TRUMP SPIKES THE FOOTBALL AFTER THE OPENING DRIVE

National Review

 

Trump Spikes the Football After the Opening Drive

By Jim Geraghty

March 5, 2025 10:17 AM

 

On the menu today: Good news for those of you who are tired of this political newsletter gallivanting around dangerous countries and telling you what brain nuggets taste like; I’m back in the United States, and the news of the morning is Donald Trump’s address to the joint session of Congress, smashing all records for length and delivered with all of the modesty and humility of the World Series winning team spraying each other with champagne in the locker room. I’m surprised Trump didn’t change his entrance theme from “Hail to the Chief” to Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” Trump is in an ebullient mood, and when looking at the issue of illegal immigration, you can’t blame him. But there are some seriously ominous rattles coming from the American economic engine, and it’s a spectacularly early dire sign to see congressional Republicans insisting that their constituents will be just fine with paying higher prices because they so fervently believe in Trump’s tariff agenda. Read on.

 

An Economically Shaky Address

 

Politico’s Playbook newsletter writes that last night’s address to Congress “generally felt more like a MAGA campaign rally than a traditional presidential speech.”

 

Eh, does Trump ever give another kind of speech these days? Think back to his convention speech in Milwaukee or the inauguration address in January. This is who he is at age 78, there’s no sign he has the interest or the will to change his tone, and he likely sees last year’s election victory as the ultimate cosmic vindication. I think my colleague Luther Ray Abel is correct that last year’s assassination attempts gave Trump a sense of his own mortality and the sense of a ticking clock. He’s a man in a hurry and holding nothing back. If he doesn’t feel like doing something, he won’t do it. If he feels like speaking for an hour and 40 minutes to Congress, he’s going to do that.

 

Trump began, “Six weeks ago, I stood beneath the dome of this Capitol and proclaimed the dawn of the golden age of America. From that moment on, it has been nothing but swift and unrelenting action to usher in the greatest and most successful era in the history of our country.”

 

On the “swift and unrelenting action” part, fact-check: True. The “greatest and most successful era in the history of our country” part is murkier.

 

Trump can genuinely take a victory lap on the border. The CNN fact-checkers look a little ridiculous when Trump claims, “Illegal border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded. Ever,” and the CNN team “corrects” that claim by pointing out, “There were fewer Border Patrol encounters with migrants at the southwest border in some of the months of the early 1960s.”

 

Ah! So it’s merely the lowest number of attempts to cross the southern border since John F. Kennedy was chasing 19-year-old interns. You know, fellas, I’m willing to give Trump this one. The line on that Customs and Border Protection chart is going down so steeply, you would think it was the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s projection of next quarter’s U.S. GDP.

 

(I doubt I’ll ever write a sentence that infuriates Trump fans and Trump critics as simultaneously as that one.)

 

The president really wants you and everyone else to believe that the economy is roaring. Eh, the post-Election Day stock market gains disappeared in sudden a puff of smoke on Tuesday, because the markets do not like tariffs or uncertainty, and the only thing that Trump is certain to deliver is an enthusiasm for tariffs that are apparently always on the verge of being canceled or postponed at the last minute.

 

On Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick appeared on Fox Business Network and suggested a possible deal with Canada and Mexico that could roll back the tariffs was imminent: “It’s not gonna be a pause. None of that pause stuff. But I think he’s going to figure out, you do more, and I’ll meet you in the middle someway. We’re going to probably be announcing that tomorrow.”

 

But last night, Trump did not sound like he was anywhere near a deal with our North American neighbors:

 

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Much has been said over the last three months about Mexico and Canada. But we have very large deficits with both of them. But even more importantly, they have allowed fentanyl to come into our country at levels never seen before, killing hundreds of thousands of our citizens and many very young, beautiful people, destroying families. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. They are in effect receiving subsidies of hundreds of billions of dollars. We pay subsidies to Canada and to Mexico of hundreds of billions of dollars. And the United States will not be doing that any longer. We are not going to do it any longer.

