After one month of the second Trump term, Peggy Noonan’s reaction expressed in her Wall Street Journal column is not dissimilar from mine:

When you think aloud for a living you’re lately getting a lot of wry comments like “It must be hard to come up with a topic with nothing going on.”

“It’s drinking from a fire hose,” the journalist will reply. Meanwhile, normal people are asking: He doesn’t really think he’s a king, right? I’ve grown tired of saying, “Well, that was insane,” and we’re barely a month in.

The question you really feel pressed to ask yourself is are these people crazy? Ms. Noonan reflects on that:

The most charitable gloss on the administration style—here we’re thinking of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s blithe announcement that he wants to cut defense spending 8% a year for the next five years—is that they’re simply riding high and have grown full of themselves, as opposed to clinically insane.

I think the most charitable gloss on the president’s remarks is that the president tends to speak rashly, off the cuff, and in superlatives. I frequently have no idea what he’s actually trying to express when you cut through the BS.

She turns to President Trump’s remarks about Ukraine:

The president’s remarks on Ukraine this week were wild and destructive. He isn’t wrong to wish to end that conflict—war is brutality and waste. Everyone knew that it would end on unsatisfying terms. But Ukraine didn’t start it, Russia did, in defiance of international law. The war isn’t Volodymyr Zelensky’s fault, he isn’t a dictator, he isn’t loathed by his people—all those things President Trump said were untrue. And the vast majority of those listening to these charges know they are untrue. Asking “Why does Trump do this?” is a decade-long cliché, but really—why does he do this?

Ukraine is a sovereign nation. Its citizens put everything they had on the field to defend themselves. Mr. Zelensky entered world history with spirit and guts, refusing to flee Kyiv: “I need ammo, not a ride.” After the Cold War Ukraine agreed to relinquish the nuclear weapons housed there for a promise the U.S. would always have its back. They trusted us. Must American presidents honor the honestly made vows of their predecessors? In this case surely yes, at pain of announcing to every friend we have, “You’re on your own, Uncle Sam has left the building.” Trump supporters think they want that message sent. It is a careless and destructive one.

Did everyone actually know Russia’s war against Ukraine would “end on unsatisfying terms”? I see very little evidence of that. Quite to the contrary what I have seen is persistence in holding overly optimistic views no one knew how to make into reality. Those few hardy souls who understood it would end on unsatisfying terms from the very outset have been castigated as either victims of or promoting Russian propaganda.

More on this in a later post.

The older I get the more I simply don’t understand things that are going on. Take the “war of words”, harsh exchanges between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky. Here’s a report by David L. Stern and Ellen Francis at the Washington Post:

KYIV — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met with President Donald Trump’s envoy on Thursday, as barbed exchanges between the two leaders deepened uncertainty about the future of U.S. backing for Kyiv.

Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s envoy on the war in Ukraine, arrived in Kyiv soon after the spat erupted, with Trump describing the Ukrainian president as failing and blaming him for Russia’s 2022 invasion of the country. Zelensky countered that Trump was repeating misinformation about him and the war.

I don’t want to psychoanalyze President Trump’s remarks about Ukraine starting the war with Russia. Maybe that’s what he meant and maybe it isn’t. I’ve been saying for years that Donald Trump puzzles me. Maybe he’s just misinformed. Maybe he meant something else. Don’t ask me.

And I’m equally puzzled by President Zelensky’s rejoinders. If I were in his position I would be doing my level best not to alienate the president of my largest supporter. What audience was he addressing? A domestic one? The Democrats? The Europeans? What does he intend to accomplish by it? I have no idea.

Let’s do a quick little quiz. What should the U. S. posture with respect to Ukraine and support for Ukraine in its war with Russia be?

1. Anything that kills Russians and uses up Russian munitions is good for the U. S. If Ukrainians are killed in the process it’s just too bad.
2. We should do everything in our power to support Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia’s unjust and illegal invasion because of our shared values.
3. Ditto to above with the exception of committing U. S. troops.
4. We should provide military and humanitarian support to Ukraine because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a violation of its treaty obligations.
5. A conclusion to the war should be negotiated as soon as possible to preserve Ukrainian and Russian lives even if it means Ukraine’s surrendering some of the territory it held in 2022.
6. We don’t give a damn about Ukraine.

My view is roughly D. Something like E seems to be the Trump administration’s view. BTW I’m not just pulling those alternatives out of thin air. I’ve heard all of them expressed by somebody at one time or another.

I haven’t actually weighed in on JD Vance’s scolding of our European allies yet. I disagree with one of his fundamental points—that the United States, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom share their regard for freedom of speech, religion, assembly, etc.

France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are ethnic states. We are not. Our greatest difference from our European allies is contained in this passage:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The reality is that our European allies think about things like freedom of speech, etc. differently than we do. Nowhere is freedom of speech so expansive and absolute as in the United States. The UK has its Official Secrets Act which allows the government to bar the media from publishing things it doesn’t care to have them publish. In the UK you can sue a newspaper for slander if it publishes something untrue about you; here you would need to show actual malice. We regard what is normal in the UK as an abridgement of freedom of the press. Germany suppresses certain speech. The UK and Germany still have established churches. The “freedom to cross the land” is secured by Magna Carta in the UK; here we call that “trespassing”. The UK and Germany do not have birthright citizenship. In Germany there are people who were born in Germany, whose parents were both born in Germany, and whose grandparents were all born in Germany who are not German citizens. The list goes on.

