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Prominent voices on the Left and within movement conservatism have argued that President Trump’s approach to foreign trade is strange, unorthodox—and even un-American. This is not surprising. After all, doctrinaire commitment to free trade—and doctrinaire distaste for protecting American industry—has been the dominant view among elites of both major political parties for at least a generation. Against this backdrop, it is no wonder that Trump’s actions on trade appear as a wholly irrational disruption of a system that, according to our political elites, does not need to be discarded.

This view of the matter, however, is based on an incomplete understanding of the American political tradition. Trump’s approach to trade policy has deep roots in American history, as we can see if we cast our gaze further back than we are accustomed to doing. Indeed, it does not go too far to say that the American Founders would find Trump’s approach to international commerce perfectly intelligible and respectable.

The most obvious way to link President Trump to the Founders is to invoke the justly celebrated name of Alexander Hamilton. The Report on Manufactures, Hamilton’s most famous state paper during his tenure as George Washington’s Treasury Secretary, laid out policy objectives that are essentially the same as those being defended by Trump and the members of his cabinet who are responsible for trade policy.

If Elon Musk didn’t have other priorities at the moment, he might want to consider adding Reddit to his free speech portfolio. Such a feat would take away one of the largest and most powerful social media platforms the Left uses to spread propaganda and organize at the local, state, and national levels. This would give conservatives a new, massive platform to drive politics and change culture, especially among younger Americans.

Conservatives missed the opportunity to dominate on Tumblr, which counts Gen Z and Millennials as a substantial portion of its active users—to the tune of 135 million per month. Given TikTok’s relationship with its Beijing-based ownership, conservatives have largely avoided the app in good conscience. But the opportunity with Reddit is different.

By the sound of it, the University of Michigan’s seeming about-face on DEI has the potential to be a drastic change for the better—but right now it’s only a distant potential. The university has been obsessed with DEI for a long time, and any serious shift in its approach will require a profound cultural and ideological change.

What we now call wokeness and DEI erupted on the public scene sometime around 2014, perhaps linked to the race riots emanating from Ferguson, Missouri. But for those of us connected to America’s institutions of higher learning, this progressivist view of social life has been around for quite a bit longer, percolating in academia among radical thinkers at least since the 1970s.

I was introduced to the now-familiar conceptual architecture of DEI in the middle of my time as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was at U-M when woke was taking root.

In the fall of 2006, I participated in the university’s Program on Intergroup Relations. I learned about social identities, privilege, intersectionality, marginalized groups, systemic oppression, etc. It was all so faddish and intellectually shallow. Even as an undergraduate, I didn’t find these all-encompassing doctrines compelling. But it was evident many of my peers did.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular poet in American history. As Dana Gioia writes,

His work commanded a readership that is almost unimaginable today even for best-selling novels. In terms of their reach and influence, Longfellow’s poems resembled studio-era Hollywood films: they were popular works of art enjoyed by huge, diverse audiences that crossed all social classes and age groups.

Longfellow published “Paul Revere’s Ride” in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1861 (when the magazine was still highly respectable). Few Americans remained who had a living memory of the American Revolution. With his poem, he succeeded in preserving part of that heroic memory in verse for many generations to come, the way Homer did for ancient Greeks or Shakespeare for Englishmen in more recent times. 

It wasn’t just for future generations that Longfellow wrote. His own generation faced the coming of the country’s great crisis, the Civil War. All his readers would have heard in this poem the appeal to the courage and spirit of the Revolution, on which America must always call when a crisis comes. Millions of Americans still know lines of the poem by heart. It does us good to know them.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Future-Maxxing | The Roundtable Ep. 263

Every nation has a story. Recently, the Washington Post described the Smithsonian Institution, with its 21 museums and 14 educational and research centers, as “the official keeper of the American Story.” What kind of story have they been telling about our country?

On March 27, President Trump issued an executive order arguing that there has been a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” and promote a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” This “revisionist movement” casts American “founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” A White House fact sheet calls for “revitalizing key cultural institutions and reversing the spread of divisive ideology.” Vice President JD Vance, a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, is tasked with leading the administration’s efforts. 

President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is perhaps the most welcome wake-up call for the federal government—and its obscene spending habits—in decades. It is refreshing to see many overpaid, underworked, often-vacationing federal employees fretting about whether their cushy jobs will disappear, and to see at least one branch of the federal government working to rein in our massive deficit spending. All of this is long overdue.

Yet it remains to be seen whether DOGE will help jump-start a serious and sustained effort to restore fiscal sanity, or whether its high-profile efforts will wrongly convince Americans that enough has been done, and that we can stop worrying that the federal government is bankrupting the country. If the former happens, it will be an extraordinary and much-needed development; if the latter, it will provide further evidence that, as Lincoln warned us nearly two centuries ago, if our republic is to be destroyed, it will be destroyed from within.

