There’s a conundrum around the politics of “affordability.” The issue is that prices are rising while incomes are stagnating, a crushing combination for most people. But there’s little the government can do about either in time for the 2026 midterms, and even the 2028 presidential election. Exacerbating matters, the president and Congress insist on making it worse.  

President Donald Trump famously promised to lower prices “on Day One” in his 2024 campaign. That was bluster, of course, and to be charitable, he meant he would reduce the rate of inflation. Yet he’s dead set against the standard way to do it—keeping interest rates elevated to slow demand. The Federal Reserve hiked interest rates 11 times under Joe Biden, and it worked: inflation slowed from 9 percent to 2.9 percent. 

But cutting rates won’t satisfy voters, because recent inflation hasn’t disappeared from prices. From December 2019, just before the pandemic, to today, overall prices in America rose 25 percent, including 25 percent increases for eggs, pork, milk, cars and trucks; 30 or 31 percent increases for housing, rent, food overall, and bread; 37 percent increases for electricity; and 55 percent increases for beef. The relative bargains—items whose prices increased notably less—have been prescription drugs, up 6 percent; and medical care, gasoline, and potatoes, all up 15 to 17 percent.  

The government can make some purchases more affordable by subsidizing them, as it often does for health care, energy, and food. Yet Trump and Congressional Republicans have taken aim at those subsidies, making healthcare less affordable by cutting Medicaid and Obamacare supports, making food less affordable by cutting SNAP benefits, and making energy less affordable by cutting support for wind and solar energy.  

On top of that, Trump’s mindless tariff policies have increased prices on thousands of products. Inescapably, today’s MAGA government is really MALA, Make America Less Affordable.  

The other half of our affordability conundrum is income, because the median income of Americans, after inflation, has been stuck since 2019. In 2024 dollars, the median household income was $83,260 in 2019, and $83,730 in 2024—and prices for food, housing, rent, and electricity have risen faster than overall inflation.  

To more fully grasp the affordability story, consider that incomes have two major components: earnings from work (“labor income”) and income from assets (“capital income”).  

Typically, people earn more when they become more productive, and over the past five years, productivity has increased at a healthy rate. Those productivity gains depend on businesses investing in new technologies, equipment, and facilities, and workers making the best of those investments. The government does its part by subsidizing both business investment and people’s education and skills. The rise of the American middle class and decades of broad-based upward mobility have rested on wages and salaries rising with productivity.  

But here’s another affordability puzzle: Productivity increased 10.4 percent from 2019 to 2024, or about 2.1 percent per year, but incomes stalled. That’s stronger than the 1.7 percent average annual productivity gains in the 1980s, when incomes rose nicely, and nearly as strong as the 2.4 percent average gains in the 1990s, when incomes grew at the fastest rate in decades.  

In one respect, Americans’ earnings behave as expected—people with more education and skills continue to earn more. In 2024, real median earnings were 24 percent higher for people with advanced degrees than for college graduates, 66 percent higher for college graduates than for high school graduates, and 26 percent higher for high school graduates than for high school dropouts. 

But at every level of education, those real earnings increased from 2019 to 2024 not by 10.4 percent or even half that, but by a total of 0.7 percent for college graduates, 0.5 percent for those with some college but no bachelor’s degree, 1.5 percent for high school graduates and high school dropouts. And for those with advanced or professional degrees, real earnings declined 0.8 percent.  

Weekly Earnings by Education, 2019 to 2024, By Educational Attainment 

At the heart of the affordability problem: productivity gains didn’t translate into higher earnings.  

Why not? Incomes have two major parts: the earnings people receive from working and the interest, dividends, and capital gains they receive from their financial and other assets.  

While most Americans’ earnings after inflation virtually stagnated from 2019 to 2024, capital income after inflation increased nearly 30 percent over the same period. And while earnings in America are distributed unequally, capital income is in a class by itself. 

The Treasury reports that capital income in 2024 totaled $4.5 trillion, and that the bottom 50 percent of Americans received just 2.5 percent of it. But the top 10 percent pocketed 88 percent of that fast-rising capital income, including 52 percent ($2.3 trillion) for the top 1 percent and 32 percent ($1.4 trillion) for the top one-tenth of 1 percent.  

The uncomfortable irony is that most of the capital income came from businesses that increased their labor productivity by an average of 10.4 percent. Yet most of it did not go into people’s earnings but into capital payments to owners and shareholders.  

This is not new. Numerous economic studies have found that labor’s share of all national income—the earnings by working people—declined slowly and fairly steadily since the 1970s, while the shares received as capital income (or transfers, mainly Social Security) increased.  

It becomes the treacherous political problem it is today for the president and Congress when inflation keeps exceeding or matches income growth, and within incomes, gains in earnings slow or stop, while gains in capital income surge.  

And in this context, Trump has compounded his economic malpractice. His tariffs and subsidy cuts not only make America less affordable for most people; they also finance $1 trillion in tax cuts for the sliver of people who collect most of the fast-rising capital income.  

That’s today’s crisis of affordability in a nutshell. I was an architect of Bill Clinton’s economic program for ordinary people that produced the 1990s boom, which included market-based reforms and government investments. Yet when the economy shifts, new politics usually follow. Today’s affordability crisis is tailor-made for populism. Given the hollowness and failures of rightwing populism under Trump, the door is wide open for Democrats to champion populism from the left.  

The post Affordability: How Trump Has Made It Worse appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The political stalemate that has closed down much of the federal government for two weeks has emotionally stressed and financially strapped 750,000 federal workers furloughed to date, and another 650,000 working without pay. This is leaving aside the 300,000 federal employees who were fired or took forced buyouts this year. In time, it will also damage thousands of companies and employees that depend on the spending of those workers and thousands of other companies and employees that rely on shuttered federal operations.

The economic costs will depend on how long the standstill lasts. If it’s resolved this week or next and the 1.4 million federal workers receive their back pay as the law requires, the economic costs will be minimal. If it persists into November and is followed by more shutdowns, and President Donald Trump ignores yet another law, the costs to the economy will mount.

In either event, today’s shutdown is the opening act or what boxing fans call the undercard—the bout that precedes the main event. The dispute concerns the Democrats’ drive to use the Continuing Resolution to undo Republicans’ directive in their One Big Beautiful (sic) Bill to slash Obamacare premium subsidies for tens of millions of Americans. But the Continuing Resolution provides only short-term federal funding while Congress struggles with the 2026 federal budget. That’s the main event.

Very soon, the brawl over Trump’s 2026 budget will dwarf today’s skirmish. It’s loaded with political third rails that will be as fearsome to many congressional Republicans as the president’s personal threats to keep them in line. With their narrow majorities, how many GOP representatives and senators will vote for policies their constituents reject?

