Economy Relax, Panicans: Trump’s Tariffs Are Just Getting Started The recent Supreme Court setback was expected. Now we turn to Section 301 tariffs. MAGA can be a very emotional movement. That passion led to a historic win in 2024 when President Trump carried every single swing state. But it can also have downsides. Unfortunately, when we run into even a little adversity, we are prone to crippling self-doubt and panic. A bad court ruling. A hostile media cycle. One misleading, hyperbolic headline. Some anonymous quote from a faceless, NeverTrump bureaucrat. Within hours, social media timelines fill with blackpilling, accusations of betrayal, and declarations that the entire MAGA agenda is dead. But the Panicans need to relax. We’ve watched the president work for more than a decade. We’ve seen him adapt, change lanes, find another lever to pull, and keep moving. He’s proven doubters wrong over and over again. At this point, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. And that is certainly true when it comes to the question of the “Trump Tariffs.”  In February, the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s “emergency power” tariffs, which he argued he could levy using executive authority granted by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Included in these were his “trafficking tariffs,” which he levied against China, Canada, and Mexico for failing to prevent the flow of fentanyl into our country, and his “reciprocal tariffs,” which he levied against nearly every nation for the “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the U.S. economy and U.S. national security posed by trade imbalances. The president obviously preferred a better ruling, just as a power hitter might prefer a fastball down the middle of the plate. But he hasn’t struck out—not even close. Governing is a process. Serious attempts to reorder the global economy were never going to move through the courts uncontested. Judicial review takes time.  Meanwhile, he’s already looking to crush the next pitch. Soon after the ruling, the administration began exploring alternative tariff authorities under Section 301 of the Trade Act, which allows the United States government to respond to unfair foreign trade practices. This angle puts the tariff argument on much firmer legal and political ground. A Section 301 framework allows the administration to connect environmental dumping, industrial overcapacity, state subsidies, weak labor standards, and non-market manipulation to a broader argument about systemic trade distortion. This argument targets the trade practices that allow foreign producers to artificially suppress prices through overcapacity and state-backed advantages that American firms cannot realistically match under normal market conditions. China stands apart because it combines nearly every distortion inside a state-directed command economy built around subsidies, industrial overcapacity, currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, forced labor, and heavy industrial pollution. While China is the clearest example, the problem is very much a global one. Many countries benefit from weaker environmental enforcement and lower industrial standards. For decades, Washington has treated these distortions as normal features of “free trade,” while domestic industry hollowed out and production shifted overseas. Environmental activists and regulatory bureaucracies played their own role in this shift by focusing heavily on reducing domestic emissions totals without accounting for how industrial production would move abroad. China now produces massive amounts of the steel, chemicals, batteries, solar panels, and industrial materials required for the so-called green transition while relying heavily on coal power and weak environmental enforcement. American policymakers spent years measuring domestic emissions reductions without seriously accounting for the offshoring of both industry and pollution. That dynamic carries direct economic consequences. Weak environmental enforcement becomes an economic advantage. Governments willing to tolerate severe pollution hand manufacturers pricing advantages over competitors in countries operating under stricter standards, allowing them to flood markets with cheap, dirty products. That is exactly why the Section 301 approach matters so much. It treats these practices as interconnected forms of trade distortion instead of isolated policy debates. Trade policy evolves through institutional fights, legal challenges, and shifting authorities. Durable frameworks usually emerge over time. The administration is adapting in real time while parts of the online right continue embarrassing themselves by treating every procedural setback, temporary injunction, or narrow ruling like the collapse of the entire America First movement.  Real patriots trust the plan. Ignore the “Panicans” and let the President cook—he’s about to hit a dinger. The post Relax, Panicans: Trump’s Tariffs Are Just Getting Started appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs The Strange Case of the United Arab Emirates Abu Dhabi, despite its previous Iran hawkism, appears to have facilitated peace between Washington and Tehran. After the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in late February, the Gulf States found themselves in a very difficult position. It was a war that served not one of their interests. They had warned the U.S. against the war and lobbied hard to prevent it, and they exerted strenuous effort to stay out of it. And yet, they provide the platform for thirteen U.S. bases and 50,000 U.S. troops that has made the war on Iran possible. As American missiles rained down on Iran and Iranian missiles rained down on the Gulf countries, reports emerged that the U.S. was using the latter nations’ territory and airspace. Bader Al-Saif, assistant professor at Kuwait University, says that the Gulf states do not want to be seen as part of a U.S.