Excellent piece. What continues to amaze me is that Trump said repeatedly during the campaign that he was going to impose these tariffs. Why did so many people, especially people like Jamie Dimon who should have known better, refuse to take him seriously? It was also one of the many failures of the Harris campaign that they did not run a barrage of negative ads on the consequences of tariffs. And yes, the Democrats are hopeless. I can’t believe how many of them, like Whitmer, refuse to fully denounce tariffs, and issue mealy mouthed statements about how tariffs can be a good thing, but Trump is just not applying them correctly.
Having been beaten up for 30 years -somewhat unfairly- for NAFTA and supposedly selling out the working class- is it any wonder that many Democrats are going to be quiet as the foolishness of protectionism is made manifest? As I have pointed out hundreds of times to my leftist friends, the purpose of NAFTA was to keep jobs in North America and forestall the leakage to Asia, then very much underway. The Left created the “working class betrayal” narrative that Trump eventually exploited so deftly, we need to see a whole lot more economic devastation before that pose is revealed to be the self-destructive path that it really is.
Sorry to be repetitive, but you SO GOOD. So, here's for your future pieces about Ds being pathetic. While Ds can and will easily run on "Not this" during the mid-terms, and it should work, they need something positive in 28. And so far, it very much looks like the progressive big spending all over again, when deficits by that time will be far higher than in 20, and fed gov't will have been eviscerated, with qualified people (think NIH scientists for starters) not wanting to take the risk of working for the feds again. So what are your thoughts on the domestic agenda? And even more important, supposing the Ds put forward an acceptable economic agenda, a big if, and another big if, if Ds move back to the center on culture issues, how can they convince the skeptics (of whom there will be many), that Ds can be trusted on that move to the center?
This is one of your best pieces, Joe. Maybe you can explain or at least describe the pathos of a Democratic party that has been given almost unbelievable political weaknesses to work with -- the chaos of Social Security, the erasure of retirement savings, the looming shadow of a self-inflicted recession -- and seems to be unable to accomplish a damn thing with them. This is a grotesque failure of basic political practice that augurs poorly for the future.
The Times reported yesterday that my alma mater Cornell may be denied a billion dollars of Federal funding. The reasons for this are of course noxious, but somehow my sympathetic reaction did not kick in at all. The university I attended from 1968 to 172 was a great one, and I received a superb liberal arts education from brilliant teachers. That school no longer exists. We got a good long look at what it has become in the aftermath of the Hamas atrocity, and the Arts faculty and a good part of the administration is a bunch of hyper- race and -gender conscious ideologues of Maoist tendencies. Oh my lost college . . . Cornell and other institutions have made themselves big fat targets, and their alumni are becoming increasingly as alienated as I am. I feel that these elite and utterly out of touch schools and the generation (or is it generations?) of graduates they have produced in their image are a major part of the Democrats' problem.
I so hope you are correct. Sooner, rather than later. 🔥🔥🔥
"Bullies, in the end, are not remembered for their chesty push, but for their glass jaws. Trump’s opponents may seem pathetic, tossing rocks at a juggernaut, but sooner or later someone is going to figure out how to put one of those rocks in a slingshot and knock the bully down."
Joe you are hilariously clueless. President Trump is playing three dimensional chess and the lamestream media who lack any knowledge or experience in deal making try to pontificate about their perception of the risks and hilariously get it all over themselves. They have no idea what it takes to swim with the sharks in the business world of which Donald Trump is the master. And he has assembled the finest cabinet in history who are aggressively and expeditiously implementing the agenda that Trump campaigned on and we voted for.
Barack Obama, after pulling a bait and switch to get elected, promised that his administration would be “transformative”. The reality is the Obama/OBiden administrations were a disaster economically, culturally, in government accountability and effectiveness, national security and grift, waste, abuse and fraud all the while their propaganda partner in the media covered over their extortion of and government weaponization against hard working American taxpayers. Fortunately hard working Americans who actually create and make products and services, build businesses and create jobs and those hard working Americans who work in these businesses have the intelligence, knowledge and experience to see through all of the gas lighting. The last poll I saw showed that only 22% of Americans trust the media.
Today instead of that continued managed decline we are as the Chinese proverb says “living in interesting times”; President Trump is leading a “transformational” re-engineering of not just the federal government, the US economy (with an emphasis of maximizing US workers opportunities and standard of living) and healthcare while dismantling everything woke but also transforming international trade relations while using US military and economic muscle to smother international security threats. The Trump administration is transforming not just America but also our world for the good of the people.