That looming debate will force virtually all of them to support publicly, one by one, the acutely unpopular tariffs Trump needs for his revenues; vast new funding for his far-reaching and even less popular ICE operations to violently arrest and summarily deport millions of law-abiding immigrants and deploy U.S. soldiers and marines to American cities; and carry out the president’s deep and wildly unpopular cuts to Medicaid and research and treatments for diabetes, Parkinson’s, and cancer. As I wrote in these pages three months ago, voting for the final passage of his 2026 budget will also endorse five years of budget deficits projected to nearly equal all U.S. annual private savings.

Given these multiple landmines, the political insider Simon Rosenberg wrote this week, “Under our current rules, passing a budget requires 60 votes in the Senate, all 53 Republicans and 7 Democrats, and a simple majority in the House. Do we think these guys can somehow strike a deal that 7 Democrats, all Congressional Rs, and Trump can agree to?”

And that’s without considering the likely damage to Trump’s political leverage from the pending release of Jeffrey Epstein files. Securing the votes he needs for his budget will make today’s struggle over the Continuing Resolution seem like child’s play.

So, as we consider the shutdown’s economic costs, bear in mind that the coming fierce fights over the 2026 budget may well lead to one or more additional shutdowns, compounding those costs. And that’s all just a prelude to the far greater economic costs from the disruptive policy changes in that budget.

The shutdown’s costs begin with its impact on the incomes and spending of 1.4 million federal employees furloughed or working without pay. The Federal Reserve has found that 37 percent of American households cannot cover an unexpected, $400 emergency expense without borrowing or selling something of value. Even so, many simply couldn’t raise it. That’s chump change alongside the average $1,662 per week that the shutdown costs the 1.4 million furloughed or unpaid federal civilian workers. That tells us that most people cannot cover their regular bills.

Most furloughed and unpaid federal employees and their families are spending less and/or borrowing more (which will only depress their spending later)—and revenues are falling, or will soon, for tens of thousands of businesses where those families pay for food, utilities, rent or mortgage payments, transportation, clothing, healthcare, entertainment, and more. The impact then ripples further through the economy, as those businesses cut back on orders and payments to thousands of other companies that provide and transport the goods and services those businesses sell or use as inputs.

That’s far from the end of it. Additional costs arise from the shutdown’s impact on the federal activities carried out by the furloughed workers. For example, when the national parks suspend operations, the thousands of businesses that supply and deliver goods and services for the parks and their visitors also forfeit revenues they count on. As the shutdown continues or is soon followed by another, those businesses will cut back their operations, jobs, and purchases from thousands of other companies.

The National Park Service is part of the Department of the Interior, and the current shutdown and furloughs also directly affect operations in ten other departments—Defense, Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, Transportation, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, the Treasury, Transportation, State, and independent agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, and NASA. Hundreds of thousands of private companies and employees are involved in those suspended operations.

Most businesses will try to wait out the shutdown, assuming it will be brief. But if it persists or is followed by additional shutdowns, the revenues and investments of companies and employees at each level of these multifaceted production and sales chains will bear meaningful costs, triggering additional ripple effects.

The shutdown also has regional effects based on where the furloughed and unpaid federal employees work and live. As a share of employment, the places with the highest percentages of federal workers, as expected, are the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia, closely followed by New Mexico and Hawaii, and then by Alaska, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Alabama. Since everything today is political, we’ll note that the first five are blue and the next four are red. At the other end, the states least affected by the shutdown are New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Michigan, Oregon, and Wisconsin, all blue or purple.

Let’s do the math. The shutdown directly affects spending by 1.6 percent of all working households and 1.4 percent of U.S. consumption and indirectly influences the spending of perhaps 4 percent of households and 3 percent of consumption. I estimate that if the stalemate continues into November and the ripple effects take hold, October’s monthly economic growth could be diminished by three-tenths of 1 percent, a modest and wholly unnecessary cost of polarization in Washington.

Greater economic damage will come once the shutdown ends, and Congress and Trump will batter themselves enough to enact some form of his budget. Every major initiative in it—the mass deportations; the military mobilizations in blue cities; the brutal cuts to Medicaid, Obamacare, food assistance, medical research, and education; and, of course, Trump’s tariffs—will damage the economy. For at least the next year, there will be few happy days here again.

The post The Shutdown Is Only the First Battle in the War Over Trump’s 2026 Budget appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Last week, Donald Trump claimed the authority to deploy the country’s military to the streets of Washington, D.C. to help fight crime. Yet, hard data show it’s not about crime in the nation’s capital.  Instead, the evidence points to other, more troubling reasons and aspirations, especially the president’s personal sense of entitlement to power, MAGA’s approach to partisan politics, and an implied threat to public opposition to his exercise of power in the future. 

Trump is not the first president to deploy armed soldiers to the streets of Washington. James Madison did it to fight the British military in the War of 1812, and Abraham Lincoln did it throughout the Civil War. Stationing troops in a country’s capital is also routine in military dictatorships, including today those in Libya, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, and Myanmar facing domestic uprisings, and those in places such as Cuba, Laos, Chad, Botswana, and Burkina Faso that fear future unrest. 

More notably, civilian dictatorships today use soldiers in their capitals to keep order and discourage dissent, an unsavory group that includes China, Russia, North Korea, Egypt, Turkey, and Afghanistan.   

The United States does not face a foreign army or armed domestic forces that threaten the District of Columbia and our political system. Instead, the Trump administration’s rationale for deploying troops in Washington are the city’s crime statistics from 2023. The claim is wholly fallacious. As Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and others have noted, the city’s violent crime rate in 2023 was an outlier that was followed by a decline of 35 percent in 2024 and another 26 percent in the first half of 2025. 

Violent crime rates are higher in DC than in any state, but those comparisons are also fallacious. Every state contains hundreds of rural communities, towns, and small cities. FBI data show that across the country, those areas have violent crime rates at least 60 percent lower than in cities with populations of 500,000 to 1 million like Washington, with no rural, town, and small city residents. 

The proper comparisons for DC are cities of similar size, and the FBI data for 2024 also show that Washington had a lower violent crime rate than Indianapolis, Albuquerque, Memphis, Nashville, or Milwaukee.  Washington also had a lower property crime rate in 2024 than Tucson, Indianapolis, Baltimore, Albuquerque, Memphis, or Seattle.   

Finally, FBI data show that the homicide rate in the nation’s capital fell 39 percent in 2024 to a rate lower than Indianapolis, Baltimore, Detroit, Nashville, and Milwaukee, and DC’s rate for all violent crime was its lowest in more than 30 years.  

If urban crime rates for homicide, all violent offenses, or all property crime were a real basis for President Trump sending in troops, they also justify a long-term military presence in at least 11 other major cities.   

