Thanks to a self-indulgent tariff fixation based on a profound misunderstanding of international economics, an insouciance about public finances that has widened the deficit, and a reckless military adventure that has choked off global energy supplies, inflation and interest rates are higher than they were in November 2024. Instead of a hands-off approach to the economy that would have generated noninflationary growth owing to the AI investment boom, we now have gasoline prices 30% higher than they were two years ago, diesel 60% higher, and the average mortgage rate nearly a percentage point higher, adding more than $2,000 a year to a typical home buyer’s interest cost. The war that has done so much harm to Americans’ finances is doing far more harm to our military capacity and our strategic interests. The president has alienated everyone in the world who could be helpful to us (perhaps excepting Israel) and emboldened and even embraced every country in the world that threatens us: China, Russia, North Korea. A signal achievement has been getting control of the border and removing some of the people who have no legal right to be here. But even with this proper and overwhelmingly popular policy, the administration has managed to harm the country and the GOP’s standing. The unnecessarily cruel and indiscriminate approach has caught many in its dragnet who shouldn’t be treated that way and is fundamentally un-American. The political effect has been to devastate support for the GOP among Hispanics, more than reversing the gains Mr. Trump had made with the fastest-growing ethnic population in the country. Further dismaying is the caesarism of the past two years: the grotesque self-enrichment, the self-satisfying prosecutorial pursuit of political enemies, the endless projects of self-grandiosity—the ballroom, the Kennedy Center and the Memorial Arch. Not to mention the buffoonish symbolic acts that substitute for actual thought and policy: the Gulf of America, Lake America, New America, the 51st state.

James Madison: At least when the British burned this place down, they didn’t try to monetize it.

It is rich irony that, after decades warning about how Democrats would corrupt our country with state-sponsored atheism and moral relativism, Republicans can now lay claim to perhaps the most godless and amoral administration in American history.

This is now about whether we’re willing to normalize sickness in power. Whether we tell ourselves comforting stories because confronting the actual reality in front of us is frightening. Whether we allow cruelty, lying, and instability to become the cultural baseline simply because calling it out makes dinner conversations awkward or costs us friends or clicks or donors.

Likening Trump’s firing of the IGs to “firing cops before you rob the bank”, Whitehouse stressed: “It’s pretty clear that what’s going on here is a very deliberate effort to create as much wreckage in the government as they can manage with a view to helping out the big Trump donors and special interests who find government obnoxious in various ways.”