THIS EDITION OF THE WEEK IS SPONSORED BY |
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NATIONAL REVIEW
APR 04, 2025 |
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◼ You won't find a single human being on the Heard and McDonald Islands to deny they deserve the Trump administration's new 10 percent tariff.
◼ When the Trump administration said it would calculate "reciprocal" tariff rates for every country according to an undefined assortment of "trade barriers" (some of which, such as value-added taxes, are not actually trade barriers), it was creating for itself a nearly impossible task. After two months of complete confusion, it settled on one of the worst possible methods to set tariff rates: It divided the country's goods-trade deficit with the U.S. by its amount of exports to the U.S. and then divided that in half. For the more than 100 countries with which the U.S. has a trade surplus, it set the tax rate at 10 percent. It's all based not on tariffs or unfair trade practices but simply on the existence of a trade deficit, and on the dogged belief that trade deficits are bad. The executive order, based on a nonexistent national emergency, imposes what is likely the largest peacetime tax hike in American history. It puts 17 percent tariffs on Israeli goods even though Israel has had a free-trade deal with the U.S. for 40 years and eliminated its few remaining tariffs earlier this week. There's nothing "reciprocal" about it, and it taxes goods from our allies Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea at higher rates than it does goods from Venezuela or Iran. Ordinarily the belief that trade deficits are bad is mistaken but harmless. Combining it with a presidential power grab has made it harmful, and American businesses and consumers will pay the price.
◼ Republican talk of a red map has given way to special election blues. Republicans got thumped by a double-digit margin in a race for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat that cements progressive control of the court for years to come. Democrats flipped a Pennsylvania state senate seat they haven't held since 1889. In Iowa, Republicans held a state house seat necessary to keep their supermajority but lost a state senate seat in a district Trump had carried by 21 points. Low-turnout special elections can be unpredictable, but they tend to favor the party out of power (which is fired up) and to favor the party with more educated professionals, settled homeowners, and other traditionally high-turnout groups. Both tendencies favor the Democrats right now. The GOP did hold onto its House majority by winning special elections to replace Matt Gaetz and Mike Waltz in Florida, but by disappointing margins. Fear of losing one or both of these seats probably motivated Trump to lean on Elise Stefanik to withdraw from consideration as U.N. ambassador rather than put her deep-red district at stake in a special election that New York Governor Kathy Hochul might delay for months. Republicans did better in a voter-ID ballot initiative in Wisconsin, but Louisiana voters decisively rejected a package of small-government reforms proposed by Governor Jeff Landry. There are always local factors, but the overall trend ought to focus the minds of Republicans on the midterm electorate—lest further blues ensue.
◼ Trump seeks to deport legal aliens tied to campus agitation that followed Hamas's October 7 atrocities. Among them are foreign students and academics lawfully present on student visas, and some lawful permanent residents (LPRs)—green card holders usually on the pathway to citizenship. The initiative raises three important questions: Is this legal? If so, is it something the government should do? And, if it should, is the policy being properly implemented? First, yes, under Cold War–era immigration law, Congress granted the executive sweeping power to exclude or remove aliens, even LPRs, whose presence the secretary of state judged detrimental to American foreign-policy interests because of association with radical, anti-American ideologies. The courts have held that this is a political determination that the judiciary is ill-equipped to second-guess. Second, the transformation of universities into hothouses of anti-Israel activism has foreign policy ramifications the government should address. Radical actions are of more concern than words, but the free-expression rights of aliens are not equal to those of citizens. Third, the Department of Justice is riding roughshod over due process, which gives legal aliens limited but undeniable rights to challenge their removal. If the administration actually wants these people removed, it should follow the law and do it the right way.
◼ Donald Trump enjoys trolling his opponents by musing about seeking a third term, no matter what the 22nd Amendment says. "I'm not joking," he told Kristen Welker of NBC News on Meet the Press. "There are methods which you could do it." There are not. But that hasn't stopped Trump before. We'd be more willing to think that he is just having fun if we hadn't seen what he did in seriousness after losing an election. The least worrisome justification Trump might have for this speculation is that he wants to ensure he is not treated like a lame duck. And even if he does not pursue the option seriously, if he is popular and still hale at 83 in 2029, he could remain de facto the power behind a successor. If the voters choose that with their eyes open, no legal structure can stop them. But the American system of transitions of power rests not only on laws but on mutual trust and, yes, norms. It is corrosive of those norms to encourage Trump's supporters to think that he might get around the rules, and to stoke the fears of his opponents that he could discard them.
◼ A federal judge granted a Department of Justice motion to dismiss the corruption indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. But Judge Dale Ho denied the DOJ's attempt to preserve the possibility of reinstating the charges at some later time. As the prosecutors who resigned over the DOJ's order to drop the charges contended, that sword of Damocles made the deal even more redolent of a quid pro quo. To save his neck, Adams would enforce Trump immigration policies that are unpopular among his heavily Democratic constituents; and to ensure Adams's continued compliance, Trump would keep the threat of revived prosecution in place. Judge Ho, a Biden appointee who drafted former George W. Bush solicitor general Paul Clement as an amicus to advise him, recognized that dismissal should be granted because courts lack authority to order the DOJ to continue a prosecution, but forbade future prosecution of the charges. Ho also rejected insinuations by DOJ leadership that the Adams prosecution was "improperly motivated" because of Adams's mild complaints about Biden's border policies, which inundated the city with illegal aliens. Adams will soon face the voters—he is now running as an independent—who are apt to be a harsher judge. |
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◼ Sometimes deception, like an onion, has layers. So it has been with one study of black infant mortality. Published in 2020, it claimed that black infants were half as likely to die if treated by a black physician rather than a white physician. The survival rate for both remained 99 percent, however. This somehow got transformed into a view—articulated by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent from the Supreme Court's decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions—that care by a black physician "more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die." Jackson's misrepresentation of the study aside, other problems with it have been evident since its publication. Its authors could not identify the race of all the doctors they surveyed. A subsequent review of the same data discovered that the original study did not account for low birth weight, more common in black infants, or for the fact that low-weight babies are likelier to be sent to specialists, themselves likelier to be white, who are then associated with higher mortality rates. Now, documents uncovered by the Daily Caller have shown that the published version of the original study consigned to an appendix a sentence asserting that white newborns had higher mortality rates when attended to by a black physician. (It "undermines the narrative," the study's lead author commented.) The final version even included a line suggesting no mortality improvement when white physicians cared for white infants. Justice Jackson's citation of this study is just one indication of how canonical it became in service of myriad leftist causes. But to unpeel all of its layers is to discover that there is nothing there.