Crime has always been an entirely legitimate focus and concern for public policy. City police forces have handled local crime in urban areas since the mid-nineteenth century; and when urban Americans find their police have not been up to the job, they can pay more taxes or float bonds to expand the police’s presence. The federal government also has helped fund municipal police forces since 1968, and the Bill Clinton and Joseph Biden administrations increased that support.  If crime were the issue for President Trump, he could have followed their examples instead of cutting federal funding for local police by $500 million in the One Big Beautiful (sic) Bill Act.  

As a practical matter, one of President Trump’s points in stationing troops in American cities is a very stark type of partisan politics. The president first sent troops to Los Angeles and now has named Baltimore, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco/Oakland as other place where he also may deploy soldiers. All of them are major cities in solidly Blue states, and all of them have much lower homicide rates than major cities in many solidly Red states. 

The city with the country’s highest homicide rate is St. Louis in red Missouri followed by New Orleans in red Louisiana.  The 2024 data show also that St. Louis’s homicide rate was twice the rate in Washington, 1.6 times higher than Baltimore’s rate, 2.5 times the rate in Chicago, and nearly 12 times the rate in New York City. Homicide rates in New York and Los Angeles are also lower than those in Indianapolis, Dallas, Atlanta, and Greensboro, all major cities in states Trump carried in 2024 and unmentioned in his threats.  

These actions and threats may serve distinct purposes unrelated to crime. A month before the 2024 election, when threats of terrible punishments were a major theme of the Trump-Vance campaign, I wrote in these pages that Niccolo Machiavelli noted long ago that strongman leaders use such threats and acts to consolidate power and authority. Recent events certainly suggest that President Trump sees his threats and use of troops at home as a means of advancing his authority and agenda. It’s equally certain that their deployments have nothing to do with a president’s traditional domestic use of troops to fight a foreign, invading power or defend cities during an armed uprising. 

Earlier this year in these pages, I also pointed to the similarities in Trumpism’s view of American politics as a struggle between friends and domestic enemies and the theories of the Nazi philosopher and jurist Carl Schmitt.  The president’s extraordinary use of the military in American cities now recalls Schmitt’s analysis and belief that when domestic enemies oppose a leader’s policies, the leader has a right and obligation to claim and exercise emergency powers to suppress them.   

Trump’s militarization of the streets of DC isn’t technically illegal, but the distinct odor of authoritarianism is unmistakable. 

The post The Lies Behind Trump’s D.C. Troop Surge  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Everyone who has ever used a dating app knows the disappointment when an online picture doesn’t match reality. Sometimes, economic reports suffer from a similar gap. On Wednesday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported that the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew at a 3 percent annual rate in the second quarter. That sounds like good news, but the underlying data tell us that the U.S. economy is stumbling—and that’s before President Donald Trump doubled down last week on his destructive tariffs.

GDP captures everything the U.S. economy produces, whether it goes into consumption or savings and investment. The BEA data show that Americans’ private consumption grew in the second quarter at an anemic 1.4 percent rate—half the rate in 2024 and half the annual average since 1990. Business investment was also weak in the second quarter, increasing at a 1.9 percent rate, again barely half last year’s rate and one-third the average rate since 1990.

There’s more bad news from other economic fundamentals. Residential investments declined at a 4.6 percent annual rate, compared to 4.2 percent gains in 2024 and average annual gains of 2.5 percent since 1990. And government consumption and investment were nearly flat.

The latest jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics also show a weak economy. So far this year, employment has increased an average of 85,000 jobs per month, falling to 32,000 jobs per month over the past three months, versus monthly increases averaging 216,000 jobs in 2023 and 168,000 jobs in 2024.

The official 3 percent growth report for the second quarter does not reflect the economy’s fundamentals. So, where did it come from?

I have an advantage here because I oversaw the BEA as Bill Clinton’s Under Secretary of Commerce and learned precisely how the Bureau builds the GDP measure. The answer is that the 3 percent growth number was an artifact of how it technically accounts for changes in imports, which fell dramatically in the second quarter.

Trump’s tariffs initially took effect on April 1, 2025, also the first day of the second quarter. Over the next three months, our imports fell at a virtually unheard-of 30.3 percent rate because markets worked as they were supposed to. As the tariffs began to raise import prices, as confirmed by the recent uptick in inflation, businesses and consumers pulled back sharply on those purchases—an important reason why overall consumption and investment weakened.

That’s what always happens when a country imposes high tariffs. Less well-known is that falling imports are counted as a positive for GDP growth under the BEA’s growth accounting. The approach here logically follows BEA’s larger framework for tracking GDP. Growth represents how much the value of domestic production—the DP in GDP—increases, whether it goes to private or public consumption or savings and investment. Imports present a special case because households, businesses, and the government use them without producing them. So, BEA subtracts imports from its measure of the value of output produced here, and when imports fall sharply, as they did in the second quarter, the decline is counted as a positive for growth. Similarly, when imports rise, the increase is counted as a negative for domestic production.

BEA’s treatment of exports follows the same logic. When we produce and export goods or services, they don’t appear as part of consumption or investment. Accordingly, when exports rise, the increase is seen as positive for growth; when they fall, the decrease is a negative for growth.

That’s how the dramatic decline in U.S. imports since Trump’s “Liberation Day” drove the 3 percent official growth rate for an economy that by every basic measure is weakening.

A simple comparison of past years and decades illustrates today’s economic weakness and how Trump’s tariffs have distorted our import and export flows. (I exclude the years of the financial crisis and pandemic here as Black Swan outliers.)

The weakness in the second quarter came after the economy’s substandard performance in the first quarter, when BEA found that GDP contracted at a 0.5 percent annual rate. Again, consumer spending was weak, and residential investment and government consumption and investment declined. Again, Trump’s tariff plans also played a role: U.S. businesses sharply increased their investments by stockpiling foreign-made equipment, technologies, and inputs before his tariffs raised prices. So, imports surged 38 percent in the first quarter, and under BEA’s accounting, that sharp increase turned sluggish growth into a technical quarterly contraction.

What happens next for Americans will depend on many unknowns, but the outlook seems bleak based on what we know today. Trump just announced higher tariffs on imports from 28 countries, including Canada, Brazil, Taiwan, India, and other important trading partners, and a new survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta confirms that most businesses plan to respond to the tariffs by raising prices. So as they take hold, inflation will accelerate, further slowing or contracting consumption and investment. This nexus between tariffs and inflation is the main reason the Federal Reserve hasn’t cut interest rates as the economy has weakened.

