Pun Salad

Man, Trump can't catch a break, can he? Yesterday, the NR editors called his Signal evasions "Clintonian". Today, Dominic Pino uses a different Presidential adjective, looking at Trump’s Bidenesque ‘Fact Sheet’ on Tariffs.

Dominic looks at the claims of the "fact sheet" which quotes (of course) "studies" and (amusingly) recycles arguments that Democrats made a few years ago to justify Biden's tariffs.

(Today's Eye Candy is from a cartoon series the WSJ did for a while. Chosen because Jeffrey's mean-girl co-workers called him "Bidenesque". Click for the whole thing.)

Also of note:

• And now we're back to "Clintonian". Jacob Sullum notes that Pete Hegseth's carelessness and dishonesty mirror Hillary Clinton's.

  In downplaying the gravity of disclosing details about an imminent U.S. military operation to participants in a Signal group chat that included an accidentally invited journalist, President Donald Trump and his underlings have insisted the information was not classified. "You all know that's a lie," Rep. Joaquin Castro (D–Texas) told CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, at a hearing on Wednesday. "It's a lie to the country."

  Or is it? It was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who divulged information about the impending air strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. The New York Times notes that "the president and the secretary of defense have the ability to assert, even retroactively, that information is declassified." When a similar issue came up in connection with the government records that Trump kept after leaving the White House in 2021, he said the president—and presumably the defense secretary too—can declassify stuff just "by thinking about it."

  That argument was a red herring because the main statute Trump was accused of violating, 18 USC 793, covers information "relating to the national defense," regardless of whether it is officially classified. And since that law encompasses "gross negligence" as well as willful dissemination of national defense information, Hegseth arguably violated it by using a forum that was manifestly insecure to discuss the timing and nature of the March 15 operation in Yemen before it happened.

  The parallels are eerie,

  Q: “In terms of the Signal chat controversy…is the DOJ involved at this point?”
  
  Bondi: “…We're not going to comment any further on that. If you want to talk about classified information, talk about what was at Hillary Clinton's home that she was trying to BleachBit.” pic.twitter.com/ECwOiK4dNn

  — The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) March 27, 2025

  Sure, Pam. Argue that Hegseth, et al.'s negligence is the same thing as Donald Trump said Hillary should have been locked up for doing.

• Don't sleep in the subway, darling. At least not while they're being "fixed". The AntiPlanner looks at a dubious claim: Fix the Subways in Hours?

  Donald Trump famously said he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, yet the war is still raging more than two months after he took office. In the same way, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently said that New York City could solve all of the problems with its subway system “in hours, not days” (he generously allowed the city 36 hours instead of just 24) if it just had the will to do so. Note that Trump promised to stop the war himself while Duffy is demanding that someone else save the subways.

  This is the level of naïveté that we’ve come to expect from the Trump administration. New York City subways have problems with fare evasion, homelessness, drugs, property crime, vandalism, and violent crime that stretch across 472 stations, 850 miles of track, and nearly 6,800 subway cars. The idea that it could solve all of these problems by simply flooding the system with police for 36 hours is so ludicrous it isn’t even funny.

  Even if those problems were solved, they are really just symptoms of the real problem, which is that transit agencies have no incentive to operate efficiently or even to attract riders. Instead, all of their incentives are to increase costs as much as possible while doing as little work as possible. These perverse incentives are not the fault of the New York MTA or any other transit agency but are due the federal government, which began throwing money at transit in the 1960s and responds to every transportation issue by increasing the flow of money.

  Multiply by … well, everything else government does.

• A penny for my thoughts? Jeff Jacoby looks at the penny controversy: A penny, more or less.

  Governments are still perfectly capable of reducing the value of money and thereby causing inflation, of course. But they do so now by artificially boosting the money supply, not by decreasing the precious-metal content of their coins. Which is why the whole business about what it costs to produce a penny seems to me completely extraneous.

  In today's US economy, the value of most money is not determined by the material from which it is made, but by the social trust placed in it. Pennies — like quarters and five-dollar bills — are examples of fiat currency. They have value primarily because the government says (and people accept) that it does. It isn't the intrinsic worth of the penny's content that matters; it is society's willingness to accept it in exchange for a penny's worth of goods and services. The same is true of nickels, each of which costs almost 14 cents to produce. The fact that virtually no one is clamoring for abolition of the nickel suggests that the "a-penny-costs-more-than-a-penny!" argument isn't a serious one.

  Good point. It's probably worth pointing out that the US Mint reported positive seigniorage on dimes and quarters, more than making up for the negative seigniorage on pennies and nickels.

• DOGE Anxiety Disorder! Catch it! Gene Healy (of the Cato Institute) diagnoses some of his friends at Reason the Dispatch, and the UnPopulist: Libertarians and DOGE Anxiety Disorder. Reality check:

  To put things in perspective, look at the agencies DOGE has gone after hardest: USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Department of Education.

  They’re all unconstitutional. Some, like CFBP, wield lawmaking powers Congress has no business delegating; others, like the Department of Education, commandeer responsibilities the Constitution leaves to the states and the people. Not one has an enumerated power that can plausibly support it.

  It would be nice if SCOTUS would see things that way, but alas…

• Don't confuse librarians with libertarians. At the Federalist, Mark Hemingway spells out one application of FAFO: America’s Librarians Became Militantly Political, And Now They Suffer The Consequences.

  Last week, Trump issued an executive order proposing the shuttering of seven obscure federal agencies, notably including the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Churlish former Labor Secretary Robert Reich went into high dudgeon, or in Reich’s case maybe just dudgeon, to let us know “Tyrants view educated citizens as their greatest enemy. Slaveholders stopped the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Dictators censor media. That’s why Trump is attacking education, science, museums, and the arts. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.”

  Well, I guess you’re just going to have to trust me when I tell you that I’m no fan of tyranny, slavery, Nazis, or book burning. I have written tens of thousands of words opposing government censorship, I have made a living reading and reviewing books, and I spent 17 years on the board of a private school. I hope it is apparent I care about knowledge and education. And speaking as an ostensibly educated, literate, patriotic American, I am asking the Trump administration to follow through and please, please, please in italics, stick it to America’s librarians.

  They are nice ladies (and they are mostly ladies), but they need to stop doing the D.C. Shuffle.