As we extend greetings as May 2025 begins and roll out our "cover" for our Social Media Corners on Facebook and X, our team pulled together a snapshot of the week that was on the aftermath of the Elections in Australia, the Elections in Canada, and the continued aftermath of the Economic War unleashed by President Trump's Tariffs with thoughts courtesy the Economist of London, Forbes, the Good Talk PodCast and Guardian Australia:
As The Donald Trump Presidency approaches 100 Days, our team pulled together a snapshot of discourse courtesy The Economist; The Knowledge; Defense News; Daniel Larson (Eunemia) on the State of Affairs and the potential "End of the American Empire" Courtesy Al Jazeera; Jacobin; the Bulwark; the Atlantic, Seth Meyers, Jon Stewart and Jimmy Kimmel:
After more than a decade of liberal-driven censorship and cancel culture, Donald Trump’s second election win was meant to have, in his own words, “saved free speech in America,” starting with an executive order on day one to “stop all government censorship,” which is “intolerable in a free society.” Instead Trump’s ascent to the presidency is so far seeing a dramatic, across-the-board clampdown on all kinds of First Amendment–protected speech and a ramping up of government suppression of certain viewpoints.
We tend to associate this with pro-Palestine activism, and there’s no doubt that’s the area that has seen the most aggressive actions taken to chill political speech. The Trump administration has, without precedent, asserted the right to unilaterally revoke the legal status of permanent residents and deport them based purely on their criticisms of US foreign policy, has reportedly canceled hundreds of visas on this same basis, and is looking through the social media histories of visa applicants to find any pro-Palestine speech. It has been assisted by private institutions like universities and businesses, which have sometimes helped federal agents with making arrests or clamped down on pro-Palestine speech themselves. This is a shocking assault on freedom of speech, and the Trump administration isn’t even pretending otherwise.
But this barely touches the surface. One visa holder, a French scientist traveling to the United States for a conference, was barred from entering the country and sent back to France — and not because of anything pro-Palestine he said. Instead authorities went through his phone and found private messages he had sent that were critical of Trump’s science policies.
House Speaker Mike Johnson and Donald Trump, pictured in 2024 at Mar-a-Lago. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
THE LIKELIHOOD OF DONALD TRUMP and his allies in Congress taking Medicaid away from millions of low-income Americans—and, in the process, rolling back a huge piece of the Affordable Care Act—has increased significantly in the last two weeks.
The change has been easy to miss, because so many other stories are dominating the news—and because the main evidence is a subtle shift in Republican rhetoric.
But that shift has been crystal clear if you follow the ins and outs of health care policy—and if you were listening closely to House Speaker Mike Johnson a week ago, when he appeared on Fox News.
Johnson was there to talk about the budget reconciliation plan Republicans in Congress had just passed. That plan envisions significant spending cuts to help finance trillions of dollars in tax cuts. But the math doesn’t work with cuts to discretionary spending alone. And Republicans have pledged not to touch Social Security or Medicare.
That leaves just one target: Medicaid. Really the only question has been what kind of reductions in the program Republicans would seek, and how big those reductions would be.
For the past few months, Republicans have been signaling they would limit themselves to imposing “work requirements” and going after what they call “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the program. Either could have a significant impact on both the budget (i.e., federal spending would come down by more than $100 billion over ten years) and access to health care (i.e., several million people would lose insurance).
At the same time, Republicans seemed to be shying away from the even bigger structural changes they have tried many times before, including in their 2017 efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), when they proposed wholesale changes to the program’s financing.
Then Johnson went on Fox and, after the obligatory promise “to protect Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid for people who are legally beneficiaries of those programs,” said the following:
We have to root out fraud, waste, and abuse. We have to eliminate people on, for example, on Medicaid who are not actually eligible to be there—able-bodied workers, for example, young men who are—who should never be on the program at all.
When you have people on the program that are draining the resources, it takes it away from the people that are actually needing it the most and are intended to receive it. You’re talking about young, single mothers, down on their fortunes at a moment—the people with real disabilities, the elderly. And we’ve got to protect and preserve that program. So we’re going to preserve the integrity of it.
That may sound like a defense of Medicaid and the people who need it, and surely that’s how Johnson hopes the public will interpret it. But that is also the language Medicaid critics have been using to describe a big, controversial downsizing of the program—one that would undermine what was arguably Obamacare’s single biggest achievement.
When I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, there were two types of people: those who cared earnestly about ideas, and those who wanted only to shock the left. The reactionary fringe has won.
The president just launched a major worldwide economic war for no real reason, and he and his allies cooked up bogus numbers to justify their unprovoked aggression.
Trump’s massive escalation of his trade war was far worse than expected. The president just launched a major worldwide economic war for no real reason, and he and his allies cooked up bogus numbers to justify their unprovoked aggression. It is an economic war based on lies.