As conditions deteriorate later this year, the Fed will cut interest rates at least modestly, but that won’t boost growth much. The Fed directly controls only very short-term rates, while markets determine longer-term rates. As I noted recently in these pages, the most likely direction for those longer-term rates for business loans, mortgages, and most Treasury securities is up, not down. Our coming budget deficits under Trump’s ill-considered tax program are so large as a share of the economy that attracting domestic and foreign capital to fund them—and new private lending financing them—will require higher rates, especially with inflation rising.

Reversing Trump’s tariff and tax program is the only reasonable way to restore healthy growth for the United States. Since that won’t happen, our most likely prospects for 2026 are stagflation or recession.

The post The U.S. Economy Is Stumbling Badly appeared first on Washington Monthly.

President Donald Trump is charting a course that may end in the economy’s third meltdown in less than 20 years. Whatever he and his economic courtiers think they’re doing, the waves of unprecedented budget deficits now under his One Big Beautiful Bill Act and his tariff war could trigger a grave economic crisis that will recall the Financial Crisis and the pandemic.

Whether budget deficits matter and how much they matter have been political issues since the government began regularly operating in the red half a century ago. But deficit hawks cried wolf so often while the United States economy outperformed other advanced countries that most people no longer pay serious attention to the deficit. Liberal advocates of the free-lunch approach to government spending and revenues latched on to “Modern Monetary Theory,” a set of baseless claims that deficits never matter because the government can always print the money to cover them. The president and his cowering congressional Republicans have embraced the same Panglossian view to defend their tax cuts and soaring spending for defense and deportations.

The economics of public finance is indifferent to the expedient rationales of both sides. Deficits always have effects. They’re a key weapon for reviving the economy when it’s underwater. They also matter in normal times because market economies run on credit, and since the government can’t go out of business, it’s always first in line for available credit. So, when companies need loans to purchase technologies and other equipment, build factories, or conduct research and development, and when people need loans for a house, an automobile, or winter jackets for the kids, they compete for the credit left over after the Treasury is done borrowing.

Deficits matter in normal times like today, depending on their size as a share of the economy and the funds available. Together, these factors largely determine the interest rates that the Treasury, private companies, and American consumers must pay for credit.

That now poses a serious dilemma for the economy. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzed Trump’s program as enacted. It calculated that the budget deficit will exceed $2.3 trillion or 7 percent of GDP next year and every year for the next decade.

Lower taxes for wealthy households and profitable companies will be responsible for most of the tsunami of red ink. CBO reports that over the next five years, from 2026 to 2030, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Act will reduce federal taxes on high-income Americans by an average of $504 billion annually and federal taxes on businesses by $130 billion annually. The sweeping law passed without any Democratic votes also harms millions of Americans by cutting Medicaid and ACA funding by an average of $93 billion annually and reducing clean energy subsidies by an average of $45 billion annually. Even so, those painful cuts will offset less than 22 percent of the reduced revenues from people and businesses at the top.

The result of all this Republican borrowing matters greatly, because a deficit of 7 percent of GDP represents 90 percent of all annual private savings. From 2022 to 2024, those savings averaged 7.7 percent of GDP—4.1 percent of GDP in personal savings by Americans, and 3.7 percent of GDP in retained earnings by businesses. On the path set by Trump and ever-compliant congressional Republicans, financing the coming deficits by ourselves would require, in effect, that everyone invest 90 percent of their yearly savings for retirement, college tuitions, or home downpayments and 90 percent of undistributed business earnings in new Treasury securities.

Fortunately, foreign governments and investors have, for several decades, used some of their savings to buy our Treasury securities, stocks, and corporate debt. At last count, they now hold $9.6 trillion or 33 percent of all publicly-held U.S. government debt, $4.5 trillion or 32 percent of all U.S. corporate debt, and $16.9 trillion or 27 percent of U.S. stocks. When Trump and his America First fans blame other nations for “ripping off” the United States, they don’t mention (and probably don’t know) how much their incomes and lifestyles depend on foreign loans and investments.

The outsized deficits coming under Trump’s program will strain those foreign creditors. Our budget deficits were larger during and immediately following the Financial Crisis and the pandemic, but those spikes were anomalies that receded quickly as the economy recovered. In normal times like today, federal red ink has represented a fraction of what we now face, with deficits averaging 2.1 percent of GDP in the 1990s, 1.5 percent of GDP from 2000 to 2007, and 3.8 percent of GDP from 2012 to 2019.

During the financial crisis and the pandemic, the Federal Reserve also kept the cost of public and private borrowing low. At the same time the deficits surged, the Fed pumped waves of new credit into the financial system through unprecedented purchases of trillions of dollars in Treasury securities and corporate bonds. These “quantitative easing” policies were Hail Mary passes that broadly succeeded because the economy was so depressed that inflation remained low despite the extraordinary levels of fiscal and monetary stimulus.

Trump’s impending avalanche of new federal borrowing is not an emergency response to the economy breaking down. Since mid-2022, the Fed has been selling off the loans it purchased under quantitative easing. Trump’s program will exacerbate post-pandemic deficits that have averaged nearly 6 percent from 2022 to 2025. The hunt for the trillions of dollars in savings needed to finance the coming deficits and support business investment, mortgages, and consumer borrowing will inevitably push up interest rates.

That’s one reason Trump regularly attacks the Federal Reserve and his appointed chair, Jerome Powell, for not cutting interest rates. But acceding to Trump’s demands in this environment won’t produce the effects he expects. The Fed directly controls only one interest rate, the “federal funds rate” for overnight loans between banks. It’s likely that when the market faces trillions of dollars in new annual deficit financings, continuing demand for business and consumer credit, and rising inflation, interest rates will increase even if the federal funds rate falls. The resulting slowdown or possible recession will further increase the deficit.

American economic stability in 2026 and onward depends on the willingness of foreign investors and governments to lend us more, year after year, than they ever have before. Their willingness to purchase one-third of our public debt and nearly one-third of our economy has rested on their confidence that the U.S. will remain highly productive, innovative, and stable.

Their confidence will be sorely tested by MAGA running up trillions of dollars in new, annual public debt caused by shrinking tax revenue from the wealthy and corporations and by imposing punishing tariffs on imports from the creditors we need. If they lose patience and reduce their purchases of U.S. Treasury securities—or worse, sell holdings—our interest rates will spike, the stock and bond markets will plummet, and the economy could crash. And this time, more deficit stimulus won’t work, and flooding the system with waves of additional credit won’t work.

Trump is playing chicken with the countries the United States needs to keep its economy going. For once, the deficit hawks are right.

The post Trump’s Budget Could Break the Economy appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Donald Trump has steered the American economy into a perfect storm. In the book, film, and now in real life, a rare combination of destructive forces comes together and magnifies the damage. This storm could break the U.S. economy.  

