By Kevin D. Williamson
Copyright thedispatch
Donald Trump is not making war on the First Amendment in particular and on free speech more generally because he has some idea about it: He just doesn’t like what they say about him on ABC News. The American economy is struggling under an idiotic new tax regime instituted with no legal basis and disrupting supply chains around the world not because Trump has an economic theory worth the name but because he has a wounded sense of unfairness based on absolutely nothing other than his own feelings. The Trump administration is effectively on Vladimir Putin’s side in Russia’s war on Ukraine—while the United States is as a matter of public policy on the other side—because Putin has flattered him. Trump has been out swanning around Windsor Castle with the British royals not because he is seeing to urgent business but because he likes the shiny things and because spending time with solicitous kings makes him feel like a very special little boy, indeed. (Here, the ghosts of Valley Forge shake their spectral fists and wonder why, after all, they suffered such an ordeal.) We have an ad hoc new immigration policy—again, one with no actual legal basis for the extent of its transformation—because Donald Trump is made nervous by Mexicans, to the extent that he distinguishes them from Nicaraguans or Dominicans or Guatemalans. We have skyrocketing public debt because Trump wants to eat his dessert first and because Mike Johnson is too much of an insipid moral nonentity to tell him he has to eat his spinach, too. We have the White House trying to stage a military occupation of American cities because the president is not the great negotiator he pretends to be but a schoolyard bully, walking around the world like the love child of Augustus Gloop and Veruca Salt.
