Donald Trump and the Republican unpopular big ugly tax cut bill and tariff prices. So what do the maga do? They cheat: Gerrymandering

Trump’s Increasingly Creative Authoritarianism

Echo interview published in The Washington Monthly:

Donald Trump’s recent efforts to seize Harvard’s patents and militarize DC show how the president is leaving no avenue untouched in his bid for absolute power.

The Trump administration has become increasingly creative—and ruthless—in its use and abuse of existing policy tools to further its agenda. It has, for instance, weaponized the Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights to reverse its historic mission. Instead of promoting diversity, it’s now working to end it. More recently, Trump has threatened to use legislation passed in 1980—the Bayh-Dole Act—to take over Harvard’s patents. While intended to give government the ability to compel the licensing of patents in fairly narrow circumstances—such as to protect health and safety—the law, in Trump’s hands, has become yet another cudgel to use against Harvard (and, potentially, other elite universities).

In this week’s politics roundtable, editors Paul Glastris, Bill Scher and Anne Kim talk about Trump’s creeping authoritarianism, as well as the false promise of revenues from Trump’s tariffs. 

Also discussed is how Democrats should respond to the escalating arms race over redistricting.

Anne Kim:  Let’s talk first about Trump’s tariffs, which have finally gone into effect. On average, we’re talking about 15 percent baseline tariffs on most goods coming to United States now, plus higher tariffs against certain countries that Trump is targeting for a variety of reasons. That includes a 50 percent potential tariff on Brazil for its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who was accused of staging a coup after losing an election, and a threatened 50 percent tariff against India for buying Russian oil. Bill, you wrote a recent column for the Washington Monthly that disputes the president’s conclusion here. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Bill Scher: Trump talks as if the federal government collects more revenue in tariffs that we’re a wealthy country. That’s not how most people really look at wealth. It doesn’t mean that you and I get more money if the federal government collects more money in revenue.

And it does seem like we are collecting more revenue from tariffs than before. If the July 2025 tariff number of $29.6 billion reflects what we will be paying going forward, the annual cost will be $355.2 billion. So that’s a lot more money into the federal government coffers.

But remember, we’re paying that.

Businesses have been trying to absorb the cost but now they’re saying they can’t keep doing this.

Anne Kim: It does seem like every day there’s a new story about how small businesses in particular are getting hit by this. And it seems that even large companies like Walmart and Amazon are beginning to announcethat they’re going to be doing price increases. And let’s not forget that these are incredibly regressive taxes.

Bill Scher:Well, not only are the tariffs regressive, if you’re middle class or working class, you pay a larger share of your wealth in goods than someone who’s a mega-millionaire. And this has been known about tariffs going back to the 19th century. This is why we got rid of these tariffs because people understood it was a very regressive system.

Trump also just passed a tax cut—the “One Big Beautiful (aka "ugly") Bill Act”—but the tax breaks in that law are also skewed to the wealthy. In fact, there are analyses that say if you’re in the bottom 40%, you’re actually going to pay more or lose more of your income. So it’s regressiveness on top of regressiveness. And I think it’s a huge opportunity for Democrats going into 2026 and 2028 to say, “We’ve got a great way to relieve you on taxes—we’re to make those tariffs go ‘poof.’” Instant tax cut for the working class. And if we need that revenue so badly to alleviate our debt burdens, well, we can replace that with tax increases on the wealthy who got a sweet deal from the Trump administration.Anne Kim: Republicans are starting to propose tariff “rebates” as a way of, well, acknowledging that tariffs are going to take a bite out of people’s budgets. It hearkens back to maybe 10 years ago when we were all talking about carbon taxes and consumption taxes, and proposing rebates as way to make these taxes less regressive.

Paul Glastris:Yeah, it’s sort of how you put the lipstick on the pig of an unpopular policy.

Well, the other thing that’s going on here is that the public is beginning to see price increases. The BIG newsletter has a piece out today about the freak out that’s happening on TikTok as people perceive that back-to-school prices this year are way higher.