Trump’s tariffs are the most destructive force. Their first-order damages begin by arbitrarily driving up the prices of every product and input we import, followed by price hikes on most competing products and inputs made here. This will leave less money for everything else, depressing growth and jobs even as inflation accelerates—a textbook definition of stagflation. And these first-order costs are compounded by retaliatory tariffs by the primary targets of Trump’s levies, further slowing jobs, wages, and growth. 

Six months ago, our economy grew at a healthy 2.8 percent rate, and inflation had eased sharply. Now, Trump’s policies have ushered in rising prices and the first stage of a recession.  

His program’s second-order costs follow from the unprecedentedly high tariffs on goods and inputs from our three largest trading partners. The 145 percent tariffs on all Chinese imports and China’s 125 percent retaliatory tariffs have established for now a mutual embargo between the world’s two most important economies, alongside Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on most goods and inputs our companies buy from suppliers in Mexico and Canada.  

If these policies remain in place, they will not only raise prices and slow the economy. By mid-summer, their punishing blows will disrupt supply chains, and Americans should expect the types of shortages their grandparents had to endure during World War II. Despite these inescapable second-order costs, Trump and his apprentice dealmakers have yet to begin negotiations with China, Mexico, or Canada—in large part because the president’s personal pique and economic delusions dictate our indefensible positions.  

It gets worse. Most U.S. imports from our major trading partners are inputs for U.S. manufacturers, products made by their foreign subsidiaries, or energy we need, and truncating our access to those imports will damage a broad array of separate economic activities related to them. (Hat tip to Brad DeLong.) 

Cripple our access to electronic parts from China, vehicles from Canada, or vegetables and fruits from Mexico, and American companies will have no choice but to wind down the jobs and spending for their related marketing, accounting and legal services, transport, and ultimate sales. Our economy will also lose the value American consumers and businesses derive from using those electronics, cars, trucks, and foodstuffs. It will pummel American manufacturers whom Trump claims he wants to help. 

If Trump’s inane tariff regime remains in place for six months or longer, its first and second-order effects could trigger a deep recession akin to 1981-1982 and 2008-2009. And unlike those recessions, the Federal Reserve won’t be able to help much. The tariff-driven inflation will limit the central bank’s ability to cut interest rates, a dilemma that drove Trump to threaten Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.  

Equally important, the bond and equity markets’ thumbs-down responses to Trump’s tariffs and threats signal an even more serious problem: Investors are losing confidence in Trump, his presidency, and perhaps the United States. It’s especially true for foreign investors who reinforced the message by moving away from the dollar, because they’re investing less in our stocks and bonds.  

If their response to our president’s ineptitude and capriciousness persists, it could be ruinous. The stability of our financial system depends on trillions of dollars in foreign capital. In 2024, foreign investors and governments held $18.4 trillion in U.S. stocks and $8.5 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities, about 30 percent of all our stock and 30 percent of all our bonds. While most American investors will likely wait out the coming storm, foreign investors with $27 trillion in American financial assets have plenty of alternatives. In a word, the United States could face destabilizing capital flight.  

To stave off this grim prospect, the Treasury Department and American corporations will have to offer foreign and domestic investors higher returns. (Yields on U.S. treasuries soared after Trump revealed his chaotic tariff regime and have decreased only slightly since then.) So, regardless of what the Fed does, market interest rates may rise even as the economy declines.  

It may not be very far off because the Treasury’s challenge to attract funds to keep the government running is coming to a head. The Treasury already planned to float $1.8 trillion in new bonds in 2025, and that burden will increase substantially as the economy weakens. On top of that, Republicans in Congress will very soon approve Trump’s deficit-busting budget, draining $5 trillion in revenues over 10 years for another round of his 2017 tax cuts, which are set to expire and perhaps up to $4 trillion more for Trump’s other tax promises, plus another $1.5 trillion in increased defense spending.  

Trump and his economic courtiers count on tax cuts and higher spending to ward off recession, and in normal times, they might have been right. But their hopes are delusions under the new conditions they’ve created since the higher interest rates needed to attract the capital the government and U.S. corporations need will thwart most or all of any stimulus.  

Our gathering economic storm includes another feature that could drive the economy onto the rocks. Apart from the tariffs, Trump’s aggrieved attacks on the rule of law also threaten the willingness of foreign investors to continue holding and buying American bonds and stocks. Along with the rest of us, they see Trump and his administration unilaterally abrogating contracts, withholding appropriated funds, dismissing court decisions, attacking judges for enforcing their rulings, deporting people without charges or hearings, providing special treatment for large contributors and favored companies, and threatening law firms and universities without any legal basis. 

The erosion of the rule of law under Trump can have enormous economic significance for a foreign government, investor, or company with stakes in our economy. They now know that the U.S. government may ignore its contracts with them or decide not to enforce their agreements with others when it serves the political or personal interests of the president. That’s the way the world works in the kleptocratic dictatorships in Russia and Venezuela, and virtually no one invests in their stocks and bonds. 

By following their lead, Trump and his apprentices risk devastating capital flight that could leave many of our leading financial institutions insolvent. In addition to his deeply destructive tariffs, Trump’s sweeping campaign against the rule of law in the United States has raised the economic stakes from a rocky business cycle to a potential financial and economic meltdown with terrible consequences. 

The post Trump’s Perfect Storm that Could Sink the American Economy appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Americans are, of course, deeply divided today over race, gender, immigration, religion, and other differences that define us as a people and political culture. These cleavages have existed throughout American history, but in their current iterations, they share a common element in Donald Trump. Both sides of the Trump fault line see him as the first mover in defining the country’s divisions, staking out unyielding positions—as he did last week on race and gender by ending federal anti-discrimination regulations.

Back in office, Trump opened a new division around presidential authority. It pits his ignoring of traditional boundaries and a determination of what he deems necessary to carry out what he sees as his electoral mandate versus the country’s founding beliefs that the Constitution, laws, Congress, and the judiciary establish hard limits on any president’s authority.

To his critics and opponents, Trump’s combative style and record raise fears that he will use his claims to open-ended powers to settle once and for all the country’s longstanding divisions around race, gender, immigration, and more, not in a peaceful or unifying way. For Trump’s supporters, the prospect of him wielding broad authority raises hopes that he will make them more prosperous, secure, and proud.

Both sides of this debate value democracy as they understand it. One side, like James Madison, believes that a large, diverse democracy requires compromise between branches, each with limited power. The other side’s view of democracy rests on the claim that a nationwide election confers the people’s consent on the winner, who can act decisively to serve their interests.

