John Bolton on the Trump White House after 100 Days
What have we learned about the White House in Trump's second term? How are decisions made in the most consequential areas of national security?During the past week, Trump fired National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. To discuss this and many other matters, we are joined again by John Bolton, who served as National Security Advisor in the Trump White House from 2018 to 2019. Bolton shares the perspective of an insider who understands Donald Trump—and government at a high level of granularity. He describes Waltz’s dismissal as emblematic of a White House in chaos. As he puts it: “more and more decisions will be made in the White House and fewer decisions in the cabinet in the second Trump term than in recent presidencies. That’s the clear message going ahead.” Assessing the price we pay, Bolton states: “[Trump] is burning through decades of effort to build up goodwill, trust, faith, reliance on America. Our friends all over the world are saying, 'You’ve taken leave of your senses.’"
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Larry Summers on Trump, Tariffs, and Threats to the Economy
Where do things stand a month after Trump's “Liberation Day” tariffs and the announcements that have followed? In a thoughtful and wide-ranging Conversation, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers shares his perspective on the economic and political consequences of the tariffs—and the threats to financial markets. According to Summers, our difficulties now go beyond any individual economic policy pronouncement by the Trump administration: “The issue is becoming, in a meta sense, confidence in the United States. When people go in and out of being confident in you, that is alarming. It’s the kind of thing that in a developing country, you’d ask yourself whether they’re going to have to have an IMF program within a few months. We’re too big for an IMF program, but we're at risk of a major kind of a financial incident.” Warning that the administration already has “done a substantial amount of damage,” Summers argues that “we may work our way through this, but only if there’s very substantial alarm and very substantial reversal.”
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Jason Furman on the Trump Tariffs and the US Economy
What are the likely effects of Trump’s tariffs, and what do they mean for the US economy? To discuss, we are joined again by Harvard economist Jason Furman, who was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in President Obama’s second term. According to Furman, Trump’s tariffs represent an enormous "shock to the system” likely to produce both short- and long-term economic pain. Furman considers both the direct and indirect effects of Trump’s policies, including the effects of uncertainty on the economy. Finally, Kristol and Furman discuss whether Congress could push back against an economic agenda likely, in Furman’s words, to produce “many more losers than winners.”
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A.B. Stoddard on Trump’s Second Term
Where do things stand five months after Election Day? According to veteran reporter and commentator A.B. Stoddard, Trump’s second term has been far more radical than many anticipated. As she puts it: “The more power you give [Trump], the more he’ll take. And the less pushback that he gets, the freer he is. So I think what we’ve seen in the last couple of months is that he’s been given permission and he will take it. That’s the way Trump is…. So people need to not underestimate the fact that things could be much, much worse in three months or a year.” In a wide-ranging assessment of the state of our politics, Stoddard shares her perspective on the Trump agenda, the Republican Party’s acquiescence, and the situation of the Democratic Party opposing Trump. Stoddard and Kristol also consider how opponents of Trump might chart alternative paths forward in the months and years ahead.
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Steve Vladeck on the Trump Administration, the Courts, and the Rule of Law
Where do things stand fifty days into Trump’s second term? According to Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck: “We’ve never seen such a wholesale attempt on the part of a president [to] hollow out the executive branch [and] install loyalists in all of the relevant positions of government.” Amid a blizzard of lawsuits in response to Trump’s executive actions, Vladeck analyzes whether and to what extent the courts, Congress, and other institutions might contain the Trump administration by asserting their own Constitutional prerogatives to defend the rule of law. While he notes that courts may push back on certain executive actions on First Amendment and other grounds, Vladeck argues that the courts simply were not set up to handle the kind of large-scale litigation that might follow from mass terminations in the civil service, for instance. This is a must-watch Conversation for anyone interested in understanding how the separation of powers, a bedrock of our constitutional government, is playing out in our institutions in real time.
Ireland