Our alliances with European countries are “marriages of convenience”. They are not based on shared values. That’s propaganda.

William Galston asks the right question in his Wall Street Journal column:

Is it unconstitutional for Congress to make government agencies such as the Federal Reserve independent by restricting the president’s authority to fire their heads? The Trump administration is behaving as though that’s the case.

He relies for his argument that “independent agencies” are constitutional on Humphrey’s Executor v. United States which in 1934 found that Franklin Roosevelt had improperly fired William Humphrey as a member of the Federal Trade Commission, rejecting the finding in the 1926 Myers v. United States. FDR thought that the SCOTUS decision was motivated by spite against him on the part of the SCOTUS. In 2020 the Roberts court found that Humphrey’s was not binding precedent today because no agencies with the powers of the FTC in 1935 now exist.

So, is Humphrey’s Executor v. United States a relevant precedent for firings of officials appointed by the president today?

My own view is that barring presidents from firing officials they appointed is a constitutional absurdity. I don’t care whether the sitting president is FDR or Trump in that regard. I also think that “independent agencies” are similarly absurd but that’s a matter for another post.

I materially agree with Filipp Piatov’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s the meat of it:

MAGA sees the AfD as a natural ally in Europe’s largest and most powerful economy. But figures such as Elon Musk and Mr. Vance may not realize that influencers within the AfD consider the U.S. to be Germany’s ideological and most dangerous adversary. They view MAGA as nothing more than a short-term, highly useful ally. Ms. Weidel recently wrote an op-ed referring to Germans as “slaves” of the U.S., offering a glimpse into the party’s deeply anti-Western ideology.

Most of the time Ms. Weidel treads carefully when indulging her party’s deep-seated anti-American sentiments. Her good relations with Mr. Musk are seen as so valuable in the current campaign that even the party’s radical right-wing faction remains conspicuously silent on the matter. Others are less discreet. Björn Höcke, an influential AfD politician, declared in a 2022 speech that the U.S. was an “extraneous power” deliberately driving a wedge between Germany and Russia. He didn’t warn of Germany’s dependence on Russian energy but of its reliance on American liquefied natural gas. He further claimed that America’s goal for the past century has been to prevent a German-Russian alliance because such a partnership could challenge U.S. global dominance.

concluding:

Superficial parallels exist between the Republican Party and the AfD, largely shaped by media. But the AfD isn’t Germany’s equivalent of MAGA. It’s becoming a “German Race First” party. Its ideologues fantasize about a rebirth of an ethnically pure German Volk. It is no coincidence that Mr. Höcke lamented the portrayal of Hitler as “absolutely evil,” or that Maximilian Krah, the party’s lead candidate for the EU elections, publicly declared that not all members of the SS—Hitler’s elite killing troops—should automatically be considered criminals.

It is no accident that AfD politicians have spent years forging ties with America’s greatest geopolitical adversaries, particularly Russia and China. AfD delegations have made obsequious pilgrimages to Moscow. Ms. Weidel has routinely held private meetings at the Chinese ambassador’s residence in Berlin. Last year, an assistant to Mr. Krah, the AfD’s most vocal advocate for a close relationship with the Chinese regime, was arrested in Leipzig on suspicion of espionage for China.

For the Trump administration, the AfD might prove a useful tool for stirring headlines and influencing debates within Germany. But an ally? That, it can never be.

My version would be that AfD is a German political party not an American political party. I think that Americans are generally wrong when they draw analogies between American political parties and foreign ones. We don’t understand the context. Tories are not Republicans. Labour is not the Democrats. No German political party is the natural ally of any American political party for the simple reason that it’s a German political party.

George Will’s latest Washington Post column, arguing for a more activist role for the U. S. vis-à-vis Ukraine can be summarized in two equations:

Russia 2025 = Germany 1938
Russia 2025 = Soviet Union 1945

He doesn’t actually present an argument but here are his major claims:

Putin is waging what Johns Hopkins scholar Hal Brands calls (in his new book, “The Eurasian Century”) “a quasi-genocidal war.” Barbarian regimes (see “‘Be Cruel’: Inside Russia’s Torture System for Ukrainian POWs,” the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 10) will be barbaric until stopped. But a revanchist and expansionist Russia worries Europeans more than it worries Donald Trump.

“Look,” he said on Feb. 3 regarding Europe, “we have an ocean in between. They don’t. It’s more important for them than it is for us.” But the ocean was there in 1941. And someone should explain to Trump the acronym “ICBM.”

I agree that Russia is revanchist. I don’t believe it is expansionist and I don’t believe either of the two equations above.