Trump ignores this debate because he operates in a different framework. His approach to politics has always been to cast supporters as friends and critics as enemies. This characterization of politics was first propounded by the German political theorist Carl Schmitt, who has drawn considerable attention. See this New York Times piece from last year, one from the Trumpian Claremont Review, and the leftist Jacobin.

And in Schmitt’s framework, when enemies at home or abroad gain notable political sway, it creates a grave emergency that warrants executive action outside the law. It’s clear why Schmitt was the favored theorist for the Nazi party and a senior jurist in the Third Reich.

It’s safe to assume that the president has never read Carl Schmitt, yet he frequently echoes Schmitt’s thinking. He declared his “authority is total” as president and baldly stated his intention to be “a dictator on day one.” He claims that his domestic enemies weaponized the government and stole the 2020 election, initiating an emergency that justified the January 6 attack on Congress as it prepared to certify Joe Biden’s election. And on the first day of his second term, he pardoned those convicted as “friends” and “patriots.”

In Trump’s first weeks back in office, he asserted presidential authority to end birthright citizenship, announced plans to investigate his critics, suspended funds appropriated by Congress, and summarily fired the Inspector Generals without notice to Congress as required by law. He turned over control of the personal data every American provides to the government to administer Social Security and other taxes and benefits to employees of the mega-billionaire Elon Musk, an open booster of Germany’s AfD party, which is surging in the polls based on anti-immigrant nationalism that echoes the Nazi era.

All these acts are arguably unconstitutional or illegal. All are wholly consistent with a Schmittian view that Trump’s return to the presidency had not yet vanquished America’s domestic enemies, so he can do what he feels is necessary to vanquish them.

This is not muddled thinking or engineered chaos. It’s a coherent view of politics that supersedes the debates between a strong versus weak presidency. A new battle over Trump’s Schmittian approach to America has begun, and the outcome is unsettled.

Our politics are very different from Germany’s in the 1930s. While Germany had been a democracy for less than 15 years before the rise of National Socialism, the United States has been a continuous democracy since the Articles of Confederation 244 years ago. Call me an optimist, but democracy is still embedded in our political DNA.

It also feels doubtful that most Americans will accept that Trump’s opponents are domestic enemies that, in turn, demand the sweeping powers Trump is trying to wield in his first weeks back in office. What happens next depends on how Congress, the Supreme Court, and the media respond to the Trump-Schmitt executive agenda. So far, a Republican Congress has been supine, as even the president’s most controversial nominees speed to confirmation. That leaves the rest of us to decide the kind of America we want, one with a leader with the outside-the-law powers Schmitt championed, and Trump seems to be seizing, or one true to our heritage as the world’s oldest democracy.

The post The German Political Theorist Who Explains What’s Happening in Washington appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Economic reality catches up with every president, and Donald Trump is no exception. His Mar-a-Lago entourage and perhaps the president-elect are already learning that what’s promised either cannot be fulfilled or would be terrible if it was. So now they’re backpedaling on his three central campaign commitments.

Trump’s number one pledge was to round up, detain, and deport 11 million or more immigrants. Promises were easy as the Republican nominee, but as president, Trump would have to deal with the costs of carrying it out and its economic fallout, so his transition team leaked that the promise was already shelved.

They’ve seen the budget numbers showing that his deportation will be $100 billion-plus yearly throughout his term. The economists in the group presumably know that 7 million of those immigrants hold down jobs, so deporting them will disrupt many labor markets. The dose of economic reality here is that pulling millions of people from the workforce will create temporary shortages in the products they produce, temporarily pushing up their prices. Replacing them will force their employers to pay higher wages, pushing up prices for the long term.

So, the word from Mar-a-Lago is that Trump’s immigration promises will be downsized into a plan to kick out those charged or convicted of serious crimes or links to foreign terrorism. The embarrassing part is that this will affect only 4 to 5 percent of those Trump promised to deport and was already U.S. policy under Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

It recalls what happened to Trump’s central pledge in 2016 to end unauthorized immigration by building a wall spanning the 1,954 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. That time, the reality check came from Republicans in Congress who balked at paying for it. (Trump’s insistence that Mexico would pay for it was even more fantastical.) Ultimately, Trump built 80 miles of new wall, spanning 4 percent of the border, and replaced another 372 miles of wall built under Barack Obama and George W. Bush. It’s very challenging to imagine GOP budget hawks in Congress will fund the much higher costs of Trump’s 2024 plan for immigration.

Trump has also declared that he won the 2024 election on inflation, and as president, he will “bring those prices way down.” The 78-year-old himself has already discarded that promise and now says he always meant to slow price increases—a goal that the Biden administration has already achieved. (It was Time correspondent and Washington Monthly Contributing Editor Eric Cortellessa who extracted from Trump the admission that he isn’t going to lower food prices.)

Economic reality explains Trump’s backpedaling on this second central campaign promise. Presumably, the economic advisers in his transitions have explained that there are two ways to engineer overall lower prices, and neither is acceptable. One route to the promised deflation would be a long, deep depression. That obviously would be a profound hardship for the country, political suicide for Trump and his economic officials, and perhaps as importantly, do severe damage to the Trump family assets. The other path to temporary deflation might appeal more to Trump: Bring it on by presidential fiat through strict government price controls. The pesky reality here is that this course also would tank the markets and alienate the wealthy donors who bankrolled 70 percent of Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Economic reality also leads Trump to downsize his third central campaign promise, the pledge to impose 60 percent tariffs on U.S. imports from China and 10-to-20 percent tariffs on imports from everywhere else. Trump’s transition team now says (without attribution) that the tariffs may be lower and apply to only the subset of imports that the White House deems to be linked to national and economic security.

A security focus has been part of U.S. export policies, adjudicated on a case-by-case basis, since 1975. Applying this focus to imports would essentially broaden the tariff policy that the Biden administration maintained in his first term but with one twist. With the Trump White House deciding what is or is not covered under the security umbrella, the downscaled tariff policy could become a form of crony capitalism where the president could grant exemptions for companies he favors—for example, a major supporter’s company with large Pentagon contracts for rocket and satellite technologies that rely on foreign-made parts.

Trump denies backpedaling on tariffs, but he will find it hard to ignore what his transition team seems to accept—that his tariff plan will damage the economy and Trump’s political standing. The economic reality is that the plan would substantially raise the prices Americans pay for goods and services, which totaled $3.9 trillion in 2023.

That’s the market’s message on expected inflation, based on rising yields for long-term bonds, and the message the Federal Reserve has sent in stepping back from its announced plans for multiple interest rate cuts in 2025. And no one needs to remind Trump that if inflation goes up on his watch, the Fed will slow the economy by raising rates.

