.

The deal Karp signed sent shockwaves through the American legal establishment because it highlights the growing identity crisis among many of the larger law firms — especially those with a strong connection to Wall Street. 

The Financial Times spoke to 35 corporate lawyers and legal insiders for this story, although many requested anonymity due to concerns about retaliation from the president and his associates.

Within Paul Weiss, some lawyers in the litigation department — once its key strength — were disturbed to see a powerful institution swiftly cede the high ground, especially one that had the firepower within its own ranks to fight, say people with direct knowledge of the matter. But many of the lawyers in its ascendant mergers and acquisitions and private equity groups were relieved. Ultimately, there was unanimity among the senior management to settle. 

Over the past two decades, dealmaking has become a much more important part of the business models of many of the larger firms, buoyed in part by the explosive growth of the private equity industry and hedge funds. This shift has brought with it a coterie of star lawyers and pay packages that mirror those of their Wall Street clients. 

The threats from the Trump administration are playing into this culture clash between the litigation business — where some lawyers would take it as a point of pride to be seen standing up to the government — and the deals lawyers, who tend to be more focused on the short-term flow of transactions and whose incentives are to keep out of the government’s crosshairs. 

The dilemma that Paul Weiss faced is now being felt in other parts of the industry as Trump broadens his assault on the sector. While some such as Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block and WilmerHale have resisted, others have not; Skadden Arps, an arch-rival to Paul Weiss for many of its corporate clients, reached a deal with Trump to offer $100mn worth of pro bono services to avoid being hit by an executive order. 

On Tuesday, Willkie Farr & Gallagher reached a similar agreement to the one Skadden struck, becoming the third major firm to forge a deal with the White House.

The industry is divided over how to respond. While a large number of small and medium-sized firms are willing to support Perkins Coie in its legal effort to fight sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, the Financial Times revealed at the weekend that not one of the 20 top law firms in the US — most of which have large dealmaking businesses — has so far given their “unconditional support” to the effort.

Although Paul Weiss was the first elite law firm to buckle to Trump’s demands, several leaders from rival firms told the Financial Times privately that they would cut similar deals if targeted with an executive order.

Karp told his colleagues that there was “no right answer” to the administration’s threats. “It is very easy for commentators to judge our actions from the sidelines,” he wrote in an email. “But no one in the wider world can appreciate how stressful it is to confront an executive order like this until one is directed at you.” …

For Karp, who has chaired Paul Weiss since 2008, the attack has represented a brutal personal reversal. An outspoken Wall Street supporter of the Democratic party, he had helped raise millions of dollars for Kamala Harris. Had she won, Karp was in the running to be US attorney-general, the highest ranking lawyer in America, according to multiple Democratic party operatives and donors.

His decision to cut a deal with the man he had worked tirelessly to keep out of office does not represent an ideological shift, according to people briefed on the matter. In Karp’s mind, the livelihoods of his thousands of employees were at stake.

One person close to Karp says the decision was excruciatingly painful for the 65-year-old: “He wasn’t just thinking about his own interests, he did it for the thousands of people who work there: the secretaries, the associates, the young partners who would have their financial lives adversely affected if the deal did not go through.”

Shortly after Trump targeted Perkins Coie and Covington, Karp contacted the heads of several law firms to try to organise support for them. The response was almost non-existent, and also failed to materialise when the White House issued an executive order against Paul Weiss.

“Disappointingly, far from support, we learned that certain other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys,” he wrote in the email to employees of the firm after he reached a deal with Trump. 

Once Karp realised there was no united front to fight the executive order, the pressure grew to find an alternative solution. Some clients warned the firm’s partners that unless the matter was resolved swiftly, they would move their business elsewhere. Rumours swirled that competitors were circling Paul Weiss’s top talent, ready to pounce whenever the opportunity arose.

Under mounting pressure, Karp travelled to Washington in mid-March to meet Trump to plead for clemency. During the meeting at the Oval Office, in a move that was not expected by Karp, the president patched in on speaker Robert Giuffra, the co-chair of rival firm Sullivan & Cromwell and a Trump donor, to help hammer out a truce. 

Karp swallowed his pride and agreed to the terms imposed by Trump. People close to Karp said that Paul Weiss did not actually make any big concession but agreed that the symbolism of what went down at the White House, while demeaning, was ultimately pragmatic. 

“We’ve used Paul Weiss forever and . . . we would have had to seek new counsel if they didn’t settle,” says a person working at a company that regularly hires Paul Weiss and has ties with the federal government. “Brad did the right thing, although we realise it must have been humiliating for him and the legal industry . . . the problem isn’t Brad but it’s Trump.” 

Yet Paul Weiss’s need to strike a deal with the administration in the first place is in part a symptom of how the law firm has morphed in recent decades into a mainstay of Wall Street, with salaries and culture to match. 

Paul Weiss is one of a handful of firms that has created a thriving free-agent market for lawyers. Partners a decade ago would make perhaps $3mn or $4mn a year and would enjoy lifetime employment and generous pensions.

With the growth of private equity firms, hard-knuckled hedge funds and a regular churn of multibillion-dollar corporate acquisitions, a small set of lawyers now command eight-figure pay packages and have no reluctance about jumping firms for the highest bidder. Karp played the poaching game as aggressively as anyone.

Since Karp took over, Paul Weiss has evolved into a transactional powerhouse attracting top-tier corporate lawyers from rivals, such as the star dealmaker Scott Barshay, who joined from Cravath, Swaine & Moore to propel Paul Weiss’s M&A business. 

