Trump's "Grown-Ups" May Be More Dangerous Than His Enablers

The case of indiscriminate tariffs.

The view this past week from the intersection of 16th St. and Pennsylvania Ave. NW.

We’re at the peek-through-your fingers stage of the second Trump presidency, which could last four years. Trump released the January 6 “hostages” and now Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys, is pledging retribution. The House is investigating its own January 6 committee (though House Speaker Mike Johnson had to block a subpoena to White House whistleblower Cassidy Hutchinson “to prevent the release of sexually explicit texts that lawmakers sent her,” according to the Washington Post). The Centers for Disease Control is prevented from releasing its weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report because if the bird flu turns into a serious epidemic the Trump administration doesn’t want you to know. The former wife of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to run the Pentagon, who makes the late John Tower look like a teetotaler, shared (according to his former sister in law) a code word in case she needed rescuing from spousal abuse; used it once; and once hid in a closet to get away from him. He will probably be confirmed. This is a landscape by Hieronymous Bosch (see his “Last Judgment,” above).

It may seem foolish, at such a moment, to quibble with Scott Bessent’s professorial defense of Trump’s tariff policy, which helped win Bessent’s nomination two Democratic votes from the Senate Finance Committee. Bessent is, after all, one of the “grown-ups” on whom we’re supposed to depend. My preferred term is Turd Polisher. In my latest New Republic piece, I argue that the Turd Polishers, by doing their best to make Trump’s Caligula-like governance seem plausible, are at least as dangerous as Enablers like Stephen Miller. I ran Bessent’s reasonable-sounding defense of Trump’s proposed tariffs by two eminent economists, UCLA’s Kimberly Clausing and Harvard’s Jason Furman, and one excellent economic journalist, Paul Blustein, late of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, who’s about to publish a history of the dollar as the globe’s dominant currency. They all explained very patiently why it’s rubbish. You can read my piece here.