And on top of that, the big retailers are using this moment to bring in what’s called “dynamic pricing.” First of all, you look at these TikToks and people are saying, “Look, they’ve scratched out the old price or they’ve whited out the old price,” and the new price is now 30 percent higher on everything from swim trunks to home decor to groceries. But what they’re also doing is taking off the prices. Now you go into Walmart and other retailers and use your phone to scan a code to get the price, and that price can change by the hour or by the day.

People hate it because they can’t plan their budgets if they don’t know going into the store what the price is going to be. And the larger context here is that it’s true that a lot of companies have held off increasing prices until now. But what’s also happening is that companies are using this as an excuse to bring in this dynamic pricing to be able to essentially extract more profit. They can know by your phone what your income is and charge you more for diapers and then the next person, right? Or they can see that there is a diaper shortage coming in two weeks and jack up prices. This is a pricing power that big retailers have wanted to use, and they’re going to use it now whether they need to be passing on prices from tariffs or not.

Anne Kim: It’s like airline pricing coming to your school notebooks and backpacks!

So let’s turn to redistricting. Texas has been trying to redraw its map in order to gain five Republican seats. Democratic lawmakers have fled the state in order to break the quorum and prevent this plan from succeeding. Abbott has issued civil arrest warrants. Meanwhile, blue state governors in California and New York, for instance, are talking about hatching their own redistricting plans and there are even some strategists who think that Democrats should go further. 

For example, I was kind of struck by this op-ed in the Washington Post over the weekend arguing that Democrats should “go nuclear” by  retaliating against Texas based companies. For instance, they say, “blue states could band together to divest pension fund investments from and bar state contracts with Texas companies.”

What do you guys think about that particular escalation of tactics? 

Bill Scher:  Well, I think Democrats are doing the right thing so far. Texas Democrats have no obligation to be handmaidens for what Republicans are trying to do. But having said that, I suspect the Republican gerrymander is going to backfire on them. It’s very heavily reliant on gains in Latino majority districts, which has not been a reliable group for Republicans, and those gains could easily recede in a in a wave election

That’s why this op-ed that you shared struck me as very excessive, because they’re talking about things like having other states punish Texas economically. But there’s not a lot of explanation about they could actually execute that and escape being slapped down by courts. So it would probably involve a lot of years of litigation and for what? 

Texas is trying to squeeze out five more seats. They may not even successfully do it on Election Day. The average pickup for the opposition party is 25 seats, and Democrats need three to win back the House. 

And if other states fight fire with fire with their own gerrymandering, I’m totally fine with that because I generally feel that gerrymandering ends up being largely a wash at the end of the day. So I don’t see the need to try to push the envelope to economic warfare, which could really backfire politically and may not even be necessary.

Anne Kim:  It seems reflective of some broader frustration among rank-and-file Democrats that the party “just isn’t doing enough.” The Democrats are always playing by the rules, playing nice, etc. etc. 

Bill Scher:  Those who are prone to complain that Democrats aren’t fighting hard enough come up with wilder and wilder ideas to prove that they mean business, and it’s always a balancing act between fighting hard and fighting smart. But economic warfare is going to really rub a lot of people the wrong way. 

Paul Glastris:  To be fair to the authors, what they’re saying is you threaten this in the same way that during the Cold War, each side threatened the other with destruction of their cities, not because you want to destroy their cities, but because you want to strike enough terror that neither side uses the weapon. 

What they’re arguing is that blue states have far bigger economic footprints than red states, so if they band together and threaten economic warfare, that might be enough for Republicans to sort of think twice about turning their side “up to 11.”

But look, Democrats have used pension funds for many years to advance political interests. In some sense, this isn’t that new. 

But what I would say is the Trump administration is being aggressively creative with policy in a way I don’t think very many people foresaw. We see every day some new use of federal power that may or may not be constitutional, but there’s no one there to tell them not to do it. And Democrats have to be thinking, if not now – because their power is limited to states and backbench press releases in Congress – what are the policies that they’re going to pursue that are creative and aggressive now that the administration has set a precedent and the Supreme Court has allowed a lot of this expansion of power.

It’s a setup for when Democrats come back to use those levers themselves, and I do think there’s a ripe opportunity here, if not in the moment,  to plan for the future about what the Democratic agenda will be.

