This Is Why Dictatorships Fail: The authors of the Constitution separated powers for a reason. - "More than two centuries later, the system created by that first Constitutional Congress has comprehensively failed. The people and institutions that are supposed to check executive power are refusing to restrain this president. We now have a de facto tyrant who thinks he can bend reality to his will without taking any facts or any evidence into consideration, and without listening to any contrary views. And although the economic damage he has caused is easier to measure, he has inflicted the same level of harm to scientific research, to civil liberties, to health care, and to the civil service.
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"But in the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has just given us a pitch-perfect demonstration of why legislatures are necessary, why checks and balances are useful, and why most one-man dictatorships become poor and corrupt. If the Republican Party does not return Congress to the role it is meant to play and the courts don't constrain the president, this cycle of destruction will continue and everyone on the planet will pay the price."
Trade Wars Are Easy to Lose: Beijing Has Escalation Dominance in the U.S.-China Tariff Fight - "In 2024, U.S. exports of goods and services to China were $199.2 billion, and imports from China were $462.5 billion, resulting in a trade deficit of $263.3 billion. To the degree that the bilateral trade balance predicts which side will “win” in a trade war, the advantage lies with the surplus economy, not the deficit one. China, the surplus country, is giving up sales, which is solely money; the United States, the deficit country, is giving up goods and services it does not produce competitively or at all at home. Money is fungible: if you lose income, you can cut back spending, find sales elsewhere, spread the burden across the country, or draw down savings (say, by doing fiscal stimulus).
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"The United States will face shortages of critical inputs ranging from basic ingredients of most pharmaceuticals to inexpensive semiconductors used in cars and home appliances to critical minerals for industrial processes including weapons production. The supply shock from drastically reducing or zeroing out imports from China, as Trump purports to want to achieve, would mean stagflation, the macroeconomic nightmare seen in the 1970s and during the COVID pandemic, when the economy shrank and inflation rose simultaneously. In such a situation, which may be closer at hand than many think, the Federal Reserve and fiscal policymakers are left with only terrible options and little chance of staving off unemployment except by further raising inflation."
The Tariff Saga Is About One Thing - "The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance. His long history of scams and hostile litigation — not to mention his frequent refusal to pay contractors, lawyers, brokers and other people who were working for him — is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals than an opportunity for Trump to abuse and exploit the other party for his own benefit. For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win, and someone has to lose. And Trump, as we all know, is a winner."
The platforms cash in their chips with Trump: From Meta to Nvidia, tech CEOs are paying the president to get the outcomes they want — and it's working - "'I was a megadonor to the Democrats,' said Palihapitiya, now himself a billionaire and the founder of Social Capital. 'I couldn't get a phone call returned from the White House to save my life … The Trump administration is totally different. There's not a single person there you can't get on the phone and talk to.'
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"It’s a shock to see such a self-styled China hawk slapping the country with the largest tariffs in decades on one hand, while slipping them the chips necessary to build high-end AI systems on the other. And while [Nvidia's] H20 seems unlikely to be decisive in China’s ability to catch up to US progress in AI development, the way that Chinese companies are clamoring for it in the wake of DeepSeek’s success suggests it remains extremely valuable."
A visual guide to the elected officials who fly Christian nationalist flags at the Capitol
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