WE'RE AT THE "I HATE MY DAD!" ADOLESCENT PART OF THE TRUMP-MUSK RELATIONSHIP

Is this total war? Is it a serious blow to Republicans as they try to pass the Big Beautiful Bill? I have my doubts, as I explain below:

Elon Musk continued his rampage against Donald Trump’s spending bill on Tuesday night, setting the stage for an ugly showdown with the president’s faithful.

“Mammoth spending bills are bankrupting America!” he wrote, sharing a graphic depicting rising national debt over the past three decades. “ENOUGH,” he added.

He also responded with a “100″ emoji to an X user who wrote that Musk had “reminded everyone: It’s not about Right vs. Left. It’s about the Establishment vs the People.”

He then posted an American flag emoji under a post from conservative satire site The Babylon Bee, highlighting a story titled, “The Lord Strengthens Elon One Last Time To Push Pillars Of Congress Over And Bring Government Crashing Down.”

Earlier Tuesday, the billionaire unleashed hellfire on Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill, lambasting the president’s flagship legislative package as “outrageous,” “pork-filled” and a “disgusting abomination.”

We think of Trump as someone who demands complete loyalty. That's true ... for most of his allies. Trump seems to treat Musk differently.

I said this in November and I'm sticking with it:

... I think it's noteworthy that Trump is the same age as Musk's father.

A couple of weeks later, I wrote:

And Trump might be looking for a son. He seems disappointed in his three biological sons....

That's how I think their relationship works: Trump is the father, and Musk is the rich, successful businessman son he never had. I'm sure Trump believes his genes should have created someone with Musk's wealth and status, but it never happened.

This was never just a boss-subordinate relationship. Remember this?

I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 7, 2025

And remember this from last week's Wall Street Journal story about the end of Musk's time in Washington?

Trump has described Musk to aides as “50% genius, 50% boy,” according to White House staffers who heard his comments. Another White House aide said they heard Trump call Musk “90% genius, 10% boy.”

"Boy" isn't a word Trump uses very often. It's weirdly paternal.

Many super-rich men throughout American history have seen themselves as equal in power to the president of the United States, or even superior. Musk clearly doesn't feel that way. He wants Trump's love -- and, of course, government contracts and the termination of all government investigations of his companies. He clearly believes he's not putting his empire at risk by lashing out at the bill -- he's really just lashing out the way a normal teenager would at a parent with whom he doesn't have any serious conflicts -- and Trump's failure to lash out at him, at Truth Social or anywhere else, suggests that their peculiar relationship will survive this. (We knew this wasn't a normal Trumpworld falling-out when Trump invited Musk to that press conference in the Oval Office last Friday, as a farewell. Trump usually kicks people to the curb abruptly and completely. There are very few soft landings.)

What's more important to understand is that Musk's attacks on the bill won't doom it. They won't give Senate Republicans cover to vote against it. The bill seems to be in trouble now, but this is a familiar pattern, and the endgame is always the same: Trump twists arms and critics fall in line. It will happen again. No one will be emnboldened by Musk's criticism because everyone in the GOP, including Elon Musk, knows which of the two, Trump or Musk, is the Daddy in the party.

DEMOCRATS AREN'T DOOMED, THOUGH THEY SHOULD BE LESS DOOMED

In The New York Times today, poll guy Nate Cohn asks this question, in effect: Yes, the 2024 presidential election was very close in practice. But was it a Republican blowout in theory? I'm serious. Here's his headline:

Should Republicans Have Won in a Landslide?

The question of whether Donald Trump cost conservatives a more decisive victory is a useful one to consider.

Cohn writes:

Should Republicans have won the 2024 election by a much wider margin?

While the history books will rightfully dwell on whether Democrats could have forestalled another Trump presidency, the question of whether Mr. Trump cost conservatives a more decisive victory might be the more useful one to understand American politics today.

Voters wanted change, badly. They were repelled not just by Mr. Biden’s faltering condition, but also by rising prices and perceived failures of Democratic governance on everything from immigration to energy. While it didn’t yield a more decisive Republican victory, the backlash against pandemic-era restrictions, rising prices and “woke” all help explain why a close election felt like a conservative “vibe shift.”