There are already signs that DOGE might not be able to deliver as much as originally promised. 

Professor James Hankins has written a sincere but largely misguided piece advocating for what amounts to a national guest worker program with a delayed pathway to citizenship. He proposes, with appropriate modesty, that “The advantages of this [immigration] proposal may not seem obvious at first sight to Republicans.” Let me, with all due humility, suggest that the alleged advantages are not obvious because they are not there. While Hankins’s program has a slightly different taste, it is basically the same old amnesty wine in a new bottle.

His core problem is viewing immigration policy as one issue among many in which any proposed solution should ultimately be subject to a popularity contest. In reality, immigration is an existential issue, and the way we approach it defines what kind of community we will be.

In the wreckage of World War II, there was no question who had won. Europe lay physically and morally bankrupt—its cities shattered, its institutions hollowed out, and its spiritual confidence extinguished in the fires of fascism and the humiliations of collaboration. America, in contrast, emerged not only militarily triumphant, but also civilizationally intact. It stood at the apex of industrial productivity, financial power, and—most crucially—a sense of providential mission. The nation had saved the world again from barbarism, and now it would rebuild it.

The instrument of this rebuilding was not martial coercion but what was euphemistically called the European Recovery Program. The Marshall Plan, as it came to be known, was a masterstroke of economic strategy. But it was more than that—it was a civilizational covenant. Through grants and loans, technology transfers, and institutional design, the United States reseeded the very soil of European life with the means of moral and material reconstruction. The goal was not merely to avert famine or restore infrastructure, but to reorient Europe toward the West—toward a shared vision of liberty, dignity, and law grounded in the remnants of a Christian moral order.

Western Europe rose from the ashes, and for a time, it seemed to regain its footing. From the founding of NATO to the forging of the European Economic Community, the transatlantic alliance was not merely a political convenience, but an expression of civilizational unity.

This book aims to provide nothing less than a full-throated defense of moral and political sanity against the latest eruptions of ideological mendacity in our time. Its thesis is simple enough, but it needs the full resources of applied political philosophy to explain with adequate clarity and depth. The thesis? That the “ideological” project to replace the only human condition we know with a utopian “Second Reality” oblivious to—indeed at war with—the deepest wellsprings of human nature and God’s creation has taken on renewed virulence in the late modern world, just 35 years after the glorious anti-totalitarian revolutions of 1989.

Public opinion has turned against DEI. It is tempting for DEI advocates to wish this reality away and call the DEI rollback part of the “white backlash.” Or claim that people just don’t want to learn real history. Or keep DEI in place under another name. Some administrators in academia are simply rebranding DEI as “community engagement” or “belonging centers.” But we all know what you are doing—it’s the same thing with a slightly different label.

DEI advocates are no doubt convinced of their position. They do not want to change. Their jobs depend on DEI policies. They think the DEI cause is righteous and central to the mission of higher education.

A majority of Americans find DEI policies objectionable, however. My home state of Idaho recently banned DEI policies, joining many states in passing sweeping bans. The recent dismantling of DEI at the University of Michigan may be a watershed moment for DEI in higher education. Michigan had been a leader in DEI advocacy, when measuring its funding of DEI initiatives and the number of DEI administrators on its payroll.

Something is happening here. What it is, is rather clear.

Let’s face facts: DEI advocates are increasingly in the minority. They are fighting rear-guard actions against a majority of people in the country, and in many states. They are fighting against democracy to preserve their DEI domain.

Professor James Hankins has proposed a grand bargain on immigration. He has the right idea: with an issue as thorny as immigration, on which the views of the American electorate are split, one might even say schizophrenic, the solution must be some kind of compromise. In order to strike a lasting bargain, each side must be satisfied with what it receives in return for giving up some of its demands.

Alas, in the Hankins bargain, what the Right gets, it doesn’t want, and what the Left gets, it doesn’t need.

The Left’s preferred policy solution for illegal immigration is amnesty. Their plan has always been to get as many people as possible over the border and then, when the congressional winds are favorable, grant them citizenship. They think they will be able to get enough conservative crossovers to pass an amnesty. There have always been Republican defectors who are either naïve would-be humanitarians and think amnesty is the compassionate solution or cynical friends of big business who want to maximize immigration as a source of cheap labor.