What I actually think is that Russia wants a materially demilitarized buffer between itself and countries that invaded Russia in the 20th century. To his discourse on 20th century history he might include that Germany, France, Britain, the United States, Poland, and even Italy invaded Russia in the 20th century.

I also think the following equations are false:

Europe 2025 = Europe 1918
Europe 2025 = Europe 1945

What I think our objective should be is to convince the Russians that they have no reason to fear invasion or even covert destabilizing activities from NATO countries. Is it even possible to do that with a country as paranoid from long experience as Russia? And do we actually want to do that?

In a piece at The Nation via MSN Rebecca Traister argues that James Carville, Rahm Emanuel, Seth Moulton, Maureen Dowd and other Democratic critics of the direction the party has taken are wrong and that the real explanation for the Democrats’ loss of the White House, House of Representatives, and Senate is that they were not “woke” and excessive enough:

The right perceives things about the centuries-long march toward a more just and inclusive nation that the left fails to grasp: that all of this is intertwined. As the left tears itself apart trying to distinguish between fights for civil equality, workers’ liberation, and democracy, its opponents are the ones who understand that we cannot have economic justice without social movements, that we cannot have a functional democracy while workers are exploited and people cannot easily vote or control their own bodies. Democrats have lost recently not because of an excess of wokeness but because of a failure to get excessive enough — to fight like these efforts, like the fate of all Americans, are linked.

That’s her conclusion. I recommend you read the whole thing.

Walter Russell Mead in his Wall Street Journal column summarizes the “Trump policy” with respect to Europe as epitomized by Vice President JD Vance’s remarks to the Munich Security Conference:

Mr. Trump’s Europe policy is likely to have one of two outcomes. It could function as shock therapy, jolting Europeans into making the changes that could renew European strength and offering hope for a new and more realistic alliance. Or it could mark the beginning of the end of the trans-Atlantic community that gave Europe its longest era of relative peace since the peak of the Roman Empire.

Either way, the Trump administration’s first foray into European policymaking won’t be soon forgotten. Europeans now know that Charles de Gaulle was right, that the Continent cannot count on American blank checks forever. Let us hope that our shocked and angry European friends draw some wise lessons from a harsh week.

Actually, isn’t there a third alternative? I suspect that the Europeans’ reaction will be to attempt to go over Trump’s head via the American press. Expect a flurry of features on how wonderful the Europeans are, how awful Trump is, how vital to our security Europe is, etc.

I believe former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s observation about European leadership was correct. They have known what needed to be done for decades. They just don’t know how they will keep their jobs if they do what needs to be done. So they won’t reform. They’ll continue to assume that the U. S. will carry their water for them as long as it is humanly possible.

However, while we’re on the subject why should we continue to carry the Europeans’ water for them? Other than that we have treaties that say we will, of course. After all treaties come and go. The European Union (EU) has more than three times’ Russia’s population and nine times’ Russia’s GDP. The Europeans should be able to handle Russian aggression with, as Dr. Mead puts it, “nuclear backstopping” by the United States. Any present incapacity is completely voluntary on their part.

Today the editors of the Washington Post rise to the defense of the Department of Education:

Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, insisted in her confirmation hearing on Thursday that the administration’s objective is not to “defund” the agency but to “take the bureaucracy out of education” and return control over schools to the states.

However, states already drive education policy. The federal government provides only about 14 percent of K-12 funding, and decisions about what schools teach are made by states and local school districts.

The Education Department’s purpose, in contrast, is to help level the playing field for disadvantaged students. It delivers aid to schools that serve such children, and it enforces federal civil rights laws that forbid discrimination based on race, gender and disability in public classrooms.

in what is one of the more self-refuting editorials I’ve read lately. Here are just two of the problems with the editorial. Let’s start with this passage:

President Ronald Reagan was not a fan of the Education Department. Nevertheless, in 1983, his administration issued a landmark report titled “A Nation at Risk,” which pressed for federal action to improve education in the United States. It divulged that 13 percent of American 17-year-olds — and up to 40 percent of minority youths — were functionally illiterate.

Let’s accept that at face value. Forty years ago 13% of seniors in high school were functionally illiterate. According to the most recent study from the Department of Education, today 19% of high school seniors are functionally illiterate.

You can come up with all sorts of excuses for why that might be but one thing is clear. The DoE has failed in the mandate it received 40 years ago. When the approach you’re using isn’t working, doesn’t it make sense to try something else? Doubling down, which is what we’ve been doing for the last 30 years, doesn’t seem to be working.

As far as the “level the playing field” argument goes, that doesn’t seem to be working particularly well, either. Consider this graph of Title I spending by state from Newsweek. The richest state in the Union (California) receives $300 less per K-12 student as the poorest state in the Union (Mississippi). That’s because, ironically, while being the richest state in the Union California also has the largest number of poor people of any state in the Union.

The even more serious problem is not one raised in the editorial: there seems to be little relationship between spending per student and outcomes. Over the last 30 years real spending per student has increased considerably but outcomes have not improved commensurately.

I don’t draw the conclusion from all of this that we should stop paying for education. The conclusion I draw is that we’re doing something wrong.