The US Court of International Trade has acted to block pretty much all of President Trump’s tariffs. I guess the first question is “what the heck is the US Court of International Trade? The story seems to be that back in 1890, Congress created a “Board of General Appraisers, a quasi-judicial administrative unit within the Treasury Department. The nine general appraisers reviewed decisions by United States Customs officials …” In 1926, Congress replaced the Board of Appraisers with US Customs Court. The status of this court evolved over time, and in 1980 became the US Court  of International Trade, a “national court established under Article III of the Constitution”– the part of the constitution that establishes the federal judicial branch.

I’ve written before that a legal challenge to the Trump tariffs seemed inevitable. The key issue is that the Article 1 of the US Constitution–the part which lays out the structure and powers of the legislative branch–states in Section 8: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States …” Over the years, Congress has written a number of exceptions into the law. For example, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) lets the President address “unusual and extraordinary” peacetime threats. For example , when Iran took US hostages in 1979, President Carter could immediately respond with trade sanctions.

The legal question is whether President Trump has the authority to invoke the “emergency” provisions and rewrite all tariffs for countries and goods all around the globe in whatever way he wishes. The law firm Reed Smith has been producing a “tariff tracker” that shows the results. The US Court of International Trade held that Trump has stretched the “emergency” provision considerably too far, that US importing firms are adversely affected, and that previous laws do not mean that Congress has given away all of its Constitutional power in this area to the President. (For those who keep score in this way, the Court decision was a 3-0 vote, and the three judges were appointed by Trump, Obama, and Reagan.)

The Trump administration justifications for its tariffs are full of goofy statements. For example, President Trump argues that the tariffs will all be paid by foreign companies, with no effect on US consumers and firms. Seems unlikely, but say that it’s true. In that case, foreign exporters to the US would have lower profits, but would be exporting the same quantity of goods at the same price to US markets. The idea that tariffs won’t affect the quantities or prices of what foreign exporters sell in the US market is inconsistent with the idea that the tariffs will give breathing space to US producers.

Or Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick explained in an interview a few weeks ago what kind of manufacturing jobs were going to return from China to the United States. He said, “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones — that kind of thing is going to come to America …” I suppose Lutnick deserves some credit for expressing a concrete idea, but my guess is that most supporters of Trump’s tariffs do not have in mind a US economy based on an “army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones …”

The trade economist Richard Baldwin has just published an e-book called The Great Trade Hack: How Trump’s trade war fails and global trade moves on. He rehearses the arguments over tariffs at some length: how they will not reduce the trade deficit, or revive US manufacturing, or help the middle class. Baldwin writes fluently, and this book is for a generalist readership. Here, I want to touch on one of Baldwin’s themes that I haven’t discussed recently. He writes:

Tariffs persist precisely because they fail economically, yet succeed politically. They provide symbolic relief, project toughness, and shift blame onto external actors without confronting difficult domestic policy challenges like higher taxes or expanded social programmes. …

Tariffs don’t coordinate investment across firms and sectors. They don’t train workers. They don’t bridge skill gaps or modernise vocational education. They don’t fund infrastructure, improve logistics, or support research and development. They don’t unlock capital, align upstream and downstream firms, or connect regions to supply chains. In short, tariffs can defend an industrial base, but they cannot create one.

Reindustrialisation requires more than tweaking relative prices. It needs a strategy. A real one. With planning, sequencing, and sustained commitment. It needs a trained workforce, one that matches the needs of 21st-century manufacturing. And to get those workers, federal and local governments must partner with industry. Firms can’t do it alone. No company will invest heavily in training workers if they’re unsure those workers will stay once their skills are upgraded. That’s why, in most countries, governments step in – funding training with tax dollars to solve the coordination problem. It’s a public good with private benefits, and it only works when governments and employers pull in the same direction.

