Energy Dept. adds ‘climate change’ and ‘emissions’ to banned words list
Fact vs. freakout on the SCOTUS universal injunctions ruling.
Trump is trying something blatantly unconstitutional that I’m confident the Supreme Court will not allow, though it is allowing this administration to use a little court gamesmanship to fight the fights they can win. Basically, the administration is not asking whether they overstepped the line but whether the courts are using the right tools to pull them back. I understand why this is happening, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating (or alarming) that it's working.
The majority found a reasonable answer, which seems to limit universal injunctions without stopping them altogether. In the immediate term, the majority opinion left open the possibility that federal judges can issue universal injunctions when their absence would create what Justice Brett Kavanaugh called “an unworkable or intolerable patchwork” across states (such as, conveniently, with birthright citizenship)
The court further clarified that it still sees other kinds of challenges, like class-action lawsuits, as appropriate ways to trigger universal injunctions in the future. These lawsuits have more procedural hurdles to clear, but they’re still quite common, and until the 21st century were the most common way to trigger the kind of universal injunction we are discussing now.
Kavanaugh said that the Supreme Court could pick up some of the authority it limited to district courts by hearing more direct appeals for universal injunctions itself. Specifically, Kavanaugh said that when the Supreme Court is asked to intervene, it “should not and cannot hide in the tall grass,” but must “grant or deny” relief as a form of nationwide guidance until the issue is resolved
The Supreme Court did not say federal courts can’t issue these injunctions, it said “universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.” In other words, courts likely don't have this power, which is granted by Congress.
The court has narrowed, but not stripped, the power of U.S. district courts to issue universal injunctions. It has not unleashed presidential lawlessness, and in the future, its decision will benefit a lot of the people who are screaming from the rooftops now about unchecked executive power.
Trump administration working on plan to move 1 million Palestinians to Libya
Sounds like the definition of ethnic cleansing
100 days of DOGE: lots of chaos, not so much efficiency
"DOGE is not a serious exercise," said Jessica Riedl, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a fiscally conservative think tank that supports streamlining government. She estimates DOGE has only saved $5 billion to date, and believes it will end up costing more than it saves.
The examples - previously unreported - span 14 government agencies and were described in Reuters interviews with three dozen federal workers, union representatives and governance experts.
At the Social Security Administration, in a four-day period in the first week of March, computer systems crashed 10 times. Because a quarter of the agency's IT staff have quit or been fired, it's taking longer to get the systems online again, disrupting the processing of claims, one IT worker told Reuters.
Few dispute the SSA's computer systems are old, often crash and need updating. Musk told Baier the agency's computer systems are "failing", and "we're fixing it."
Since its founding on Trump's first day in the White House, DOGE has largely shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides aid to the world's needy, canceling more than 80 percent of its humanitarian programs. Almost all of the agency's employees will be fired by September, all of its overseas offices shut, with some functions absorbed into the State Department.
At home, the government overhaul has resulted in the firing, resignations and early retirements of 260,000 civil servants, according to a Reuters tally.
Over 20,000 probationary workers - recently hired or recently reassigned employees - were fired in February. After court rulings they were reinstated but most were sent home on full pay. Most are now being fired again after further court decisions.
Trump and Musk have said the U.S. government is beset by fraud and waste. Few civil servants and governance experts dispute efficiencies can be made, but say there are already people inside the federal bureaucracy trying to save taxpayer dollars. Yet some of these offices have been targeted for cuts by DOGE.
American Disruption
manufacturing in Asia is fundamentally different than the manufacturing we remember in the United States decades ago: instead of firms with product-specific factories, China has flexible factories that accommodate all kinds of orders, delivering on that vector of speed, convenience, and customization that Christensen talked about.