The "vibe shift" was an invention of pundits, because the voters who turned out in increasing numbers for Republicans (men of all ethnicities) were considered zeitgeisty and the voters who turned out in large numbers for Democrats (mostly women, especially women of color) were considered not cool at all.

Cohn makes much of the fact that early polling revealed Democratic vulnerabilities. He cites a November 2023 Times poll of six battleground states. In this poll, Nikki Haley was beating Biden 46%-38%, while Ron DeSantis was in an effective tie with Biden, leading him 44%-43%. (Biden led Donald Trump 48%-40%; Trump led Kamala Harris 47%-44%.)

Haley probably would have been the strongest candidate against either Biden or Harris. But the actually existing Republican Party would never have nominated Haley, because she wasn't perceived as a Fox News culture warrior and bombthrower. Similarly, polls in early 2016 showed John Kasich with a large lead over Hillary Clinton -- 7.4 points, according to Real Clear Politics. I think Kasich might have won a far more decisive victory than Trump, but like Haley, he had a reputation (deserved or otherwise) for moderation and conciliation, so there wasn't a chance in hell that his party would nominate him.

The Republican Party has nominated an extremist presidential candidate three times in a row, and pushed somewhat less extreme candidates to the right in the two previous election cycles. (Surely you recall John McCain repudiating his own immigration bill and Mitt Romney rejecting the healthcare law he signed as governor of Massachusetts.)

Meanwhile, CNN is selling a new poll as more bad news for the Democrats:

There’s new evidence that the Democratic Party’s reputation is in a bad place.

... a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS provides insights into the party’s problems.

... Perhaps most striking was that people were more likely to view the Republicans than Democrats as the party with strong leaders (40% to 16%) and even the “party of change” (32% to 25%).

... The “strong leaders” question might be the most troublesome finding for Democrats. Only about 1 in 6 Americans said Democrats have stronger leaders than Republicans. As remarkably, only 39% of Democrats said that.

Well, obviously we feel this way -- our leaders aren't strong. But that may not say anything about future voting intent, as I'll explain soon.

In an additional CNN write-up of this poll, it becomes clear that there's disenchantment with both parties.

Neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party has consolidated a majority of the public behind its approach, with more than 4 in 10 saying that neither party can get things done or has strong leadership, a new CNN survey conducted by SSRS finds.

Asked to choose which of the parties they see as the “party that can get things done,” “the party with strong leaders” or the “party of change,” the lion’s share of the public – more than 4 in 10 – say that neither party fits the bill.

... True independents, those who don’t lean toward either party, are particularly grim in their views of the parties on these issues: 76% say neither party has strong leaders or can get things done, and 72% that they view neither as the party of change.

... While the public as a whole sees the GOP as relatively effective, they also say, 41% to 30%, that it’s better described as the party of extremism.

... Americans are closely split on which party represents the middle class, with a third saying neither does.

Republicans are seen as having strong leaders and the ability to effect change, but Americans don't seem thrilled with the change they're getting.

And where does this leave Democrats, assuming there are future elections? According to Brendan Higgins at The Smoke Filled Room, it leaves them on track to win a 231-204 House majority. That's based on polling showing Democrats with an average 4-point lead on the "generic ballot" question. That average is skewed by one poll showing Democrats up by more than 9 points, but the poll is from AtlasIntel, one of two firms given an A+ rating by Nate Silver.

I think there are many voters who want to vote for a Democratic Party that isn't ground down by GOP attacks, media contempt, and its own timidity. In elections, or at least non-presidential elections, Democratic candidates stick up for themselves, advance good ideas, and denounce Republican policies -- and often they win, or at least exceed expectations. Even as we're seeing the Democrats-are-doomed messaging in the media, we're also seeing poll results like this:

This poll was conducted before Ernst's "We are all going to die" remark and obnoxious follow-up.

Take it with a grain of salt -- it's from a liberal polling firm working for Sage, and the big caveat is that Sage took the lead only after biographies of the candidates were read. Click to enlarge this if you want to see what respondents were told about Ernst, Sage, and other Democrats who might challenge Ernst (one, J.D. Scholten, just entered the race):

The Ernst bio is positive, but the two versions of Sage's bio are very appealing. One says:

Born and raised in a trailer park in Mason City, Sage enlisted in the Marines, served two tours in Iraq, then re-enlisted in the Army and served a third tour in Iraq. Back home, he put himself through college with the GI Bill and worked as a mechanic, a sports radio host, and eventually became Director at an Iowa radio station, working closely with local businesses. He's now the director of his local Chamber of Commerce as a voice for Iowa small businesses and working people.