◼ Large bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate passed a law requiring that TikTok be sold or banned. President Biden signed it. The Supreme Court upheld it. And then Donald Trump came into office and decided he didn't feel like enforcing it. Instead, Trump issued an executive order delaying enforcement for at least 75 days. Nothing in the law's text said the president could do that. Trump's defenders have argued that the president didn't have to enforce the law if a sale of the company was imminent. Nothing was imminent; the deadline is Saturday. In remarks to reporters aboard Air Force One over the weekend, he said, "We have a lot of potential buyers. There's a lot of interest in TikTok. The decision is going to be my decision." The decision should be to follow the law. |
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◼ Palestinians in Gaza have taken to the streets to protest . . . Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for 18 years. This is not the first such protest. In 2019, Palestinians took to the streets for several days, in what was known as the "We Want to Live" movement. Hamas put this down mercilessly. It has done the same to the more recent protest. Palestinians had shouted, "Hamas, get out!" and "Hamas are terrorists!" One of the protesters was Oday al-Rubai, age 22. According to his family, he was murdered for his trouble, his body dumped at their doorstep. When people say they are "pro-Palestinian," what do they mean? One thing they should mean is that a terror group should not rule Gaza, or any territory.
◼ Last November, a Romanian court made the unprecedented decision to annul the first round of elections, which were led by Călin Georgescu. He has since been arrested and banned from running again. This week, French courts banned Marine le Pen, leader of National Rally, from running for election. This is no way to run a continental superpower. The reason for Le Pen's punishment was the misappropriation of funds. Beginning 20 years ago, before she took over, the party diverted EU funds that it received for staffing up its government offices to the carrying out of political tasks. There is no doubt the party is guilty of the offense. But the application of justice here is extravagant and obviously politically motivated. Others who violated these rules received mere slaps on the wrist or nominal fines or were never punished at all. Le Pen's party currently leads all others by double digits in the polls. There is much we do not like in Marine Le Pen's platform. And there is worse than that in the history of her party. But the popularity of her party reflects real sentiments and her work at deradicalizing it. There are better ways of containing populists than preventing people from voting for them. One way is to concede something to them. In Denmark, mainstream parties simply adopted the attitude of restrictive immigration favored by their populist critics. Mainstream parties survived there whereas in France they've been destroyed. If the incumbent ruling establishments in liberal democracies can neither adapt to new political circumstances, nor survive the election of popular outsiders, then their promise of political freedom and a measure of self-government is a lie.
◼ The Kremlin has announced the largest call-up of conscripts in more than a decade as it moves to expand its military. More than 160,000 men, ages 18 to 30, will be inducted into the army this summer, 10,000 more than in 2024. (Last year, the Kremlin raised the maximum age of men eligible for the draft from 27 to 30.) No matter what comes of Trump's cease-fire negotiations, the Kremlin has shown no signs of beating its swords into plowshares, notwithstanding the unpopularity of the draft among the Russian people. Russian conscripts are—at least in theory—not supposed to be sent to fight the "special military operation" in Ukraine. But if you were a young Russian, would you trust Vladimir Putin's Kremlin? We don't.
◼ It's an apt demonstration of Val Kilmer's acting talent that, in his first movie role, at age 24, he credibly portrayed an Elvis-like musician who somehow gets tied up in an anti-communist plot against the government of East Germany. If you haven't seen 1984's Top Secret!, a joke-a-second spoof by the team that brought us Airplane!, then you've missed the debut of one of his generation's most impressive actors. You probably have seen him in Top Gun, in which his macho alpha Iceman goes toe to toe with Tom Cruise's Maverick. Or in Tombstone, the Wyatt Earp film in which he stands out from an impeccable cast with his louche yet genteel portrayal of Doc Holliday. Or maybe you caught him in The Doors, in which he more embodied than portrayed the band's front man, Jim Morrison. It wasn't all hits for Kilmer; his shots at superstardom as the titular characters in Batman Forever and The Saint did not quite achieve their desired aim. And in making such films as the misbegotten The Island of Dr. Moreau, he displayed the actorly ego and distemper that got him a reputation (not entirely unearned) as difficult. But at his best, Kilmer brought to his roles a unique commitment, and a thoughtfulness also evidenced in his own self-reflections. His career waned in recent years; throat cancer made even speaking a challenge. The exception—and, it turned out, his career epitaph—was a brief yet powerful appearance in Top Gun: Maverick, the surprisingly excellent, decades-later sequel to the shlocky original. We learn that Cruise's Maverick and Kilmer's Iceman became close friends in the intervening decades, but also that Iceman, suffering from a malady similar to Kilmer's, could hardly talk. An eccentric man but an electric performer, he deserves to be remembered among his profession's greats. Dead at 65. R.I.P., Huckleberry. |
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