Every decrease in node size comes at increasingly astronomical costs; the best way to afford those costs is to have one entity making chips for everyone, and that has turned out to be TSMC. Indeed, one way to understand Intel’s struggles is that it was actually one of the last massive integrated manufacturers: Intel made chips almost entirely for itself. However, once the company missed mobile, it had no choice but to switch to a foundry model; the company is trying now, but really should have started fifteen years ago. Now the company is stuck, and I think they will need government help.
companies that go up-market find it impossible to go back down, and I think this too applies to countries. Start with the theory: Christensen had a chapter in The Innovator’s Dilemma entitled “What Goes Up, Can’t Go Down”:
Three factors — the promise of upmarket margins, the simultaneous upmarket movement of many of a company’s customers, and the difficulty of cutting costs to move downmarket profitably — together create powerful barriers to downward mobility. In the internal debates about resource allocation for new product development, therefore, proposals to pursue disruptive technologies generally lose out to proposals to move upmarket. In fact, cultivating a systematic approach to weeding out new product development initiatives that would likely lower profits is one of the most important achievements of any well-managed company.
So could Apple pay more to get U.S. workers? I suppose — leaving aside the questions of skills and whatnot — but there is also the question of desirability; the iPhone assembly work that is not automated is highly drudgerous, sitting in a factory for hours a day delicately assembling the same components over and over again. It’s a good job if the alternative is working in the fields or in a much more dangerous and uncomfortable factory, but it’s much worse than basically any sort of job that is available in the U.S. market.
First, blanket tariffs are a mistake. I understand the motivation: a big reason why Chinese imports to the U.S. have actually shrunk over the last few years is because a lot of final assembly moved to countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, etc. Blanket tariffs stop this from happening, at least in theory.
The problem, however, is that those final assembly jobs are the least desirable jobs in the value chain, at least for the American worker; assuming the Trump administration doesn’t want to import millions of workers — that seems rather counter to the foundation of his candidacy! — the United States needs to find alternative trustworthy countries for final assembly. This can be accomplished through selective tariffs (which is exactly what happened in the first Trump administration).
Secondly, using trade flows to measure the health of the economic relationship with these countries — any country, really, but particularly final assembly countries — is legitimately stupid. Go back to the iPhone: the value-add of final assembly is in the single digit dollar range; the value-add of Apple’s software, marketing, distribution, etc. is in the hundreds of dollars. Simply looking at trade flows — where an imported iPhone is calculated as a trade deficit of several hundred dollars — completely obscures this reality. Moreover, the criteria for a final assembly country is that they have low wages, which by definition can’t pay for an equivalent amount of U.S. goods to said iPhone.
At the same time, the overall value of final assembly does exceed its economic value, for the reasons noted above: final assembly is gravity for higher value components, and it’s those components that are the biggest national security problem. This is where component tariffs might be a useful tool: the U.S. could use a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer to incentivize buying components from trusted allies, or from the U.S. itself, or to build new capacity in trusted locations. This does, admittedly, start to sound a lot like central planning, but that is why the gravity argument is an important one: simply moving final assembly somewhere other than China is a win — but not if there are blanket tariffs, at which point you might as well leave the supply chain where it is.
You can certainly make the case that things like castings and other machine components are of sufficient importance to the U.S. that they ought to be manufactured here, but you have to ramp up to that. What is much more problematic is that raw materials and components are now much cheaper for Haas’ foreign competitors; even if those competitors face tariffs in the United States, their cost of goods sold will be meaningfully lower than Haas, completely defeating the goal of encouraging the purchase of U.S. machine tools.
Fourth, there remains the problem of chips. Trump just declared economic war on China, which definitionally increases the possibility of kinetic war. A kinetic war, however, will mean the destruction of TSMC, leaving the U.S. bereft of chips at the very moment that A.I. is poised to create tremendous opportunities for growth and automation. And, even if A.I. didn’t exist, it’s enough to note that modern life would grind to a halt without chips. That’s why this is the area that most needs direct intervention from the federal government, particularly in terms of incentivizing demand for both leading and trailing edge U.S. chips.
my prevailing emotion over the past week — one I didn’t fully come to grips with until interrogating why Monday’s Article failed to live up to my standards — is sadness over the end of an era in technology, and frustration-bordering-on-disillusionment over the demise of what I thought was a uniquely American spirit.