It gets worse for Trump because everyone should expect our trading partners to respond to any U.S. tariffs with new tariffs on America’s exports, totaling $3.1 trillion in 2023. That’s what happened when Trump imposed much more limited tariffs in 2018. This year’s plan would trigger broader and sharper retaliation, substantially depressing total U.S. exports and costing tens of thousands of Americans their jobs. It’s a scenario familiar from the 1930s when the United States hiked tariffs by 20 percent, everyone else retaliated, and a long recession became a longer Depression.

Donald Trump can be bombastic and stubborn. He has also demonstrated that he can convince people to buy into an imagined reality or distract them entirely, perhaps explaining the saber-rattling toward Canada, Denmark, Panama, and Greenland. But Trump knows prices and unemployment can’t rise on his watch. He would face grim economic and political realities if he pushes forward with his central campaign promises. I doubt Trump ever read Charles Darwin, but it’s a good bet he’ll adapt to survive.

The post Trump’s Campaign Pledges Are on a Collision Course With Reality appeared first on Washington Monthly.

So, how did Kamala Harris lose to a surly opponent who had been found guilty of 34 felonies and liable for broad business fraud and sexual abuse? While she had to shoulder the burden of President Joe Biden’s dismal performance numbers, her skills as a campaigner were clearly up to the task. She also had all the money she needed, and in a 50-50 country, she was always within striking distance of winning.

Ultimately, her heaviest burden was being nominated without a normal primary process that would have allowed her to hone a winning agenda. In a closely fought election, it’s incumbent on the lesser-known candidate to offer a compelling policy agenda, especially for weak partisans and independents.

But the Harris campaign never came to grips with the three issues that voters cared about most—the continuing pain of inflation, the disappointment of voters without college degrees about their narrowing prospects, and the anxieties Americans feel about immigrants crossing the border without a legal right to do so. According to polls and surveys, substantial majorities expected and demanded that the candidates address those three concerns meaningfully.

That’s how democracy works. Yet, the strategists who Harris inherited from Joe Biden’s campaign—which was faltering even before his unfortunate debate performance—tried to convince voters to focus on abortion rights and threats to democracy. They didn’t appreciate how downplaying the voters’ most pressing concerns could align Harris with the status quo. Worse, Harris’s team didn’t fully appreciate how the context for the issues they considered more important had changed.

It’s hard to convince voters who aren’t committed partisans that American democracy is at stake when they’re about to participate in a free, nationwide election. (And it’s a tougher sell from the first major party nominee since 1968 to win their party’s nod without going before a single primary voter.) Harris’s strategists also didn’t understand how the debate over abortion rights has shifted since 2022. The Dobbs decision came four months before the 2022 midterm, and it was a winning issue then and often since in referenda. Two years later, however, most voters lived in states that had maintained or strengthened abortion rights. Those restorative measures coming out of state capitols in places like Lansing, Michigan, Madison, Wisconsin, and Phoenix, Arizona, didn’t end anxiety over reproductive rights, but they did change the facts on the ground.

In this environment, Trump’s position that he had shifted authority over those rights to the states insulated him to the point that a quarter of pro-choice women voted for him, according to exit polls. Yet, the Harris campaign didn’t acknowledge the significant new protections for abortion access in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and that the 2024 elections in Arizona and Nevada included referenda to extend access there, too. So, virtually all the pro-choice voters who could be personally affected by the nationwide guarantee to restore Roe v Wade that Harris talked about signing again and again vote in reliably red states that were always out of her reach.

By making abortion access the touchstone of her closing argument, Harris also may have sent a message to persuadable voters that their frustrations about the economy and immigration were secondary.

More importantly, in the end, the Harris campaign didn’t make a persuasive case that she had the ideas and strength to address voters’ real concerns, given her difficulty separating herself from an administration that voters believed hadn’t done enough about those concerns.

Biden handed off the problem of inflation to the bankers at the Federal Reserve, who raised interest rates, as expected, 11 times. It was the right course economically, but temporarily worsened voters’ finances. Harris promised to stop price gouging, but it rang a little hollow since the administration hadn’t done so. Its robust antitrust agenda could lower prices in the long run, such as food processing, but not in time for November.

To convince voters of her commitment to lower prices, she might have followed the example of John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter by calling the CEOs of the giant food producers and supermarket chains to the White House and publicly jawboning them to pare back their prices for meats, cereals, eggs, and milk. She might even have threatened them with federal price guidelines if they resisted and she won the election.

The economic dissatisfaction of working-class voters was much more challenging to address because the causes lie mainly with the computer and Internet technologies eagerly adopted for most workplaces and the large numbers of available college-educated workers. No one can roll back those structural changes, but a president can help make working people better off.

That’s what the Biden-Harris administration did. Employment and business startups, post-pandemic, grew 50 percent faster under Biden than under Trump pre-pandemic. And a good share of the credit should go to the administration’s four signature legislative achievements—the American Rescue Act, the Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act.

With such success, how could Harris fail to win over more working-class voters? One reason is that voters, of course, knew little about it. It’s unsurprising given the administration’s genuinely baffling decision not to claim much credit for the historic job gains and business creation, lest people feel the administration didn’t see their pain. So, much of the public concluded that the economy was in bad shape.

Trump naturally seized on the misperception, blaming the administration’s trade policies and promising to turn it around—but with self-crippling, inflationary tariffs on our trade partners. It won’t work, but it helped get him elected.

Harris’s strategists responded by portraying Trump’s tariffs as a national sales tax and promoting herself as the tax cutter. She vowed to cut taxes for entrepreneurs and hike rates on the rich. It might have worked if Harris had pledged to use the revenues to fund initiatives that voters without college degrees could see as a path to get ahead.

Here’s an example that makes economic sense and could have communicated her determination to make the lives of working-class people materially better: Use the revenues to pay the cost of retraining courses at local community colleges for anyone without a bachelor’s degree. It could become a new way for working-class voters to get past a dead-end job and earn more as a bookkeeper, practical nurse, entry-level programmer, or plumber.

The Harris campaign completed their self-damaging trifecta by missing the mark on immigration. Their approach was to trumpet the administration’s support for immigration reform on “day one” and the bipartisan compromise on immigration earlier this year. But since neither passed Congress, she ended up boasting about the administration failing to make a difference for the voters’ third hot-button concern.

A new initiative highlighting her commitment to cleaning up immigration would have been more convincing. For example, the president already has legal authority to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” whenever she finds that their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” The Biden administration used that authority in limited ways, yet the Harris campaign barely mentioned it. Voters might have felt that she heard their concerns if she had pledged to limit entry more broadly until Congress passed serious immigration reform.

Remarkably, the Biden and Harris campaigns also made little mention of Trump’s unprecedented convictions and civil judgments. That allowed Trump to deploy his greatest political asset—using his media talents to convince a majority to blame the system instead of him. It was a remarkable feat of political jujitsu that could work only in a populist era when people already distrusted the system.