Plus, it would take some very compelling sweeteners to get the Left to agree to accept the half-loaf of guest worker permits, since they fully expect to get the full loaf of amnesty soon enough. None of the concessions Hankins offers are anywhere close to sweet enough.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

The Fog of Trade War | The Roundtable Ep. 262

Trump announces a sweeping tariff regime, then pauses it for 90 days—why? As a tactic to renegotiate trade deals? To reshore manufacturing? Some combination of both? With midterms just over the horizon, the stakes of this gamble to reorient global trade are high. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court lifts District Judge Jeb Boasberg’s temporary restraining order on deporting members of the Venezuelan gang Tren De Aragua—what’s next?? Internment camps for U.S. citizens?? This week, the hosts weigh in on the effectiveness of the recent tariffs, recount Justice Sotomayor’s ridiculous dissent, and touch on the limp, confused effort by the Left to protest. Plus: media and reading recommendations!

Recommended media:

The most powerful nation in history has spent the last three decades outsourcing its strength. Factories have been shuttered, energy dependence was reinstated, domestic bureaucracies have continued to grow, and bad trade deals were signed with rivals—all moves that have weakened America’s sovereignty. The Trump Administration is reversing this decline not only through rhetoric but also through action (which, admittedly, can be confusing at times).

The common thread weaved through President Trump’s current efforts is self-reliance. It’s evident in the concessions the Trump Administration is seeking from partners and adversaries alike. The administration’s “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariffs illustrate this tone. Unlike the soft diplomacy of the past, President Trump is seeking to rebalance trade and renew focus on American industry, while forcing better terms for America by using access to our markets as common leverage. While confounding critics who are accustomed to diplomatic platitudes and bureaucratic stagnation, this signals a return to American independence.

In the world that emerged after the Cold War, power moved with container ships and capital markets. Liberalism’s invisible hand was fortified by a visible navy, and its logic was one of frictionless flow: of goods, information, money, and governance standards. The sea was its main artery, and the U.S. Navy its steward.

Today, that world is cracking. Capital markets are fragmenting. Supply chains are shortening. Naval supremacy is increasingly contested not by peer fleets but by $10,000 drones and firmware updates. And, perhaps most significantly, ordinary people—the supposed beneficiaries of the globalized order—are turning against it.

What we are witnessing is not simply a redistribution of power, but a transformation in the very grammar of geopolitical influence. Economic integration no longer secures peace; in many cases, it foments resentment. Technological innovation no longer reinforces traditional hierarchies; it bypasses them. And military might no longer projects primarily from the sea—it radiates from code, chips, and algorithms.

This is a world no longer ruled by frictionless flows, but by points of friction—strategic chokeholds where denial is cheap and control is asymmetric.

The architecture of globalization was strategic, not merely economic. The United States underwrote an open trading system, because it extended American influence while suppressing the rise of challengers. Pax Americana was a naval enterprise. Aircraft carriers were not just tools of war; they were guarantees of commerce.

News of Britain’s disastrous 30-year experiment with mass migration appears to have left the rainy little island for the sunny uplands of America, where it was picked up by JD Vance. Speaking at a recent Washington, D.C. summit hosted by Andreessen Horowitz, the vice president argued that Britain’s economy is stagnating due to high levels of immigration, and accused Western nations of growing “lazy” by relying on imported “cheap labor” as a replacement for productivity.

President Trump has put into words what everyone in Washington was already thinking: there is a very real possibility of strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities this summer. They would probably be led by Israel, with U.S. support and the quiet acquiescence of several Arab partners allowing the use of their airspace. It would be an enormous undertaking to blow up hardened underground sites in multiple locations at long distances, but the Israelis are almost certainly prepared and capable, having explored this option many times before. It’s probable that they briefed the Trump campaign in the months leading up to the election, setting out the most likely options and contingency scenarios. In the intervening months, it’s been a matter of the administration getting the right team in place at the National Security Council and waiting to see how Iran responds. 

JUAREZ, Mexico – On New Year’s Eve 2020, as President-elect Joe Biden was at home in Delaware celebrating his imminent move into the White House, a mob of some 300 Cubans stormed out of Juárez, Mexico, in a mad banzai charge over one of the international bridges toward El Paso, Texas. 

They swept past Mexican border guards, leapt pell-mell the wrong way over Mexican pay turnstiles, and sprinted for America in a crisscrossing stampede through traffic over the bridge lanes.

But alas, the outgoing Donald Trump was still in office, and his U.S. Customs and Border Protection Mobile Field Force, already riot-ready and waiting behind heavy concrete blocks tipped by concertina wire, stopped the migrant charge cold. Bunched up behind the barricades, the foiled mob loosed a telling chant: 

“Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den! Bi-den!”

“They should let us pass. We are calling out to Mexico and the U.S. and to Biden, the new U.S. president, to remind him of the presidential campaign promises he made, to make him aware we are here,” said one of them, Raul Pino Gonzalez of Havana, to a Cuban news reporter. 