It also needs reliable infrastructure, stable regulation, and targeted investment incentives. It needs the trust of industrialists – not just that the cost of imported goods will be higher this year, but that America will be a profitable place to make things for decades to come. And this is critical: building a modern manufacturing operation is a long-term proposition. From planning to permitting, from equipment procurement to workforce training, the timeline is measured in years, not months. For investors to commit, they need confidence that support policies – tariffs, subsidies, tax credits, training programmes – will remain in place long enough to generate a return. If the policy environment is unpredictable or politicised, those factories won’t get built.

That’s the real shortcoming of Trump’s pray-and-spray, tariff-first and tariffs-only approach to reshoring manufacturing. There’s no plan to use the breathing room tariffs might create. Without that plan, the most likely outcomes from the 2 April tariffs are higher prices, reduced manufacturing, riled allies, and retaliation against exports from industries where America is competitive today.

We are seeing with President Trump one of the dangers of electing someone with a business background to government: the lessons of business and government overlap in some areas, but are not the same. Baldwin writes:

Trump’s real estate experience also taught him one simple rule: the seller is ripping off the buyer. From that premise, it’s just a logic hop-skip-and-jump to the idea – which the President is firmly convinced of and which shapes his attitude towards trade – that a bilateral trade deficit is theft. … This notion is completely false – as anyone versed in mainstream, positive-sum business practices would attest. Nevertheless, it is a cornerstone of Trump’s belief system.

I’m confident that the US Court of International Trade decision will be appealed to the US Supreme Court, but I suspect that President Trump might benefit politically if the courts take his tariff plans off the table. Trump blocked by the courts is a powerful political force. On the other side, if Trump is forced to face the actual effects of his tariffs, my expectation is that as the gains from international trade are diminished, he won’t come out looking so good.

The post Will the Courts Save Trump from His Tariffs? first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Recent Chaos Has Made the Fed Act In Nervous and Unusual Ways

That’s quite a headline to unpack but follow along and the connections will become clear.

When the Fed (Federal Reserve) fights inflation it does so by undermining workers. Huh? They raise interest rates which makes it more expensive for businesses to start or grow, which leads to fewer job openings. That means there are more applicants to apply for each opening meaning businesses don’t have to offer sweet deals to find workers. See my previous pieces (link1, link2, link3) explaining this further, including quotes from the Fed acknowledging this is how it works.

Chairman Powell just said they are looking at the, “possibility that inflation could be volatile going forward”. More of his statements make it clear they are anticipating inflation spikes created by general business uncertainty, and by supply chain choke periods, also brought on by uncertainty. Where does the uncertainty come from? It’s obvious but we’ll come back to that.

If they do have to raise rates to fight inflation then, well, see that previous paragraph about how it works.

The uncertainty has created some crazy actions by the Fed. They just bought a large volume of bonds. Without going into detail, that’s something they usually do when trying to go the other way, trying to heat up the economy at times that’s needed. The opposite of fighting inflation. So are they going in two directions at once? Kind of. That’s what a chaotic economy brings. But it’s a little worse than that.

They did this without telling anyone. Only investment companies that track many things about the economy happened to notice. That’s odd because usually the Fed makes a lot of publicity about it when they do this because that’s part of the idea. To let everyone know when the Fed is actively trying to heat up the economy so everyone gains confidence and jumps on the growth bandwagon.

So why did they do it now, and quietly? The Treasury Department had a sale of bonds, which they do constantly. They didn’t sell nearly as many as they would normally. Why? Because of economic uncertainty. The U.S. Treasury having trouble selling bonds? That’s such an oddity that it could spook investors and business planners, so the Fed quietly stepped in to buy a bunch and make things look normal.

Get that. The Fed had to pull this, “Don’t look behind the curtain. Nothing to see here. Just go on about your business as normal” move because things are in such an unpredictable state.

Why are things in that state? Let’s go straight to the most authoritative of sources. The following are recent quotes directly from the Fed’s media releases of statements from Powell, and from interviews with Powell, and from a member of the Fed board, Austan Goolsbee.

