The Washington Post has no idea how Social Security works

Let's start with a thought experiment. Suppose you want to purchase some U.S. Treasury bonds to add to your investment portfolio. And why not? Apart from cash, treasuries are the safest and most liquid financial instrument on the planet. Unlike cash, they pay interest.

When you buy treasuries you're effectively loaning money to the U.S. government. For each purchased bond, you fork over some money—conceptually the bond's "face value"—which the government takes and uses to fund its agencies, operations, projects, wars, whatever. The government gets to use your money for some some specified length of time, making periodic interest payments to you of a specified amount. When the bond reaches maturity after a predetermined number of years, it is retired and the government returns your money—the amount you loaned it initially—to you.

That's how bonds work.* The government takes your money, uses it, pays you interest while it's using it, and then gives your money back. (Corporate bonds are similar. When you buy a corporate bond, you're loaning money to a corporation, to build a factory, a pipeline, or some such.)

As a holder of treasuries you're one of the government's creditors. The government is a debtor that owes you money—the amount you loaned it. Treasury bonds you hold are part of the U.S. government's debt.  

Here's where our thought experiment gets weird. Suppose, upon your bond's maturity, instead of returning  your principal as promised, the government says: Sorry, the money has been spent. Hope you understand.

In the context of U.S. government debt, that would be absurd.†

But not too absurd for the Washington Post. In an editorial that egregiously misrepresents how Social Security is financed, the Post's editorial board said:

"Politicians have told seniors that they are simply getting back the money they paid in, but that’s not true. The government already spent the payroll tax money retirees paid during their careers. The money retirees receive today is funded by a combination of taxes on workers, who are on average poorer than retirees, and debt. It is a strange sense of morality which says that because the government lied to past generations it is bound to continue lying to current and future generations."

It's hard to know where to begin with this stupendously ignorant string of nonsense. Maybe we should start by saying that the money retirees receive today is emphatically not funded partially by "debt." The Post's claim about that is egregiously false. Social Security has always had its own dedicated funding stream, and still does: the "payroll tax" ("FICA" on your W-2). The government does not borrow money to fund Social Security.

Quite the contrary, in fact. Like you when you bought your Treasury bonds, Social Security is actually one of the government's creditors, a reality that turns the Post's narrative completely on its head. That's because for many decades, going back to the 1980s, the Social Security system deliberately and by design collected more in payroll taxes than was needed to pay current benefits at the time. (That strategy was designed by Alan Greenspan and the commission he chaired, and was enacted into law by Congress.)

The excess taxation was done in order to accumulate a large "trust fund" surplus that would be needed down the road to pay benefits when the large glut of baby boomers, which was moving like an enormous demographic bubble through the system, ultimately retired. If nothing had been done, current payroll taxes alone would be insufficient to pay benefits, so the trust fund surplus was created to augment them. That's what's happening now.

So what's the disposition of all those excess funds deliberately collected since the 1980s? It's a question the Post completely botches.

Those accumulated excess payroll tax receipts flowing into the trust fund had to be somehow invested until they were eventually needed, decades later. So Social Security did something sensible: It loaned the money to the government, through the purchase of special issue government bonds, created for that very purpose. (The trust fund's bonds can't be traded on the financial markets.)

That's not the only imaginable investment approach that could have been chosen, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it. The bonds pay a competitive interest rate. And lots of people, businesses, and other governments loan money to the U.S. government. Social Security's doing so is exactly analogous to what you did when you loaned money to the government when you purchased your Treasury bonds.

But the Washington Post's editorial board smells a rat. "The government already spent the payroll tax money retirees paid during their careers," complains the Post.

Already spent? That's the Post's way of saying the trust fund loaned money to the government, and the government went and spent it on stuff! Now it's gone. Too bad about that.

That's the very same sort of absurdity we uncovered in our thought experiment above, in which the government declined to refund your Treasury bond's purchase price on maturity, on the grounds that the  money had been spent. (And why wouldn't it be spent? The government had no reason to borrow your money in the first place if it didn't intend to use it.)

Our example was contrived, but the Post extends the absurdity, out in the light of day, to the money loaned to the government by the trust fund. The money is gone—spent, alas, by a feckless government. Perhaps the Post thinks the money should have been stuffed under a mattress.

The Post, which is clearly out of its element, compounds its mistake. With the trust fund money spent and gone, the only recourse, reasons the Post, is to fund Social Security benefits by borrowing even more money. Good money after bad. At least we assume that's the reasoning behind the Post's false claim that Social Security is funded by "debt."

It's an age-old canard, advanced by persons who have no business opining on things they don't understand. Even persons who really ought to know better make this fundamental mistake. Which, by the way, is ample cause for despair about whether society more generally can reason its way to true conceptions of reality—a capability that's sorely needed to manage our joint affairs.

You might be wondering—the Post is surely wondering—how it can be that the money you loaned the government, and the money the trust fund loaned the government, was spent but still paid back. But isn't that how it is with loans? The money is used. Spent. To buy things. A house, for example. But the loan is ultimately paid back. If it wasn't, then it wouldn't be a loan.

You pay off your own debt by working and earning a living. The government pays off its debt by collecting taxes and issuing new debt, as needed, to replace the old.

Maybe it's the issuance of new debt that has the Post's panties in a bunch. Maybe that's why it falsely said that Social Security is partially funded by debt. Fear not: We can think our way through this easily enough.

The definitive proof that Social Security isn't funded by debt is to put on your accountant's visor and look at the government's books. Because the Social Security trust fund is an actual creditor (and a rather large one) of the U.S. government, the government's obligations to the trust fund are duly itemized in the official accounting of the U.S. national debt, which is the sum total of money the government owes to all its creditors. All those special issue bonds (presently over two trillion dollars worth) held by the trust fund are thus part of the debt, and you can look it up.

So when the trust fund needs to redeem (sell) some of its bonds to pay Social Security benefits, what happens? Here's what. The government issues new Treasury bonds and sells them to the financial markets to raise the needed funds. This is new debt. Don't panic. The government then uses the funds from its bond sales to buy back some of the trust fund's bonds—old debt—effectively retiring them while giving Social Security the money it needs to pay benefits. With those old bonds retired, the government now owes less money to the trust fund than before. Thus the trust fund's share of the national debt is reduced in the official accounting. The increase in the national debt thanks to the issuance of the new Treasury bonds, and the decrease in the national debt thanks to the retirement of some of the trust fund's bonds, cancels exactly. The overall national debt remains entirely unchanged. Meanwhile, the trust fund has been used to help pay benefits, exactly as designed. As those benefits are paid the trust fund's balance declines, exactly as you'd expect.

Somebody should tell the Washington Post's editorial board.

If you didn't get it, let me state it again: Even though new Treasury bonds are issued to cover trust fund redemptions, the size of the national debt remains completely unchanged through that maneuver, because bond issuance and bond retirement cancel. Social Security doesn't increase the debt, and never has. As I have previously explained, Social Security has never added a penny to the debt. It's entirely self-funded through the payroll tax. And it's never failed to pay any promised benefits, which means it's always been solvent and the trust fund's assets are real. Some benefits are paid by current payroll tax receipts, with the rest paid by payroll tax accumulations in the trust fund.