Many news reports have referred to these tariffs as reciprocal because that is what the administration calls them, but there is nothing reciprocal about any of this. The countries targeted with significantly higher tariffs have generally low tariffs on American goods. Trump’s trade war is as far from tariff reciprocity as it is possible to get.
The president has arbitrarily imposed one of the largest tax increases in American history. As Americans realize what he has done and how much it is costing them, the political backlash will likely be severe. If there is any good news in all of this insanity, it is that Trump has probably destroyed his presidency in just the first three months of the new term.
There isn’t much point in trying to understand why the president has chosen to wreck the economy, but there are some explanations we can dismiss. This has nothing to do with making America wealthier or stronger. There is no long-term strategy at work here. The president chose to indulge his bizarre delusions about economics, and he seems indifferent to the destruction it will cause.
As far as I can tell, Trump just wants to cause widespread harm. It is similar to his frequent use of broad sanctions. It doesn’t matter to him if these coercive measures achieve anything. He just wants to inflict pain on others to show that he has power. The more pain he can inflict, the more he enjoys it.
America’s trading partners will be well within their rights to retaliate in self-defense, and Trump has left them no choice. China and the EU have already promised to take countermeasures. Many analysts assumed or maybe just hoped that Trump was engaged in some elaborate bluff to extract concessions on this or that issue, but that was giving him far too much credit. There was no way for other countries to avoid the trade war because there was nothing they could have given that would have satisfied Trump. There is also nothing that they can do now to convince Trump to back off except to make him feel some of the pain that he is dealing out. It is going to be a pointless destructive fight that leaves everyone worse off than before.
This attack on our trading partners will likely do significant possibly irreparable damage to our relations with many other countries. When the U.S. lashes out at other countries and directly threatens their prosperity and interests, it is making new enemies all around the globe. The U.S. is torching the goodwill and trust that it has built up with dozens of countries over decades, and it will be difficult to get that back once it is gone.
We can’t know for sure what the political effects of this economic war will be, but sharp economic downturns often undermine international peace and security. Intensified economic warfare with China may not lead to armed conflict, but it is sure to ratchet up tensions even further to the detriment of both countries. It comes as no surprise that Trump’s legacy will be creating a less stable, more dangerous world.
Economic warfare is warfare. It can do more damage than military action, and it attacks the entire population. Trump’s economic war punishes the rest of the world and the American people at the same time. It is a colossal self-inflicted disaster, and it will leave our country poorer, weaker, and more isolated than it has been in a long time.
Sean Rayford/Getty
America is destined to become a “rogue superpower”
In 2020, says Michael
Beckley in Foreign Affairs,
I argued in this magazine that the fate of America was not, as most
predicted, to remain “leader of the liberal international order” or adapt
to a “post-American multipolar world”. Instead, I said the most likely
trajectory was for the country to become a “rogue superpower”, neither
internationalist nor isolationist, but “aggressive, powerful, and
increasingly out for itself”. In this light, Donald Trump is “more
accelerant than architect”, channelling long-simmering frustrations with
America’s global role, and deeper structural forces “pulling US strategy
inward”. One reason the country is going rogue is because it can – US
consumers buy more of the world’s goods than China and the Eurozone
combined; militarily, the US is still the only country that can fight
major wars thousands of miles from its shores.
Today, the US has not just the
means to strike out alone, but also the motive. The American-led liberal
order has “outlived its original purpose”, growing into a “maze of
burdens and vulnerabilities”. It didn’t fail, it triumphed over threats
that no longer exist. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union controlled nearly
half of Eurasia and possessed twice the military power of western Europe.
Communist parties – “committed to abolishing private property” –
controlled a third of global industrial output, and regularly won up to
40% of the vote in major democracies. The threat to the American way of
life was clear, and the US defence of the capitalist order worked. But
that success created new problems the old order was never designed to
solve. Vigorous allies became ageing dependents; globalisation hollowed
out American industry while enriching and empowering ruthless foreign
autocrats. The result? Abandoning it all and becoming a rogue superpower
is the “path of least resistance”.
The Trump administration wants to turn a long stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border into an Army base in an extraordinary move that’s likely to be challenged in court, U.S. officials told the Associated Press on Monday, three days after the White House released a memo entitled, “Military Mission for Sealing the Southern Border of the United States and Repelling Invasions.” In that memo, President Trump said he wanted this border-militarization plan to be implemented within 45 days.
If it sounds familiar, the Washington Post reported last month White House officials were considering these actions in order to “empower active-duty U.S. troops to temporarily hold migrants who cross into the United States illegally.” States Newsroom also wrote about this most recent development on Friday, after the White House posted its memo online.
How it might run into legal trouble: The plan authorizes the U.S. military to begin occupation of federal land referred to as the Roosevelt Reservation, extending from New Mexico to California—with exemptions at Native American reservations. But such a plan “could put U.S. military members in direct contact with migrants, [which is] a possible violation of federal law” known as the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law that generally prohibits the military from being used in domestic law enforcement, States Newsroom writes.