-Israeli front against Iran and that they know that this is an illegal war launched amid negotiations that Tehran had appeared to approach in good faith. Reports that Saudi Arabia was pushing the U.S. to continue the war and to put an end to the Iranian threat were denied by Saudi Arabia, and both Al-Saif and Maria Luisa Fantappiè, head of the Mediterranean, Middle East and Africa programme at the Istituto Affari Internazionali, say that there is no evidence of such Saudi lobbying and that the reports are not true. According to President Donald Trump, it was the leaders of the Gulf states, including Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, who had asked him last month to “hold off” on an imminent U.S. attack that would have restarted major hostilities. But while the rest of the Gulf countries went one way, toward restraint and staying out of a war they were trying to end, the United Arab Emirates went another. The UAE urged the other Gulf countries to take a more aggressive posture in their defense and to join the United States. They alone said they would be willing to join a U.S.-led international effort to “secure navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.” And on the very day the Gulf Cooperation Council opened its recent summit, the Emirati government announced it was leaving the Saudi-led OPEC group of oil-producing nations. But then the more sensational revelations came. In an extraordinary first, Israel sent an Iron Dome battery, interceptors, and dozens of IDF operators to the UAE, to help intercept Iranian missiles fired at the UAE. It was the first time that Israel had transferred an Iron Dome battery to another country and suggested a level of cooperation between the two nations previously unknown. Then it was reported that the UAE had secretly entered the war by carrying out military strikes on Iran, attacking a refinery on Iran’s ⁠Lavan Island in the Persian Gulf. The UAE’s more aggressive and rogue stance made it a leading target of Iranian missiles. Hassan Ahmadian, associate professor of Middle East and North Africa studies at the University of Tehran, says that Iran sees the UAE and Bahrain as the worst offenders and that they have been struck the most, with the UAE being struck more times than all the other Gulf states combined. But then a strange thing happened. On May 4, Iran struck the UAE’s Fujairah port—and then did not strike the UAE again. There had long been rumors, and even some reports, that Qatar and Oman may have struck their own deals with Iran to avoid further retaliatory strikes. And now, the same rumors have surfaced about the UAE, and Reuters has recently corroborated them. Four unnamed sources told Reuters that the UAE had agreed to release between $10 billion and $20 billion of funds to Iran that are frozen under U.S. sanctions. Two of the sources say that $3 billion has already been delivered.  Perhaps having realized that aligning with the U.S. was making them the key target for Iranian missiles and that, contrary to the promises, the U.S. was unable to defend its territory, the UAE updated their tactics and engaged with Iran rather, than confronting it. Two sources told Reuters that the release of frozen Iranian funds had been promised “in return for a halt to Iranian attacks on ⁠the UAE.” (The UAE has denied the report.) Furthering the intrigue, according to one of the sources “with knowledge of the arrangement,” the intent of the deal went beyond stopping the missile strikes. It has long been clear that Iran would not accept any peace deal without sanction relief and the release of at least some of its frozen assets. The U.S. has insisted that, unlike their representation of Obama’s JCPOA, the U.S. would not be bribing Iran to curb its nuclear program out of a position of weakness, and that any release of funds would be tied to performance.  The UAE releasing funds to Iran would allow Iran to receive frozen funds at the front end of the agreement while allowing the Trump administration to save face. The White House has called claims of side agreements that allowed frozen funds to flow back to Iran at the front end “misinformation,” but the UAE seems to have facilitated precisely that arrangement. Over the past several months, the UAE’s pendulum has swung wildly from Iran hawkism to engagement with the Islamic Republic that makes a peace deal possible. This strange pattern of relations could be made even stranger if, as one source told Reuters, the arrangement between the UAE and Iran went further than stopping the strikes to encompass “rebuilding of bilateral ties, including intelligence sharing and economic cooperation.” Such reports suggest the U.S.–Iran peace deal, with the help of the UAE, could help transform the Middle East and reintegrate Iran and the Gulf nations. The post The Strange Case of the United Arab Emirates appeared first on The American Conservative.