But today’s lavishly paid top talent are less likely to display allegiance. “Karp saw a clear and present [danger] that star partners there would defect to other peer firms and take very lucrative business with them,” says John Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School. “M&A stars are unique and carry the keys to Fort Knox with them.” People close to Barshay say he had no intention to leave regardless of the decision. 

One lawyer who has gone up against Paul Weiss put it more bluntly: “There’s too much fucking money. When a Big Law partnership is $2mn a year, people can have some principles because the fall isn’t so bad.” The calculation changes entirely, the person says, “when they are making $20mn a year”.  …

Under Karp’s leadership, the firm has often been a ruthless advocate for the powerful. Its biggest clients include Apollo Global Management and Goldman Sachs, while it has also represented members of the Sackler family, who founded Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical behemoth that has been accused by prosecutors of stoking the US opioid crisis.

Indeed, one of the considerations for the firm was its stable of private equity clients, many of whom are Republicans. As one partner puts it, if the firm only acted for clients whose ethics they agreed with then they would have no clients.

Some in the industry see Paul Weiss’s concession to Trump as a compromise of its values. 

The firm’s history is steeped in contributions to dismantling segregation, defending reproductive and LGBT+ rights, and challenging the death penalty, and it maintains an image of strong social consciousness. 

Given all that, many of the lawyers and people working in adjacent industries who spoke to the FT say it would have been the best-placed firm to set an example by taking the fight to Trump. 

“As lawyers, we need to be really stepping up and doing just the opposite of what the administration wants,” says Jessie Weber, managing partner at Brown Goldstein & Levy, a mid-sized firm with a big civil rights practice. “But certainly, it will take the whole legal community stepping into that role, and that’s what I hope to see.”

During Trump’s first term, leaders at Paul Weiss stood up to the administration. Karp himself co-wrote an op-ed in 2018 accusing the government of violating the law. 

Around that time, a team of Paul Weiss lawyers volunteered to provide counsel travellers from countries affected by the administration’s Muslim ban, says Erin Elmouji, a partner at Mancuso Brightman who previously worked at Paul Weiss. 

“Standing up for the underprivileged and the voiceless is something Paul Weiss has committed to over and over again over the years,” she says. Reaching a deal with the White House “has made it a lot harder for other firms and organisations to stand up and fight [governmental over-reach], which is essential to preserve the independence of the legal system”.

Some critics of Karp’s deal say that in the long term, the cost of settling will outweigh the short-term benefits. 

Reaching an agreement with Trump raises the question of whether Paul Weiss can independently advocate for the positions of its clients, Elmouji says, and ultimately makes the law firm vulnerable to further demands from the administration.

“Would you really hire Paul Weiss to go to war against the government?” says one lawyer at a rival firm. “Would you hire Karp to go up against the DoJ [Department of Justice] right now, when he just folded when his own interests were at stake?”

A litigator who has close ties with many colleagues at Paul Weiss rejects this as half of the firm’s business involves interacting regularly with federal and state regulatory agencies. “Under the Trump administration, when he says you’re an enemy, he’s going to make sure that everyone is retributive and vengeful towards you, and anything Paul Weiss wanted by way of relief from these regulators they would not get. It would have destroyed them even if they were purely a litigation firm.” …

There is little sign of pressure letting up. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sent letters to 20 large law firms, most of which were large corporate firms similar to Paul Weiss, asking them to describe their diversity, equity and inclusion policies. 

Lawyers at many of those firms say they are sympathetic to Karp’s decision and admit their firms could soon similarly bow to Trump in an effort to preserve their businesses.

“Most firm leaders would do exactly what Brad did,” says a chair from one of the country’s top law firms. “We — and I talk to everyone — are all incredibly grateful because it allows the industry, it gives us a blueprint, to resolve things in a constructive way.”

“No one is willing to go on the record because everyone’s concerned. I don’t want to pop my head up because you don’t know how it’s going to get smacked. But that’s very different from saying we don’t support what was done.” 

Another corporate adviser is more blunt: “It was a mafia-like shakedown . . . There was no choice. Do you have a choice whether to pay the mob?”

Perkins Coie, WilmerHale and Jenner & Block will test whether signing a deal with Trump is the right thing to do. 

The temporary victory in court of the three firms “may give Paul Weiss a reason to reconsider its approach”, says Ryan Goodman, professor at the New York University School of Law. “That will be even more likely if their reputation emerges stronger for having put up this fight.”

As for Paul Weiss, even if its business model remains intact, there is still the risk it has irreparably sacrificed its singular moral authority among elite law firms. …

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Trump Versus Princeton

Today’s message from the President of Princeton University:

Dear Princeton community:

Princeton University yesterday and today received notifications from government agencies including the Department of Energy, NASA, and the Defense Department suspending several dozen Princeton research grants. The full rationale for this action is not yet clear, but I want to be clear about the principles that will guide our response.

Princeton University will comply with the law. We are committed to fighting antisemitism and all forms of discrimination, and we will cooperate with the government in combating antisemitism. Princeton will also vigorously defend academic freedom and the due process rights of this University.

We have begun reaching out to affected faculty, academic researchers, and grants managers. My colleagues or I will continue to be in touch as information becomes available. Anyone with specific questions should contact grantsquestions@princeton.edu.

Thank you for your resilience and commitment to our shared mission during this challenging time.

Chris Eisgruber

Princeton’s alumni number over 100,000. Their career choices and incomes are diverse, but, on the average, they are considerably more affluent than other college graduates. 

143 colleges and universities have endowments exceeding $1 billion. Among those 143, Princeton ranks number 5.

In view of Princeton’s great wealth, many alumni have found other objects for our charity. Now is the time to reconsider, and to do what must be done.