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Trump’s Anti-Economic Growth Agenda

The Felon's favorite mantra is "make America great again" yet his policies and alienation of long time allies and demonization of immigrants looks more like the United Kingdom's Brexit which ten years later has left the UK both poorer and saddled with high prices than across the English Channel on the continent.  Worse yet, by slashing funding for research and development, showing contempt for universities (and knowledge in general), and holding open hostility to renewable energy sources, the Felon is likely guaranteeing that America falls behind economically., particularly compared to China. Indeed, one could almost believe the Felon is taking orders from Vladimir Putin on how to weaken America from within.  In the short term, some of this harm may not be readily visible, but over the longer term, the brain drain of top scientist and researchers - and the growing hesitancy of the best and brightest to come to America - combined with disruption of international trade and the growing realization around the world that America is no longer reliable ally will bring real economic harm. Meanwhile, the Felon's ill-conceive war with Iran is eroding America's military strength and appears likely to cause more spikes in energy prices and higher consumer prices.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the short sightedness of the Felon's policies and how nothing has been learned from the decline of past world power such as the UK.  Here are excerpts:

In June 1897, Great Britain, at the apex of empire, organized an elaborate pageant celebrating Queen Victoria’s 60 years on the throne. The industrial revolution had turned a small island nation into an economic and military superpower. The writer Rudyard Kipling, one of imperialism’s greatest apologists, was asked to contribute an ode for the queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Yet far from boasting about the empire that Kipling adored, the poem he wrote imagined its eventual end. “Far-called, our navies melt away; / On dune and headland sinks the fire,” he wrote. “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”

Much less humility was on display as the United States celebrated its 250th anniversary. “We will always be on top,” Donald Trump said in his July 4 speech. “We will never let our country fall.” Yet even as he insisted that U.S. global dominance will last forever, Trump is busily dismantling the very economic underpinnings that would ensure future American might.

When economies lag, hegemony becomes unsustainable. Britain’s decline took only a few short decades. The Soviet Union rivaled America militarily but could not keep up economically, and unraveled as a result of its inability to grow. Americans today enjoy material abundance scarcely imaginable in Kipling’s day. That is the reaped reward of scientific prowess, high-skilled immigration, the rule of law, free trade, and stable monetary policy—all of which Trump is jeopardizing in his current term.

In the postindustrial world, ideas are the ultimate engine of growth. “Productivity isn’t everything, but, in the long run, it is almost everything,” the economist Paul Krugman once remarked. Much of America’s outperformance of Europe in the past two decades can be explained by greater efficiency in creating goods and services. The United States is still the best place in the world to be rewarded for inventions and other advancements. Yet the pace of future discoveries could soon decelerate. Out of distaste for elite universities and the study of disfavored subjects, the Trump administration suspended and canceled nearly 8,000 scientific grants in 2025, . . . Federal scientific agencies have seen their workforces slashed. If the president had his way with the federal budget, non-defense research funding would be cut by 35 percent.

One reason for America’s technological ascendance has been its capacity to siphon brainpower from the rest of the world. From 1901 to 2024, 410 Americans have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, medicine, economics, and physics. Of those, 35 percent were immigrants.

This immigration-innovation linkage ought to be easily detectable even from the Oval Office . . . . Yet the Trump administration’s hostility toward immigration is not limited to undocumented or low-skilled entrants. The president has attempted to add a $100,000 fee to applicants seeking H-1B visas, intended for skilled workers in health care and technology. The administration is also close to finalizing four-year limits on student visas—which would make most Ph.D. programs difficult to complete for international students.

In their book Why Nations Fail, the Nobel Prize–winning economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argued that dependable, pluralistic institutions are essential for long-run growth. . . . These norms and institutions are buckling under the pressure. The president treats the law as a tool to punish enemies and reward friends.

Far from avoiding conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety, the president is aggressively monetizing the office—earning $2 billion last year, largely from cryptocurrency sales. The president wields his pardon opportunity to reward his supporters, even those convicted of corruption in elected office and serious fraud. Such capricious governance has not immediately made America less hospitable for investment. However, the risk is not of imminent economic recession, but a steady erosion that becomes apparent only years from now.

Just as British might was once underwritten by the ascendancy of the pound, America benefits from the dollar’s status as the default currency of global commerce. The dollar’s place in international finance is sustained only in trust: in the strength of American institutions, in the full faith and credit of the Treasury, and in the stability of the global financial system. Trumpism is an attack on all three pillars. . . . Because of his tax cuts, the American debt has continued to grow at an extraordinary rate. Trump’s unilateral imposition of sweeping tariffs on the rest of the world—and the abusive way he speaks of allies—weaken trust in both Pax Americana and the dominance of the dollar.