Powell said the increased likelihood of inflation is, “really due to the tariffs” and called it, “tariff inflation“. Regarding the state of the economy generally he said there was, “heightened uncertainty”.

Tariffs are expected to cause the supply chain to become erratic. “We may be entering a period of more frequent, and potentially more persistent, supply shocks — a difficult challenge for the economy.”

As part of dealing with this the Fed is considering tweaking its policies to be less focused on keeping unemployment low, or as they put it, “shortfalls of employment“, and more focused on fighting inflation. That is, more damage to working people might have to be tolerated in order to deal with higher inflation.

That’s because they may find themselves stuck in a Catch-22 where, “Prices are going up while jobs are being lost and growth is coming down.” Or as one headline put it more clearly, “Higher prices or higher unemployment? The economy could face a no-win dilemma”.

Powell plainly states what the price of this will be, “We understand that elevated levels of unemployment or inflation can be damaging and painful for communities, families, and businesses.”

Oof! That’s a lot of hard, direct statements. You could suspect those quotes are cherry picked but read the sources and you’ll find they reflect the overall Fed message.

All of this because of confused and chaotic policies. And that because too many people were either conned into, or willfully chose, to throw their vote to someone who has long since proven himself to be a confused and chaotic man.

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The post Trump May Force Fed to Hurt Workers appeared first on DCReport.org.

Today I saw an unusual and very sad thing.

Or at least, it was unusual for me. I walked away saddened and troubled and realized it’s not that unusual at all.

This isn’t a dramatic story or a dramatic scene. It was a gaggle of babies, maybe seven or so in total. They were playing with various toys, and ostensibly with each other, as much as babies really ever play with each other. Around them was a circle of adults, also about seven or so, a phone in each adult’s hand, each one not just photographing and videotaping but calling the kids’ names and encouraging them to look / smile / perform for the camera. Look! Oliver! Oliver look here! Henry! HENRY, SMILE! Here’s Henry having fun!

This was not a scene of kids getting lost in happy play. This was kids being made to look like they were happily playing for the many, many cameras being shoved in their faces. It was one of the more dystopian things I’ve seen in a while.

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I live in Hong Kong, where cellphone addiction is the most extreme I’ve witnessed anywhere in the world. It’s pretty standard to be out to dinner here and see a couple or small group of friends have a whole meal without speaking to each other — except, of course, to take photos of the food when it arrives at the table. Walking down the street is total chaos because most people have their noses in their phones — not looking at maps, but texting or, shockingly often, watching social media clips or television shows, and so everyone walks like they’re insane. There are a million things I absolutely love about living here, but the phone culture is flat-out bonkers. And seeing a group little kids who should have been able to lose themselves in play instead being treated like a bunch of zoo animals was truly depressing.

Not that it’s the first time. I’ve seen parents here hand smartphones to babies in strollers — kids who cannot even walk yet. At a coffee shop this morning I watched two parents plop their baby in a high chair, then both sit silently scrolling through their phones while she strained to see what they were looking at — and when she fussed, they handed her one phone while they watched videos on the other. I realize I have no real right to judge, but also: If you hand an infant a smartphone, I am definitely judging.

“Screens are bad for babies and toddlers” seems to be pretty widely-understood conclusion at this point, at least among people who do things like read the Atlantic. But I haven’t seen much about the impact of parental screen use — not just handing kids phones, but always having the phone in hand and constantly documenting their kids’ lives.

What happens to a childhood mediated through a parent’s screen?

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The first thing children learn if they’re endlessly photographed and filmed is that a phone is a high-value object. And listen, my phone is a high-value object; I am too attached to it, and I take a series of conscious steps to decrease my use of it (my husband and I have a pretty hard rule about screen-free meals, for example). But if you’re a parent who wants to give your child a screen-free childhood, or even a childhood in which they are curious about the world around them and less interested in what’s on the phone, then step one really does have to be consciously uncoupling your hand and the device. Kids, after all, are more like sponges than tape recorders: They absorb the totality of what you do, they don’t just record and spit back what you tell them. You can tell a child that the world is a gorgeous and fascinating place and they should go live in it instead of living on a device designed to capture as much of their attention as possible. But if what they see is that their parents are primarily fascinated by the phone, well — they’re going to learn a lot more from that than from values that are stated but not lived.