Internet 1.0 was about technology. This was the early web, when technology was made for technology’s sake. This was when we got standards like TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, etc. This was obviously the best era, but one that was impossible to maintain once there was big money to be made on the Internet.
Internet 2.0 was about economics. This was the era of Aggregators — the era of Stratechery, in other words — when the Internet developed, for better or worse, in ways that made maximum economic sense. This was a massive boon for the U.S., which sits astride the world of technology; unfortunately none of the value that comes from that position is counted in the trade statistics, so the administration doesn’t seem to care.
Internet 3.0 is about politics. This is the era when countries make economically sub-optimal choices for reasons that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. In that Article I thought that Big Tech exercising its power against the President might be a spur for other countries to seek to wean themselves away from American companies; instead it is the U.S. that may be leaving other countries little choice but to retaliate against U.S. tech.
There is, admittedly, a hint of that old school American can-do attitude embedded in these tariffs: the Trump administration seems to believe the U.S. can overcome all of the naysayers and skeptics through sheer force of will. That force of will, however, would be much better spent pursuing a vision of a new world order in 2050, not trying to return to 1950. That is possible to do, by the way, but only if you accept 1950’s living standards, which weren’t nearly as attractive as nostalgia-colored glasses paint them, and if we’re not careful, 1950’s technology as well. I think we can do better that that; I know we can do better than this.
Trump brags that billionaire pals made a killing after he pulled the plug on tariffs
Trump’s EPA Plans to Stop Collecting Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data From Most Polluters
The One Word that Explains Globalization's Failure, and Trump's Response
The proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible.”
By this logic, anything that slows the flow of imports, or raises their cost, would indeed be a self-inflicted wound. If the Chinese Communist Party wants to block the sale of U.S. electric vehicles in China, let it. We should still want as many cheap Chinese EVs as possible flooding into our market.
Even Friedman’s claim that “the proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible,” runs directly counter to what Smith actually wrote, which was: “If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry.”
With some part of the produce of our own country. A vital assumption of the classical model was that trade would be balanced—something made here for something made there
Trump’s Executive Order Targeting Perkins Coie Must Be Condemned | National Review
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.
On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz.
I accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.
Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”
We discussed the possibility that these texts were part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization, the sort of group that attempts to place journalists in embarrassing positions, and sometimes succeeds. I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.
I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.
According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.
I went back to the Signal channel. At 1:48, “Michael Waltz” had provided the group an update. Again, I won’t quote from this text, except to note that he described the operation as an “amazing job.” A few minutes later, “John Ratcliffe” wrote, “A good start.” Not long after, Waltz responded with three emoji: a fist, an American flag, and fire. Others soon joined in, including “MAR,” who wrote, “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” and “Susie Wiles,” who texted, “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM! Really great. God bless.” “Steve Witkoff” responded with five emoji: two hands-praying, a flexed bicep, and two American flags. “TG” responded, “Great work and effects!” The after-action discussion included assessments of damage done, including the likely death of a specific individual. The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.
In an email, I outlined some of my questions: Is the “Houthi PC small group” a genuine Signal thread? Did they know that I was included in this group? Was I (on the off chance) included on purpose? If not, who did they think I was? Did anyone realize who I was when I was added, or when I removed myself from the group? Do senior Trump-administration officials use Signal regularly for sensitive discussions? Do the officials believe that the use of such a channel could endanger American personnel?
William Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, said that despite the impression created by the texts, the vice president is fully aligned with the president. “The Vice President’s first priority is always making sure that the President’s advisers are adequately briefing him on the substance of their internal deliberations,” he said. “Vice President Vance unequivocally supports this administration’s foreign policy. The President and the Vice President have had subsequent conversations about this matter and are in complete agreement.”
It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion.
Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story. Harris asked them to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a senior U.S. official creates a Signal thread for the express purpose of sharing information with Cabinet officials about an active military operation. He did not show them the actual Signal messages or tell them specifically what had occurred.