Trump has committed his administration to an idiosyncratic vision of American greatness. It is a greatness so internally brittle that it requires extraordinary governmental pressure against institutions and people who disagree with the administration’s aims. Yet it is also so self-assured that America can safely jettison the postwar international order it built, in trade and military alliances, without risk to American supremacy. . . . Trump, as his defenders tell it, has canceled the expensive clean-energy projects of his predecessor Joe Biden, while supporting fossil-fuel electricity generation that will power the data centers needed here and now.

This argument—a monomaniacal fixation on preventing America from being overtaken by China as Britain was overtaken by America—is worth taking seriously. But it is undercut by Trump’s other actions. Today’s advantages in artificial intelligence will be hard to maintain unless the United States keeps attracting the field’s best minds—especially given the declining literacy and numeracy of American students. Building supply chains that exclude China would be easier if allies were not also charged high tariffs. Disregarding the eventual harms of climate change does not just affect future Americans; it also cedes the field of clean-energy technology to China.

A world order led by China’s authoritarian rulers will still be less attractive than the American-led one that Trump is creating. But the more mercurial the United States acts—the more markets are balkanized, private wealth is contingent on political favor—the less advantage the rest of the world will see in choosing Washington over Beijing.

A more measured defense of Trumponomics is to note that it may last only two more years. Courts have also blocked some of the president’s most aggressive actions—such as his attempts to remove a Fed governor and impose blanket tariffs under emergency authority, and his retaliation against law firms that challenge him. . . . . four years of such policies will still take a serious toll, both on quantifiable measures such as health-care costs and scientific capacity and unquantifiable ones such as the trust that allies place in America’s security guarantees. Furthermore, Trumpism may linger as the dominant ideology in the GOP even after Trump leaves office. The irony is that policies intended to “make America great again” would instead push it toward Britain’s fate.

For Britain, decline set in slowly. Despite inventing the technologies that permanently altered the world, it eventually fell behind America and Germany in technical prowess and output. This slippage could be obscured for as long as Britain retained its empire and London remained the epicenter of the global financial system. But the productivity gap would ultimately result in Britain’s dethroning.

Reflecting on what turned out to be his country’s apogee, Kipling wrote a memento mori, presciently reminding his compatriots that power is inevitably transient. Trump entertains no such thought. “We will always be the best,” he said in his July 4 speech. Perhaps this really is, as the president claimed, “the dawn of the golden age of America

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The Ukraine-Russia War Has Reached a New Phase

With the constant chaos generated by the Felon and the continued murder of people by ICE, it's easy to forget about the war in Ukraine and the importance of seeing a Russian defeat for not only Ukraine, but also Europe and the world as a whole.  Nothing sends a message to dictators with visions/delusions of grandeur like Putin's than to see one of their number go down to defeat. Sadly, the Felon - who seeks to emulate Putin as both a dictator and in terms of his rampant corruption - has vacillated in support for Ukraine and has likely allowed the war to drag on.  As a piece in the New York Times lays out, Ukraine has proven adaptable and has created its own domestically built drones that are taking the war to the interior of Russia (see the image), but the need for ballistic missile interceptors remains high on Ukraine's needs if the war is to turn further in Ukraine's favor.  Meanwhile, the USA and Iran are back in a shooting war and America's stockpiles of Patriot and other missile systems are being  depleted.  One can only hope Ukrainian ingenuity and aid from Europe will help to further turn the tide of Putin's aggression:

Back when the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was in its early stages, the cry from the West was to supply Ukraine with enough artillery shells and tanks to blunt the Russian onslaught. Now, well into the war’s fifth year, this is a far different fight, one that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, says has become a decisive “battle in the sky.” It is a decisive moment, too, for the West.

The ground war is at a stalemate. Russia is still clawing away at Ukrainian territory, but at a snail’s pace and extraordinary cost. Ukraine says it inflicted almost 40,000 Russian dead and wounded in June, or about 1,300 casualties per square kilometer “seized or infiltrated,” according to the Institute for the Study of War — an attrition rate 19 times what it was a year earlier.

Russia is pummeling Ukraine with salvo after deadly salvo of drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles; Ukraine is using ever more sophisticated and longer-range drones to drive Russia’s fleet away from Ukraine in the Black Sea, starve Russian-occupied Crimea and, most effectively, strike oil facilities and military installations deep inside Russia. Long lines for gas in Moscow and black smoke billowing from a refinery in distant Omsk, and images of victims being pulled out of demolished apartment blocks in Kyiv, tell the rest of the story. . . . . “And frankly, in that contest it matters far less whose territory is larger.”