UK Special Coverage Angry Brits Could Make Burnham PM—Then Turn on Him The voters are in a state of electoral ataxia that makes political forecasting impossible. UK Special Coverage Britain has had six prime ministers in the last decade and is about to install a seventh. This seems inevitable following the stunning victory of Andy Burnham, the erstwhile mayor of Manchester, in the crucial Makerfield by-election Thursday night. He received 55 percent of the vote and crushed the life out of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. The Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, is now under intense pressure to hand over the keys of Number Ten Downing Street to wannabe Burnham tout de suite. Around 81 MPs are needed to trigger a leadership election under Labour’s rules. Burnham’s people claim they will have over 200 names by Sunday. Starmer insisted as recently as two days ago that he was not going to quit, whatever happened in Makerfield. He had a job to do and he was going to finish it, having won a thumping general election victory only two years ago. If a leadership election happened, he said, he would be a candidate in it—as is his right. But that now seems a forlorn hope, even a state of delusion. The political reality is that Andy Burnham’s momentum is unstoppable. Last weekend, a succession of senior Labour MPs, led by the Energy and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband, will be lining up to persuade Sir Keir that he should agree to an “orderly transition” to avoid a damaging leadership election that would only extend the crisis. Starmer can reasonably claim that this is not a crisis of his own making. It is ambitious politicians like Burnham, former Health Secretary Wes Streeting, former Defence Secretary John Healey, and others who have plunged the government into chaos by resigning serially from his cabinet. He has a point. Starmer won Labour’s biggest election victory in twenty-seven years in July 2024. “People have said to me it’s not possible, it’s not possible to turn the Labor Party around,” he noted earlier this week. He points out that some things have been going right under his watch: Immigration is down, inflation is down, GDP is up, and wages are rising. Starmer took the wise decision not to get involved in Donald Trump’s Iran adventure. He has been gradually removing trade barriers with Europe. Only this week, he took on the tech billionaires with his plan to ban children under sixteen from using social media. (Not that many people believe it will work.) However, the first priority of an MP is not policy success but job security—his own. Starmer’s unpopularity has plunged in recent months and has been as low in polls as any of his unloved Tory predecessors. Burnham is much more popular, though whether that will last once he is in the top job remains to be seen. To paraphrase Tony Blair, Starmer was the future once. The apparently irresistible rise of Reform UK is what has induced a state of panic on the Labour benches. The party lost 1,100 seats in the May council elections, mostly to Farage’s people. Northern MPs, often in vulnerable constituencies, feared that Labour, and their seats, were doomed under Starmer. Reform has been leading Labour in the national opinion polls for the last thirteen months and Farage had been drawing up plans for his first government. Now suddenly all that has changed.  After Makerfield, Reform looks to have peaked, says Labour-supporting commentators. Farage is back in his box. Andy Burnham is the Reform killer and looks Labour’s best bet to win the next general election. Well, maybe. We have been here before. The Tories changed their leaders like football managers five times in eight years and they just got more unpopular each time. There is no particular reason why Andy Burnham should be able to turn Labour around.  He stood for leader twice in the past and was rejected. He has been dubbed Andy U-turnham for his policy flip-flops on immigration, borrowing, benefits, and Brexit. It’s hard to know what Burnham’s appeal is beyond the fact that he is not Keir Starmer, whose very speaking voice has been a turn-off for many voters. It’s not really about personalities anyway. The Brits are angry and alienated. There is widespread discontent at the rising cost of living, illegal immigration, unaffordable housing, NHS waiting lists, the benefits culture. “Alarm clock Britain,” as middle- and lower-level wage earners are called, is getting poorer. Petrol prices, energy bills, groceries all seem to be racing ahead of the official inflation figures. Many blame mass migration, welfare claimants, and environmental policies like Net Zero.  British voters seem somewhat lost politically. Old class loyalties have disintegrated.  Cynicism reigns. Politicians are thought to be “in it for themselves,” like the SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, who recently admitted embezzling £400,000, or the Labour Lord Peter Mandelson, who was hand in glove with Jeffrey Epstein.  This alienation has led to apparently contradictory results in elections. Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election with 55 percent of the vote—more than all the right-wing parties (Reform, Restore and the Conservatives) put together. Yet only six weeks ago, Nigel Farage’s Reform won around 50 percent of the votes in this very northern English town in the local elections. What are we to make of this? Nigel Farage is claiming that many potential Reform supporters voted tactically for Labour in order to get Starmer out. That is a clever piece of spin, but somewhat improbable. Andy Burnham has been trimming his left-wing policies, but he is still a self-styled “socialist” and is more pro-immigration and “woke” than the prime minister. Burnham is expected to install his main backer, the left-wing Miliband, as chancellor. The Energy and Net Zero Secretary  is everything white working-class Reform voters are supposed to hate: a green zealot who opposes immigration controls and wants, if anything, to increase spending on welfare. Burnham is on record as saying he wants the UK to eventually rejoin the European Union, so why would Reform voters, who invariably backed Brexit, lend their votes to him? It makes little sense. Nor does Farage’s claim that Reform were robbed by the intervention of the far-right ethnonationalists of Rupert Lowe’s Restore UK, which supports remigration and a restoration of the death penalty. Adding Restore’s 3,000 votes to Reform’s 16,000 still leaves them far short of the almost 25,000 received by Burnham. Voters are just mad as hell, to echo Howard Beale in Network, and won’t take it any more. They lash out in all directions. It is a state of electoral ataxia that makes predicting election results almost impossible. Four months ago, in the Gorton and Denton by-election, Labour’s vote collapsed and they lost one of their safest seats to the Green Party. In Makerfield, the once-mighty Conservatives returned 2.2 percent of the vote. Yet on the same day they won their first by-election gain in half a century in Aberdeen South—formerly a Scottish National Party stronghold. What goes around doesn’t come around any more in British politics. It is here-today-gone-tomorrow politics, as this once-great imperial power learns to live with economic and geopolitical decline—and really doesn’t like it. The post Angry Brits Could Make Burnham PM—Then Turn on Him appeared first on The American Conservative.

I was struck by the many fun reactions to my column last Saturday on “Your Vanishing Newspaper.” One reaction I didn’t expect was the readers celebrating the decline if not disappearance of newspapers because of their left-wing biases. Then again, in a publication like ours, focused on politics and ideology, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by that reaction. Still, I wasn’t thinking about that. Now that I have thought about it, I’ll make just a quick observation: In the old days, because there were multiple print dailies in major cities, you often had the option of picking a more conservative or Republican-leaning newspaper over a liberal one. Admittedly, too often you had a choice between a liberal paper or a moderate/liberal one. But you frequently had a legitimate choice between a “Democrat” or “Republican” paper. Many townsfolk read both, expecting the slant and reading accordingly. Big cities aside, smalltown newspapers were generally more conservative. My hometown paper, the Butler Eagle, was Republican. And either way, you didn’t rely on your local paper for national political news. Most people read the local paper for local news, sports, classifieds, letters to the editor, obituaries, community events, photos, and more. Indeed, some readers of my column noted that a big problem with local print dailies (including those still barely surviving) is that their national news coverage is quickly outdated and trumped by online dailies. Well, that’s true—if you’re going to your local newspaper for coverage of, say, Iran or Ukraine. But who does that? On a separate point, another reader noted that “What killed most of those papers wasn’t politics but labor costs and the refusal of the unions to permit any automation. So everyone lost their jobs, much better.”  Precisely. I noted the meltdown in Pittsburgh in the late 1980s with the Pittsburgh Press and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It was based on labor-union nonsense, the same junk that destroyed the steel industry in our area. And more recently with the Post-Gazette (i.e., this year), it was labor issues once again that nearly destroyed the paper entirely. But that aside, there was another subject raised by a couple readers that really struck me, and I’ll be surprised if anyone cheers “Good riddance!” to this. That would be the vanishing not of newspapers but newspaper boys.  