All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said.
Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.
There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.
“Intentional violations of these requirements are a basis for disciplinary action. Additionally, agencies such as the Department of Defense restrict electronic messaging containing classified information to classified government networks and/or networks with government-approved encrypted features,” Baron said.
It is worth noting that Donald Trump, as a candidate for president (and as president), repeatedly and vociferously demanded that Hillary Clinton be imprisoned for using a private email server for official business when she was secretary of state. (It is also worth noting that Trump was indicted in 2023 for mishandling classified documents, but the charges were dropped after his election.)
Waltz and the other Cabinet-level officials were already potentially violating government policy and the law simply by texting one another about the operation. But when Waltz added a journalist—presumably by mistake—to his principals committee, he created new security and legal issues. Now the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it. That is the classic definition of a leak, even if it was unintentional, and even if the recipient of the leak did not actually believe it was a leak until Yemen came under American attack.
Trump's plan for Gaza.
A UN commission investigating crimes against humanity in Yugoslavia defined ethnic cleansing as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” That’s an accurate description of what Trump wants to do in Gaza. What else would we call it? And where are they going to go? Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and even the West Bank all reject this plan. One of Gaza’s defining characteristics is that over 80% of its inhabitants are descendants of people displaced following the 1948 war; that history is part of what makes Gazans so committed to staying in place — but Trump wants to run it back.
the route of peacemaking he’s pursuing is making one of two sides just go away. That’s not peacemaking; it’s domination. And it’s a means of diplomacy that tends to create the preconditions for future conflicts.
The same president who criticized nation-building in Afghanistan and wanted to avoid conflict in Ukraine now wants to “take over” Gazan reconstruction.
Trump tends to push interpretations of his statements towards the poles of either optimistically brushing him off or paranoia, depending on the person or the topic. For me, on this topic, it creates paranoia. What exactly does Trump mean by “we’re going to take it over?”
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says Trump wants to remove Gazans from the strip temporarily, but Trump also literally said he wants to permanently relocate them and then rebuild Gaza “for the world’s people”
Trump consistently phrased his descriptions of Gaza to avoid apportioning any amount of responsibility to Israel. Gaza is a “demolition site,” but demolished by whom? “Gaza is a guarantee that they’re going to end up dying,” meaning the location itself is hostile to Palestinians? Gazans have suffered “bad luck,” meaning that bad things have just happened to occur to them?
What has Trump done today?
There is no utopia waiting on the other side of Trump's economy
Trump’s FBI Moves to Criminally Charge Major Climate Groups
Trump’s Latest Weapon Against Critics: Destroying Their Lawyers
Trump executive order kneecapping a prominent law firm
The Trump Administration Said These Aid Programs Saved Lives. It Canceled Them Anyway.
Dismantling the Department of Education.
So, we’ll “defund” the department, but the money will “keep flowing.” We’ll “dismantle” it, but really redistribute its programs across the government. We’ll “eliminate” it, but actually reassign its various responsibilities to other agencies. When you add that actually eliminating ED will require an act of Congress and 60 Senate votes (as Ramesh Ponnuru wrote under “What the right is saying”), what actually ends up happening is not at all clear to me.
Defund ED? Who would teach? Who would create curriculums? How would our public schools stay funded?
I was subsequently surprised to learn then that ED has very little to do with curriculum or employing teachers, and that its role in funding public schools is fractional.
The Department of Education is responsible for about 14% of all funding that goes to our K–12 schools, and at the same time the department’s reach into state and local education has gone incredibly far. Through the power of the purse, the Education Department now wields a great deal of influence over how parents, teachers, and schools behave. At the same time, a lot of what ED does could be easily moved to other departments (for instance, I think it’s pretty easy to argue that ED’s Office for Civil Rights could move to the Department of Justice).