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But there’s something even more pernicious at play here. The issue with having the phone out to take photos and videos of everything your kid does goes deeper than simply broadcasting one’s values about screens.

What does it do to a child’s perception of self when, from before they are even really conscious, they are being constantly photographed and videotaped, encouraged to perform and smile and be cute for the camera, essentially surveilled even when they’re just playing or exploring or sitting or crawling or eating?

In John Berger’s famous essay Ways of Seeing, he writes:

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

This is partly what feminists talk about when we talk about the male gaze and its impact on women. Women lose the ability to simply be in the world. We become, instead, not just surveilled but self-surveilled. We watch ourselves being watched.

I remember reading the Berger essay in college and tasting the sourness of recognition. That I self-surveilled — that I didn’t just move, I saw myself moving almost as if from outside my body, and that shaped how I moved — had never occurred to me; it was just what life was like in my own skin. Understanding that this way of seeing oneself is not actually universal or natural but rather feminized and imposed made visible a profound loss: What must it be like to simply move through the world, to simply be in one’s body? At some early point in my life, I understood, I had that ability. At some point, probably as I entered early adolescence, it was snuffed out.

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I think we’re snuffing this freedom out in all of our kids now. I suspect it’s worse for girls than for boys, but I also suspect it comes earlier for them. And it comes, devastatingly, not just from a sexist and sexualized culture, but from the people who are supposed to be protecting their children, and who almost certainly aren’t trying to make their kids self-conscious and self-surveilling. Parents are trying to preserve memories of their kids, because life flies by and it’s impossible to be fully present and savoring all of it, let alone remembering all of it. For about as long as it’s been possible to capture images of people, parents have sought to capture images of their children. We now have technology that makes it possible to capture a nearly infinite number of images as long as you’re willing to pay for cloud storage, and that technology is also our primary communication device, clock, roadmap, To Do list, calendar, health monitor, personal trainer, credit card, checkbook, meteorologist, television, radio, and workplace, among many other things. It travels with us just about all of the time. An iPhone is not the camera your parents grabbed for holidays and once a year when you went on vacation. It’s always there, and many of us look at it dozens if not hundreds of times a day. Of course if your child is being cute or doing something for the first time, the impulse is to document it.

There’s a photo of me as a child, taken when I was about ten, with my mom and my sister on a family vacation in Hawaii. I remember the photo being taken, because I believed myself to look very glamorous, and I was thrilled to have it documented: I was wearing sunglasses, which was not a typical accessory for a child raised in the grey-blues of Seattle, and I had a scarf tied over my hair like an old-timey Hollywood star. In the photo, I’m jutting one hip out, trying to look jaunty, maybe even a little sexy, like an adult woman. In reality, I just look silly and now I think rather cute, because, as I said, in the photo I’m ten. But performing for the camera was fun. Dressing up and imagining myself to be a beautiful woman was fun.

For child-me, though, the camera got put away, and I went back to playing with my sister in the sand. The camera and the action that it set in motion was an aberration. It was not so constant that the play-acting imagined adulthood — the posing, the hip-jutting — became second nature, and then first.

For children today, photos are constant, and their childhoods live on their parents’ camera rolls (not to mention on Facebook and Instagram). At some point, the play-acting pose evolves into a way of being. I think this is especially pernicious for girls, who tend to be more inclined toward people-pleasing, and who are being raised in a world that continues to over-value their agreeableness and sexual appeal. But boys being trained up to also perform and self-surveil and lack a sense of agency is not exactly the kind of equality feminists want.

