On international trade, the other ‘BLM,’ a late conductor, the American Revolution, and more
‘Look, I’m a huge fan of Ronald Reagan,” said President Trump, “but he was bad on trade. Very bad on trade.” My first thought was: Wait’ll he finds out about Reagan’s foreign policy.
• The administration’s line on tariffs keeps changing: Are tariffs good in and of themselves? Will they bring us great wealth, allowing us to erase our debt and deficit and even to eliminate the income tax? Or are they mere tools, designed to get other countries to lower their own barriers?
Last month, the president said, “We’re gonna take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs and we’re gonna become so rich you’re not gonna know where to spend all that money.”
Sounds great — miraculous, even. Why aren’t we rolling?
• You perhaps know the expression “Second verse, same as the first.” When Trump was president before, he socked farmers with tariffs, then compensated them with subsidies (i.e., our tax dollars). To adapt a phrase from another president: Here we go again.
• For many years, Republicans touted the presence of BMW in South Carolina as a great success story — a triumph of international trade, benefiting all concerned. Years after BMW landed in South Carolina, Mercedes landed too.
The other day, Peter Navarro said, “This business model where BMW and Mercedes come into Spartanburg, South Carolina, and have us assemble German engines and Austrian transmissions — that doesn’t work for America. It’s bad for our economics, it’s bad for our national security.”
Navarro, as you know, is President Trump’s senior adviser on trade.
But South Carolina business leaders have “clapped back.” The headline over the article I linked to, above, is “SC business leaders clap back after Trump official criticizes BMW & Mercedes makers in state.”
• It’s a little early for a language item in my column — usually I have those toward the end — but let me say, here and now, that “clap back” is relatively new, I think. How long has this phrase been around? I believe I first started hearing it maybe ten years ago.
The article I cited begins, “South Carolina business leaders are punching back against criticism from a senior Trump official . . .” Punching back — that’s an oldie!
• Greg Mankiw — N. Gregory Mankiw — is a professor of economics at Harvard. He is a very sophisticated fellow. But he is also a very clear explainer, as I learned a few years ago when I podcasted with him. An excellent teacher, he is.
In a post last month, he used a very simple, and apt, phrase. He was talking about reciprocal tariffs. “Why should I shoot myself in the foot just because you shoot yourself in the foot?”
Right on. (Talk about an old phrase.)
• “Trump says compensation fund being discussed for pardoned Jan. 6 rioters.” To read that article, go here.
At first, Republicans condemned the rioters (or many Republicans did). Then, Trump started to call them “political prisoners” and “patriots.” After October 7, 2023 — when Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis and took 250 hostage — he started calling them “hostages.” Other Republicans, such as Elise Stefanik, followed suit. Once reelected, Trump sprang them all, with pardons and commutations.
Now we have to pay them?
• Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, tweeted,
President Trump is working to DISMANTLE the Deep State and return America back to the people! Does he have your support?
Johnson does not look like a dunce. I’d like to ask him, “What is the Deep State?” I wonder what he’d say. Also, “If America doesn’t belong to the people now, to whom does it belong?” Also: “What do you mean by ‘the people’? All of us? Or only some of us?”
Populism makes fools out of otherwise sensible people.
• We first knew “BLM” as the Bureau of Land Management. Years later, the initials stood for “Black Lives Matter,” primarily. Well, the bureau is back in the news . . .
Trump nominated Kathleen Sgamma to lead it. She is the president of the Western Energy Alliance. But on the day of her confirmation hearing, her nomination was withdrawn. What happened?
A document had been unearthed, earlier in the week. Uh-oh. It was a memo, written by Sgamma on January 7, 2021. The heading of the memo: “Hope for a Resurgence of Sanity.”
Wrote Sgamma, “I am disgusted by the violence witnessed yesterday and President Trump’s role in spreading misinformation that incited it.”
That sealed her fate.
• Linda McMahon is the secretary of education. (Is that department still around?) Earlier, she was in professional wrestling — I mean, as an executive and owner, not a performer.
About a week ago, she was speaking about AI (which is to say, artificial intelligence). But she kept saying “A1,” like the steak sauce.
Naturally, the steak-sauce company capitalized: “You heard her. Every school should have access to A.1.”
Secretary McMahon had obviously seen “AI” in print and misread it as “A1.” Such misreadings are common enough.
Gore Vidal spoke of MI6, the British intelligence service, as “M-Sixteen.” Some people called the North Korean dictator “Kim Jong the Second.” They had seen “Kim Jong Il” in print.
I have patience for such blunders — although when you’re the education secretary . . .
(There was also “Malcolm the Tenth.”)
• A headline: “Millions tune in for 24-hour live coverage of Sweden’s epic moose migration.” (Article here.) Many of us have long said, the Scandinavians are far too tolerant of migration.
• Throw some music at you? For a review of the Philadelphia Orchestra, in Mahler’s Sixth, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, go here. For a review of Julia Fischer (violin) and Jan Lisiecki (piano) in recital, go here. For a review of a recital by Leif Ove Andsnes, the pianist, go here.
And one opera review: a Marriage of Figaro at the Met, here.
By the way, Julia Fischer makes her living as a violinist, true. But she is also capable of playing the other role — that of pianist.
I know a young woman at the Cleveland Institute of Music who is the same way. She has given her senior recital in violin and, in a few days, will give one in piano. So which path will she pursue, professionally?
She will be a conductor.
• John Nelson, the American conductor, has died at 83. To read his obit in the New York Times, go here. I had a memorable exchange with him.
Let me set it up.
In the 1999–2000 season, Nelson conducted Giulio Cesare (the Handel opera) at the Met. Act I ends with a sublime E-minor duet: “Son nata a lagrimar.” Singing on this occasion were Stephanie Blythe (mezzo-soprano) and David Daniels (countertenor).
Fast forward years later. Across the aisle from me on a plane is a man studying a score (Schumann’s oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri). It is Nelson. When the plane lands, and we get up to leave, I speak to him.
“Maestro Nelson, that Giulio Cesare at the Met? ‘Son nata a lagrimar’? I think that was the most electric moment I have ever experienced in a theater.”
He says, “Me too” (earnestly and sincerely).
Damn fine musician.
• At the end of March, I was in North Carolina — and would like to show you some blooms from the garden of friends:
Maybe one more shot, from their garden:
When I saw this store in the Charlotte airport, I thought, “Cripe, I’m neither”:
Seeing the below, also in the airport, I had a memory from college:
I had two great teachers of southern history: Barbara Fields and J. Mills Thornton III. I remember something that Professor Thornton said about the South, the North, and the American Revolution. It went something like this:
“Northerners, of course, thought of the Revolution as a northern phenomenon: Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys! But southerners thought of it as southern, at least equally: Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox from South Carolina!”
There is a famous book that addresses this, I believe: Cavalier & Yankee, by William Taylor (1961).
Coincidentally, I spoke of Professor Fields in my Impromptus yesterday: here. Both Fields and Thornton were students of C. Vann Woodward, at Yale.
What we owe our teachers . . .
Thank you, my friends, for joining me today.
If you would like to receive Impromptus by e-mail — links to new columns — write to jnordlinger@nationalreview.com.