Some writers, like Cato’s Neal McCluskey, have made straightforward arguments that we don’t need a federal education agency when the federal government isn’t allowed to regulate education, and that the department itself is neither competent nor effective. At the very least, I think one of ED’s biggest responsibilities — its federal student loan programs — has gotten completely out of control. When higher-education costs have exploded and the president responds to those costs by forgiving hundreds of billions in student debt, moving that responsibility somewhere else makes sense. Writers on the left and right have made the case that the Treasury would be better suited to manage and oversee student loans, and I’m inclined to agree with them.
my general view is that ED is not really emblematic of a thriving, successful expansion of federal government — and while trying to “delete” it with Musk-level tact or care would be a disaster, I also think Congress (if it wanted) could significantly reduce ED’s role in American life, turn over its responsibilities to other federal agencies, and streamline a lot of the work it does as a department.
The problem with the current debate is that doing so wouldn’t really reduce the size of the federal government — and it wouldn’t save us all that much money, either. Instead, the administration would just create a whole lot of disruption, risk interrupting popular services, and probably lose the political debate in the public square — all to simply pass on one department’s responsibilities to others.
Trumpian policy as cultural policy - Marginal REVOLUTION
Trumpian Policy as Cultural Policy Analysis: Trump's administrative actions and policy decisions are primarily driven by a strategy to reshape American culture rather than achieve specific policy outcomes, using controversial decisions to dominate public discourse and shift cultural narratives.
- The article analyzes Trump's policy approach as primarily a cultural strategy rather than traditional policy-making
Key aspects of this cultural policy approach:
- Focuses on highly visible, controversial decisions that generate widespread discussion
- Prioritizes cultural messaging over policy effectiveness or implementation
- Aims to control ideological agenda through rapid, multiple policy announcements
- Doesn't require policies to be legal, practical, or even implemented to achieve cultural impact
Specific examples:
- Executive orders against DEI and affirmative action as first actions
- Proposed renaming of Dulles Airport
- Bill to add Trump to Mount Rushmore
- Tariff threats against Canada and Mexico
- Changes to federal employment structure
- Elimination of Black History Month at Department of Defense
- Targeting of US AID
- Nomination of RFK Jr.
Strategic elements:
- Uses polarization to guarantee at least one-third public support
- Deliberately chooses well-known targets (like Canada/Mexico) for maximum cultural impact
- Creates debates that delegitimize existing institutions
- "Floods the zone" with multiple controversies to maintain constant cultural dialogue
Author's analysis:
- Strategy doesn't require coordinated planning
- Works through spontaneous order of competing interests
- Relies on three factors:
- Conflicting interest groups
- Competition for Trump's attention
- Trump's belief in cultural issues' importance
Effectiveness factors:
- Leverages internet-intensive, attention-based media environment
- Creates disorganization among opponents
- Uses negative contagion to reinforce cultural shifts
- Prioritizes cultural impact over policy success
HIV, transgender care, climate change and other federal websites go dark
President Trump's first days in office.
He’s identified real problems with our system and possesses the political will to pursue real change. Paired with a Republican majority in both chambers of Congress, he could genuinely achieve what his predecessors could not and pass major immigration reform during his term. But the sweep of these actions — mobilizing the military, pausing asylum, halting the parole process, trying to end birthright citizenship — will incur far more costs than benefits. The innocent people who are trying to flee danger or persecution in their countries and immigrate to the United States legally out of a sincere motivation to better their lives, who often help our country grow and stimulate our economy, will be caught in the machinery of these changes. All told, these executive actions are a step in the wrong direction.
Our system tends to exacerbate criminal behavior more than rehabilitate it, and the United States uses imprisonment as a punishment far more often than is productive or necessary. When it comes to the January 6 defendants, I fully support consequences for those who broke the law, but I also believe the Justice Department acted improperly in how it handled many cases.
The biggest example of this prosecutorial overreach came in a recent Supreme Court ruling that found the DOJ wrongly charged hundreds of rioters under an obstruction of justice statute that elevated the severity of their cases. This case did not fall along ideological lines; Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the majority in the 6-3 decision, while Amy Coney Barrett dissented. At the time the ruling came down, roughly 50 defendants had been convicted and sentenced on that obstruction charge alone, and 27 of them were incarcerated.