Yes, paperboys. Remember those? Of course, you do. How many of you reading today delivered newspapers as a boy? It was probably your first job. It was for me. I delivered the Butler Eagle. Each morning, the delivery truck stuffed a stack of newspapers in a large circular metal container at the end of our driveway. I would grab the stack and shove them in a huge bag with a large shoulder strap. Like other paperboys, I was just that, a boy—a young kid—and those bags were heavy. You had to build up the muscle to get used to hauling around that weight. It could be doubly, triply difficult on heavy snow days when you trekked across massive fields in boots and coat. And no matter what the weather, you delivered the newspaper on time. Customers expected it, whether the paper was tossed sidearm to their doorstep, or placed between their doors, or inside a screened-in porch. This taught young boys a sense of responsibility—a work ethic. The paperboy not only collected newspapers but also the money for the subscriptions, usually provided as cash in envelopes from the customer. The cash always included coins. Credit cards were not used. If you did your job well, you got tips.  How common was newspaper delivery? There wasn’t a house in my neighborhood that didn’t get a paper. Not one. Everyone read the local newspaper. Indeed, that’s quite the contrast to today. Some readers reacting to my last column hailed the convenience of getting their news today online, via their phone or laptop. Sure, but how many citizens of your town read the local newspaper even electronically? Not nearly as many who once read it in print. That’s why those papers are vanishing. In the old days, everyone read it in print and paid for it. And it wasn’t expensive because there were so many subscribers. Today, those papers are online and struggling to get subscribers behind their paywalls. And they’re not getting them. They’re going bankrupt. They’re vanishing. Anyway, I heard from several of you who were paperboys. We swapped stories about our adventures. My friend Lee told me about the moment he carefully contemplated crossing a raging creek of ice-cold water on a fallen tree to shorten his time one freezing winter day. He stared at the tree as he decided whether to risk his 10-year-old life. What did he do? You guessed it. He walked across, high above the water. He didn’t die, but he damned well could have. Could you imagine if his parents knew? That story reminded me of a friend of mine. His last name was Fleming, and thus we called him “Flem” (my wife and daughters find that “gross”). I sometimes walked his paper route with him. One day he ventured across an ice patch that wasn’t very thick. Flem was a very heavy kid. The ice cracked and he fell in. Fortunately, I was there to pull him out. Did his parents ever know? Of course, not. They never knew anything. Gosh, if only they knew half of it. In fact, today, most parents wouldn’t let their kids deliver newspapers. They would fear (not wrongly) weirdos and perverts and predators. Nonetheless, we delivered in those days, and we were very young. One reader, Phil, told me that he was eight years old when he delivered the afternoon edition of the Buffalo News. No fear. He rode his bike from house to house. Personally, I walked my route, because it was more rural, but I could’ve benefited from a bike in trying to escape the angry German Shepherd that growled and chased after me. The Neanderthal owners refused to tie up the monster. I started placing their paper in the mailbox at the end of the driveway, which they didn’t like. The delivery department at the Butler Eagle intervened. The two people acted like cavemen, utterly unsympathetic to a boy getting attacked by their stupid animal.  Ridiculous as that experience was, it was a life lesson for a young boy, namely: people are jackasses. Getting through life—and a job—means learning to deal with idiots. How many paperboys exist today? Not many. If you ask AI, it says that paperboys are virtually extinct. I’m sure that’s true. The New York state legislature last year passed a child-labor law banning newspaper deliverers under the age of 12. That would have killed Phil’s job with the Buffalo News.  This is a loss. These were nice jobs that taught boys a sense of responsibility. I would like to see a statistic showing the percentage of males for whom paperboy was their first job. I can’t think of another first job more common to guys. Alas, with the vanishing daily print newspaper, paperboys are vanishing as well. And that’s nothing to celebrate.

Local country sheriffs and district attorneys in Virginia are speaking out against Governor Abigail Spanberger and her Democrat legislature’s ban on assault weapons by refusing to prosecute and enforce the unconstitutional law. (READ MORE: ‘Sanctuary’ Policy Is a Double-Edged Sword, As Virginia’s Dems Are Finding Out)  The Spectacle Podcast hosts Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay discuss the ban and how many counties in Virginia have declared themselves as sanctuaries for the Second Amendment. They explain the tensions between state and federal government and the historical precedent of Americans reacting to terrible policy, pointing to moments in American history like Prohibition and the COVID-19 pandemic. They also discuss how the GOP needs to be stronger on political principle than the Left, and emphasize the need for clean voter rolls to have honest elections. (RELATED: Gunfight at Governor Abigail’s Corral)  Tune in to hear their discussion!  Listen to The Spectacle with Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay on Spotify. Watch The Spectacle with Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay on Rumble.