The other says he "actually cares about working people" and describes him as "a patriot, not a politician."

But in a real campaign, Democrats can't control the messaging, which is why, in a red state, it'll be a struggle for Sage or any other Democrat to win. But a Democrat who could be perceived this way throughout a campaign could appeal to committed Democrats as well as swing voters. There's an opening.

However, Democrats need to a better job of defining themselves positively and counteracting the negative impression created by Republicans, the media, and some fellow Democrats. The country hasn't moved to the right -- Republicans have simply done a better job of ensuring that the media environment downplays their flaws and allows them to claim virtues. And that might be breaking down as the reality of GOP rule becomes more obvious. So Democrats aren't doomed -- but they need to define themselves before their enemies can define them. And they need to do a better job of persuading swing voters that Republicans aren't on their side.

STEPHEN MILLER WAS ALREADY TRYING TO MEMEIFY THE COLORADO ATTACK JUST HOURS AFTER IT HAPPENED

Israel's brutality in Gaza is no justification for this:

Eight people calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza were injured at an outdoor mall in Boulder, Colorado, by a man who police say used a makeshift flamethrower and hurled an incendiary device into a crowd. The FBI immediately described the violence as a “targeted terror attack.”

The suspect, identified by the FBI as 45-year-old Mohamed Sabry Soliman, yelled “Free Palestine” during the Sunday attack on the group of demonstrators, said Mark Michalek, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Denver field office....

The injuries authorities found were consistent with reports of people being set on fire, Boulder Police Chief Steve Redfearn said....

The right-wing media is eager to inform us that the suspect entered this country unlawfully.

BREAKING: Three senior DHS sources tell @FoxNews that the Boulder terror suspect is an Egyptian national in the U.S. illegally as a visa overstay who entered the U.S. during the Biden administration. I’m told Mohamed Sabry Soliman arrived at LAX on 8/27/22 on a B1/B2 nonimmigrant…

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) June 2, 2025

I think Stephen Miller is the happiest man in America right now. I'm sure he feels entirely vindicated in all of his life choices.

The incident took place yesterday afternoon. In the evening, Miller posted this:

A terror attack was committed in Boulder, Colorado by an illegal alien. He was granted a tourist visa by the Biden Administration and then he illegally overstayed that visa. In response, the Biden Administration gave him a work permit.

Suicidal migration must be fully reversed.

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) June 2, 2025

You know that he's trying to make the phrase "suicidal migration" happen, because he's used it before:

Suicidal migration. https://t.co/Z9m4GDCVgd

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) April 25, 2025

The right has accused the U.S. and European countries of having "suicidal migration policies" for years, but Miller seems to want a tighter, punchier, meme-ier phrase, one that leaves the dull word "policies" out and gives the listener just two words, equally weighted: "suicidal" (with its echo of the early-twentieth century eugenicist idea of "race suicide") and "migration." He's saying that the act of allowing more liberal immigration policies has been suicidal for America, but he's wants our brains to associate national suicide with migration, period.

Apparently it's working.

Suicidal migration is a powerful term

— Brian Baumann (@brian_e_baumann) June 2, 2025

"Suicidal migration" is a term we should use more https://t.co/dnvXCXR1oK

— Angst Cranker (@fairwayfare) June 2, 2025

Expect to hear this phrase repeatedly in the near future -- from Kristi Noem, from prominent elected Republicans, and from everyone on Fox.

TRUMP PROBABLY DOESN'T BELIEVE BIDEN WAS KILLED (BUT HE WANTS TO KILL BIDEN'S PRESIDENCY)

Last night at Truth Social, President Trump "re-truthed" a post that claimed Joe Biden was executed in 2020 and replaced by a clone. Does he really believe this?

I don't think Trump believes this. Trump sometimes posts conspiratorial ideas that he doesn't express himself -- for instance, he's retransmitted and amplified QAnon messages over the year without ever fully embracing QAnon. It's a way to stay connected to his craziest supporters -- and it's a way to own the libs.

