Of course he isn't going full TACO, just half TACO with a twist.
Chinese students in America number under 300k annually. Communist Party membership/support will receive more scrutiny.
And helping Israel beat Iran doesn't mean being neck-deep in war.
But this gets traffic, which is the point for social media parasites.
... the White House deputy chief of staff — and chief architect of Trump’s immigration agenda — is taking a sledgehammer to what remains of the libertarian-conservative fusionism that was prominent in the party pre-Trump.
“The libertarians in the House and Senate trying to take down this bill — they’re not stupid. They just don’t care,” Miller said in an interview with conservative activist and commentator Charlie Kirk last week.
“Immigration has never mattered to them; it will never matter to them. Deportations have never mattered to them; it will never matter to them. You will never live a day in your life where a libertarian cares as much about immigration and sovereignty as they do about the Congressional Budget Office.” ...
Miller’s aversion to libertarians, though, seems to go deeper than opportunistic messaging for the bill. He posted in 2022 that the uprising of the ideology in the House GOP is “how we ended up with open borders globalist [Paul] Ryan.” He blamed libertarian candidates for siphoning votes away from failed Trump-endorsed candidates in 2022 — Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona, and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire.
“Another example of how libertarians ruin everything,” Miller said in one post responding to a 2022 Georgia Senate poll. ...
More.
The CBS Poll referenced in the story indicates 55% like Trump's deportation goals but 56% dislike his approach.
Polling on the reconciliation bill indicates most think it will help the wealthy and hurt poor and middle class people, with a third admitting they have no idea what's in the bill. Well, neither did many in the US House who voted for the damn thing.
This points up the political danger of these Christmas Tree bills adorned with something for everyone. They're too complicated to understand and therefore capture little enthusiasm. But Stephen Miller fancifully thinks otherwise:
“By including the immigration language with the tax cuts with the welfare reform, it creates a coalition. Politics is all about coalitions,” Miller said in the interview with Kirk — also praising Trump in the interview as “able to create a winning formula for populist, nationalist, conservative government.”
But not libertarian government.
This is the full text of La révolution Trump by Emmanuel Todd in "From Russia With Love", translated by Arnaud Bertrand:
The Trump Revolution
I would like to try to understand the immediate cause of the Trump Revolution. Every revolution has primarily endogenous causes; it is first and foremost the outcome of internal dynamics and contradictions within the society concerned. However, one striking thing in history is the frequency with which revolutions are triggered by military defeats. The Russian revolution of 1905 was preceded by a military defeat against Japan. The Russian revolution of 1917 was preceded by a defeat against Germany. The German revolution of 1918 was also preceded by a defeat. Even the French Revolution, which seems more endogenous, had been preceded in 1763 by France's defeat in the Seven Years' War, a major defeat since the Ancien Régime lost all its colonies. The collapse of the Soviet system was also triggered by a double defeat: in the arms race with the United States and by the retreat from Afghanistan. I believe we must start from this notion of a defeat that brings about a revolution to understand the Trump revolution. The experience currently underway in the United States, even if we don't know exactly what it will be, is a revolution. Is it a revolution in the strict sense? Is it a counter-revolution? It is in any case a phenomenon of extraordinary violence, a violence that turns on one hand against the allied-subjects, the Europeans, the Ukrainians, but which expresses itself on the other hand, internally, in American society, through a struggle against universities, against gender theory, against scientific culture, against the policy of including Blacks in the American middle classes, against free trade and against immigration. This revolutionary violence is, in my opinion, linked to defeat. Various people have reported to me conversations between members of the Trump team and what is striking is their awareness of defeat. People like J.D. Vance, the vice president, and many others, are people who have understood that America had lost this war. For the United States, it was fundamentally an economic defeat. The sanctions policy showed that the financial power of the West was not an all-power. The Americans had the revelation of the fragility of their military industry. People at the Pentagon know very well that one of the limits to their action is the limited capacity of the American military-industrial complex. This American awareness of defeat contrasts with the non-awareness of Europeans. Europeans did not organize the war. Because they did not organize the war, they cannot have full awareness of defeat. To have full awareness of defeat, they would need access to Pentagon thinking. But Europeans do not have access to it. Europeans therefore situate themselves mentally before the defeat while the current American administration situates itself mentally after the defeat.