As anticipated the globalists who have sold out American workers are frantically shrilling that the sky is falling as the try to cover their margin positions causing short term market volatility (be aware though that much of the market is still overvalued). The Bond market is taking a hit because of the change under the Clinton administration to short term bonds to lower interest costs which led to printing money and bloating the national debt. Now they are struggling to refinance under the current higher interest rates caused by government overspending of the failed OBiden administration. When President Trump pauses the tariffs for 90 days because 70+ countries want to negotiate reciprocal trade agreements which are complicated and take time, the clueless media screech that the Trump administration is flip-flopping or retreating. The clueless media can’t even recognize that President Trump is artfully creating a coalition of allies to align with the US to collectively reign in the unfair trade practices of China. President Trump is playing three dimensional chess far beyond the comprehension of most of the media.
The bottom line is that American taxpayers who actually Make things elected President Trump to Make America Great Again – And Greater Than Ever Before and in a short time he is exceeding our expectations. So we say to all the clueless naysayers that you should just sit down, shut up, pay attention and let the Dealmaker-in-Chief show you how it’s done.
Joe Klein, your best piece by far on Trump 2.0. Rarely does such insight parade forward in so pithy a delivery, and so concise a reality check on where we are as a nation - a bit lost, suffering a hangover from the hissy fit too many moderate voters had over Biden's cultural indulgences and his over stimulation of a recovering economy. Until the poor lost Dems are rescued by the voters in the midterms, I hope we can hang on.
Joe, I’ll join the chorus of applause. A great column among many great pieces. One of the defining marks of your writing is never using more words than necessary to express your perspective. Frugality of language is a rare talent. Thanks for your work.
It was already one of your best, even before I got to “the anti-vaxxers are vexed”. Am now engaged in trying to turn it into an irresistible riff. Nothing yet, but give me time.
Overhead in the Oval Office. A group of staff were discussing writers. One of the group mentioned the writer Joe Klein. Trump looked up and said, Yes he is a fine writer. I knew him years ago, back in the days when I was a Democrat in NY. He always wrote nice things about me.
What's he doing now? The room went quiet. Oh he now writes for a website called Sub stack said a nervous staffer. Oh said Trump if you see him, give him my regards. I always liked him.
Excellent piece. What continues to amaze me is that Trump said repeatedly during the campaign that he was going to impose these tariffs. Why did so many people, especially people like Jamie Dimon who should have known better, refuse to take him seriously? It was also one of the many failures of the Harris campaign that they did not run a barrage of negative ads on the consequences of tariffs. And yes, the Democrats are hopeless. I can’t believe how many of them, like Whitmer, refuse to fully denounce tariffs, and issue mealy mouthed statements about how tariffs can be a good thing, but Trump is just not applying them correctly.
Having been beaten up for 30 years -somewhat unfairly- for NAFTA and supposedly selling out the working class- is it any wonder that many Democrats are going to be quiet as the foolishness of protectionism is made manifest? As I have pointed out hundreds of times to my leftist friends, the purpose of NAFTA was to keep jobs in North America and forestall the leakage to Asia, then very much underway. The Left created the “working class betrayal” narrative that Trump eventually exploited so deftly, we need to see a whole lot more economic devastation before that pose is revealed to be the self-destructive path that it really is.
Sorry to be repetitive, but you SO GOOD. So, here's for your future pieces about Ds being pathetic. While Ds can and will easily run on "Not this" during the mid-terms, and it should work, they need something positive in 28. And so far, it very much looks like the progressive big spending all over again, when deficits by that time will be far higher than in 20, and fed gov't will have been eviscerated, with qualified people (think NIH scientists for starters) not wanting to take the risk of working for the feds again. So what are your thoughts on the domestic agenda? And even more important, supposing the Ds put forward an acceptable economic agenda, a big if, and another big if, if Ds move back to the center on culture issues, how can they convince the skeptics (of whom there will be many), that Ds can be trusted on that move to the center?
This is one of your best pieces, Joe. Maybe you can explain or at least describe the pathos of a Democratic party that has been given almost unbelievable political weaknesses to work with -- the chaos of Social Security, the erasure of retirement savings, the looming shadow of a self-inflicted recession -- and seems to be unable to accomplish a damn thing with them. This is a grotesque failure of basic political practice that augurs poorly for the future.
The Times reported yesterday that my alma mater Cornell may be denied a billion dollars of Federal funding. The reasons for this are of course noxious, but somehow my sympathetic reaction did not kick in at all. The university I attended from 1968 to 172 was a great one, and I received a superb liberal arts education from brilliant teachers. That school no longer exists. We got a good long look at what it has become in the aftermath of the Hamas atrocity, and the Arts faculty and a good part of the administration is a bunch of hyper- race and -gender conscious ideologues of Maoist tendencies. Oh my lost college . . . Cornell and other institutions have made themselves big fat targets, and their alumni are becoming increasingly as alienated as I am. I feel that these elite and utterly out of touch schools and the generation (or is it generations?) of graduates they have produced in their image are a major part of the Democrats' problem.