What matters, he made clear, is to have the means to block the Russian fusillades, and there lies the current crunch. After America’s large-scale expenditure of crucial missiles against Iran, including the prized Patriot interceptors, precious few Patriots remain to share with Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky said that in the intense Russian attack on July 6, Ukraine shot down drones and cruise missiles but did not have enough interceptors to stop a single ballistic missile.

So interceptors, and specifically Patriots, have replaced artillery shells as the indispensable weapon for Ukraine in what may well be the end game of this war. That was at least part of the thinking behind Mr. Zelensky’s government reshuffle announced on Sunday; the “most important” matter for the new government to address, he said, was the procurement and production of Patriot missiles.

The money is there — NATO has pledged $80 billion in military aid for Ukraine, and individual NATO countries have allocated billions more. [The Felon] President Trump also seems to be shifting his favor back toward Ukraine after its recent military successes.

At the NATO summit meeting in Ankara, Turkey, last week, he called Ukraine’s leadership “ingenious,” and said he’d license Ukraine to produce the Patriot missiles it so urgently needs. Mr. Zelensky, reflecting the hard lessons of a rocky relationship, told The Financial Times, “President Trump wants to be where there’s success.”

[I]t would take years for Ukraine to start full production. In the meantime, Ukraine has to compete with U.S. armed forces and 16 other foreign clients waiting for Patriot deliveries, and these fancy weapons take time to put together.

Each $3.9 million missile takes about two years to make, and Lockheed currently produces only about 600 a year. In the 39 days of bombardment before the cease-fire with Iran began, the United States used up about half of its inventory of 2,330 Patriots, so just replacing them would take three and a half years, according to an estimate by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

That is not what Mr. Zelensky wants to hear. “It is simply absurd that, in the modern world, production has still not been scaled up to the level actually required to protect people from ballistic terror,” he said in one of his nightly video addresses.

That does not mean Ukraine is doomed. Far from it. The Ukrainians have displayed remarkable ingenuity in adapting to new forms of warfare, most notably in the development of sophisticated, inexpensive and lethal drones. Following the old precept of “shoot the archer, not the arrow,” Ukraine has been increasingly targeting military-industrial facilities deep in Russia with considerable effect, as evidenced by Russia’s recent ban on the export of diesel fuel. Ukraine’s relentless drone attacks on Crimea and Russian shipping in the Sea of Azov have also been highly effective.

Authorities in Crimea have declared a state of emergency because of acute fuel shortages and power outages. In addition to drones, whole battalions of tracked and wheeled robots fight on the ground, conducting thousands of missions every month to haul ammunition, evacuate the wounded, lay mines and hold land.

It is what David Petraeus and Clara Kaluderovic, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called “adaptation warfare,” and for now, Ukraine is doing it better. As Mr. Zelensky put it, “Today, I believe victory in this war belongs to whoever is smarter.”

Overall, it is difficult to fathom how Russians have put up for so long with Vladimir Putin’s maniacal mission to destroy Ukraine, given the growing pain of Ukrainian strikes, a battlefield death toll of about 450,000, deteriorating living standards and the revival of a Soviet-style police state.

Yet Mr. Putin continues to believe that he can bring Kyiv to its knees with regular barrages. That makes it imperative for Ukraine, at this critical juncture of the war, to find ways of surviving the dearth of Patriot missiles while it hammers away at Russia.

In the meantime, it is imperative for the United States and Europe to do what they can to help Ukraine protect itself. In his last undertaking before his death, Senator Lindsey Graham had traveled to Ukraine. From there, he said he had reached agreement with the White House on a bipartisan bill to sanction buyers of Russian oil. That bill should be quickly advanced. Mr. Trump also should urgently act on his pledge to grant Ukraine a license to produce Patriots, and also to accelerate production at home and in Europe. Europeans, too, should share as many air-defense missiles as they can and redouble their efforts to help Ukraine develop new systems. That may not block Russian missiles right away, but it would be a powerful message to Mr. Putin that his time is fast running out.

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Thanks to the Felon, the World Is Cutting Ties With America

As the war in Ukraine continues to grind on with Ukraine increasingly taking the war to the Russian home front, in one area Vladimir Putin continues to have great success: the weakening of America through the actions of the Felon and his band of sycophants.  Long time allies of America have been threatened, insulted and delivered a resounding message that America is not a trustworthy ally and that  the safest course of action is to reduce dependence on America. One immediate outcome has been America's isolation in its failing war with Iran which is continuing to deplete America's munitions supplies and again cause oil prices to rise. But the damage extends far beyond the Iranian front as nation's rethink who they purchase armaments from to who they sign trade deals with, including Canada, our former strong ally to the north. It's hard to see any goal of the Felon's actions - when not focused on shocking self-enrichment - other than degrading American power around the globe.  As a piece in the New York Times lays out, some of this damage may never be fully undone even after the Felon has left office and/or this world (another Times column also looks at this ongoing damage to America's best interests):

In March 2023, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, laid out a strategy for managing the coercive policies of China. Europe, she argued, should “de-risk” from its dependence on the economic juggernaut by joining forces and building homegrown alternatives.