What Trump does believe is that Biden wasn't in charge of his own presidency. Last weekend, I told you about this Truth Social post:

Trump's own theory is that there were "people that knew [Biden] was cognitively impaired, and that took over the Autopen." Biden was alive, in Trump's view, long after 2020 -- he just wasn't the real president.

Then on Friday, in his joint press conference with Elon Musk, Trump said this:

The headline was Trump attacking Biden after Biden's cancer diagnosis (which suggests that Trump knows Biden is alive) -- but again, if you watch a longer version of the clip, you see Trump questioning who was really president the last four years:

TRUMP: One thing I can't figure out is what would an administration -- what were they thinking when they allowed millions of people from prisons all over the world -- not just from South America, Venezuela, all over the world, from the Congo in Africa, hundreds of people, thousands of people from the Congo, rough, rough prisoners, from Asia, from Europe, rough parts of Europe -- why would they allow them to come into our country? Why would they do that? It's the one thing I can't figure out.

And I don't believe it was Joe Biden. I really don't. I mean, look, he's been a sort of a moderate person over his lifetime -- not a smart person, but a somewhat vicious person, I will say. If you feel sorry for him, don't feel so sorry, 'cause he's vicious. What he did with his political opponent, and all of the people that he hurt -- he hurt a lot of people, Biden. And so I really don't feel sorry for him. But he wasn't a person that would allow murderers to come into our country. He wasn't a person that was in favor of transgender for anybody that wanted it, take kids out of families, et cetera, et cetera.

So I just don't understand why, why a thing like this, how a thing like this, could have been allowed to happen. Very sad. It's very, it's very sad, very sad for our country.

Again, Trump clearly believes that there is a living Joe Biden who doesn't deserve our sympathy, but who also wasn't involved in his own admini stration's policy-making.

As I told you last weekend, Trump really, really wants to prosecute political enemies who were pardoned by President Biden at the end of his term, and he also presumably wants to invalidate bills and executive orders that were signed by Biden. So Trump is pushing the "Biden was too mentally checked out to function as president and subordinates controlled the autopen" conspiracy theory.

I also told you that fossil fuel interests are pushing the autopen theory -- and now here's a Fox News story from a couple of days ago:

A pro-energy group is renewing its call for an investigation into over half a dozen Biden administration executive actions related to climate that it believes should be deemed null and void due to them being signed by an autopen without any public comment from former President Joe Biden confirming his knowledge of them.

Power the Future, a nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs, reviewed eight Biden executive orders that it says were significant shifts in domestic energy policy and said it found no evidence of the president speaking about any of them publicly, raising concerns that the orders were signed by autopen and that he was not aware of them....

The executive orders reviewed by Power the Future include an Arctic drilling ban in 2023, a 2021 executive order committing the federal government to net-zero emissions by 2050, an executive order mandating "clean energy" AI centers and an offshore drilling ban executive order shortly before leaving office in 2025.

Finding no evidence of Biden publicly speaking about the executive orders on climate, Power the Future sent letters this week to the DOJ, EPA, DOI, DOE, along with the House and Senate Oversight Committees, calling for an investigation to determine who made the decisions, drafted the executive orders and ultimately signed them.

"In light of the growing evidence that actions purportedly taken by the former president may not have been approved or signed by him, but instead promulgated by a small coterie of advisers in his name without his knowledge or over his signature using an ‘autopen,’ the need for congressional access to information has grown in importance with these revelations," the letter to GOP House Oversight Chair James Comer states.

Here's some information about Power the Future:

Power the Future is an energy advocacy organization with a “mission of offering truth, facts, and research that will enrich the national conversation on energy.”

Power the Future was launched in February 2018 by Daniel Turner, a former Republican communications staffer and alumni of the Charles Koch Institute. Turner also worked for Generation Opportunity, a non-profit 501(c)(4) organization that is funded by Freedom Partners, a multimillion dollar Koch-tied funding vehicle.

And before you get too mushy and sentimental about Josh Hawley because he's positioned himself as a defender of Medicaid, remember that he's still a bog-standard Republican in most ways. Here he is peddling anonymous gossip about Biden to Fox News -- and, of course, invoking the autopen:

... a Republican senator has made an explosive new claim: that Biden would sometimes get lost in a closet inside the White House while serving as commander-in-chief.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., made the stunning claim on "Hannity" Friday, citing an unnamed Secret Service whistleblower who Hawley said was assigned to Biden.