Anne Kim: Speaking of economic warfare and creative uses of policy, let’s turn to Trump’s escalation in the fight against higher ed. So there have been a couple developments here. The first is that the administration is now demanding that colleges hand over all admissions data, including on race, grades, and standardized test scores. Columbia and Brown have actually agreed to do this as part of their “settlements” with the government. 

Paul, you’ve been the arbiter of the College Guide for 20 years now for the Washington Monthly. What do think the long-term implications of this particular move are going to be for college accessibility all the things that the College Guide has stood for the last two decades?

Paul Glastris: Well, the way I look at it, is that the Trump administration is following everyone else in putting all its focus on elite universities, which educate 5 percent of students. A lot of this battle that the administration is waging against these hated elite institutions is trickling down to damage the universities and even the community colleges that educate 90 percent of college students. And most of these universities don’t have big DEI budgets. They didn’t have big protests during Gaza. They’re not rife with “woke” classrooms. They’re mostly people going to marketing classes taught by adjunct professors who have normal politics.

But there is a kind of a conspiracy in in the media and in politics to make everything about Columbia. So part of me is upset that this battle is going to again screw the average college student.

Anne Kim:  One small consolation is that the New York Times reported that there’s literally no one actually available to collect all the race and admissions data anyway because of the 100 people who worked for the National Center on Education Statistics, only four of them are left. So it may end up being kind of a toothless thing, but it does set a bad precedent.

The second thing I wanted to ask about was the government’s threat to seize control of Harvard’s patents under the compulsory licensing regime outlined under the Bayh-Dole Act. And this is actually something that the Monthly has supported in the past in different contexts. So Paul, I would love for you to clarify the intent of the statute and how that’s an abuse in this particular context.

Paul Glastris: Well, I’m not a patent lawyer. I’m not even a lawyer. But we have at the Monthly done considerable reporting by people who know the subject. And yes, the federal government has the ability to utilize this clear statutory power to force the use of patents in ways that advantage the American people. And we were arguing that they should do so to lower drug prices by taking the patents away from drug companies that misuse them and providing other means of producing these drugs in order to lower prices.

The Trump administration is not going after the drug companies, it’s going after the universities using the same statutory language. So it could well be legal with a pliant Supreme Court – maybe it becomes constitutional – but it’s for a very different cause.

But it does go to the point that there seems to be more aggressive use of policymaking on the Republican side than the Democratic side. When we started writing about this issue, arguing for march-in rights to bring down drug prices, it was when the Obama administration spent years debating it internally and not doing it. Then Biden comes in and they spent several years actually advancing the ball but left office without doing it. Donald Trump’s been in office six months and they’re already doing it. So that gives you a pretty good measure of the willingness of one party to push the envelope versus the other.

Anne Kim: So to wrap things up, Donald Trump is making announcements as we speak about the pending militarization of DC. So what are you guys expecting from that? What are you expecting the response to be and what else are you watching for this week?

Bill Scher: It’s another case of Donald Trump inventing an issue out of nothing. Crime is down in DC. There was a high profile incident involving someone he knew personally, and so he’s made that into a giant issue to give a justification for federal intrusion.

And to Paul’s point, this is how the Trump administration operates. They’re on full tilt all the time to aggressively deploy and weaponize the power of federal government when it suits their political games. Otherwise, they’re hyper-libertarian. They’re denying disaster relief even not just in blue areas, but in red areas. They’re decimating the federal workforce. They’ve decimated the Medicaid program, which is going to affect a lot of people again, not just in blue areas, but in red areas. They want to take down the Department of Education.

You can credit them for their diabolical creativity, but I think Democrats can be very well positioned to say these folks want to use the federal government to serve their own ends. And they don’t want to use it at all to help you.

Paul Glastris: I agree that what may in the end bring down the Republican Party and Donald Trump is this aggressive policy overreach. But I wouldn’t take away from that the lesson that Democrats shouldn’t be aggressive because it’s going to take real aggressive policymaking to deliver to voters what they clearly want, which is affordability, lower prices, better incomes.