This is not a case for never taking photos or videos of your child. It is a case for being thoughtful about it — for giving your child space to play and be free not just from surveillance, but from evaluation and performance. Because ultimately, isn’t that what we’re doing and asking when we pick up the phone to document all the precious moments? I think we are saying: When I perceive your actions as cute, I pull out the high-value device, and I would like it if you would be cute more often, or at least whenever the device is out. And sure, I think most people want their kids to be cute more often. But I don’t think most people want their children to be trained seals; I think most people want their children to get lost in imagination and play, to feel a sense of freedom in their own skin, to take in the big new world around them without performing for the camera (and for parental approval).

(I won’t even get into the dynamic of turning one’s children into influencers; maybe in another newsletter).

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I really appreciated this conversation between Ezra Klein and Jonathan Haidt about screens and childhood, even if I disagree with several of Haidt’s points. Like Ezra, I don’t want to get caught up in the social science of it all — in the idea that screens are only a problem if we can find clear and irrefutable evidence that they cause some social or personal ill like lower grades (even though there is a growing body of evidence that screens are not great for kids). Ezra says that he finds the conversation around Haidt’s book, which is about screens and adolescent anxiety, “a little annoying because it got at one of the difficulties we’re having in parenting and in society: a tendency to instrumentalize everything into social science. Unless I can show you on a chart the way something is bad, we have almost no language for saying it’s bad. This phenomenon is, to me, a collapse in our sense of what a good life is and what it means to flourish as a human being.”

Does it help our kids to flourish if we constantly document them? Does it help us to flourish? Does putting a phone between you and your child foster connection or disrupt it? Who or what is documenting them for? How much is enough?

This is not a screed against ever taking a photo or video of your kid. Please take photos and videos of your kids; if we are friends, please send them to me. Please capture their joy and their personalities and the mundane moments and the times when the light is just beautiful on their perfect little faces. This is not a polemic against taking your kid’s photo, or against smartphones.

It is an entreaty to be more thoughtful about when the phone comes out. It is my small attempt to ask what, exactly, we are telling our children about themselves — how we are teaching them to see themselves — when we try to document every moment. It is a question: What happens when our children are right in front of us, and we repeatedly choose to see them through a screen?

xx Jill

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Way back in March of 2023, Donald Trump went on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News and said he would “solve” the war in Ukraine in “24 hours” if he was elected president in 2024. “There’s a very easy negotiation to take place. But I don’t want to tell you what it is because then I can’t use that negotiation; it’ll never work. But it’s a very easy negotiation to take place. I will have it solved within one day, a peace between them,” Trump confided to the ever-eager, ever-gullible Hannity.

In May of 2023, Trump told a CNN town hall, “I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done — I’ll have that done in 24 hours.”

In August of 2024, Trump told a National Guard conference, “Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, shortly after I win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled. I’ll get it settled very fast.”

On February 28 of this year, just after the three-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Trump and Vance infamously sandbagged Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. Accusing Zelenskyy of starting the war, Trump declared that he had not taken sides in the conflict and was “in the middle.” He berated the shocked Ukrainian leader before having him escorted out of the White House, “You see the hatred he’s got for Putin. That’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.”

A few days later, Trump paused military and intelligence aid to Ukraine.

In April, after Putin fired yet another barrage of drones and missiles at civilian targets in Ukraine, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP!”

On Sunday, Trump fired off this blast at the Russian president: “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY! I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia!”

Yesterday, Trump whined again on Truth Social that “if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!”

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chief of Russia’s security council and Russia’s puppet-president when Putin took a time-out as Prime Minister between 2008 and 2012, fired back: “Regarding Trump’s words about Putin ‘playing with fire’ and ‘really bad things’ happening to Russia. I only know of one REALLY BAD thing — WWIII. I hope Trump understands this.”

Russian President Putin did not attend the abortive “peace talks” in Turkey earlier this month, although Zelenskyy did show up. Now the two sides are trading “proposals” that amount to demands if there is to be a ceasefire and eventual peace.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reports that Putin’s army is pressing to take more Ukrainian land across a wide swath of territory that includes the area around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and has been running what it calls “illegal” new power lines near the Sea of Azov in Russian occupied territory, “suggesting that Russia intends to bring the ZNPP's reactors out of their current cold shutdown state…acting upon its long-held plans to connect the ZNPP to the Russian power grid.”

