According to the Horseshoe Theory of Politics, the extreme left and right are much closer to each other than they are to the center. And that is true of MAGA conservatism; much that distinguishes it from traditional conservatism is precisely its embrace of values and methods from the left. As I’ve repeatedly said here at […]
Archives
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Trump’s embrace of Socialism is Increasing
19 Sep 2025
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It all comes down to really one question. Is it acceptable to the United States for the Iranian regime to have nuclear weapons? If the answer is no, then Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have performed a tremendous service to the world. The wicked Iranian regime has directly and indirectly killed perhaps 1000 Americans since […]
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Ukraine Stuns the Russians! Can we finally get the U.S. fully committed to helping them achieve victory?
02 Jun 2025
Regular Berean readers know that I have a very simple and historically conventional view of foreign policy: there are countries that are implacably against the U.S. and its interests (e.g. Russia), those that allied with ours (e.g., the U.K) and those that are not hostile but may or may not support our interests (e.g., India). […]
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Adam Smith 4, Donald Trump 0
13 May 2025
Yesterday we heard the announcement of a dramatic pullback from Mr. Trump’s trade war with China, and markets had a major rally. Predictably, some fans of the “master negotiator” cheered the market’s reaction, even while saying they didn’t care about Wall Street when markets first corrected. China was told not to retaliate, or they’d regret […]
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Short note on Trump’s mandate for Tariffs
10 May 2025
Some of Mr. Trump’s more ardent supporters say that because he won the election, and in the campaign regularly brought up his intent to have more tariffs, this gives him a mandate for his trade war. As I’ve said repeatedly, his mandate–such as it was–was to 1) stop the open borders, 2) get prices down, […]
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Admitted, this is very rough ballpark with a little help from our AI friends, but let’s assume Mr. Trump does an amazing deal with all countries and gets all imports now taxed at 10%, which he says is the minimum tariff rate. Given we imported about $4T in 2024, let’s assume we’ll now get $400B. […]
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After the first 100 days of the Trump Administration, numerous reviews highlighted both the good and the bad. Most of the good focused on the complete stoppage of the porous border that Mr. Biden created. Most of the harshest hit at his misguided trade war, with some (rightly so!) focusing on his abominable siding with […]
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Adam Smith 3, Donald Trump 0
25 Apr 2025
In a previous post I suggested Mr. Trump’s retreat on his tariff proposals (the 90 day pause) made the score Adam Smith 2, and Donald Trump 0. Bereans know that we have repeatedly condemned Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on trade as completely wrong, and to the extent he actually tried to do it, he would Make […]
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Tariff War Chronicles: Trump’s playing with fire, but we’ll be the ones burned for years if he’s wrong
09 Apr 2025
I’m willing to accept for the sake of argument that in the internal battle within the Trump Administration over whether the tariffs are tools to 1) negotiate free trade or are 2) non-negotiable to force manufacturers back to the U.S. that Mr. Trump wants free trade and believes that his tariffs will both get us […]
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Trumpian fans will almost surely say “how could you not see it before?”, but I still believe it’s a reasonable response that when someone says “go and drink this poison–it will taste really good!” we should vehemently disagree. And I still disagree with his rhetoric on tariffs, but there is some small reason for optimism. […]
Bert Wheeler
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