"He [Secret Service member] told me that Biden used to get lost in his closet in the mornings in the White House," Hawley said. "I mean, the guy literally stumbling around in the White House residence couldn't find his way out of his own closet. The president of the United States. I mean, this is outrageous. We were lied to."

... Hawley said the brewing scandal about the Biden administration’s use of an autopen to sign executive orders amounts to "one of the worst constitutional crises of our country’s history."

"We need to find out who actually signed off, so to speak, on all those autopen signatures and all of those pardons and all of those clemencies."

"It’s a rogue’s gallery of crooks and criminals and terrible people, rapists and others, I mean who actually was doing that, we know it wasn’t Biden, he didn’t know anything about it. "we’ve got to figure out who was actually in charge cos it sure as heck wasn’t Joe Biden."

Can they go mainstream with this? As I said last weekend, I think they'll try.

DO TRUMP'S POLL NUMBERS IMPROVE EVERY TIME WE BEAT HIM?

I know you all hate it when I take a Ross Douthat column seriously, but Douthat's latest includes some ideas worth considering if we want to combat Trumpism.

Douthat begins by discussing the acronym we're all using these days, TACO, which stands for "Trump always chickens out." It's a reference to Trump's tariffs. Douthat sees Trump's capitulation to financial markets as an explanation for his popularity with many voters:

... the acronym gets at something that’s crucial to Trump’s political resilience. The willingness to swerve and backpedal and contradict himself is a big part of what keeps the president viable, and the promise of chickening out is part of Trump’s implicit pitch to swing voters — reassuring them that anything extreme is also provisional, that he’s always testing limits (on policy, on power) but also generally willing to pull back.

A case study: Just six weeks ago, I wrote a column describing the second Trump presidency as headed for political failure, while noting that a course correction was still possible....

But since that column appeared, Trump has bobbed and wove away from his most extreme China tariffs, he has achieved some kind of separation from Elon Musk and he’s started complaining about the “crazy” Vladimir Putin while casting himself as the great would-be peacemaker of the Middle East. And lo and behold, his poll numbers have floated back up, not to genuine popularity but to a perfectly normal level for a president in a polarized country.

I wouldn't exactly say that Trump was willing to pull back on tariffs -- he did it, kicking and screaming, because the markets scared the hell out of him, and because his poll numbers cratered. But now markets have recovered, and in the Real Clear Polling average, Trump is at 47.5% job approval, 50.4% disapproval.

It's good that Trump pulled back, but it's also creating a false sense that guardrails are constraining him the way they did in his first term. If you're paying attention, you know that Trump is much, much less constrained by guardrails than he was in his first term -- but most people don't pay a lot of attention, and nothing earth-shattering has happened in their lives. Immigrants are being sent to hellhole torture prisons for life with no due process, but most Americans are native-born citizens. Foreign aid cuts are killing hundreds of thousands of people, but all that is happening in countries most Americans can't find on a map. The markets crashed and dragged 401(k)s down with them, but then there was a market recovery. Cuts to the Veterans Administration and Social Security staffing and science funding haven't affected most people directly yet. Harvard is being gutted, but most people don't go to Harvard.

The sense that the center is holding is false. Even Douthat understands this:

And then there is just the inherent danger in living, for three years and eight months more, with a president whom we know from the experience of Jan. 6, 2021, doesn’t always backtrack when he enters dangerous terrain.

I worry that Trump is so thin-skinned that his response to the humiliation of the "TACO" insult will be to apply even bigger tariffs, just to show us all who's boss, especially now that an appeals has ruled that the tariffs can proceed for now, and because there are other mechanisms through which Trump can apply tariffs if the block is upheld.

The Trump administration nevertheless has other legal means of imposing tariffs, Goldman [Sachs] says, flagging Section 122 of U.S. trade law, Section 301 investigations and Section 338 of the Trade Act of 1930.

And what do you know: the ruling that blocked the country-wide tariffs permitted Trump to impose tariffs on categories of goods, so Trump doubled the steel tariffs yesterday.

Trump is responding to court losses on the subject of immigration by doubling and tripling down.