None of this is to say that the government doesn't partially fund itself with deficit spending. Of course it does. Whether that's good, bad, or indifferent is a completely separate question. It has nothing to do with Social Security or its finances. There is nothing more inherently wrong with the trust fund loaning money to the government than with you loaning it money through your purchase of Treasury bonds for your own portfolio. They're basically the same thing.

And by the way, if the trust fund didn't loan its money to the government, the government would easily fund itself by selling additional Treasury bonds. The notion that the trust fund is a nefarious enabler of deficit spending is ridiculous. The arrangement was chosen because Social Security has to invest its funds somewhere.

Also by the way, although the benefit formula isn't completely straightforward, there's a sense in which seniors really are "getting back the money they paid in," which the Post said, above, is "not true." At a minimum, all the money "paid in" is used for its intended purpose, and no additional money of any kind has been used. Not bad for a program that's almost a century old.

Way back in 2005, a person who considered himself wise in the ways of the world, government, and finance told me that "Social Security is broke - period."  He also said the trust fund "for all practical purposes does not exist" (I wonder if his bond portfolio exists?) and that "everyone knows the budget is currently balanced with that money."

And that's the problem, now and then: Everyone knows.

It turns out that what "everyone knows" is just an unexamined prejudice, and always has been. Somehow even our best journalistic enterprises have not taken the trouble of finding out and explaining accurately. How can that be? As empirical intellectual exercises go, this is not nearly one of the hardest. It really is quite possible to understand how it all works.

Realizing that Social Security's critics were doing a lot of yammering but weren't ever actually explaining anything, and having had enough of the mindlessness being constantly flung about, I decided to go to the trouble of finding out for myself. The result was a 2013 piece that explains Social Security's funding in considerable detail. It describes how Social Security was originally conceived as a "pay as you go" system, but that the future retirement of the baby boomers necessitated enhancements made long in advance of that eventuality. The Post may not realize it, but it worked. Along with much else, my piece also explains the difference between the "deficit" and the "debt"—something people routinely misunderstand, as did my "wise" commentator above. If you want to have a basic understanding of how Social Security works, and how we got to this point, it's still a good read.

I maintain that understanding how the system actually works is a basic prerequisite for deciding how to extend its ability to pay benefits far into the future, as it always has in the past, with such obvious benefit to citizens. That's a topic of considerable and increasing urgency, one that, as far as I can tell, nobody important seems to be thoughtfully engaged with. Certainly nobody with a large megaphone is explaining it to the public at large.

 

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Footnotes

*Mine is an idealized simplification that ignores Treasury auctions, primary dealers, secondary markets, the buying and selling at discounts and premiums as market interest rates change, and so forth. But it's conceptually correct and useful for purposes of this discussion.

†With bonds there's always a theoretical risk of default, but with U.S. Treasury bonds that risk is negligible.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

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Boots on the ground

The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq began with "shock and awe" from the air, but also included a ground invasion by two divisions of the U.S. military: one Marine, and one Army, commanded by James Mattis and David Petraeus. Perhaps you've heard of them.

The U.S. forces fought their way north, each division keeping to its own side of the Tigris river, to Baghdad, which quickly fell. Statues of Saddam toppled. Celebrations erupted, in the U.S. and in Iraq. George W. Bush proclaimed "Mission Accomplished."

But the mission was not accomplished. An insurgency soon took hold and grew in fury over the years. Americans became intimately acquainted with the concept of the "improvised explosive device," or IED. Brutal battles were fought in Fallujah and, thirteen years after the initial invasion, Mosul. The U.S. administration that ruled the country hunkered down in the highly fortified "Green Zone" in Baghdad. U.S. forces were dying there, and elsewhere.

In August 2005 I wrote:

Taking stock of our unwanted property is discouraging: The constitution writing process in Iraq is in shambles, with the Shiites and Kurds unwilling to compromise with the Sunnis. The U.S. death toll nears the 2000 mark. The insurgency is well entrenched and more deadly than ever. Shiite militias rule the south. The U.S. military is stretched almost to the breaking point and desperately wants to begin a discrete exit, but still needs to appear resolute. President Bush says that as Iraqi forces are able to stand up, U.S. forces will stand down, but the number of Iraqi forces able to fight without U.S. assistance is dismally low. The President's approval ratings are in the toilet, and Americans are drawing parallels between Iraq and Vietnam.

Meanwhile the people of Iraq are caught in a violent maelstrom of bombings, assassinations and instability. The electricity won't stay on and the oil won't flow. More than two years after Bush's strutting about under a "Mission Accomplished" banner, Iraq is in chaos. In 2004 the CIA described three possible scenarios for the future of Iraq; one of them was that the country would descend into civil war. That outcome seems as likely as ever.

This is the place that we broke and now own.

The U.S. invasion led to the emergence of the insurgency group Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Despite Bush administration lies before the invasion, Al-Qaeda hadn't previously been active in Iraq. Now it was. And note that while the 9/11 terrorist attack on the U.S. was the ostensible reason for invading Iraq, Iraq had nothing at all to do with it.

The invasion and insurgency also gave later birth to the Islamic State, which Iraqi and U.S. forces fought to expel from Mosul in 2016. The Islamic State also captured portions of Syria, and the U.S. fought it there, as recently as this year.

Perhaps most significantly with respect to current events, the U.S. invasion of Iraq profoundly altered the balance of power in the region, thereby causing a substantial elevation in the power and influence of Iran as a noxious force in the Middle East. Talk of unintended consequences. Everything is connected.

It's oft and truly said that air power alone can only accomplish so much: To effect real change there need to be "boots on the ground." In 2003 the U.S. supplied boots in large numbers, but even that was not nearly sufficient to ensure a desirable or predictable outcome. No wonder the title of one book on the Iraq war was Hubris. Another was Fiasco.

More than 4,000 U.S. forces died in the Iraq war. The number of civilian deaths is likely in the hundreds of thousands.

Here we are, more than a week after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran. The lessons from Iraq loom large, or should. What will be the unintended consequences this time? How far into the future will those unintended consequences stretch? Iraq showed that substantial military power alone cannot subdue and control a country, or make it what we want it to be.

The U.S. action now seems far less thought out than even the Iraq invasion. There has never been a coherent explanation to the Congress or the country about objectives or endgame. Iran is a far larger country than Iraq, both geographically and in population. The Islamic regime that has ruled the country for decades is well entrenched and deep. Decapitating it from above will not destroy it. The regime-hating populace is large but weak and unorganized. Saying that the people of Iran should take control of their government, as Trump did, is absurdly naive.