In a populist era, voters demand that a candidate offer concrete actions that could plausibly change the conditions and circumstances that frustrate and anger them and then display the personal strength to carry them out. Kamala Harris has that strength, but it wasn’t enough because her campaign never provided a convincing blueprint.

The post Kamala Harris’s Policy Agenda Kneecapped Her Chances appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This past weekend, Donald Trump and JD Vance accused their Democratic opponents of plotting to kill Trump, implicitly threatening to prosecute Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz should the Republican ticket capture the White House. As shocking as it sounds, it was unremarkable since personal threats are a common and menacing feature of the Republican presidential campaign. Since Trump announced his bid for a second term, he has threatened to investigate and jail President Joe Biden and his family, Vice President Kamala Harris, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Secretary of State John Kerry, former Representative Liz Cheney, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Representatives Adam Schiff and Ilhan Omar, plus his perennial target Hillary Clinton, his opponent in the 2016 presidential race.

That’s only the beginning. Trump threatened to convene a military tribunal to try former President Barack Obama, imprison Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder and CEO, for life, and bring conspiracy and racketeering charges against Attorney General Merrick Garland, Special Counsel Jack Smith, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Judge Arthur Engoron, Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis, and the members of the Select House Committee that investigated the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

He also launched a broad threat to jail “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” who have been “involved in unscrupulous behavior,” along with millions of “illegal immigrants” whom he vows to deport. And he doesn’t hide his motive. Recently, he reposted a word cloud from his speeches, and “revenge” was the most frequently uttered word.

Trump’s threats are more than a dark schtick or entertainment for his hours-long rallies. They reflect a view of the president as a strongman who determines the law. Niccolò Machiavelli, the Renaissance-era chronicler of power, nailed Donald Trump a long time ago: A strongman ruler should display “the fearlessness of a being who makes and executes his own law” and by issuing threats to punish anyone as he sees fit, he “gathers in his person the power to awe his subjects.”

By instinct, Trump heeds Machiavelli’s counsel that a “memorable execution”—or at least the suggestion of one—helps a strongman intimidate the people. That’s the specter Trump raised by charging that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, committed “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” Milley’s crime: In the aftermath of the January 6 attack, he called a high-ranking Chinese official to reassure him that the assault on the Capitol by Trump’s followers did not represent a threat to Beijing. Trump has publicly contemplated other executions, calling for Obama’s prosecution by a military tribunal for capital murder and the civilian prosecution of Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC host, and has claimed that pro-choice doctors and nurses are executing newborns. This charge carries an implicit threat of prosecuting medical personnel.

Beyond intimidation, awe, and revenge, the former president’s litany of threats constitutes a strategy of scapegoating his critics. This blame recalls Machiavelli’s advice to strong rulers in The Prince, his 1532 exegeses of power that is still a relevant guide for would-be strongmen. By excoriating Haitians for “eating the pets,” pledging to bar Muslims from the country, stating Jews would be to blame if he loses, and railing that migrants are murdering innocent Americans, he reassures his overwhelmingly white, Christian, native-born supporters that they are safe and protected—all with an implicit warning that they too should stay in line.

The stumbling block to Trump’s thirst for threats and condemnation is that courts alone retain the authority to mete out punishment. As president, Trump followed his predecessors by nominating all-out supporters for seats on the federal bench—but with a difference. While previous presidents chose ideologically aligned jurists, Trump expected what he calls “his” judges and “his” justices to protect him personally from civil and criminal prosecution.

So, when even those nominated and confirmed jurists he selected failed to do so, Trump threatened them, too. The Brennan Center for Justice has documented many of Trump’s responses to uncooperative judges and courts. This goes even more so for judges nominated by Democrats. When he was president, Trump demanded that Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonya Sotomayor recuse themselves from all cases involving him. He pressed Ginsburg to resign for “incompetence.” During his first term, the 45^th president charged that the judge presiding over the trials and convictions of his political operatives and friends, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, with “blatant bias.”

Trump regularly singles out jurists who question his insistence on exercising what he claims are unilateral powers, especially when he wants to punish immigrants. As president, he called the federal courts “unfair and broken” when a judge blocked his order to unilaterally terminate the DACA program for Dreamers. He called another federal judge “a disgrace” and “unfair” for ruling that he lacked legal authority to summarily reject the applications of asylum seekers who failed to enter the country at a designated port of entry.

In fairness, Biden kept that policy in place with an exception for asylum seekers who use a Customs and Border Protection app to schedule an appointment. When the COVID-19 emergency ended in 2023, Biden ended Trump’s policy of refusing asylum seekers at the southern border because they might spread infectious diseases. He also ended Trump’s order that asylum seekers remain in Mexico while their claims are adjudicated, often under dangerous conditions and for more than two years.

In 2017, Trump also called three federal judges and the Ninth Circuit “ridiculous” and “political” for blocking his ban on Muslims entering the country. In that case, he also questioned the judicial authority to review his executive orders and suggested that the judges who did should be blamed for future terror attacks.

When he was in the Oval Office, Trump also denounced a federal judge for ruling that he could not summarily deny congressionally appropriated funds to sanctuary cities, those that do not use their police to help federal authorities round up unauthorized immigrants. In that case, he branded the judge’s decision “a gift to the criminal gang and cartel element empowering the worst kind of human trafficking and sex trafficking.” 

Trump’s bluster hasn’t been effective since judges and courts still have the final say in those matters, and they’ve stood up to the threats despite Trump’s bullying. Even so, Trump’s ambition to remake the presidency into an autocrat’s perch—the unspoken goal behind years of threatened punishment for those who oppose or annoy him—seems to have swayed the court that counts most.

In this year’s decision on presidential immunity, Trump’s three appointed justices and three more, including the two most radical conservatives and the chief justice, held that whatever the president does in an official capacity is above the law. Equally important, they endorsed the radical view of the president as a “unitary executive” with plenary authority over every part of the Executive Branch, including prosecutions pursued by the Department of Justice.

By this holding, lawful governance rests on the character of unfettered presidents, including one convicted of 34 felonies and held liable for large-scale fraud and sexual assault.

So, the court’s ruling will allow Trump to carry out his threats. As president in a second term, he could direct the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute those he has vowed to punish. Using his Supreme Court-given authority, the 78-year-old also could direct federal law enforcement to carry out his threats to round up and imprison or deport millions of immigrants, whether legal or undocumented. And if the judiciary were to hold that he lacks such legal authority, Trump could press ahead, knowing he can’t be held liable.

That’s rule with the power to carry out threats, just as Machiavelli prescribed.

The post How Donald Trump is Channeling Machiavelli appeared first on Washington Monthly.