With all this chaos, and some pushback from the Establishment, does life ever get better? Douthat is skeptical:

But any trust-the-plan case for Trump’s approach underrates how much time can be wasted and policy opportunities lost unraveling problems of your own making. The idea that we’re going to end up with the optimal form of re-industrialization at the end of all the Trump trade drama is, let’s just say, extremely unproven; a scenario where the economy just survives the drama seems more like Trump’s best case, with worse ones still very much in the picture.

I worry that many Americans are having a reptile-brain response to Trump's push-and-pull on tariffs. Obviously, MAGA Nation is happy no matter what he does:

But I worry that there's a psych-experiment quality to this:

1. Trump arouses anxiety with new tariffs. Markets tumble.
2. Trump removes/suspends all or some of the tariffs he imposed. Markets rally.
3. Even though we're no better off than we were before step 1, voters feel as if progress is being made. Trump's poll numbers go up.

Trump's poll numbers aren't terrible anymore because he's constantly doing things, and constantly telling us he's doing things. Biden did things that would have paid off in the long run, but most voters didn't know what he'd done because he was a terrible public communicator, and because Democratic presidents generally assume the public will simply know what they've done.

Trump's decent poll numbers suggest that roughly half the country just wanted a president who seemed forceful, no matter what he was doing -- and if they don't like the specifics, they believe there are still guardrails to save them. It may be quite a while before they understand that that's not true, and they might never grasp that all the problem-solving that made them happy was just Trump solving problems he'd created.

THE NEW SANEWASHING: ASSUMING TRUMP HAS IDEAS, NOT JUST RESENTMENTS AND PERSONALITY DEFECTS

We all know that Donald Trump is routinely "sanewashed" by the media. He'll interrupt a speech with a rambling and inappropriate digression, or respond to a reporter's question with a vicious personal attack, and most news reports will ignore or downplay Trump's weirdest and nastiest words.

But in The New York Times this week I've seen three examples of a different kind of sanewashing: Times reporters have attempted to portray Trump's actions as the result of some grand theory or other, when they're really the product of the much more primitive workings of Trump's brain.

On Monday, the Times published a piece by Edward Wong with this headline:

Trump’s Vision: One World, Three Powers?

Yes -- according to Wong, Trump might actually have a geopolitical vision.

For President Trump, anytime is a good time for deal-making, but never more so than now with the leaders of China and Russia.

Last week, Mr. Trump said he wanted to normalize commerce with Russia, appearing to lessen the pressure on Moscow to settle its war with Ukraine. And he is trying to limit the fallout from his own global trade war by urging China’s leader to call him....

Mr. Trump may have something even bigger in mind involving Russia and China, and it would be the ultimate deal.

His actions and statements suggest he might be envisioning a world in which each of the three so-called great powers — the United States, China and Russia — dominates its part of the globe, some foreign policy analysts say.

It would be a throwback to a 19th-century style of imperial rule.

Wong knows how great powers once divided up control of the globe. Does he really believe Trump knows that history? Or any history?

Wong concedes that he might be off base on this:

Some close observers of Mr. Trump, including officials from his first administration, caution against thinking his actions and statements are strategic. While Mr. Trump might have strong, long-held attitudes about a handful of issues, notably immigration and trade, he does not have a vision of a world order, they argue.

Donald Trump, geostrategist? Nahhh.

Wong writes:

Mr. Trump often praises President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, as strong and smart men who are his close friends.

I think it's all psychologically weirder than that. To Trump, Putin is the hot supermodel who flirts with him but won't give him a tumble, to his great frustration. Putin seems to haunt Trump's dreams. Xi is just a global big macher who makes Trump feel insecure -- Trump wants the world to see him as on Xi's level, but more powerful, and Xi frustrates him by never quite finalizing deals with him that make him feel like a winner.

The idea that Trump is Xi's great pal would seem to be contradicted by a story Wong published yesterday, under the headline "Trump Makes a New Push to ‘Decouple’ U.S. From China":

The Trump administration has threatened to revoke the visas of many of the 277,000 or so Chinese students in the United States and to subject future applicants from China, including Hong Kong, to extra scrutiny.

Cargo ships laden with goods from China stopped coming into American ports earlier this spring as President Trump escalated his trade war against Beijing.