U.S. leaders are presently relishing the violence that comes with unchallenged control of the skies. A seemingly giddy Pete Hegseth reveled in "death and destruction from the sky all day long." Where will all that death and destruction lead? One lesson from Iraq is that boots on the ground might be necessary but not sufficient. These are early days. What misery will follow in the weeks, months, and years ahead is not at all clear. The dice have been rolled, all without any obvious plan, and all without the consent of the American people or their elected representatives.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

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A leech and a parasite

 "I inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country. And now we have almost no inflation," lied Donald Trump in an NBC News interview on February 4.

Inflation hit 9.1 percent in the summer of 2022 as a consequence of Covid-era supply chain disruptions, but that was not nearly the "worst inflation in the history of our country," and Trump wasn't in office to bring it down. By January of 2025, when Trump was sworn in, inflation had fallen all the way to 3 percent. That was the inflation Trump "inherited." A year later inflation is 2.4 percent, all thanks to the Federal Reserve, at which Trump has continually sniped and griped for its inflation fighting efforts.

Not only did Trump not inherit high inflation, but he also didn't do anything to bring down the modestly elevated inflation he did inherit. Trump, however, is always eager to take credit for the accomplishments of others.

Like with this disparagement of Joe Biden at a rally on Thursday, in which Trump said Biden "was sleeping while you were trying to get a job. You weren’t working, and now we have the most people working in history."

Now? I wonder why there are so many people working right now. Maybe it's because Biden created an astonishing 15.4 million jobs during his four years as president. It's an all time record: no other president has come anywhere close to that many jobs created in a single term. So what Trump actually did inherit, thanks to Biden, is a country with lots of people working, for which he's suggesting you should give him credit.

What, you might wonder, was Trump's contribution to our "now [having] the most people working in history?" This: Trump added a paltry 359,000 jobs total in his first full 12 months of his second term, for a dismal average of just 30,000 per month. Joe Biden, who Trump denigrated as "sleeping," averaged 321,000 per month over four full years. Now that's impressive. (Authoritative job creation numbers are available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

Trump would like you to think he brought down historically high inflation when it wasn't historically high and when he had nothing to do with bringing it down. And he certainly didn't bring down prices, as he promised he would. (Prices and inflation aren't the same thing.) He'd like you to think the country's record number of people working is his doing too, but his actual job creation performance has been underwhelming, and that's being charitable. He actually had the gall to slander Biden, who really did create unprecedented numbers of jobs. Truly, Trump is a leech and a parasite, always trying to adulate himself by taking credit for the accomplishments of others.

And he must think you're stupid, that you'll swallow whatever he's peddling, as so many seemingly do. I have to admit that the abject stupidity of his hardcore supporters, or at least their stupendous ignorance, is about the only explanation I can come up with for how Trump gets away with continually spewing his noxious lies, and creating made-up realities that feature his godlike accomplishments. He's the ultimate con-man, and everybody is a mark. Can millions really be so gullible?

Because Trump wants credit for how many people are now working, I will leave you with the graph below showing total nonfarm employment since 2008. It comes from the St. Louis Fed, the Federal Reserve branch responsible for the Fed's economic data. I added my own annotations marking the intervals that Trump has held office. As you can see, in his first term employment continued up at about the same rate as the long term trend Trump had inherited from Obama. There was no jolt of job creation under Trump. (In fact, job creation actually slowed a bit.) So in this and other respects, Trump can rightly take credit for not screwing up Obama's economy.

Which is hardly the economic "miracle" (his word) Trump claimed he accomplished in his first term. The recovery after the Great Recession of 2008—a catastrophe Obama really did inherit—ended up becoming one of the longest economic expansions in U.S. history. Trump got in at the end, and promptly took credit for all of it. That's our Donald. Then Covid hit in the final year of his first term, and jobs were decimated.  (20 million lost in a single month, April 2020.) Counting the Covid bloodletting, Trump actually lost 3 million jobs net over his first term.

But fair persons that we are, we won't blame him for those. Yet even when we only look at Trump's first 37 months, before Covid, we see that Trump substantially underperformed Obama over adjacent intervals. (You'll need to refer to the tabular job creation data from BLS for the details, or see my previous post which gives the numbers.) Then Biden came along and obliterated all job creation records. "Sleepy Joe's" massive accomplishment is so cognitively dissonant to Trump's all-consuming self-aggrandizing ego that he simply creates his own made-up reality, and baldly lies in the face of all evidence.

Now, over a year into his second term, we can see Trump's recent contribution to the employment picture: that pathetic little flat squiggle at the right edge of the graph. That's his contribution to our "now [having] the most people working in history," for which he wants to take credit.

He really is a piece of work, isn't he?

 

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"The greatest economy actually ever in history"

 "I think we have the greatest economy actually ever in history," said Donald Trump in a February 9 interview with Larry Kudlow.

Actually ever in history. Oh my. Kudlow did not offer a peep of protest.

How great an economy is it? Consider that the jobs numbers for 2025, which were already dismal, have been revised down. Job creation is one of the hallmarks of a great economy. Trump created a scant 359,000 jobs total in his first twelve months (counting from February), for a monthly average of just 30,000. (Update 03/07/26: A big downward revision for December reduced that to 290,000 and 24,200.) By contrast, Joe Biden created 15.4 million jobs, for a monthly average of 321,000. Biden created more than ten times as many jobs per month as Trump did last year in his "greatest economy actually ever," and Biden sustained it for four years.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

 

Whereas Trump spews endless absurdities and outright bullshit, which sycophants like Kudlow happily swallow in large quantities, Biden really did have the greatest single job creation term in all of U.S. history, at least in absolute numbers. Adjusted for population, Jimmy Carter was actually a little better. Yes, Jimmy Carter. Although most of us have long been trained to believe otherwise, Democratic administrations consistently have stronger economies than Republican ones.

Trump, in both his first term and now, has substantially under-performed all recent presidents except for George W. Bush, who had the bad fortune of recessions at each end of his eight years in office. He gets the blame for the second one, but not the first.

Job creation last year was stupendously weak. Here are some other presidential numbers, with monthly averages in parentheses. Clinton: 11.4 million (237,000) first term and 11.3 million (235,000) second term. Reagan: 7.4 million (154,000) and 10.8 million (225,000). Obama's second term: 10.4 million (216,000). Carter: 10.3 million (214,000). Trump's first 37 months: 6.7 million (180,000).

Obama's first term doesn't count, because he inherited George W. Bush's "Great Recession"—the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. The economy was in freefall and losing around 800,000 jobs per month when Obama was sworn in. Trump's first term monthly average in my account covers just his first 37 months. Fair person that I am, I do not ding Trump for the massive Covid job losses (almost 10 million net) that occurred at the end of his term.

Poor miserable George W. Bush created just 78,000 (1,625) jobs in his first term and 1.3 million (27,000) in his second.

When comparing with Biden, job numbers can and should be adjusted for differences in population, which are considerable over the interval we're discussing. Here are the adjusted rankings of monthly averages, normalized to Biden, best to worst, across administrations. Carter: 322,000. Biden: 321,000. Clinton: 297,000. Reagan: 266,000. Obama (second term): 226,000. Trump (first 37 months of first term) 183,000. Trump far under-performed all these presidents.