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Task Force Dragging On | The Roundtable Ep. 261

James Hankins proposes a guest worker program that would address a half-century of shortcomings in American mass immigration policy. In its rare combination of hardheadedness and empathy, his argument calls to mind Victor Davis Hanson’s 2003 memoir/essay Mexifornia. Hankins is writing neither for economists nor for international lawyers, but for people who actually live in America and wish to do right by their neighbors, including the most recently arrived among them. This is going to be difficult.

We should be clear what Hankins means by “guest worker.” Aren’t illegal immigrants guest workers already? They are guests, after a fashion, and they do work. The expression “guest worker” means something different. Though the specifics can vary from country to country, the term means someone who is in the country where he works on sufferance. A guest worker has the right to work, but not necessarily the right to stay or become a citizen. Guest worker is an intermediate category between citizen and foreigner.

Hankins argues that elaborating such a special status for people would fix a few aspects of the present system that are especially unfair and perverse. By definition, illegal migrants do not belong here legally, but after long residence they may well belong here, and only here, culturally. What is more, their American-born children belong here unambiguously.

The triumphal arch holds a very important place in the annals of Western architecture and urbanism. In Roman times it played a lofty honorific role, even though most Roman arches commemorated civic achievements and personages rather than military victories. The freestanding monumental arch was a syncretic creation, structurally derived from Etruscan gateways and decoratively enriched with Hellenistic architectural and sculptural forms. Its distinctive presence, which accommodated an astonishing variety in massing and detail, enriched towns and cities across the Roman empire, from Spain to Syria.

The monumental arch should be regarded as a universal entity—eminently appropriate, one would think, to a universal nation like these United States. The late, great historian of imperial Roman architecture, William L. MacDonald, noted how the arch corresponds to the classical concept of human proportions as delineated in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, in which a male figure is inscribed within an overlapping circle and square. The impost or “springing” of the opening within the arch corresponds, MacDonald noted, to the Vitruvian Man’s arms extended directly outward, while the curvilinear opening itself corresponds to his arms sweeping upward. The arch’s geometry thus addresses us as embodied beings. You can’t get more universal than that.

In his address to Congress this month, President Trump boasted—and justly so—of his administration’s astonishing success in stopping illegal border crossings over just six weeks. “Since taking office, my administration has launched the most sweeping border and immigration crackdown in American history. And we quickly achieved the lowest numbers of illegal border crossers ever recorded.” This is no Trumpian bombast: A 94% year-on-year reduction in illegal entries really is an unprecedented accomplishment. It is also a popular one: a majority of Americans approve of controlling the border.

An even larger majority—some 76%—approve of his policy of deporting undocumented aliens who have committed felonies. Even some on the Left like Jon Stewart have been wondering: if ICE knew exactly where to find all those murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and human traffickers, as clearly they did, why then did the Biden Administration never act to deport them? Good question.

The United States needs immigrants. Americans aged 65 or older will nearly double to about 50% of the population from today’s 27% due to declining fertility and rising longevity. The dire warnings we hear about the Social Security and Medicare systems will come true with a vengeance. Immigration, to be sure, is not the only remedy for our demographic problems—we can incentivize child-raising and extend the average working life—but it is an indispensable one. Working-age adult immigrants who pay into the Social Security and Medicare trust funds help keep these systems solvent.

The fall in America’s fertility rate stems from cultural and religious shifts that cannot be undone quickly. In a January 10, 2022 contribution to The American Mind, I reviewed the statistical evidence that the decline in our fertility can be explained by the attenuation of religion in the United States.

The most popular and encouraging part of the upheaval unleashed by the Trump presidency may be the administration’s fierce determination to break the grip that wokeness, the new racialism, and gender ideology have had on all levels of government, as well as on the commanding heights of civil society. As William Voegeli perceptively argues in the latest issue of the Claremont Review of Books, Trump speaks for the 80% of Americans who are appalled by “anti-racism” being turned into a weapon of war by other means; who want free speech to be respected again; who are alarmed by limitless social engineering, the genital mutilation of the young, and literally open borders; who do not want women’s sports to be dominated by biological men; and who deeply resent the constant invective being directed against the noble American project itself.

President Trump has repeatedly spoken of a “common sense revolution,” a “revolution” that puts the lie to the para-Marxist claim, beloved by academics, journalists, and almost all politicians, that the concerns of citizens are almost exclusively “bread-and-butter” ones, and that “culture war” issues are at best a distraction and at worst an exercise in demagoguery, racism, and homophobia.

Jeremiah Gridley, leader of the Massachusetts bar when John Adams joined it, said that “a Lawyer ought never to be without a Book of Moral Philosophy on his Table.” In the founding era, moral philosophy was itself part of common law reasoning, as was political philosophy.