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One of the problems with the “take him seriously, but not literally” philosophy — or vice versa, or both, or neither — is that it’s increasingly difficult to sort out which presidential statement is just a negotiating tactic, which part is the usual bluster, which part the president actually means, and which part is just off-the-cuff stream-of-consciousness. The easiest thing for Trump fans to do is to throw up their hands and insist it’s all seven-level chess that we mere mortals cannot understand. President Trump works in mysterious ways.

 

But American businesses with supply chains that rely on parts from Canada or Mexico — roughly $900 billion worth, as of 2024 — need a bit more clarity on how much everything is going to cost next month and beyond. You might think your local burger or burrito joint isn’t going to be affected by Trump’s new 25 percent tariff on all steel and aluminum imports into the United States that would go into effect March 12. Unless your local restaurant is one of the customers of the $1.5 billion in imported aluminum foil.

 

Trump insisted, “Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again, and it is happening, and it will happen rather quickly. There will be a little disturbance, but we are okay with that.” Trump’s dismissal of higher prices as “a little disturbance” that all Americans, collectively, are “okay” with reminded me of these statements from GOP Representative Mark Alford of Missouri:

 

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REP. MARK ALFORD (R-MO): We all have a role to play in this to right- size our government. And if I have to pay a little bit more for something, I’m all for it to get America right again, to start whittling down this $36.5 billion or trillion worth of debt that we have that’s unsustainable.

 

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: You think that a lot of your constituents feel the same way, they’re willing to pay a little bit more?

 

ALFORD: Well, I think so.

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And this perspective from Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma:

 

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Sen. Markwayne Mullin told me “of course” he’s worried tariffs could impact his state but argued that his constituents are willing to “do what it takes” to support the president’s policy.

 

“Are the American people ready to get the country back on track and do what it takes to make that happen? Absolutely. . . . It’s going to affect a lot of companies. We’re going to have to adjust some prices for it, but the president is tired of people taking advantage of our country.”

 

Asked if his constituents are ready to pay higher prices, Mullin said: “I think our constituents are going to do what it takes to get America back on track. We’re tired of countries taking advantage of us.”

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Do you remember the Trump or Republican campaign message on inflation last year being, “If I have to pay a little bit more for something, I’m all for it”? No, I don’t, either.

 

Remember, Americans, as you see higher prices in stores and at gas stations in the coming months — or to use the senator’s preferred euphemism, “adjust some prices” — it’s up to you to “do what it takes” to support the president’s policy.

 

If Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ever served up a justification like this, the (justified!) purple-faced neck-vein-bulging outrage reaction from Republicans would remind astronomers of a sun going supernova.

 

But it’s Trump, so everything’s hunky-dory. Hey, it’s not like inflation and higher prices were a big deal in the fate of the Biden administration, right?

 

ADDENDUM: Speaking of domestic politics, if you haven’t checked out my epic-length review and fact-checking of Bill Clinton’s post-presidential memoir Citizen in the latest issue of the print magazine, please do so:

 

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In keeping with the pattern whereby nearly everyone Clinton encounters praises him for what an excellent job he did, a black pastor in Marietta, Ohio, whose grandfather knew Clinton’s grandfather in Hope, Ark., tells Clinton that he was a great president and that his grandfather would be proud. A woman in Ghana runs to him on the airport tarmac to tell him that because of a foreign aid bill he signed, she has a good job making shirts. Two Americans unjustly imprisoned by the North Korean regime burst into tears when Clinton embraces them, and one cries with relief, “I knew you’d come for us.”

 

As far as I can tell, no one else has bothered to go through Citizen and fact-check it. Everyone knows he is, as the late New York Times columnist William Safire diagnosed Hillary Clinton, a congenital liar. Everyone has heard all his excuses and unconvincing explanations and lies — and they’ve faded into history, even if they may get short shrift in the history books. These days, if you make an “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” joke, the Millennials and Gen Z folk around you might not even recognize the reference.

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The sun is setting on Bill Clinton and his legacy, and he’s going out whining about how unfair everyone was to him.