Defeat and Cultural Crisis
My experience of the fall of communism taught me, as I have said, something important: the collapse of a system is mental as much as economic. What is collapsing in the current West, and first in the United States, is not only economic dominance, but also the belief system that animated it or was superimposed on it. The beliefs that accompanied Western triumphalism are collapsing. But as in any revolutionary process, we do not yet know which new belief is the most important, which is the belief that will emerge victorious from the process of decomposition.
The Reasonable in the Trump Administration
I want to clarify that I had no principled hostility toward Trump at the start. During Trump's first election, in 2016, I was among those who admitted that America was sick, that its industrial and working heart was being destroyed, that ordinary Americans were suffering from the general policy of the Empire and that there were very good reasons for many voters to vote for Trump. In Trump's intuitions, there are very reasonable things. Trump's protectionism, the idea that America must be protected to rebuild its industry, results from a very reasonable intuition. I am myself a protectionist. I wrote books about it long ago. I also consider that the idea of immigration control is reasonable, even if the style adopted by the Trump administration in managing immigration is unbearably violent. Another reasonable element, which surprises many Westerners, is the Trump administration's insistence on saying that there are only two sexes in humanity, men and women. I do not see there a rapprochement with Vladimir Putin's Russia but a return to the ordinary conception of humanity that has existed since the appearance of Homo sapiens, a biological evidence on which, moreover, science and the Church agree. There is reasonableness in the Trump revolution.
Nihilism in the Trump Revolution
I must now say why, despite the presence of these reasonable elements, I am pessimistic and why I think the Trump experience will fail. I will recall why I was optimistic for Russia from 2002 and why I am pessimistic for the United States in 2025. There is in the behavior of the Trump administration, a deficit of thought, an unpreparedness, a brutality, an impulsive, unreflective behavior, which evokes the central concept of The Defeat of the West, that of nihilism. I explain in The Defeat of the West, that religious emptiness, the zero stage of religion, leads to anguish rather than to a state of freedom and well-being. The zero state brings us back to the fundamental problem. What is it to be a man? What is the meaning of things? A classic response to these questions, in a phase of religious collapse, is nihilism. We pass from the anguish of emptiness to the deification of emptiness, a deification of emptiness that can lead to a will to destroy things, men, and ultimately reality. Transgender ideology is not in itself something serious on the moral level but it is fundamental on the intellectual level because saying that a man can become a woman or a woman a man reveals a will to destroy reality. This was, in association with cancel culture, with the preference for war, an element of the nihilism that predominated under the Biden administration. Trump rejects all that. However, what strikes me currently is the emergence of a nihilism that takes other forms: a will to destroy science and the university, black middle classes, or disordered violence in the application of American protectionist strategy. When, without thinking, Trump wants to establish customs duties between Canada and the United States, while the Great Lakes region constitutes a single industrial system, I see there a destructive impulse as much as protection. When I see Trump suddenly establishing protectionist tariffs against China while forgetting that the majority of American smartphones are manufactured in China, I tell myself that we cannot be content to consider this as stupidity. It is stupidity certainly, but it is perhaps also nihilism. Let us move to a higher moral level: the Trumpian fantasy of transforming Gaza, emptied of its population, into a tourist resort is typically a high-intensity nihilist project. The fundamental contradiction of American policy, however, I will look for it on the side of protectionism. The theory of protectionism tells us that protection can only work if a country possesses the qualified population that would allow it to profit from tariff protections. A protectionist policy will only be effective if you have engineers, scientists, qualified technicians. Which Americans do not have in sufficient numbers. Now I see the United States beginning to hunt down their Chinese students, and so many others, those very ones who allow them to compensate for their deficit in engineers and scientists. This is absurd. The theory of protectionism also tells us that protection can only launch or relaunch industry if the State intervenes to participate in the construction of new industries. Now we see the Trump administration attacking the State, this State that should nourish scientific research and technological progress. Worse: if we look for the motivation of the struggle against the federal state led by Elon Musk and others, we realize that it is not even economic. Those who are familiar with American history know the capital role of the federal State in the emancipation of Blacks. Hatred of the federal state, in the United States, most often derives from anti-Black resentment. When one fights against the American federal State, one fights against the central administrations that have emancipated and that protect Blacks. A high proportion of black middle classes has found jobs in the federal administration. The struggle against the federal State therefore does not integrate into a general conception of economic and national reconstruction. If I think of the multiple and contradictory acts of the Trump administration, the word that comes to mind is dislocation. A dislocation whose direction we do not know very well.
