In January, I wrote about President Donald Trump on his first day in office signing an executive order that appeared designed to help implement his express desire to roll back many of the United States government restrictions imposed over the last few decades that have limited Americans’ choices for products used in their homes. Three months later, it looks like the Trump administration is following through in a significant way toward accomplishing this objective.
Since his first term, we have grown used to President Donald Trump badgering governments of fellow NATO countries to increase their “defense” spending to five percent of their respective GDPs. Quote marks are used in the preceding sentence because such spending by these governments, or the US, will largely be used for offense, feeding the military-industrial complex, and other purposes far removed from defense.
It is an improvement that President Donald Trump has made himself many times more available for media questions than did Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden and Trump’s November election opponent Kamala Harris who notoriously made great effort to avoid reporters’ questions. Still, it would be nice if Trump told his White House employees to knock off their use of petty rules limiting media access.
“A range of factions with mutually exclusive policy goals entered the Trump White House hoping the president would prioritize their particular political project.” So begins an interesting article by Christian Britschgi last week at Reason.
It sounds like a setup for failure. And Britschgi presents a case that that is what is unfolding for these factions whether they advocated removing government barriers to operation of the free market or imposing trade barriers, ending wars or starting more wars.
The tariffs President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday are massive in size and scope, Indeed, some early analysis indicates Trump has raised the United States average tariff rate to higher than did the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 that contributed to the American people’s suffering in the Great Depression. A big difference, though, is that Trump on his own was able to impose his sweeping tariffs this week, while the 1930 tariffs were imposed via legislation approved by votes and in the United States House of Representatives and Senate and then signed into law by President Herbert Hoover.
In the November of 2024 presidential election, CNN exit polling indicated that Donald Trump won the support of 76 percent of voters who answered that in the past year inflation had caused their families “severe hardship.” Now, less than five months later, voters are viewing the Trump administration as failing to address this issue sufficiently. A March 27-28 CBS poll found that 64 percent of polled individuals believed the Trump administration was “not enough” focused on lowering prices.
On November 9, a few days after Donald Trump won election to return to the White House, I wrote an article titled “Defunding NPR.” In the article, I presented reasons why “a spending cut that jumps out as among the most obvious for [Department of Government Efficiency leader Elon Musk] and the incoming Donald Trump administration to pursue is eliminating all US government support for National Public Radio (NPR) and its affiliated programing and radio stations.” Here is an update.
The United States government does not need to give a dime to any college. But, if it does continue its funding of colleges, the First Amendment of the US Constitution bars that funding from being denied to a college because the college is determined to have insufficiently prevented speech the US government opposes, such as speech the US government deems to be critical of the Israel government.
Last week, I wrote about experimental “vaccines” that the United States government has been working with pharmaceutical companies to develop — different ones for poultry and people. I asked if Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Brooke Rollins, both new to their jobs in February, would stand up against this and other aspects of “the US government’s bird flu scheme ramped up during the previous presidential administration.” Here is an update.
President Donald Trump’s efforts, through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and otherwise, to reduce United States government spending is the focus of much attention. Indeed, in his speech Tuesday night in the US Capitol, Trump listed several expenditures his administration had uncovered that he categorized as “appalling waste.” He also declared that his administration would balance the budget, something he noted had not been accomplished in 24 years.
It was thus peculiar that Trump slipped into his over hour and a half speech a shout-out to one of the groups most notorious for involvement in massive spending by the United States government — the military-industrial complex. The shout-out, though, was likely not understood by most people. This is because Trump did not use the term “military-industrial complex.”