All of that is going to take much stronger use of federal power than the Biden administration even used. So Democrats have to think very hard about how to do that, and how to deliver on the promises that they make when they next have a shot at voters.

Anne Kim : Well, thanks very much, gentlemen. See you next week. 

Does anybody know where JD Vance can go to get a personality transplant? He is a boring Trumpzi cult cheer leader

Echo essay published in the Washington Monthly by Bill Scher

Qute from Huffington Post: #SIASD "JD Vance’s latest defense of Donald Trump was met with mockery on social media, with critics calling it 'absolutely LUDICROUS', and an example of Vance 'creatingfake  reality'. ance wrote on the Elon Musk-owned platform X/, formerly Twitter: 'So much of American diplomacy has become pure performance―an obsession with *saying* this or that. The reason the failed establishment hates President Donald J. Trump is because he chooses his words carefully..." 😁😳😧😧😛❗

J.D. Vance Is the Most Disliked New Vice President in History
The public isn’t taking to his obnoxious style, which bodes well for politics in the post-Trump era.

Kamala Harris’s likability, competence, and political acumen were publicly questioned throughout her vice presidency. 

Viewed through the lens of poll numbers, that was understandable. According to Real Clear Politics, her average favorability seldom cracked 50 percent. It was higher than her average unfavorability for only her first five months (save for a brief post-presidential debate spike last September).

Maybe it’s time for J.D. Vance to face some questions.

Vance’s favorability is worse than Harris’s at the same two-month mark and perhaps worse than any new vice president in the history of polling. 

In fact, his Real Clear Politics favorable-unfavorable rating is 41.7 percent-44.8 percent, a slightly worse net favorable rating (-3.1 percentage points) than Donald Trump’s (-0.9). When looking only at March polling—sampled after his infamous Oval Office hectoring of Ukraine’s president—he’s even more underwater: 42.4 percent-48.0 percent.

Vice presidents, while rarely public opinion rockstars, typically begin with a bit more goodwill from the public.

In Gallup polling, Dick Cheney’s favorability was over 60 percent for his first two-and-a-half years before his role in influencing intelligence assessments was uncovered. In his first year as Barack Obama’s number two, Joe Biden started with a 53 percent favorable and a 29 percent unfavorable though, as the Great Recession ground on, drifted down to a 42-40 split by the end of October 2009. (Biden’s first-year numbers from Pew were better, starting at 63-20 in January 2009 and declining to 50-29 in November 2009.) Mike Pence’s favorables and unfavorables were unimpressively split in the low 40s during his first year, though that was a better performance than that of his superior, Donald Trump.

Polling from CBS/The New York Times in the first vice presidential years of Dan Quayle and Al Gore—in the pre-Internet era—showed high numbers of voters who were “undecided” or “didn’t know enough.” 

Nevertheless, Gore started fairly strongly with a 36 percent-7 percent favorable-unfavorable rating. Quayle, who was tagged as an intellectual lightweight when he joined the 1988 Republican ticket, started underwater at 19 percent-23 percent and didn’t improve.

Quayle is a rare example of a vice president in the modern presidential primary era who couldn’t secure his party’s presidential nomination, with the other being Pence. Vance could easily be the third.
Quayle and Pence were not only poll-challenged. They each ran in a presidential primary against either his former ticket mate or his former ticket mate’s son, complicating the usual play by veeps to be perceived as next-in-line. Trump has indicated he may wish to prop up a family member in 2028. In December, Time asked if “there will be a Trump dynasty,” and Trump said, “I think there could be,” and never uttered Vance’s name. Last month, Fox News asked during the pre-Super Bowl interview, “Do you view Vice President J.D. Vance as your successor, the Republican nominee in 2028?” Trump replied, “No, but is he very capable. I mean, I don’t think that, you know, I think you have a lot of very capable people. So far, I think he is doing a fantastic job. It’s too early. We are just starting.” (Trump did not take the opportunity to claim he could run for a third term.)

Vance shrugged off the comment gamely, but he must realize he is being diminished. If he can’t count on Trump’s endorsement, explicit or tacit, then the only way to survive a presidential primary is with poll numbers so stellar that the electability argument could not be denied. Yet he starts from a very weak place. Put me down as skeptical that Vance’s petty, pedantic, and petulant approach to politics will wear well over time.