All raw jobs data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is authoritative. You can specify parameters to look at whatever years you want. The adjustments for population in this commentary are mine. 

When comparing the "greatest" economies ever, GDP growth is of course also relevant. Clinton, for example, had a run of multiple years above 4 percent. Official numbers aren't yet in, but GDP grew an estimated 2.3 percent in 2025. (Update 2026-02-20: Now it's official: 2.2 percent. Biden's final year, 2024, was 2.8 percent.) Not exactly the "greatest economy actually ever in history." Trump has never had a year of 3 percent GDP growth.

By the way, Trump's current nonsense about the greatness of his economy is similar to the hilarious absurdities from his first term, in which he claimed he himself had created an "economic miracle," when it fact he was just drafting on what he inherited from Obama. I am, however, happy to give Trump credit for not screwing up Obama's economy.

In the Kudlow interview, Trump said "We inherited a total mess from Biden, and not only the borders, but the economy, the inflation, the inflation was the worst ever in history, they say 48 years, but basically ever in history. And the prices were high, and you don't hear them use the word affordability anymore. They can't use it because we brought the prices down."

Yes, you do hear "them" use the word "affordability" still. And prices have not come down.

And only in Trump's deranged mind did he inherit a "total mess from Biden." On October 19, 2024, in the waning months of the Biden administration, The Economist produced a special issue on the U.S. economy, with the headline "The envy of the world."

"The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust," proclaimed one of the issue's headlines. Another was "American productivity still leads the world." A third was "What can stop the American economy now?"

That's the economy Trump inherited. Countries around the world were hit hard economically by the Covid pandemic, but the U.S. economy under Biden out-performed most of the world, including on inflation. It's no exaggeration to say the U.S. led the world in post-pandemic recovery.

Trump nonsensically said U.S. inflation under Biden was the "worst ever in history." Inflation hit around 18 percent in the World War I era. Shortly after World War II it was over 14 percent. Thanks to the 1970s oils shocks, it was over 13 percent at the end of the Carter administration and into the first part of the Reagan administration. U.S. inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in July 2022 under Biden, primarily as a consequence of Covid-era supply chain disruptions, and then fell by 6 points from that peak, all before Trump took office. Critics who blame the U.S.'s massive economic stimulus for the inflation spike need to explain why Covid-era inflation was a worldwide phenomenon, with the U.S. actually faring better than many advanced countries, most of which did not stimulate their economies the way the U.S. did. The 2024 Biden economy over which The Economist gushed is evidence that the U.S. threaded the Covid needle remarkably well.

Trump lied (of course) when he said he "brought the prices down." By the time Trump took office annual inflation was already down to 3 percent, so he didn't even reduce inflation by much, let alone prices. (They aren't the same thing.) As always, Trump is a leech and a parasite, continually taking credit for the accomplishments of others.

Inflation is currently 2.4 percent. Inflation fell by 0.6 points during Trump's first year thanks not to his administration but to ongoing efforts of the Federal Reserve, which had been battling the problem for some years by holding interest rates high. Trump actually fought the Fed repeatedly on this, including with insults, trying to get it to cut interest rates dramatically to juice the economy for political effect. The very deep cuts Trump wanted (and still does) would have been inflationary.

And Trump is simply wrong about prices. Although inflation has come down substantially, mostly under Biden, prices have not, and will not, despite Trump's previous campaign promises. Higher prices are here to stay. That's just how it works, people. Once prices are raised across the economy, that becomes the new baseline level. (Some prices, such as energy, normally tend to fluctuate, for a variety of reasons. And egg prices rise during outbreaks of avian influenza, and fall after flocks are rebuilt. Set those aside.) The question is, will prices stabilize at their new higher level (in which case inflation comes down), or will they keep going up even more (in which case inflation continues)?

That said, prices would be a bit lower now but for Trump's tariffs. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the tariffs themselves have resulted in a 1.2 percent price increase. Whether the tariffs will embed persistently higher inflation over the longer term, or cause just a one-time price increase, is a matter of economic inquiry. The Fed is currently trying to figure that out. The Yale Budget Lab projects tariffs will shave 0.6 points off GDP in 2026, and for the economy to be persistently 0.3 percent smaller as a result. The initial price rise averages amounts to around $1,700 per household over a year, and is projected to settle at $1,292 per household. Importantly, tariffs represent a highly regressive tax on consumers, which means they affect poor households much more than rich ones as a fraction of their incomes. And by the way, The New York Fed reports that 90 percent of the cost of tariffs is being paid by U.S. companies and consumers, which flatly contradicts what Trump has always claimed.

And indeed, this is a rich person's economy. The stock market is at record highs. GDP growth is substantially being driven by construction of AI data centers, which are also driving up electricity prices. Their construction sucks huge amounts of resources, such skilled tradespersons, away from other parts of the economy, which could result in a reduction in broader infrastructure investment. It remains to be seen if AI is a sustainable boom, or something with darker portent. If AI doesn't produce increases in productivity and profit sufficient to justify the enormous amounts of money being pumped in, the boom could turn to serious bust.

Apart from AI data centers, which are a thing unto themselves, Trump told Kudlow "they're building all these factories all over the country" and that "construction jobs are way up."

And yet, according to Deloitte Insights,

In 2025, the engineering and construction industry’s early growth momentum was increasingly tested by emerging challenges as the year progressed: Real value added climbed to US$890 billion in the second quarter—a 1% increase year over year—while real gross output reached US$1.732 trillion, reflecting a 0.6% fall. By July, total construction spending declined almost 3% year over year, primarily driven by downturns in commercial (–8.2%) and manufacturing (–7%) construction. At the same time, firms grappled with persistent inflation, elevated interest rates, tariff uncertainty, acute labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, and material price spikes, contributing to tightened margins and stretched schedules.

So much for Trump's claim that "we're building a record number [of factories] in history. There's never been anything like it." With Trump, everything he's associated with is the greatest "in history." Do his worshipful followers never tire of this?

Note too that manufacturing jobs declined significantly, month after month, through all of 2025.

So here we are in the midst of Trump's "greatest economy in history." Job creation is abysmal. Inflation is slightly elevated but inching closer to normal thanks to a Federal Reserve at which Trump constantly snipes. Prices remain high, and that won't change. Tariffs create an economic drag and hurt poor people the most. Affordability is still a concern, as a trip to the grocery store will readily confirm. Manufacturing jobs have been declining. Outside AI, construction is unimpressive. Not only is the economy not "the greatest," but it might not even be all that good. In that regard time will tell as the AI surge plays out.

Which makes me wonder: How stupid do you have to be to actually swallow Trump's absurdities? The answer: Very. Which doesn't mean there aren't literally millions who qualify. And if you do recognize how buffoonish and self-aggrandizing Trump is, but shrug it off, what does that say about your standards for the presidency? Millions surely do know better but somehow can't summon a basic modicum of embarrassment at what their president is feeding them. Larry Kudlow himself happily played along. According to the transcript, one of his most common rejoinders to Trump's nonsense was "Mm-hmm." I would note that Kudlow has lived in his own special reality for all the decades I've been observing him.

