Trump's ad hoc presidency is destroying the economy -- and a lot more - Milbank, WaPo
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Trump is running an ad hoc presidency. There are no rules. The law is strictly optional. And Trump, unbound by both, administers one shock to the system after another. There is no predictability to his actions. Business leaders and consumers have no idea what’s coming next and, therefore, have no way to plan — and that, as much as anything, is what is wrecking the economy.
Trump has unilaterally shattered the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal he negotiated with much fanfare just five years ago, at the time calling it “the largest, fairest, most balanced and modern trade agreement ever achieved.” He’s slapping huge tariffs on Mexico, Canada and Europe and is making wild threats to raise them higher. At different points this week, he threatened a 50 percent tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum and 200 percent on European alcohol — and our erstwhile allies are retaliating. Trump has similarly shocked the world’s security, destroying U.S. soft power (the administration announced this week that it had canceled 83 percent of foreign-aid programs) and chaotically cutting off military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine before restoring it days later.
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This week alone, the Trump administration eliminated half the staff at the Education Department — overnight — while making cuts that will cause as many as 2 million people to lose health insurance. After campaigning on a promise to make the nation’s capital safer, Trump successfully pushed the House to pass legislation that will all but force the District of Columbia to fire police officers. The Environmental Protection Agency terminated $20 billion in grants that had already been awarded to local communities to help reduce Americans’ energy bills, drawing a rebuke from a federal judge on Wednesday who suggested the White House had offered no justification for canceling the program other than that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin “doesn’t like it.” The administration ousted the top lawyer at the IRS because he objected to Musk’s team accessing taxpayers’ private records.
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There was a time, back when Republicans still believed in the free market, that avoiding such “overwhelming uncertainty” would have been the highest priority of government. “The role of government,” Milton Friedman, the celebrated conservative economist, wrote in 1956, “is to do something that the market cannot do for itself, namely, to determine, arbitrate and enforce the rules of the game.”
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On Thursday, a federal judge ordered the administration to re-offer jobs to many of the 30,000 probationary workers it fired, after previously ruling that the firings broke the law. On Wednesday, a judge slapped a restraining order on the administration for an executive order that, she said, sent “chills down my spine”: punishing the law firm Perkins Coie because of its work for Democrats against Trump. Trump had unilaterally revoked security clearances for lawyers at the firm, blocked their access to federal buildings and stripped the firm’s clients of their government contracts. On Tuesday, another federal judge blocked a Trump scheme to eliminate more than $600 million in grants for teacher training, without justification, at a time when the country already has a nationwide teacher shortage. Already, federal judges have blocked an executive action by Trump at least 45 times since he has taken office. (The New York Times keeps a handy tally.)
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Here’s Trump’s DOGE boss, Musk, using his federal powers to further his private fortune again, telling the Polish foreign minister to “Be quiet, small man,” when the minister complained about Musk’s threats to cut off his Starlink service to Ukraine; Secretary of State Marco Rubio backed up Musk. Here’s Musk calling Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), a combat veteran and former NASA astronaut, “a traitor” because Kelly visited Ukraine and criticized the Trump administration’s “‘screw you, go it alone’ foreign policy.” And here’s Musk baselessly blaming Tesla protests on George Soros.
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