In 2021, I was pretty bullish on Harris’s long-term prospects despite her early difficulties and argued she was being judged by unrealistic standards. Her spike in favorability partly validated that view after becoming the 2024 presidential nominee and filleting Trump in their lone debate. But she couldn’t fully shake the negative narratives that Trump and his allies had pushed over the previous few years. More importantly, in my view, she was damaged by Biden’s compromised communication skills and inability to manage perceptions of inflation.

I’m not inclined to view Vance’s early weakness as charitably as I did for Harris for several reasons. His initial poll numbers are worse than Harris’s. While he has shown a modicum of capacity to calibrate his rhetoric for broad audiences (most effectively in his lone vice-presidential debate), he expends far more energy trying to emulate Trump’s nastiness, which I don’t consider a sustainable model for political success at the presidential level.

Yes, Trump won narrowly twice, but both times, he was not in power. His approach can work when he can blame everything on those in office and sell himself—trading on his fraudulent reputation as a celebrity businessman—as an omnipotent fixer. But his demagogic skills have proven far less potent once he holds power and has to deliver on his promises, which is why he lost in 2020 and has already frittered away his honeymoon poll numbers.

A Vance ‘28 campaign, I suspect, will be bogged down with immense baggage from his current stint in the public sector, without the ability to lean on any record of success in the private sector—save for a profitable book with a message that has no resemblance to anything Vance peddles today.

If Trump taps a namesake to carry on his legacy, Vance will lose out on the party’s MAGA base. If Trump’s presidency is deeply unpopular by 2028, maybe a growing faction of Republican voters will want to turn the page on Trump, but Vance would be in no position to win their favor.

More important than what this all means for Vance’s career prospects is what this all means for the fabric of American politics. Many understandably fear that Trump has so permanently warped our politics that even once he is off the stage, extreme dishonesty and disparagement will continue to be the coin of the realm. But if that were so, Vance’s attempt to replicate the Trump style would resonate more with the public. Instead, Vance is slightly more unpopular than the president, who is getting more unpopular by the day❗

Donald Trump's dangerous real estate fantasies- Panama, Canada, Greenland and now Gaza? YGTBK- OMG

Trump’s Imperialism Puts Americans Last published in the Washington Monthly by Bill Scher:

The president demands more territory from Greenland to Gaza as if America were a real estate holding company. But most Americans won’t get a penny.

If you ever suggested Donald Trump is an isolationist (and I have), you have been shown the error of your ways. Trump is not an isolationist. Rather, Trump is an imperialist.

He began his second term announcing bizarre plans for territorial expansion: demanding a return of the Panama Canal, pining for Canada to be the 51st state, and gunning for Greenland. He offered flimsy rationales—America needs to ensure China doesn’t control the Canal, Canada is ripping us off by selling us more than it buys, and we have national security interests in the Arctic Circle—but at least there was an attempt to claim America, and Americans, would benefit from these land grabs.

Reaching new levels of absurdity, Trump now lays claim to Gaza. No one will buy an argument that Americans will benefit from occupying perhaps the most fiercely contested, blood-soaked swath in the world, let alone that the U.S. can peacefully annex Gaza by shoving two million Palestinians into neighboring countries.

Trump is promoting America First-style isolationism where America is not a nation but one of those real estate investment trusts (REITs) that improves its bottom line through acquisitions. That tracks with Trump’s cartoonishly corrupt gambit to turn the federal government into an extension of his oft-fined and convicted Trump Organization. But America is not a REIT. Seizing land is not isolationism. It’s imperialism.

American expansionism from its founding through the 19th century was a bloody affair—the forced removal of Native Americans, the Mexican-American war (a war of choice driven, in large part, by a desire to expand slavery beyond the South), and the jingoistic Spanish-American War in 1898 that gave America control of the Philippines, leading to a new front of violence against an Indigenous people.

Some Americans contemporaneously opposed such expansionism. For example, the Whig Party-controlled House in 1848, passed a resolution, with Representative Abraham Lincoln in the majority, charging President James K. Polk with “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally” starting the Mexican-American War.

