Wall Street Journal Editorial Page personalities offer their thoughts on the return of Trump. Three slices:
Matthew Hennessey, deputy editorial features editor: Growth matters. Americans are naturally optimistic. They believe in their bones that tomorrow will be better than today. But they will rescind the GOP’s majority in 2026 if it doesn’t cut taxes, reduce burdensome regulation and get the growth engine humming. Tariffs, industrial policy and net-zero immigration hinder the growth that Americans need and want. I hope the White House economic team understands that.
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Kimberley A. Strassel, columnist: The horseshoe theory of politics holds that the far left and far right tend to converge. Under Mr. Trump’s leadership, Republicans are chasing populist economic policies that sound much like the Bernie Sanders left. Mr. Trump’s first-term success came from a Reaganesque agenda: broad-based tax cuts, deregulation, muscular foreign policy. Yet a subsection of the party, including JD Vance, is increasingly focused on populist policies—handouts to families, crackdowns on business, price controls, industrial policy, even ending right-to-work laws. Mr. Trump got in on the act with promises to exempt tips and overtime from income taxes, limit credit-card interest rates, and ramp up tariffs. If this continues, the GOP may cease to be the party of free markets and limited government—and the economy will suffer.
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Allysia Finley, editorial board member: I worry there will be a recession or financial crackup, which Democrats will blame on Mr. Trump no matter the actual cause. The economy now appears strong, but there are signs that the labor market is cooling. The Biden administration has covered up problems in the housing market by waiving and reducing mortgage payments. Asset prices are stretched, and leverage in financial markets has increased. The European and Chinese economies have slowed, and their problems could dent U.S. growth. If there is a recession, Congress and Mr. Trump will almost certainly respond with a fire hose of spending, which would increase debt and borrowing costs. This could set Democrats up to retake Washington in 2028.
Here’s Eric Boehm on the U.S. government’s effective destruction of TikTok in the United States. A slice:
Regardless of what happens next, the TikTok ban remains a disturbing development that expands federal power to attack free speech—and a worrying precedent that could allow the government to target other platforms over similarly vague concerns about national security. It’s a dark day for free expression; not just on the popular dance-video app.
Pierre Lemieux ponders businesspeople and their connection to trade policy.
Samuel Gregg reviews Odd Arne Westad’s and Chen Jian’s The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform. A slice:
Westad and Chen show that there were sporadic outbursts of unauthorized private economic activity from below in the late 1960s and 1970s. This often resulted from sheer necessity. Peasants were less worried about being denounced as “Rightists” when they were starving.
On other occasions, lower-level officials and technicians (some of whom traveled to America, Europe, and Japan in the 1970s) became disillusioned by the effects of a state-run economy. They also discovered, sometimes by accident, that incentives and the prospect of acquiring wealth produced tangible economic growth. In other words, China was not a nation lacking any experience whatsoever with private enterprise when policy changes began being introduced in the early 1980s. Westad and Chen even maintain that this “revolution from below did more to change China than any orders issued by the CCP.”
John O. McGinnis and Michael Rappaport are not persuaded by Jonathan Gienapp’s new book in opposition to Constitutional originalism. A slice:
Perhaps most egregiously, Gienapp suggests that the Framers’ lack of historical experience with societal change undermines the propriety of taking their venerable commitment to originalism as opposition to today’s living constitutionalism. But, as Philip Hamburger has demonstrated, the Framers were acutely aware of the problem of social change. This awareness shaped their choices as they drafted the Constitution. They often wrote at the level of principles whose application, although not their meaning, changed as the nation grew. For instance, as interstate commerce became more important to the nation’s economy, the Commerce Clause naturally allowed the federal government’s power to expand over the greater domain of commerce. They also included a more flexible amendment process that avoided the unanimity requirement of the Articles of Confederation and so was amenable to addressing social transformation—not by changing the meaning of the Constitution but by changing its text. Gienapp’s failure to engage with this evidence reflects a broader failure to reckon with the depth and sophistication of the Founding generation’s constitutional vision.