All that said, the public does seem to be catching on, at least on some things. Trump unsurprisingly insisted that he's "popular," but the polls tell a very different story. The latest polls show Trump's approval rating sinking well into the 30s (Pew and Quinnipiac 37 percent, AP-NORC 36 percent). 

You'd think the president who gave us the greatest economy in history would get more respect.

 

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Our one-and-one-half week of winter

This is a follow-up to my previous two posts in which I showed that even as very cold Arctic air was pushing deep into parts of the continental United States, abnormal warmth was occurring around much of the globe, including in the Arctic itself.

That cold Arctic air pushing southward sometimes happens when the polar vortex that encircles the Arctic and traps cold air at high latitudes gets disrupted and allows cold air to escape and push far south of where it would normally be. That can happen because the jet stream that controls the vortex gets "wavy" and bulges in spots or gets otherwise disrupted. And that in turn can be caused by an abnormally warm climate that affects the jet stream. So paradoxically, the kind of transient deep freeze we saw in the U.S. might itself be more likely thanks to global warming. Whenever conditions are unusually cold in one region, it's always a good idea to look around and see what's happening in other regions. That's what my previous two posts did.

Whatever the reason for that burst of cold Arctic air, it's now over. That didn't last long. The graphic below (click on it for a larger view) shows that pretty much the entire U.S. is now experiencing abnormal warmth, as is most of Canada and some of the Arctic. Same for the northern half of Africa and most of Asia.

Temperature anomaly 2026-02-12

 

As I previously explained, the graphic shows not absolute temperature but rather temperature anomaly, which means deviation from normal. In this case "normal" is defined as a 1979-2000 baseline. Colors map to the scale on the right, which is in degrees Celsius. White indicates normal temperature. As is standard for measuring surface temperature, this refers to temperature 2 meters (about 6 feet) above the ground.

See my previous two posts for more information about this and where the data comes from. The images are updated daily, so you can always get a current view of what's happening around the globe.

I would just finally note that the short-lived influx of Arctic air occurred in the context of a very mild winter, and that's an increasingly recurring phenomenon. The serious cold of winter I remember from my childhood now seems to last just two or three weeks. Late December was quite warm, with a high in the upper 70s in southeast Kansas on Christmas day. That's bonkers. Now that the Arctic air has departed, we're having a long run of temperatures in the 60s. Up into the 70s again next week. In February, for gawdsake. Winter increasingly shrinks as the climate gets ever hotter.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

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Abnormal warmth persists

Abnormally cold temperatures remain in a good bit of the continental United States and southeast Canada. Abnormally warm temperatures remain and have expanded in the far north, including Alaska. I wrote about this phenomenon six days ago, as the disrupted polar vortex was pushing deep into the southern U.S., bringing abnormal cold. As is often the case in these situations, the Arctic was simultaneously experiencing abnormal warmth.

The map below shows the situation as it is today. See my previous post for an explanation of where the data comes from. I would just add here that the displayed temperature anomaly is relative to a 1979-2000 temperature baseline, chosen because it represents the temperature record prior to significant warming observed across the Arctic since the early 2000s. The earth's climate has been warming rapidly in recent decades, with the Arctic warming far faster than the planet as a whole.

Temperature anomaly 2026-01-30

 Below is a map of the entire globe. Note the abnormal warmth covering much of Africa, Europe, and Asia. You can click on these images for a larger view.

Temperature anomaly 2026-01-30

 

 Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

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Abnormally warm temps are happening right now

Here we go again. Another "disrupted polar vortex" pushing brutally cold temperatures deep into the southern states of the continental U.S. The last memorable one was the deep freeze of 2021, which came within a gnat's eyelash of taking down the entire Texas electrical grid. (Gov. Greg Abbott dishonestly blamed wind turbine failures, when in fact the most significant failures were with natural gas power generation.) Officially 246 Texans died in that event, but excess mortality statistics suggest the real toll was more like 700-800 dead.

This one won't be quite as bad, but it's still plenty cold. Our house in Kansas is working hard to stay warm right now.

If this leads you to think global warming is bunk, think again, for multiple reasons. The first is that it's January, i.e., winter. Winter is when it gets cold. Occasionally in winter it gets really cold. And even though the climate overall is rapidly warming, winter hasn't yet been canceled.

More enlightening, though, is what we see when we look around, at other parts of the planet. If we were to look right this moment at the high Arctic (including, um, Greenland!), where in the dead of winter we expect it to be extremely cold, what we'd find is that it's abnormally warm. The image below shows what's going on. Click on the image for a larger view. Use your browser's back (<-) button to return and continue reading.

Temperature anomaly 2026-01-24

 

It's often the case that when the polar vortex that encircles the Arctic and traps cold air at high latitudes is disrupted or stretched, cold Arctic air escapes and is pushed far southward, while at the same time warm mid-latitude air is pushed northward, causing the Arctic, or parts of it, to become abnormally warm. That's what we're presently seeing. Jet stream "waviness" is involved in this pattern, and climate change might produce wavier jet streams, potentially amplifying outbreaks. The Arctic is warming far more rapidly than lower latitudes, and Arctic warming narrows the temperature gradient driving the jet stream, slowing it and promoting deeper waves, which can cause cold outbreaks farther south.

It's important to understand that the image above doesn't show absolute temperature but, rather, temperature anomaly, which means deviation from normal. The scale on the right maps colors to temperature anomaly (in degrees Celsius). Thus deep blues mean much colder than normal, and bright reds mean much warmer than normal.

The source of the image is the Climate Reanalyzer tool from University of Maine, which you can view here. The climate maps are updated daily, so you can always get a current view of what's going on around the world. Various kinds of information is shown; be sure to select (mouse over) "2m Temp Anomaly" from the left side of the page to view what I'm showing here. This is a really useful tool. I keep it bookmarked and refer to it from time to time.

When interacting with the Climate Reanalyzer tool you can click the map to see other parts of the planet, or scroll to the bottom of the page to see the entire globe. Each click displays a different region. If you did so right now you would see that most of Africa is warmer than normal, as is much of Asia. So is a lot of Australia and most of Antarctica. Which puts the central U.S. into a larger context.

Indeed, that's my main point. I'm not an expert on polar vortexes or jet stream circulation patterns, but I do understand that the conditions I'm experiencing in the moment in my own location don't say a lot about the global climate. It's useful to realize that the continental United States comprises just 1.6% of the total area of the planet, and what's going on with us isn't representative of the planet as a whole. There's usually even significant variation within the U.S. itself. Presently the western third of the U.S. is experiencing warmer than normal temperatures. The image below provides helpful global perspective. To my eye, it appears that more of the planet is abnormally warm than abnormally cold right now.

Temperature anomaly 2026-01-24

 

While we're on the subject of "planet as a whole," I should note that there are tens of thousands of monitoring stations around the globe and aboard ships and ocean buoys that take daily measurements used to compute global average temperature. These give us a very accurate view of how the temperature of the planet is changing, and unfortunately it's warming at an unprecedented rate—far faster than it ever would under "natural" conditions. Last year was the third hottest year in the instrumental record. 2024 was the hottest by a large amount. 2023 was the second hottest. The ten hottest years in the instrumental record, going back to the 1800s, all occurred in the past decade.