Meanwhile, over the last three days, Russia has bombarded Ukraine with more than 900 Shahed and decoy drones against civilian targets in Ukraine, along with dozens of ballistic missiles and Kh-101 cruise missiles.

ISW reports that Putin is in it for the long haul, importing hundreds of mobile missiles and 155 mm artillery pieces and ammunition from North Korea and thousands of computer chips from China to ramp up its drone production.

Trump’s frustration at not being able to end the war in Ukraine is boiling over. He has changed his timeline for ending the war multiple times, and now he is changing his rhetoric about his “friend” Putin.

The words “World War III” are now being flung back and forth between the superpowers. European nations are sufficiently alarmed that they have just completed a security conference and pledged to increase their defense budgets in many cases to 5 percent of their GDP. The upcoming NATO summit in The Hague is being met with headlines about the “dark cloud” cast by the “war of words” between Trump and Putin.

The biggest question at the summit should be, where is Trump’s power?

Here at home, Trump’s power is taking hit after hit. Tonight, the U.S. Court of International Trade handed down a ruling that Trump exceeded his power to impose tariffs under federal law. “The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined,” the panel ruled. The three judges on the Court of Trade were appointed by Obama, Reagan, and…you guessed right…Donald Trump.

Trump had invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act or IEEPA in setting the taxes on imported goods. The court found that Trump exceeded his authority under the IEEPA and ended tariffs he had imposed on Canada, Mexico, China, and all the other 10 percent tariffs Trump had imposed on every other country on earth, as well as several uninhabited islands.

The Constitution gives the Congress the power to impose tariffs, although the legislature has enacted several laws, including the IEEPA, ceding certain powers over the economy to the president. No president before has invoked the IEEPA to impose “emergency” tariffs. The trade court found that Trump had not adequately supported the reasons for his emergency declaration, ruling that the law did not allow “the President to impose whatever tariff rates he deems desirable.”

Trump has been losing in other courts, which have ruled that his attempt to shut down the Department of Education was illegal, that his takeover of the United States Institute of Peace was illegal, and that many of the federal workers fired by Elon Musk’s DOGE assault on the government must be rehired.

With Musk resigning his “special government employee” status in the face of the reversals of so many of his and Trump’s efforts to remake the government in either Musk’s or Trump’s image – it was never clear which – and Musk’s announcement that he opposes Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” where is Trump’s power now?

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Donald Trump is many things, but highly ideological is not one of them. He knows what he doesn’t like: Immigrants, NAFTA, liberals, the fake news media, germs, windmills. He knows what he wants to do: Restore American manufacturing. Return white men to their natural positions of power and dominance. Make himself richer. Make himself more powerful.

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But Donald Trump, for all of his bluster and his Make America Great campaign slogan, doesn’t really have a vision for what America will be if he gets his way. There isn’t a grand, overarching plan here. There is just retribution and vibes.

More traditional and savvy Republicans, by contrast, do have clearer visions of the world they want. Those visions sometimes clash and they have evolved significantly under Trump, but today they generally include some iteration of traditional religiosity, patriarchal family formations, more power in white male hands, far fewer immigrants, and businesses that are unfettered from regulation and taxation. We see some of these ideologies show up in Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill, upon which there are many different conservative fingerprints, and which is indeed very big – and very distinct from anything that might have been supported by the old GOP that claimed to care about fiscal responsibility, or at least about not torpedoing the country into enormous debt at the same moment that tariffs then no tariffs than maybe some tariffs were making the US dollar look a whole lot less reliable.

But the incoherence of Trumpism does not mean that the policies of the Trump administration aren’t shaping up to something. The are. What we’re getting from the Trump hodgepodge of sometimes-incoherent often-damaging policies is an America being made into a dumber, poorer, more isolated place.

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