Absolute Nuclear Family + Zero Religion = Atomization
I am very pessimistic for the United States. I will return, to conclude this exploratory conference, to my fundamental concepts as historian and anthropologist. I said at the beginning of this conference that the fundamental reason why I had believed, quite early, from 2002, in a return of Russia to stability, is because I was aware of the existence of a communitarian anthropological foundation in Russia. Unlike many, I do not need hypotheses about the state of religion in Russia to understand Russia's return to stability. I see a family, community culture, with its values of authority and equality, which moreover allows us to understand a little what the nation is in the Russian mind. There is indeed a relationship between the form of the family and the idea one has of the nation. To the community family corresponds a strong, compact idea of the nation or people. Such is Russia. In the case of the United States, as in that of England, we are in the inverse case. The model of the English and American family is nuclear, individualist, without even including a precise rule of inheritance. Freedom of will reigns. The Anglo-American absolute nuclear family is very little structuring for the nation. The absolute nuclear family certainly has an advantage of flexibility. Generations succeed each other by separating. The speed of adaptation of the United States or England, the plasticity of their social structures (which allowed the English industrial revolution and American takeoff) largely result from this absolute nuclear family structure. But beside or above this individualist family structure there was in England as in the United States the discipline of Protestant religion, with its potential for social cohesion. Religion, as a structuring factor, was capital for the Anglo-American world. It has disappeared. The zero state of religion, combined with very little structuring family values does not seem to me an anthropological and historical combination that could lead to stability. It is toward ever greater atomization that the Anglo-American world is heading. This atomization can only lead to an accentuation, without visible limit, of American decadence. I hope I am wrong, I hope I have forgotten an important positive factor. I unfortunately now find only one additional negative factor, which appeared to me when reading a book by Amy Chua, a university professor at Yale who was J.D. Vance's mentor. Political Tribes. Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (2018) underlines, after many other texts, the unique character of the American nation: a civic nation, founded by the adherence of all successive immigrants to political values transcending ethnicity. Certainly. This was very early the official theory. But there was also in the United States a dominant white Protestant group, itself derived from a rather long and quite ethnic history at bottom. This American nation has become, since the pulverization of the Protestant group, really post-ethnic, a purely "civic" nation, in theory united by attachment to its constitution, to its values. Amy Chua's fear is that of a reversion of America to what she calls tribalism. A regressive pulverization. Each of the European nations is fundamentally, whatever its family structure, its religious tradition, its vision of itself, an ethnic nation, in the sense of a people attached to a land, with its language, its culture, a people anchored in history. Each has a stable foundation. Russians have that, Germans have that, the French have that, even if they are a bit bizarre at the moment on these concepts. America no longer has that. A civic nation? Beyond the idea, the reality of an American civic nation but deprived of morality by the zero state of religion leaves one dreaming. It even gives one chills. My personal fear is that we are, not at all at the end, but only at the beginning of a fall of the United States that will reveal to us things that we cannot even imagine. The threat is there: even more than in an American empire, whether triumphant, or weakened, or destroyed, going toward things that we cannot imagine.
This is a link to the original text (in French: emmanueltodd.substack.com/p/bons-baisers) which is actually much longer than this, as it touches on more topics than the "Trump revolution".
I disagree with the premise that the United States has been defeated and that the Trump "revolution" is the result, but I do not doubt that she is in danger of defeat. Todd's other observations are salutary.
Such defeats as we have experienced have resulted from a failure of the will, primarily of the will to pay the financial costs of maintaining American leadership in the world. This failure of the will traces to the 1960s liberal social revolution, but was made bipartisan and supercharged as conservatism by the libertarian success of the Reagan Revolution in defeating the necessary role played by high ordinary income tax rates in the United States to fund it.
The word "tax" has been a four-letter word to Republicans ever since. But it is a myth that the taxpayers know best what to do with their money. The rich have hollowed out the country's capital strength and call it the land of opportunity. We have little to show for it since 1986.
The Trump revolution, for all its will to power, which is its main attraction in a country devoid of will, also refuses to pay, which is why it is not a true revolution and will not endure. The tax cut revolution of 1986 is not repeatable. That Trump would raise taxes on the rich to pay for his big, beautiful bill tells you that he knows what must be done, but as with immigration, he is a paper tiger and is not up to it. Trump is not the man demanded by the times, however much millions hope otherwise. He remains but a transitional figure.
Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.
They are as stupid as they are insufferably arrogant.
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| US GDP as a share of world GDP has been in steady decline since 1960 to just 26% in 2023 |
AXIOS today, here:
A bedrock idea of conservative economic philosophy is [the] idea that low taxes fuel economic growth.
This idea is simply false, and history proves it.
We've had 38 years since the Reagan Tax Reform Act of 1986 to prove it correct and it's not.
Real GDP 1986-2024 has grown at a compound annual rate of 2.586%, a rate 29% worse than for the same length of time before that when taxes were much higher.
Real GDP 1948-1986 grew at a compound annual rate of 3.635%.
Tax reform is a complicated topic, the political subject of the AXIOS article.
I can simplify it for you: Tax like we used to in the immediate post-war.
Nominal marginal rates in 1957 (dollars are NOT adjusted for inflation in the tables), the height of the Baby Boom, went from 20% to 91%.
The set up didn't stop people from marrying, having children, and buying houses, and it didn't stop economic growth, because it forced rich people to avoid these confiscatory marginal rates by investing their money domestically to earn income at lower rates of capital taxation.
Ronald Reagan's tax reform was a license to invest elsewhere, and we're all poorer for it.
If Democrats had any brains they would propose richly rewarding domestic investment using the tax code and severely punishing foreign investment. They could start by raising top marginal tax rates on ordinary income and offering much lower long term capital gains tax rates de-linked from ordinary income but only for domestic investment.
The country desperately needs much better economic growth, and the libertarian-Republican consensus is not providing it.
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| Investment abroad eclipsed investment at home for the first time in 1993 and is 200% of domestic today |
Everything is reduced to a mere transaction.
It is libertarianism writ large.
John McCain would not be happy with his old friend. McCain was a main agitator for freedom in Ukraine and its alliance with the West. The policy wisdom of that was controversial, but it wasn't framed as purely economic.
Lindsey used to be for freedom in Ukraine like McCain. Lindsey used to be an immigration liberal who advocated for amnesty. Now he's a suck-up to Trump as bad as Marco Rubio, who also used to talk about the old American values preached by Ronald Reagan.
They are shapeshifters all, just like the formerly NeverTrump J. D. Vance.
You cannot trust any of these people any more than we can trust Vladimir Putin.
Lindsey Graham here:
I told Zelensky we'll talk about security guarantees. We'll talk about ceasefires and how the war ends. This is a process. You have a new relationship with America, a 500 billion, half trillion, dollar deal that President Trump is proud of that gives us an interest worth defending.
In other words, if it's not about money it's not worth defending.
Thy money perish with thee.
-- Acts 8:20
But The Federalist has its blinders on. Biden baaaaaaad! Trump gooooood!
"Let's see if we can find some naive kid to write a story about it!"
By Defending Free Speech Worldwide, Team Trump Reclaims America’s Global Moral High Ground:
Under President Donald Trump, the suppression of natural rights by Western powers will no longer be ignored by the United States.
Yep, J. D. Vance goes to Europe to beat up on our friends. But suppression of freedom will be ignored, in places like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China. And above all in Ukraine.
This is the essence of libertarianism: Make the good the enemy of the perfect.
But defending freedom where it really counts would take some courage, and they don't have it.
The author of this article, who graduated from college in 2022 with a BA in political "science", ends it touting the execrable Darren Beattie at Marco Rubio's State Department, a Taiwan surrender monkey.
The article is the second in the queue at Real Clear Politics this morning. One goes there looking for some serious editorial judgment and gets this.
Trump/Vance don't have the moral high ground. They are just the cowardly other side of the same old hypocritical American coin.
"Here, let's look at this completely irrational thing and apply some logic to it now that we're down 28 points in the fourth quarter".
Their tidy little world of dollars and cents makes no sense, either.
Imagine Winston Churchill saying this after Dunkirk.
What Trump is doing will be challenged all the way to the Supreme Court, which already ruled the 1996 version of the line item veto unconstitutional.
Trump is a renegade.
Imagine a Democrat president simply canceling programs Republicans passed and firing all the people in them. That's what this is. And that's what the future will bring if Trump gets away with any of this.
It's anarchy, and it's unconstitutional, however much you may agree with the cuts. The Court will set this straight or the federal government is finished as an institution.