While I'm on the subject, I should mention that I have a book about global warming consisting of essays from this blog. 

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

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For the taking: The world is Trump's smorgasbord

In a 2021 interview, Trump explained his thinking on Greenland. "I said, ‘Why don’t we have that? You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer, I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different. I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’"

As massive as Trump's vanity. Or nearly so.

In an interview this month, Trump framed it in terms of personal desire. Asked why ownership was important instead of just fortifying Greenland, he said,  "Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success." Asked if he meant psychologically important for himself or psychologically important for the country, he said, "Psychologically important for me."

Always the narcissist, our president.

Trump the narcissist wrote this on Sunday to Norway's president: "Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America."

A slight rewording: "Considering you didn't stroke my vain cravings for adulation, I'll stroke them myself by taking Greenland." Except he would have insisted on having Greenland regardless.

It's remarkable how much Trump has spoken of taking this past year. Canada, for example, which Trump opined should be the 51st state.

Or Gaza, which Trump insisted the U.S. would own and develop. "It would be a beautiful piece of land," he said. "The Riviera of the Middle East." Trump acknowledged that the actual owners of the land would have to go elsewhere. Forcing them out, of course, would be ethnic cleansing, which I wrote would be a criminal monstrosity.

"Forced deportation or transfer of a civilian population is a violation of international humanitarian law, a war crime and a crime against humanity," wrote The New York Times. "The prohibition against forced deportations of civilians has been a part of the law of war since the Lieber Code, a set of rules on the conduct of hostilities, was promulgated by Union forces during the U.S. Civil War. It is prohibited by multiple provisions of the Geneva Conventions, and the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II defined it as a war crime."

Or the Panama Canal, about which in his inaugural address Trump said: "We didn't give it to China, we gave it to Panama, and we're taking it back." Trump has falsely claimed that China is operating the Panama Canal. Now he claims China will take Greenland if we don't take it first.

And of course Trump recently took Venezuela. For the oil. He actually said so. Trump has indicated the U.S. will have to "run" Venezuela for years.

One Trumpian idea is to take money from Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, and use it to buy Greenland. At one point, according to an administration official, Trump suggested the U.S. just trade Puerto Rico for Greenland, because "Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor."

Our NATO allies are having none of it. Asked what was his higher priority, obtaining Greenland or preserving NATO, Trump said "it may be a choice."

Which, in the context of all Trump's blathering about security, is really really moronic.

In a recent column Maureen Dowd noted that Trump, when asked if there are any limits on his power, replied, "My own morality, my own mind."

To which Dowd simply said: "God help us all."

 

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

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And burn it will

6 ½ years ago I wrote that "Trump's narcissistic hunger for adulation sucks goodness and light out of the environment and annihilates them. The president is a parasite who feeds off hatred and division."

My description has been validated innumerable times over the years.

In my piece I quoted George Will saying "Trump doesn’t just pollute the social environment with hate. He is the environment."

I quoted David French, writing in National Review, saying "Trump is fully employing malice as a political strategy. It’s not clever. It’s not shrewd. It’s destructive and wrong."

I quoted Rod Dreher saying "Where does he think this is all going to go? Where does this cycle stop? I don’t see how it fails to end in violence."

Dreher was right about the violence, but wrong about the ending. It hasn't ended.

I quoted Ross Douthat describing a "dark nihilism" that permeates Trumpism. Douthat said Trump and mass shooters (this was after the El Paso and other shootings) are "connected to the same dark psychic forces."

These are all conservative commentators.

I myself wrote that "a president's job is to tamp down such flare-ups, but Trump does the opposite, throwing gasoline on the fire and watching it burn. And burn it will." The title of the piece was "The Arsonist-in-Chief".

Trump's goon squads are presently rampaging through Minneapolis, and the city is metaphorically burning. After an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in her car, Trump surged an additional thousand federal agents into the city. Instead of calling for calm in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, he lied that Good "violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer." She was neither violent nor vicious, and he was not run over. Trump lies continually.

My 2019 piece is as relevant today as it was back then.

 

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

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Thing One: Get out of the way. Thing Two: There is no "Thing Two." Just get out of the way.

The very first thing that must be said about the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis by an ICE agent is this. Video of the incident shows the agent had two choices in the moment Good's vehicle began to move forward. His choices were (1) move to the side to get out of the way, or (2) move to the side to get out of the way, while simultaneously firing his weapon into the face of the driver. He chose the second option.

Video evidence shows that moving to the side to get out of the way was accomplished without a lot of difficulty. (The New York Times produced a detailed analysis consisting of synchronized and annotated videos from multiple angles, for you to peruse. The Washington Post said "the agent was able to move out of the way and fire at least two of three shots from the side of the vehicle as it veered past him, according to the analysis.")

The evidence also shows that, from the standpoint of self-defense, discharging the weapon was entirely superfluous. It yielded the agent zero additional protection from harm.

This needs to be the baseline reality for all further discussion of the incident, about which much more can and should be said. Such as, for example, the observation that the vehicle's front wheels were turned (to the right, whereas the officer was positioned to the left) suggests the driver was simply trying to depart the scene, rather than run anybody over. Or that once again hot-headed law enforcement in this country is all too ready, willing, and able to use lethal force rather than do something more sensible and responsible.

Whatever the Renee Good's intentions may have been, and at some level we just can't know, the officer was readily able to get out of the way. Any reasonably nimble person without a gun could have done the same, and been equally safe from harm. He moved to the left, she to the right. The gun added nothing useful; if anything it would have slowed him down. And notice what should be obvious: In that particular situation, a side-stepping human is far more maneuverable than a motor vehicle. Had she actually wanted to run him over, it's unlikely that she could have done so, especially since he was positioned at the front corner of the vehicle, not directly in front of it.

It shocks the conscience that at least two of the three shots were fired with the officer positioned well to the side, where there's no way he could have been struck. The car was moving past him, not at him. In that sense his actions seem more punitive (or maybe just reflexive) than defensive. Had he kept the gun in its holster, as he should have, reflex wouldn't have become an issue. And it demonstrates another sad truth we've seen many times over the years: That once the first shot is fired (which happens all too readily), an officer seems committed to maximum lethality, intent on emptying as much of his clip as possible.

There is, alas, a long and sorry history of law enforcement having a seeming hair trigger with regard to the use of lethal force. We've seen it over and over. In this country it's not uncommon for police to shoot innocent and/or non-threatening people purely by reflex. One commentator noted with rueful irony that simply trying to obey police commands, which are often contradictory, is not a sure way to save your life in encounters with police. Police are actually trained that they are the ones in peril, and that they need to act fast or die. This is perverse, but it's nothing new.