The president pardoned the vast majority of the convicted rioters of all wrongdoing in a sweeping manner, with an apparent lack of knowledge of or care for the crimes he was excusing and without expressing any remorse for the pivotal role he played on that day.
Trump withdraws from the Paris Agreement and WHO.
While Trump can justify his decisions based on some of the recent failures of the WHO and the Paris Agreement, the withdrawals still carry significant risks for public health and climate change mitigation, which the Trump administration has not shown a plan to address.
Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement won’t affect our climate change outlook much, but it is a missed opportunity to redirect U.S. climate policy toward a more realistic objective. The treaty’s goal of keeping global surface temperatures to roughly 1.5°C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels is now practically unattainable after record-hot years in 2023 and 2024, and its secondary 2°C goal also appears to be in peril — a 2024 UN Environment Programme report stated that “emissions must fall 28 per cent by 2030 and 37 per cent from 2019 levels by 2035” to maintain the 2°C goal. Achieving those reductions would undoubtedly require massive, destabilizing changes to economic systems, which are neither desirable nor plausible.
However, that provides more justification for the United States to stay in, not to drop out of, the agreement. In his executive order announcing the withdrawal from the Paris accords, Trump even said the U.S. must play “a leadership role in global efforts to protect the environment” — but how can we lead from the sidelines? Withdrawing is a huge missed opportunity to direct international climate policy towards its biggest problems: China’s rise and finding alternative fuel sources.
Domestically, Trump is also missing a large opportunity to combine a center-right "all of the above" energy policy with a center-left "abundance agenda," one that maintains a seat at the table for petroleum and natural gas while we continue to invest in renewable technologies. Nuclear energy should also be part of this effort, and its adoption is squarely in line with both the Trump administration and Paris Agreement’s goals.
The WHO does critical work tracking new disease outbreaks and identifying emerging pathogens, and the U.S. withdrawal threatens its ability to aid this work and maintain the benefits we all receive from it.
Furthermore, our status as a global health leader within WHO is smart diplomacy and advances our national security interests. We can guide ongoing efforts to eradicate polio, protect children from diseases, and mitigate future outbreaks. We also receive benefits, like communications on transnational spread of dangerous viruses, scientific collaboration for each year’s seasonal flu vaccine, and access to information about emerging threats. Lastly, we can investigate global threats, as we did when U.S. scientists joined the WHO delegation that visited China in February 2020 to assess its Covid response.
Both Trump and public health experts have rightly criticized the effusive praise the WHO heaped on China in the early days of the pandemic, even as questions swirled about how the virus spread. In a critical moment for its mission, the WHO seemed more occupied with keeping China happy than fulfilling its obligations to the rest of the world. The organization also failed to acknowledge that Covid was airborne early on, providing more evidence that it was ill-prepared to meet the moment.
Trump is right that the U.S. contributes a disproportionate amount to the WHO compared to China (even though he has exaggerated the magnitude of that difference), and we should push for fairer standards. While it is now starting to diversify its revenue sources, the organization’s reliance on the U.S. is evident in the measures it has already taken since Trump announced the withdrawal order — freezing recruitment and drastically scaling back its travel budget.
With all these issues in mind, leaving the WHO is still not the answer; in fact, leaving will make our problems worse. In our absence, China would likely seek to step up to mold decisions to its will — how does that help the U.S.? If Trump wants to play tough with the WHO, why not stay involved but slash our funding commitments?
Trump’s new economic war
Saudi Arabia and other producers must cut oil prices, global central banks “immediately” needed to slash interest rates, and foreign companies must ramp up investments in US factories or face tariffs. The EU — which came in for particular opprobrium — must stop hitting big American technology companies with competition fines.
Trump’s demands came amid a frenetic first week in office in which the president launched a blitzkrieg of executive orders and announcements intended not just to reshape the state but also assert America’s economic and commercial supremacy. Tariffs of up to 25 per cent could be slapped on Canada and Mexico as early as February 1, riding roughshod over the trade deal Trump himself negotiated in his first term.