Three years later, de-risking from predatory superpowers remains the fundamental challenge facing European leaders, but China is no longer the main country of concern: The United States is. As they publicly seek to mollify a vindictive American president, policymakers across Europe are quietly working to reduce their decades-long dependence on the United States by increasing their own defense, energy and technology industries and diversifying their relationships with other nations. That dynamic was on display last week at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, where President Trump renewed his threats against the U.S. allies Denmark and Spain.

It’s not just Europe backing away from the United States. Leaders of America’s partners in Asia and the Middle East are quietly doing the same. The second Trump administration’s ostentatious corruption, trade conflicts, military adventurism and mercurial artificial intelligence regulation have produced a new moment in international affairs: a nearly global grand strategy of countries distancing themselves from the world’s most powerful nation. . . . For the United States, which has called itself the “indispensable nation” for decades, this represents a sea change.

Now, amid intense competition from China, the erosion of key partnerships is undermining our military edge and world-leading technologies and limiting our ability to respond to China’s industrial advantages.

The Trump administration tends to view weaker foreign ties as positive, on the logic that countries’ doing more for themselves frees America to focus more on its interests. But . . . . .the global de-risking is already hurting Americans at home.

One doesn’t have to look far to see the costs. The lost war against Iran, the first in which we didn’t have diplomatic or military alignment with our closest allies in Europe and Asia, caused a spike in gas and fertilizer prices that contributed to a $132 billion hit to American consumers, according to Moody’s. Even as Europe increased its military spending by 14 percent, to $864 billion, in 2025, its military purchases from American companies actually fell by almost half.

[The Felon's] Mr. Trump’s immigration policies are also driving countries away. Four million fewer visitors came to the United States in 2025 than in 2024, at an estimated cost of more than $8 billion. America is hemorrhaging future skilled labor as enrollment by international university students dropped 17 percent last fall from the prior year, already costing universities at least an estimated $1 billion, and potentially costing the country hundreds of billions in future revenue.

The chilling effect is spreading. As [the Felon's] Mr. Trump muses about making Canada a 51st state, it has embarked on a “new strategic partnership” with China, opened its market for the first time to 50,000 Chinese electric vehicles and joined a more than $150 billion European defense fund aimed at breaking the dependency on the American defense industry.

In East Asia, where Mr. Trump has paused the sale of arms to Taiwan in deference to President Xi Jinping of China, Taipei and allied capitals are recalibrating their relationships. Japan is overhauling its concept of national defense to develop greater offensive strike capabilities. South Korean contractors are displacing American arms sellers around the world.

India is deepening commercial ties with Europe, the Middle East and even, grudgingly, China. India is one of a growing number of countries sufficiently worried about reliable access to American frontier A.I. models that it is reconsidering Chinese or domestic alternatives.

But nowhere is the push to de-risk from the United States more costly to both sides — and disadvantageously timed — than on the continent that coined the phrase. Once-unthinkable conversations are underway in European capitals. European officials tell me they are quietly developing plans for responding in the event of a full-blown trade war with America that would include choking off our technology companies’ access to the continent’s vast market or limiting key inputs like semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

[S]ome de-risking can have some benefits for the United States. Expanded European defense capacity could eventually free up American resources. . . . But the divisions Mr. Trump is causing are different. . . . Some costs of the world’s de-risking from America are already hitting home. Others won’t be evident overnight. Allies were right not to join Mr. Trump’s unnecessary Iran fiasco, but our ability to deter future conflicts is weakened by our greater isolation.

As our partners enhance their own resiliency to us, future American administrations must prepare plans for avoiding a more fundamental rupture. Whoever succeeds [the Felon] Mr. Trump will be the first to take office with countries around the world asking not what America can do for them, but rather seeking to do as much as possible without us. The first step to coping with the fallout is realizing just how much — and how permanently — the world has changed.

Then there is this from the second column:

It’s not just NATO. Bureaucracies once defined by their lethargy are moving at surprising speed to limit their exposure to both the U.S. government and the companies that serve as outposts of American power. Since taking office a little over a year ago, Mr. Carney’s government has made just over 100 international trade deals. The European Union has expanded its defense procurement deliberately to avoid integration with American military forces. Disentanglement from American technology will be the thorniest knot to undo, but the work is already underway on this, too: The European Union has switched from Google to the French Qwant as a default search engine in its official systems, while Belgium and Finland have both moved away from Amazon Web Services. . . . . An increasingly isolationist America is no longer the leader of the free world. How can it be, when it’s no longer the leader of itself?

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