As the present incident demonstrates, acting fast with a gun is not a justifiable strategy, and sometimes ends in tragedy. Getting out of the way was all that was needed. And yet, this officer's un-holstering of his gun was rapid and instinctive, and once it was in his hand the obvious thing to do was to fire it.

Another crucial observation is how quickly reality becomes manipulated and distorted. This is an unfortunate feature of the broken political, social, and ideological environment in which we live. It's also a feature of autocratic governments, which deem it more essential to wield power and control the narrative than to elucidate truth. We unfortunately live in a world of made-up realities.

And so we have the president of the United States saying the deceased woman "violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer." She did no such thing. She was not violent. She was not vicious. And the ICE officer was not run over. Trump wrote on social media that it's "hard to believe he [the officer] is alive." He called the woman a "paid agitator"—a baseless, scurrilous claim he made up on the spot. (I have previously referred to Trump as a "bullshitter," in the technical meaning of that word. Yes, there's a technical meaning.)

Stop and think. If the president of the United States is allowed to claim the ICE agent was run over when he wasn't, then reality itself is up for grabs. What a dismal situation for a highly inflamed country, where so many of us will simply believe what we want to believe rather than what is. If we can't trust the president to convey basic information truthfully to the public, how can we expect the system to hold at all?

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the woman had committed an act of  "domestic terrorism," first disobeying officers’ commands, and then weaponizing her SUV by attempting to "run a law enforcement officer over." The preponderance of evidence shows she made no such attempt. And not only is disobeying police not terrorism, but civil disobedience is an established noble feature of American civil rights protest. A leader who so reprehensibly misuses the word "terrorism" relinquishes moral and governing legitimacy. Such assertions and labels are unworthy of leaders in a free society.

For his part, vice president J.D. Vance said "other angles of the video show the woman clearly hit the officer with her car while accelerating." Clearly, he said. They do not. One fuzzy low-resolution video shot from a distance seems to show that he might have been hit, but a clearer, closer video from a better angle shows that he was not. I should not have to say this, but both things can't be true, and you don't get to pick whichever video suits your preferred narrative. Either he was hit or he wasn't, and you go with the most definitive evidence. That the officer deftly dodged the car, and then walked around the scene for more than a minute afterward with no apparent difficulty, backs up that conclusion.

As for Vance's "while accelerating" claim, the most rapid acceleration happened after the woman had been fatally shot in the face. The car crashed further down the street. I'd imagine the woman wasn't even conscious when her foot slammed down on the accelerator pedal in the final convulsion of her life.

It's shameful that officials justify the shooting in part by claiming the woman was acting illegally. Vance said officers "are approaching her vehicle because she is violating the law: namely, she is obstructing a lawful enforcement operation. You're not allowed to walk up to or drive up to people who are enforcing the law to make it harder for them to do their jobs." Noem spoke of the woman "disobeying officers’ commands," as if getting shot is a rightful consequence of such disobedience. These are morally weak arguments in defense of a killing. None of this justifies deadly force, and only a sick society holds that it does.

One witness reported that ICE officers had issued conflicting orders, which is itself a common occurrence in police stops gone bad. One agent told her to drive away, the witness said, while another told her to get out of her vehicle.

A newly released video from the officer's own phone (he'd been recording the scene) adds some additional details. Just before the shooting, Renee Good's wife, who was standing outside the vehicle, told her to drive away, which she seemingly then attempted to do. "She then looks down as she shifts the vehicle into drive," says a Washington Post analysis of the new video. "She looks up again as she turns the steering wheel to the right, away from Ross [the ICE agent]." We'd already seen the rightward pointed wheels from earlier video.

After three shots are fired, says The Post, "A male voice — it is not clear whose — can be heard uttering two expletives: “Fucking bitch.” "

One can be forgiven for concluding that the speaker of that epithet, in the instant after Renee Good's face had been blown apart, believed she'd gotten what she deserved—as did our highest governing officials who worked so shamefully to justify the shooting and, more broadly, as does the right wing commentariat. We live in very ugly times.

I want to finish where I started, and reemphasize that from the standpoint of self-defense, discharging the weapon was entirely superfluous and completely unhelpful. It yielded zero additional protection from harm for the officer. Shooting Renee Good achieved nothing other than ending her life. It ought to be trivially self-evident that if you're a few feet in front of a moving vehicle whose driver intends to run you over, you will not stop it by shooting the driver. The only useful thing you can do is get out of the way, which is what the officer did. Unfortunately, he took the opportunity to shoot and kill a 37-year-old mother as he was doing so, ensuring she got her comeuppance for all the whistles and taunts and indignities he'd had to endure.

 

---

Update 01/13/26 - As reported by The New York Times yesterday, Trump was asked by a reporter if he believed deadly force was necessary in this case. Trump replied: "It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement. The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement."

That's his answer? They were disrespectful? And their disrespect justified deadly force?

In another report yesterday, The New York Times quoted Trump as saying Renee Good, the deceased Minneapolis woman, was "very violent" and "very radical," even though there's not the slightest whiff of violent action or intent in the video we've seen, and nothing in the extensive reporting of her personal life suggests otherwise. Nothing reported by the media or released by the government demonstrates any proclivity for violence. The Times said its video analysis (which you can view) suggested she was likely trying to drive away from officers when she was shot. Thus does the president of the United States lie continually and despicably. It's beyond my comprehension why so many of us tolerate that.

Renee Good's "violent" crime was stopping her car in the middle of the street, and then trying to drive away. Others in the neighborhood were blowing whistles to alert neighbors of the ICE presence. Renee Good's only interaction with the shooter was when she said this through her open window as he was taking video of her and her vehicle: "That's fine dude. I'm not mad at you."

"This is classic terrorism," said vice president J.D. Vance.

"If you look at what the definition of domestic terrorism is," said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, "it completely fits the situation on the ground."

Stop it! We can't allow those wielding power to attach the "terrorism" label to nonviolent protest and civil disobedience and monitoring of law enforcement. If we do, we are living in a police state under authoritarian rule. 

 

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

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No, really: It's now the "The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts"

There are all kinds of coups. Here's one.

In an unprecedented move in February, Donald Trump fired 18 general trustees of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts (commonly known as the Kennedy Center) who had been appointed by President Biden.

The Kennedy Center, which is the national arts and culture institution, has a board of 36 general trustees, who are appointed by the U.S. president and who serve six-year terms, as specified by law. The board also has some ex-officio members, such as certain cabinet secretaries and holders of other offices. Presidents appoint new general trustees when the terms of existing trustees expire. Never before has a president dismissed trustees without cause or resignation prior to the completion of their terms. Now one has.

Trump replaced the fired Biden-appointed trustees with loyalists. He also appointed himself as one of the trustees. Board members who were appointees from Trump's first term were retained. Ex-officio members in Trump's cabinet were of course also loyal to Trump. Thus Trump gained control of the board. The newly constituted board fired Kennedy Center president Deborah Rutter, and also elected Trump himself as board chairman to replace the previous chairman who had been one of the 18 fired by Trump.