But these wars were popular for reasons that can be understood in historical context. It was an era of imperial powers, chiefly England. A nation with static borders ran the risk of being steamrolled. Theodore Roosevelt, in 1899, made a blunt case for annexing the Philippines: “[T]he nation that has trained itself to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities.”

While T.R. was a driving force in an American era of global imperialism, his cousin Franklin Roosevelt helped end it by instituting the Good Neighbor police in the Western Hemisphere, pushing Winston Churchill towards liberating colonies in the Atlantic Charter, and creating the United Nations. He didn’t quite live to see his Secretary of State Edward Stettinius finish negotiating the UN charter at the 1945 San Francisco Conference weeks after his death. The diplomat forged a compromise promoting “self-government” in conquered territories. Historian Stephen Schlesinger said that language in the charter sparked the “almost total decolonization of the world.”

What replaced rank imperialism in America’s foreign policy toolkit was a greater emphasis on benevolent soft power (as well as less benevolent covert operations). At the top of the list is the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which Elon Musk targeted for destruction on Trump’s behalf. President John F. Kennedy created the agency to assist other countries and us—a low-cost way to broaden alliances and contain the Soviet Union, an imperialistic-minded power, during the Cold War. But USAID’s utility outlasted the Cold War.

As recently described by The New York Times, “The scope of USAID’s work is extensive: war relief in Ukraine, peace-building in Somalia, disease surveillance in Cambodia, vaccination efforts in Nigeria, H.I.V. prevention in Uganda and maternal health assistance in Zambia, among a wide range of other programs. The agency has helped to contain major outbreaks of Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers in recent years. In some regions, it supplies food, shelter, and access to clean water, which can be the difference between life and death.” It is, as Republican Senator Bill Cassidy has said, America’s answer to China’s aggressive belt-and-road plan to extend economic aid and influence around the globe.

Attacking USAID fits in an America First framework: stop exporting money so we can keep it for ourselves. Democratic political strategist David Axelrod and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel even told Politico that Democrats would be politically foolish to defend USAID because foreign aid is unpopular.

But will you see more dollars in your wallet if Musk crushes USAID? Of course not. It may contribute to higher grocery bills.

The agency’s former global health director, Atul Gawande, the famed physician and bestselling author, has warned that 49 countries have stopped monitoring bird flu. This virus has wreaked havoc on America’s farms and jacked up the price of eggs.

Economists believe the flu’s persistence will continue to kill chickens and keep egg prices high for the foreseeable future, the Washington Post reports. (NPR reports that some believe chickens need to be vaccinated to end the crisis, but I am not expecting the incoming Health and Human Services Secretary to consider such an initiative.) And less bird flu monitoring isn’t going to 

help matters.

Tariffs won’t lower prices for Americans❗ Foreign importers pay the tariff to Trump’s America, Inc., then pass the cost on to consumers. While Trump flinched on imposing 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, for now, he followed through on a broad 10 percent on all Chinese imports. His trade adviser, Peter Navarro, said this week, “We are going to structurally shift the American economy from one over-reliant on income taxes and the Internal Revenue Service to one which is also reliant on tariff revenue and the External Revenue Service.” That would require tariffs on a lot more countries than China.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, the 10 percent tariff on China will bring into federal coffers about $15 billion a year (again, ultimately paid by American consumers). If Trump dusted off the Canadian and Mexican tariffs, that would total another $130 billion annually. But individual income taxes—not even counting Social Security and Medicare or corporate income taxes—bring in $2.4 trillion. And remember, we have a progressive income tax system where the wealthy pay more, and many working-class Americans don’t pay any net federal income tax at all. A tariff-based revenue system would be far more regressive and increase the average cost of living.

Trump’s tariffs and his assault on foreign aid are actually happening, unlike his musings on land grabs. But even if his musings are impossible to execute, they reflect his worldview and priorities. He obsesses about how to make America—and himself—appear more powerful. He is not obsessing about how to improve the daily lives of Americans.

Trump declares America First. But his imperialist agenda puts Americans last.