Anyway, go to it, Joe, and great work here.
To add to the chorus: superb! Good to see your vacation hasn't worn off. Keep hackin'!
I so hope you are correct. Sooner, rather than later. 🔥🔥🔥
"Bullies, in the end, are not remembered for their chesty push, but for their glass jaws. Trump’s opponents may seem pathetic, tossing rocks at a juggernaut, but sooner or later someone is going to figure out how to put one of those rocks in a slingshot and knock the bully down."
One of your best yet, Joe, and that's saying something.
Joe you are hilariously clueless. President Trump is playing three dimensional chess and the lamestream media who lack any knowledge or experience in deal making try to pontificate about their perception of the risks and hilariously get it all over themselves. They have no idea what it takes to swim with the sharks in the business world of which Donald Trump is the master. And he has assembled the finest cabinet in history who are aggressively and expeditiously implementing the agenda that Trump campaigned on and we voted for.
Barack Obama, after pulling a bait and switch to get elected, promised that his administration would be “transformative”. The reality is the Obama/OBiden administrations were a disaster economically, culturally, in government accountability and effectiveness, national security and grift, waste, abuse and fraud all the while their propaganda partner in the media covered over their extortion of and government weaponization against hard working American taxpayers. Fortunately hard working Americans who actually create and make products and services, build businesses and create jobs and those hard working Americans who work in these businesses have the intelligence, knowledge and experience to see through all of the gas lighting. The last poll I saw showed that only 22% of Americans trust the media.
Today instead of that continued managed decline we are as the Chinese proverb says “living in interesting times”; President Trump is leading a “transformational” re-engineering of not just the federal government, the US economy (with an emphasis of maximizing US workers opportunities and standard of living) and healthcare while dismantling everything woke but also transforming international trade relations while using US military and economic muscle to smother international security threats. The Trump administration is transforming not just America but also our world for the good of the people.
As anticipated the globalists who have sold out American workers are frantically shrilling that the sky is falling as the try to cover their margin positions causing short term market volatility (be aware though that much of the market is still overvalued). The Bond market is taking a hit because of the change under the Clinton administration to short term bonds to lower interest costs which led to printing money and bloating the national debt. Now they are struggling to refinance under the current higher interest rates caused by government overspending of the failed OBiden administration. When President Trump pauses the tariffs for 90 days because 70+ countries want to negotiate reciprocal trade agreements which are complicated and take time, the clueless media screech that the Trump administration is flip-flopping or retreating. The clueless media can’t even recognize that President Trump is artfully creating a coalition of allies to align with the US to collectively reign in the unfair trade practices of China. President Trump is playing three dimensional chess far beyond the comprehension of most of the media.
The bottom line is that American taxpayers who actually Make things elected President Trump to Make America Great Again – And Greater Than Ever Before and in a short time he is exceeding our expectations. So we say to all the clueless naysayers that you should just sit down, shut up, pay attention and let the Dealmaker-in-Chief show you how it’s done.
Fabulous column. Remark about RFK jr. being both dangerous and useless is one of the wittiest barbs ever.
Joe Klein, your best piece by far on Trump 2.0. Rarely does such insight parade forward in so pithy a delivery, and so concise a reality check on where we are as a nation - a bit lost, suffering a hangover from the hissy fit too many moderate voters had over Biden's cultural indulgences and his over stimulation of a recovering economy. Until the poor lost Dems are rescued by the voters in the midterms, I hope we can hang on.
Great analysis! I hope that you are right about the Democrats' slingshot!
Joe, I’ll join the chorus of applause. A great column among many great pieces. One of the defining marks of your writing is never using more words than necessary to express your perspective. Frugality of language is a rare talent. Thanks for your work.
It was already one of your best, even before I got to “the anti-vaxxers are vexed”. Am now engaged in trying to turn it into an irresistible riff. Nothing yet, but give me time.
Overhead in the Oval Office. A group of staff were discussing writers. One of the group mentioned the writer Joe Klein. Trump looked up and said, Yes he is a fine writer. I knew him years ago, back in the days when I was a Democrat in NY. He always wrote nice things about me.
What's he doing now? The room went quiet. Oh he now writes for a website called Sub stack said a nervous staffer. Oh said Trump if you see him, give him my regards. I always liked him.