China could face levies of up to 100 per cent if Beijing failed to agree on a deal to sell at least 50 per cent of the TikTok app to a US company, while the EU was told to purchase more American oil if it wanted to avoid tariffs. Underscoring the new American unilateralism, Trump pulled the US out of the World Health Organization, as well as exiting the Paris climate accord for a second time.
This proposal throws a “hand grenade” at international tax policymaking, says Niels Johannesen, director of the Oxford university Centre for Business Taxation at Saïd Business School. The move suggests a determination to “shape other countries’ tax policy through coercion rather than through co-operation”, he adds.
“Those around Trump have had time to build up a systematic, methodological approach for protectionist trade policy and it shows,” says former UK trade department official Allie Renison, now at consultancy SEC Newgate. The approach will be to build up a case file of “evidence” against countries, she says, and then use it to extract concessions in areas of both economic and foreign policy.
The question remains how far Trump is willing to go. The danger of trampling on the rules-based order, says Jeromin Zettelmeyer, head of the Bruegel think-tank, is a complete breakdown in the diplomatic and legal channels for settling international disputes.
If Trump were to pull out of a wider range of international frameworks, such as the WTO or the IMF, he warns, then the arrangements that help govern the global economy could get “substantively destroyed”.
Some caution against being awestruck by Trump’s threats or his espousal of capitalism without limits, because his agenda was so incoherent.
“What we are seeing is huge doses of American hubris,” says Arancha González, dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po. “We are blinded by the intensity of all the issues put on the table and by Trump’s conviction. But we are not looking at the contradictions. It’s like we are all on an orange drug
MANAGING FINANCIAL INSTABILITY IN 2025
Managing Financial Instability Risks in 2025
Summary
- The analysis positions itself as a warning about economic warfare, not financial advice
Key threats identified:
- Alleged Russian influence over key US political figures including Trump and Musk
- Strategic goal to dismantle US through internal turmoil and financial destabilization
- Bitcoin characterized as an economic weapon in a zero-sum game
- Christian Nationalist alignment with plans to destroy dollar/Fed system
Immediate financial risks for 2025:
- Potential government shutdown due to no budget passage
- Proposed $2 trillion budget cuts by Musk
- US debt default risk as leverage for cuts
- Strategic Bitcoin Reserve proposal threatening dollar stability
Critical timeline identified:
- January 2 2025: Government runs out of money
- January 3: New Congress installation
- January 20: Treasury transition period
- May 2025: Potential default date ("X-Date")
Recommended defensive measures:
- Diversify holdings across bonds, real estate, gold/silver ETFs
- Avoid Bitcoin/crypto investments
- Contact representatives to oppose extreme measures
Additional considerations:
- Moving to another country unlikely to help financially
- Social Security potentially at risk
- Banking system likely to hold but spreading funds recommended
- Resolution depends on mainstream Republicans recognizing and countering these threats
Document context:
- Living document subject to updates
- Written by Dave Troy, presented as analysis of warfare operations
- Includes extensive bibliography and related articles
- Last updated November 16, 2024
Don't Panic
the idea that the next Trump term will ruthlessly implement his awful agenda. For one thing, it’s hard to say that Trump has an agenda. He’s going to rattle the saber about the border and probably find some ways to beef up enforcement, although it’s hard to say to what effect. He seems really intent on this tariffs thing, but that’s an issue that’s going to prompt huge corporate resistance which will in turn create turmoil within the Republican coalition; it seems very unlikely that he’s going to get anything like what he wants at the scale he wants.
The Trump administration was a daily exercise in corruption, controversy, and scandal. Major admin officials seemed to resign by the day. As I won’t stop pointing out, Trump’s signature policy objective (according to him!) was Obamacare repeal, and he was incapable of getting it past his own party in Congress.
Trump's MAGA allies gloat Project 2025 "is the agenda"
Why millions voted for both Trump and progressive policies