Federal statute specifies the 6-year trustee terms. Whether or not the president can legally execute mid-term removals is a matter of dispute. While the law might not prohibit such removals, norms of conduct, historical precedent, and basic decency do prohibit them, but of course carry no legal weight. The notion that Trump would consider himself bound by norms of conduct and governance long ago became laughable.

(Example: As I write this Trump has ordered 30 ambassadors, all Biden appointees, to leave their diplomatic posts around the world and return home. Basically, they've been fired. These are career diplomats. "A standard tour is three to four years," said the New York Times. "The union representing career diplomats said this was the first time that such a mass recall had taken place of career diplomats serving as ambassadors or chiefs of mission." A union spokeswoman said the method of removal was "highly irregular." Which is to say, an egregious violation of norms.)

Once the dust had settled at the Kennedy Center, Trump had a compliant board of which he himself was chairman, and a compliant president of his choosing. He then proceeded to overhaul the Kennedy Center's programming, which he declared had been too woke. Trump himself had never attended a Kennedy Center performance, not even the annual Kennedy Center Honors gala, which by tradition U.S. presidents have attended. "Prior to 2017," says Wikipedia, "there had been three occasions in which the president did not attend the gala performance [due to pressing matters of state -mb]."

The Kennedy Center was conceived in the Eisenhower years as the country's "national cultural center." Authorized by the National Cultural Center Act of 1958, and opened in 1971, the Center has hosted, according to Wikipedia, "many different genres of performance art, such as theater, dance, classical music, jazz, pop, psychedelic, and folk music. It is the official residence of the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera." It is sustained mainly through ticket sales and private donations. The federal government pays for building upkeep. The building is administered as a bureau of the Smithsonian Institution.

Since Trump's takeover, the Kennedy Center’s 2025 season has been turbulent, more politicized, and financially weaker than in prior years. Ticket sales and subscriptions have declined, several major artists and productions have withdrawn, and the programming mix has shifted away from some of the more progressive and experimental work that characterized recent seasons. There were waves of staff firings and resignations.

According to The Washington Post, fired president Deborah Rutter had led the Center "through a decade in which it had diversified its offerings, endured the 2020 lockdown and emerged to boast robust ticket sales and, according to publicly available tax filings, steadily grown revenue."

Previously the Center's board had been decidedly bipartisan and apolitical, with a genuine mission to promote the arts as broadly conceived. No more. It's now dominated by Trump loyalists. "Nearly 10 months in," says The Post, "a picture of a transformed institution has come into view. Standbys of the Kennedy Center’s stages like the National Symphony Orchestra have been strained by plummeting ticket sales and organizational uncertainty. Traveling productions and acts have pulled out. And a new kind of right-leaning programming has begun to take root." [links in the original]

The building has gotten an imperial Trumpian makeover too, with new marble (of course) and portraits of the first and second couples hanging in the Center's Hall of Nations. Performance themes are less diverse and artistic, and more patriotic. Trump, says The Post, "routinely refers to the building as 'the Trump Kennedy Center.'"

This year Trump chose himself to host the Kennedy Center Honors, the building’s marquee annual event. He also chose the honorees. "All went through me," Trump said.

Originally named in its authorizing legislation the "National Cultural Center," the Center was renamed the "John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts" in 1964, following the assassination of President Kennedy. President Lyndon Johnson signed the joint resolution renaming it as a living memorial to the slain president, who had supported the center's development through fundraising efforts.

A living memorial. Never one to miss an opportunity to profane the sacred, the always self-aggrandizing Trump has recently bigfooted himself into the Center's formal name. The Center's loyalist board voted on December 18 to rename the storied institution the "The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts," a.k.a. the "Trump Kennedy Center." Because the previous name had the force of law, the board has no legal authority to change it. No matter. The Kennedy Center began updating signage on the exterior of the building the following day. The coup was complete.

We should of course not be surprised by Trump's vainglorious self-exaltation, in this or anything else, because it's long been on continuous display. This is the man who has heavily lobbied without embarrassment for himself to receive the Nobel Peace Price, which is itself surely a moral disqualification. Not achieving that, the U.S. Institute of Peace building in Washington, D.C., became the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, announced by the State Department shortly after Trump's Nobel advocacy. According to PBS, "the takeover of the Peace Institute was also anything but peaceful, with his administration seizing the independent entity and ousting its board before actually affixing his name to the building." Sound familiar? Independent entity. Illegal or improper board ouster. Trump takeover and renaming.

Trump has also been long interested in his face appearing on Mount Rushmore, which (thankfully) is almost certainly physically impossible due to geological considerations.

The examples are almost endless. Trump has just announced the construction of a new "Trump class" of naval warships. 

As I'm writing this, a New York Times headline says "Trump Takes America’s ‘Imperial Presidency’ to a New Level."

"Nearly 250 years after American colonists threw off their king, this is arguably the closest the country has come during a time of general peace to the centralized authority of a monarch," writes Peter Baker of the Times.

"He no longer holds back, or is held back, as in the first term," says Baker. "Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 unleashed. The gold trim in the Oval Office, the demolition of the East Wing to be replaced by a massive ballroom, the plastering of his name and face on government buildings and now even the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the designation of his own birthday as a free-admission holiday at national parks — it all speaks to a personal aggrandizement and accumulation of power with meager resistance from Congress or the Supreme Court." [links and italics in the original]

All this is reminiscent of authoritarian regimes elsewhere, where government is equated with the cult of the leader. In America, we used to believe that we were different, profoundly so. A nation of laws, not men. No ubiquitous portraits of presidents gazing down on us from buildings and billboards, and attaching their names to our institutions even during their tenure in power. We were a different kind of country. A beacon of possibility.

I'm reminded, too, of how it was in the 1990s and early 2000s when Silvio Berlusconi was prime minister of Italy. Back then I imagined the utter embarrassment that country must have felt at being ruled by such a self-evident buffoon. I could never have anticipated that such buffoonery could claim the American presidency, with all its assumptions of competence, dignity, and decency rising in this office above human shortcomings.

Yet here we are.

We have found to our surprise and dismay how much our institutions have depended on fidelity to norms that everybody more or less implicitly agreed  to follow (although Mitch McConnell also busted a number of important norms).

Before now we have in very large part not needed to legally specify every minute detail in statute in a way that explicitly anticipates and defends against presidents who act in continuous bad faith. When the law says trustees are appointed to six year terms, we should be able to assume that, barring something extraordinary, they serve six year terms. We ought not even have to argue about whether the specification of term lengths in the statute itself implies that a president cannot normally interrupt those terms. But now we do, thanks to Donald J. Trump. The combination of a rogue president, a compliant Congress, and an enabling Supreme Court has done much damage to our system of governance.

Will that damage endure? The development of an imperial presidency has turned our country's founding principles upside down. What remains is to wonder whether we will learn from this dismal experience and somehow reaffirm and renew our earlier commitments to constitutional governance, the rule of law, and—not least—basic character and decency. Whether or not that happens ultimately depends upon an informed and engaged citizenry. Us. I'm sorry to say that I'm not very hopeful. 

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

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