And the Trump administration is suspending sales of some critical U.S. technologies to China, including those related to jet engines, semiconductors and certain chemicals and machinery.

Taken together, the actions by the Trump administration amount to an aggressive campaign to “decouple” the United States from China, as it seeks to break the close commercial ties between the world’s two largest economies and toss away what had been the anchor of the relations between the nations for decades.

Um ... I guess Trump could see himself as being best buds with Xi Jinping and want to screw him on trade and other issues. He could want to damage China's economy while generously ceding a third of the planet to China. But it doesn't make much sense.

I think Trump believes he needs an enemy, and he's picked up from Fox News and his better-informed subordinates that China is the right-wing enemy of the moment. But I think he'd also be happy to make a big, beautiful deal with China, as long as the deal made him look like the alpha male. Xi, alas for Trump, is too smart and powerful to let that happen, although you don't have to be particularly smart to be smarter than Trump. In any case, while Trump is trying to punish China, I don't think he has a "decoupling" vision. He's just doing what he always does: he's hurting the counterparty in the expection that the counterparty will give up and yield to him. It's not working, so he's trying to bully China even harder. But if he got what he perceived as a win, I think he'd be just as happy coupling as decoupling.

On a different subject, he's a story by Glenn Thrush headlined "Trump’s Flurry of Pardons Signals a Wholesale Effort to Redefine Crime." Thrush seems to understand what Trump is doing here -- using the criminal justice to help people he and his allies like -- but he uses language suggesting that Trump has highly developed ideas about crime:

President Trump is employing the vast power of his office to redefine criminality to suit his needs — using pardons to inoculate criminals he happens to like, downplaying corruption and fraud as crimes, and seeking to stigmatize political opponents by labeling them criminals....

An offshoot of this strategy is relegating white-collar offenses to a rank of secondary importance behind violent and property crimes....

These actions follow a systematic effort inside the Justice Department to dismantle units that investigate public corruption, fraud and foreign interference in U.S. businesses and elections.

Does Trump think white-collar offenses are "of secondary importance"? Not all white-collar offenses. He'd certainly be happy to pin some white-collar offenses on Hunter Biden, and if, as I suspect, he someday declares Hunter Biden's pardon null and void because it was allegedly signed with an autopen, I think he will order the Justice Department to prosecute the hell out of him.

I believe that Trump wants to go easy on white-collar criminals, but only because they're disproportionately right-leaning. His Justice Department would happily prosecute the Soros family if a real or imagined crime could be found.

Also:

Another Trump objective: Rewriting the history of the Capitol riot to minimize the actions of his supporters and emphasize the hardship they endured by being prosecuted. He has gone so far as to call some of those who were imprisoned “hostages.”

Hours after declaring at his inauguration that “the scales of justice will be rebalanced,” Mr. Trump granted blanket clemency to around 1,600 rioters, some of them violent, who ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021....

At the time, Matthew M. Graves, the U.S. attorney in Washington who oversaw many of the trials, said the move undermined the rule of law and set a dangerous precedent by removing the main deterrence against future acts of insurrection and violence by would-be rioters.

But it wasn't intended to remove the main deterrence against future acts of insurrection and violence by would-be rioters. It was intended to apply to pro-Trump insurrectionists only. This administration will have a separate system of justice for its enemies.

Attacks on Tesla property are acts of domestic terrorism meant to inspire fear.@DHSgov will use every tool available to track down the perpetrators and bring them to justice. pic.twitter.com/ahfgCwbkJE

— Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) April 1, 2025

(To be fair, this may no longer apply now that Trump and Elon Musk are squabbling.)

For the most part, the Thrush story makes clear that Trump wants to prosecute (or persecute) his enemies and give his friends clemency. But this isn't an effort to "redefine criminality" in any abstract way. Trump's only idea here is "You're criminals. We're not."

I understand why Times journalists write this way: they're encouraged to find meaning in the actions of presidents, and they're used to presidents who actually have ideas, and even philosophies of governing.

But we're in the second Trump term. By now we should be used to the fact that he has few if any ideas, only (as Lionel Trilling put it when discussing an earlier crop of right-wingers) "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."

