ROGER KIMBALL: Actions v. Words.
Donald Trump is different. He does what others say is impossible. Some commentator (I forget who) recently employed a quip attributed to Winston Churchill about Trump. Churchill is supposed to have said that U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was “the only bull I know who carries his china shop with him.” Apparently, Churchill did not say that. But it is a memorable image, and one can understand why someone would apply it to Donald Trump. He has been in office fewer than 100 days, yet look at the disruptions he has instigated. On his first day, he abolished all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs throughout the federal government. He also forbade simply renaming those programs in order to carry on their racist, inequitable work by subterfuge. He insisted that universities jettison their coddling of racist and anti-Semitic policies as a condition for receiving federal money. As of this writing, hundreds of millions of dollars have been withheld from Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and other elite institutions for failing to abide by this directive. He tapped Elon Musk to help him identify and eliminate waste and fraud in the government. The revelations are stunning. It’s almost as if the U.S. government had evolved into a machine to serve politicians at the taxpayer’s expense.
This last week, Trump got around to one of the main things he campaigned on, his “favorite word,” tariffs. The stock market cratered, the establishment recoiled like a scrotum in icy water, and the acrid scent of panic was everywhere. I wrote about the tariffs the morning of what Trump called “Liberation Day” before the market opened. I expected market tumult but was taken aback by the ferocity of the market reaction.
Still, I continue to believe that we should give Trump’s strong medicine a chance to work. I think that the commentator Tanvi Ratner is correct: the tariffs “aren’t a trade tweak,” she wrote, “they’re the first move in a full-spectrum reset.” As the stock market declines, investors flee to treasury bonds, forcing the yield on those bonds lower. This year, almost $10 trillion will need to be refinanced. Every basis point that the yield declines translates into a billion-dollar annual savings in loan repayment. Thus, a 0.5% drop, she points out, would save $500 billion over a decade. As of this writing, the yield has declined about 0.7 points. That’s a lot of money saved.
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