This sets the Founders apart not only from the modern academy, with its separate departments for government, philosophy, and law, but even from their British contemporaries of the late 18th century such as the jurist William Blackstone. As James Wilson noted of Blackstone, “He should be read and studied. He deserves to be much admired; but he ought not to be implicitly followed.”

Contra Blackstone, the Founders maintained that if one does not think about common law precedents in particular, and legal reasoning in general, in light of the moral/legal reasoning behind them, one will misread them. The reasoning that justified them was inseparable from the law itself, and informed the scope and limitations of any precedent that followed.

A sense of fear is rippling through higher education—the fear that the Trump Administration will hold it accountable for violating federal law. As President Trump withholds millions in grants to Ivy League institutions, The New York Times’s Thomas Edsall innocently asks, “The American university system commands worldwide respect. What would prompt a call for its abolition?”

Like so many institutions, the American university system used to enjoy bipartisan trust and support. It once commanded broad-based respect, a respect that has been in freefall as the Left systematically dropped objective standards of excellence and the canon of Western civilization, replacing them with ever-evolving departments of grievance studies and activism. The majority of Republicans view American universities as a net negative. Independents are trending the same way, with just one-third saying they have “quite a lot” of trust in our universities.

On the basis of once high levels of trust, the universities secured enormous taxpayer benefits not given to any other sector. Now, they are shocked to find themselves in the process of losing their special carve-outs, which make up a substantial portion of their budgets. Losing these perks is a serious threat to their entire business model. In other words, as the kids say, FAFO.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Mixed Signals | The Roundtable Ep. 260

Atlantic reporter Jeff Goldberg was mistakenly added to a national security group chat, leading to a DC media feeding frenzy—is there anything of substance to be gleaned from this goof? Meanwhile, Jay Bhattacharya—an early opponent of the 2020 lockdowns—was confirmed by the Senate to direct the National Institutes of Health, hopefully marking a turn back to sound health policy. This week, the guys talk through messaging and operations security, Biden-era censorship, plummeting egg prices, and more! Plus: a round of reading recommendations.

Recommended articles:

How Covid Remade Our America, Five Years Later

My friend, mentor, and former professor Jed Rubenfeld published an article last week in The Free Press titled “Why MAGA is Furious with Amy Coney Barrett.” In addition to discussing the particulars of the Right’s recent spat with Justice Barrett due to her vote in Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, Rubenfeld explores “a civil war now being waged within legal conservatism, a war that will determine its future.” He contends that, like his progressive students a decade ago, many young conservatives are beginning to “turn against the constitution.”

With the utmost respect, Professor Rubenfeld is wrong. The rejection of our constitutional order remains a fringe view among right-wing law students and young lawyers. The most potent challenge to actually-practiced legal conservatism comes not from “right wing anti-constitutionalism”—it comes from originalism itself. But ours is not the same critique of originalism as Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule, who has been something of a bogeyman for legal liberals and FedSoc types. Yet for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the FedSoc establishment, it’s not clear Vermeule has much sway among young lawyers on the Right.

Those who control the Democratic Party despise America, our Constitution, and our history. Their goal is a repressive society based on Marxist and intersectional ideologies. Their claim to be champions of democracy is hypocrisy of the highest order. Through subterfuge and force they have moved the United States to the precipice of the abyss. Their radical views, vitriol, and violence are intolerable. Only by the strongest medicine, intravenously administered, can we turn the tide.

Donald Trump’s goal is to restore individual liberties, a constitutional republic, and American exceptionalism. He is fallible, and his flaws have been exacerbated by a decade of political, legal, and financial attacks. Yet, blemishes and some dark impulses aside, there is a broad chasm between the hellscape sought by Democratic activists and leaders and the America Trump seeks.

Like any young right-winger, I follow Vice President JD Vance closely on X. He’s one of the most interesting and inspiring figures in the Trump Administration. Recently, he discussed an interaction he had with a Ukrainian American that got my attention. The gentleman accused Vance of abandoning “his” country, to which Vance retorted that his country is America. He then said a line that has stuck with me, something I had never heard a politician express before: “I always found it offensive that a new immigrant to our country would be willing to use the power and influence of their new nation to settle the ethnic rivalries of the old.”

What Vice President Vance succinctly outlined is a problem that naturally seems to come with empire building: becoming international waters. The United States has become a place where other nations fight to win money, power, and influence for themselves while the American people are left in the dust. Client states at the outer edges of our empire have become the constituency of our politicians and bureaucrats. Taxpayers of the empire suffer as they’re forced to fund the outer colonies, getting hardly anything tangible in return for their labors.