THAT ORIGIN STORY FOR TRUMP'S WAR ON HIGHER EDUCATION LEAVES OUT A FEW FACTS

President Trump's all-out assault on Harvard and other universities has experienced setbacks in court, so last night The Wall Street Journal published some Republican pushback, in an attempt to portray Trump's war on education as a campaign of fairness and decency rather than resentment and pique. The Journal tries to give Trump's war on universities an origin story -- but it leaves out some facts and downplays others.

The headline of the Journal story is "The Punch That Launched Trump’s War on American Universities." The story tells us this:

Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, said he, [Stephen] Miller and others close to the president talked about asserting more control over universities in the early days of Trump’s first term. “The idea was nothing more than a concept back then,” said Bannon, a Georgetown and Harvard graduate. “You couldn’t even call it an idea.”

Then a punch in the face grabbed Trump’s attention.

In February 2019, Hayden Williams set up a table at UC Berkeley, where he was helping recruit students to join Turning Point USA, a youth-outreach group founded by conservative activist Charlie Kirk. A man taunted Williams and delivered a sucker punch. Neither the attacker, who was later arrested, nor Williams were students at the school.

Video of the attack went viral....

I know no one here wants to watch Laura Ingraham, but the attack is shown in the first few seconds here. It was a real punch:



But the attacker was arrested (although Ingraham, in the clip above complains that the arrest took ten days.) Meanwhile, the victim briefly became a right-wing celebrity:

... Williams, sporting a black eye, appeared on Fox News.

Kirk recalled Trump saying at the time, We’ve got to do something about this. Kirk said he told Trump that it was a chance to stand up for conservative students, and that they talked about withholding federal funding for free-speech violations....

About two weeks after the altercation, Trump brought Williams onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Trump said he planned to sign an executive order requiring colleges and universities to uphold free speech if they want federal research money.

“If they don’t, it will be very costly,” Trump said.

Soon after, Trump signed the executive order. It was stalled by opponents, who included congressional Republicans and some in the White House. Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, chair of the Senate’s education committee, questioned whether the order was constitutional.

At this point in the story, we've heard the last about the Berkeley assault. But the Journal's account leaves a few details out.

When the assailant, Zachary Greenberg, was arrested, he was charged with three felonies. Republicans want us all to believe that a conservative-hating lefty university and community didn't take this incident seriously, but three felonies is a lot of felonies.

The charges are still pending six years later, but there's a reason for that: Greenberg, out on bail, was arrested a year later for what appears to have been a completely apolitical stabbing. That was 2020. In 2022, he was tried and found guilty:

A San Mateo County jury found the 30-year old El Cerrito resident guilty of assault with a deadly weapon Friday, more than two years after he was arrested for stabbing a man five times during a fight outside of a Princeton-by-the-Sea restaurant, according to court records.

In August 2020, as Greenberg and his girlfriend waited in line outside a Princeton-by-the-Sea restaurant, the victim asked the couple to move out of his way as he rode his bike on the sidewalk, according to court documents. After Greenberg declined, a fight broke out between the two men. Greenberg eventually stabbed the victim three times in the head and twice in the torso with a folding knife. San Mateo County Sheriff’s deputies arrested Greenberg near the scene.

The victim survived after a week-long hospitalization.

During the trial, Greenberg was “defiant,” according to San Mateo County District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe. He said Greenberg claimed that he had stabbed the man in self-defense and that the two men were complete strangers.

Greenberg got a six-year sentence in that attack.

It appears to me that Zachary Greenberg isn't an anti-conservative ideologue -- he's a man with severe anger management issues and a penchant for sudden violence. I have no idea how Berkeley was supposed to prevent him from attacking Williams, any more than I can imagine how the restaurant was supposed to prevent him from stabbing the bicyclist. Also, a university that was allowing a right-winger unaffiliated with the institution to set up a table on campus was already a pretty good job of promoting campus speech. (By contrast, right now, in order to limit anti-Israel activism, Columbia University has locked the gates at most campus entrances and is not allowing anyone on campus without a university ID.)

The Berkeley incident was merely a pretext for Trump's unsuccessful first-term assault on academia -- the Journal story explicitly tells us that Bannon and Miller already wanted to launch the attack before the incident happened. Pro-Gaza campus protests are a pretext now. The war would have happened anyway, because the right can't tolerate the existence of any institution it can't control.