In his address to Congress this month, President Trump boasted—and justly so—of his administration’s astonishing success in stopping illegal border crossings over just six weeks. “Since taking office, my administration has launched the most sweeping border and immigration crackdown in American history. And we quickly achieved the lowest numbers of illegal border crossers ever recorded.” This is no Trumpian bombast: A 94% year-on-year reduction in illegal entries really is an unprecedented accomplishment. It is also a popular one: a majority of Americans approve of controlling the border.

An even larger majority—some 76%—approve of his policy of deporting undocumented aliens who have committed felonies. Even some on the Left like Jon Stewart have been wondering: if ICE knew exactly where to find all those murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and human traffickers, as clearly they did, why then did the Biden Administration never act to deport them? Good question.

An unexpected line to trace through Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement underscores how post-1960s America—high on a new civil rights regime enforced by the federal bureaucracy—evolved into a culture of easy capital and low-accountability work. Caldwell’s warnings about limitless government spending, cheap credit, and extraordinary leniency on personal and corporate debt hint at a deeper transformation that I will make explicit: easy money ultimately begat easy jobs, embedding a sense of entitlement not just in civic life, but also in corporate America. Lax job performance and perpetual punting on profitability became commonplace, normalizing positions unattached to genuine operational needs.

The book’s climax spotlights Ronald Reagan’s decision to cut taxes and increase spending to buoy the Baby Boomers. Rather than halting the runaway habits of endless federal agencies, trimming spending, and repealing harmful laws from the prior generation, the Reagan Administration doubled down. The massive expansion of the administrative state—ostensibly to enforce civil rights—spilled into economic policy: free-flowing money, perpetual government growth, workless jobs, and inflated assets in both the public and private spheres. The federal government, alongside subsidized industries, sprawling corporate giants, and a host of NGOs, served as the unwitting backstop for this risky status quo.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Tren Wreck | The Roundtable Ep. 259

You’re fired. Trump, by executive order, has moved to terminate federal contracts with law firm Perkins Coie for its role in promoting the 2016 Russiagate conspiracy and otherwise influencing elections—sparking fervorous debate in and across the aisle. Meanwhile, the administration invoked the emergency powers of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport members of the violent Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, provoking an activist judge to obstruct the law’s use. Who rules: Congress or courts? The hosts sit down to discuss these ongoing legal battles in government, real battles abroad, and the absurd responses from the Left across the board. Plus, more media recommendations!

Recommended reading:

As the Trump Administration pushes DEI out of schools and colleges, it should incentivize patriotic civic education as a salutary alternative. While curricular mandates from Washington violate federalism—besides the views of the growing chorus of Americans to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education—many federal tools remain available.

DEI, which nominally denotes “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” has come to stand for the full set of anti-American teachings and principles outlined in the January 2021 report of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. These include promoting a false history of slavery that inaccurately denigrates the American Founders, praising progressivism and muting the horrors of Communism, and inculcating racist identity politics.

In contrast, the 1776 Report highlights ways Americans can develop enlightened patriotism. The family, inspiring and accurate education, noble stories, solid scholarship, and reverence for the rule of law under our common Constitution of the United States all have their roles.

Much has been written about Trump Derangement Syndrome, that mental and emotional affliction that distorts its victims’ ability to make measured judgments about the doings of our past and present president. No doubt much more will be written about it, because this malady shows no signs of abating.

One of the worst side effects of TDS is the widespread circulation of bogus constitutional claims. As Trump, the astute politician that he is, has staked out popular positions on many issues of interest to the public, his critics, at a loss for other arguments, routinely say he is trashing the Constitution.

This is a serious problem. Preserving our constitutional system, and the many blessings that flow from it, depends on preserving a correct understanding of the Constitution’s various provisions among the public. But the public’s understanding of the Constitution is undermined by the TDS brigade’s continual reiteration of fanciful claims of constitutional violations.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo v. City of New London is undoubtedly one of its worst decisions in the past 20 years. The Court gave state and local governments the option to transfer private property from its rightful owner to another private owner, justifying this as a “public use” since it will supposedly promote “economic development.” Kelo is a classic example of activist judges rationalizing a predetermined result—in this case, overturning the Constitution’s protection of private property rights.

The Court’s decision stripped Susette Kelo and her neighbors in the historic Fort Trumbull neighborhood of their property in order to build an “urban village”—a fact Justice John Paul Stevens breezily dismisses in his opinion, which is a thoroughly unimpressive piece of legal legerdemain. Stevens failed to note that the neighborhood would be bulldozed even though he acknowledged that not only had Kelo lived in her house since 1997, and had made substantial improvements to her property, but that “Wilhelmina Dery was born in her Fort Trumbull house in 1918 and has lived there her entire life.” The continued existence of what was apparently a very stable residential area, however, could not be allowed to stand in the way of “progress.” Stevens held that the residents and their homes must be sacrificed in the interest of a supposed greater good.

Two monumental events have shaken the U.S. foreign policy establishment since the inauguration of President Donald Trump. They took place at roughly the same time, but few have recognized their connection.

The first was the widespread exposure of USAID as the “world’s hipster vanguard of globalist, cultural Marxist revolution,” in the words of J. Michael Waller. When it wasn’t outright funding jihadist terrorism, USAID redirected billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to left-wing organizers promoting LGBTQ radicalism, anti-racism, climate change, and every other imaginable progressive policy around the globe.

While “charity” CEOs living in taxpayer-funded luxury wailed about how cuts would cost lives, the debate among the online Right was about burning USAID to the ground and salting the earth, or perhaps repurposing some form of foreign aid to support an America First foreign policy agenda.

“[T]he love of fame,” wrote Alexander Hamilton, is “the ruling passion of the noblest minds” (Federalist 72). But—also in the noblest minds—passion bows politely to reason, and the love of fame is tempered by love of the true and the good. Fame is the height of honor on the grandest scale, and the noblest minds will want to be honored only for what is most worthy of honor. They don’t seek the applause of fickle opinion here and now, but the respect of the wise and good of all times and places; ultimately, they want to be measured by what is worthy in the eyes of God.

What is most worthy of honor deserves to be remembered. “Old men forget,” as Shakespeare’s King Henry V proclaims at Agincourt, “yet all shall be forgot,” before oblivion shrouds in darkness the most worthy deeds. These will be remembered “from this day to the ending of the world.”

No human deed, in the whole “course of human events,” surpasses the American Revolution—bringing forth “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Rightly will the names of those happy few, that band of brothers—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Adams—be remembered to the ending of the world.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

BIPOC Cholbe | The Roundtable Ep. 258

First, they came for the green card-holding terror groupies—then they came for…us? Not exactly. But the recent detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University protest organizer who fought “for the total eradication of Western Civilization,” has prompted cries of fascism. Again. Meanwhile, California governor Gavin Newsom sheds his skin and snakes his way toward the center of the political spectrum: best not be fooled! This week, the guys discuss the antisemitic venom poisoning some young right-wingers, the ongoing disarray of Democrats; and more! Plus: a batch of media recommendations.

Recommended reading:

In politics, as in life, winning is better than losing. But some losses are worse than others. An especially damaging defeat creates a situation that is both hard to endure and hard to change.

This is the Democratic Party’s dilemma after the 2024 election: It suffered a bad defeat. An important cause of that defeat was that the party had embraced and become identified with a social justice ideology that offends more voters than it attracts. To become more politically competitive by becoming less politically correct is, under the circumstances, clearly advisable but also highly improbable.

A Win Is a Win

First, the election. Republicans retained a majority in the House of Representatives, with a 220- to 215-seat advantage, after a net loss of two seats. By gaining four seats, the GOP also captured control of the Senate with a workable but not dominating 53-47 majority. Finally, the party won the presidency with a 49.8% to 48.3% popular vote plurality and won 58% of the Electoral College: 312 electoral votes to the Democrats’ 226.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Red State Strategy | Cincinnatus Series Ep. 6

New Year’s Day 2020 was no different than the ones that came before. Many people were traveling back home from the Christmas holiday, expecting to find their jobs and schools much as they had left them. Almost no one owned a surgical mask, and nobody had ever been offered a free cheeseburger in exchange for taking a vaccine.

Those first months of the new year brought whispers of a virus that was causing disruption in China. Based on everything most Americans knew at the time, there was no reason to pay attention to COVID-19. The virus seemed far away—things like that never happen here. Nevertheless, in early March, our children’s schools shut down for “two weeks to flatten the curve.” They did not reopen for the remainder of the school year.

The months that followed brought a great deal of confusion. There was constant revision of recommended guidelines. Who was in charge of those guidelines? And by what authority? The lack of data in the early stages of the pandemic made it virtually impossible for citizens to evaluate whether the restrictions were really supported by what soon came to be known as “The Science.” And as is increasingly the case, The Science was “settled.”

There is a movement sweeping state legislatures, from Connecticut to Hawaii, to enact a “green” amendment that would enshrine a person’s “individual right” to a “safe and stable climate.” To be sure, clean air and drinking water are certainly laudable goals, necessary for life. But enshrining the “green” amendment into state and federal constitutions would have unintended—and disastrous—consequences.

The movement for an amendment began gathering momentum after the landmark decision in Robinson Township v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (2013). In that ruling, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declared unconstitutional portions of Act 13, which expanded natural gas drilling from the Marcellus Shale reservoirs. Since then, activists such as those at For the Generations have argued that a federal amendment, modeled on Pennsylvania’s Constitution, would further strengthen the fight against climate change.

The next chapter of lawfare has already begun. A host of federal judges have issued orders to stop President Trump’s political appointees from implementing his policies. Judge Paul Engelmayer’s initial 4-page order against the administration temporarily prevented Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent from accessing department records.

And worse still, the Supreme Court just allowed a lower court to command the federal government to disburse foreign aid before ruling whether the president’s attempt to withhold the funds was lawful. Justice Alito’s dissent excoriated the Court’s abdication of responsibility as “a most unfortunate misstep that rewards an act of judicial hubris and imposes a $2 billion penalty on American taxpayers.”

The ensuing struggle for executive power over the next few years will determine whether presidential elections have lasting consequences.

This latest round of chipping away at the executive power builds on the last century of judicial activism. What started in the 20th century with progressive darlings on the Supreme Court like Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter reached full bloom during the infamous Warren Court.

What do a windswept town on the plains of North Dakota and a sandy beach hamlet in Florida have in common? Aside from the fact they’re both in the U.S., they only require students to show proof of identification, residency, and an up-to-date vaccine card to enter their schools. With the exception of some states that allow for vaccination waivers, this policy has led to an unprecedented number of illegal migrant children gaining admittance to public schools across the country.

Though statistics on these demographic movements have been difficult to find, what is available suggests that the number of children of illegal immigrants attending publicly funded schools is staggering. The situation is becoming clearer with an uptick in deportation, and the Trump Administration’s stemming the tide of illegal entries into the U.S. The strain on public resources has been intensely felt—and in many school districts, the strain has become downright catastrophic.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Trump’s Cards | The Roundtable Ep. 257

The grotesque banalization of Hitler and Hitlerism proceeds apace. The American Left’s discourse is replete with comparisons of President Donald J. Trump to Adolf Hitler and constant evocations of a dangerous “fascist” threat to democracy supposedly coming from an altogether illiberal Right. Kamala Harris labeled Trump a fascist and Nazi sympathizer in a CNN town hall meeting in October, and she and the mainstream media continued to pile on until the November election.

When Trump held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, a little over a week before the election, many Democrats, and the increasingly hysterical talking heads on CNN and MSNBC, compared that rally to a meeting of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund in that same venue in 1939. Completely disregarding the impressively multiracial character of the MAGA supporters gathered to hear Trump, as well as the large contingent of Orthodox and Hassidic Jews also in attendance, the media incessantly identified Trump with Hitler and “fascism.” Not only was the deep-seated evil that was National Socialism trivialized beyond recognition, and not only was fascism crudely (and absurdly) identified with any opposition to a hard Left agenda, but crucial distinctions between fascism, National Socialism, and democratic conservatism were elided in a deeply misleading manner.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Cell Phones in Schools | Cincinnatus Series Ep. 5

On Super Bowl Sunday, President Trump announced that the penny, a coin that has been in circulation since 1792, will no longer be minted. For as long as America has had a penny, it has also had a national debt, and there has recently been a discussion of how much debt is too much.

The penny has become a microcosm of our financial issues. We collect a penny in revenue but incur three cents in costs. The penny-minting business runs a deficit, just like much else in Washington.

In order to keep our financial system operating smoothly, it is time for Washington to address the question of the debt limit.

Always a political minefield, Congress is supposed to set the credit limit on its own credit card. But for eight of the last ten years, it has given itself unlimited credit by suspending the limit altogether. Congress is now considering raising the debt limit beyond the existing $36 trillion.

But how far can Congress safely go?

In our personal lives, we are all aware that there is a limit to how much can be borrowed on a house or automobile. A banker will ask two questions before approving your loan: how much you earn and what you owe. He is seeking to determine if you have the capacity to handle a certain amount of debt.

The Oval Office showdown between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance was perhaps one of the most consequential spectacles of modern political history. Now that the administration has announced an end to further aid to Ukraine, many believe that Zelensky’s outburst may go down as one of the worst diplomatic mistakes in recent memory.

The claim that Trump is simply adjusting America’s involvement in Ukraine because of one bad meeting, however, is an insult to the president’s capacity for statesmanship. The seemingly intransigent impasse that has been reached is a direct result of Trump intending to keep his campaign promise to achieve a realizable peace in Ukraine, while Zelensky continues to demand an unattainable victory.

Trump came to office recognizing that U.S. support for Ukraine was always intended as a relatively low-risk way to weaken Russia through an armed proxy. If the Putin regime did not collapse due to domestic pressures, then Moscow would have a pyrrhic victory forced upon it due to significant military losses, a weakened economy, and broader international ostracization.