President Donald Trump's decision last week to impose sweeping global tariffs, despite warnings from economic experts against the move, and then to suddenly "pause" most of them on Wednesday has been met with sharp rebuke from political commentators.
In a Wall Street Journal article published Wednesday, conservative commentator Mark Helprin accused the Trump administration of being "too addicted to shock, awe and intimidation to see the harm it is doing to itself."
"In his attempt to break the excesses of the administrative state, Mr. Trump’s every action can be countermanded. More consequentially, given that the seat and beneficiary of the administrative state is the executive, once the wheel turns and a Democratic administration effortlessly reverses his flurry of executive orders, augmented executive power insulated from judicial restraint will resurrect and supercharge the permanent bureaucracy," Helprin wrote.
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"Thus, unbeknownst to him, Mr. Trump is building, as he might say, an “incredibly beautiful” fortress—across the battlements of which Elizabeth Warren may someday stride," he added.
The columnist noted that the administration's initiatives in various areas jeopardize its true achievements. "Its delight in shock and awe feeds upon itself in complete disregard of history and without projecting forward in view of the relative powers it seeks to marshal against those of the world, the laws of economics, and the very weight of reality, all of which it seems to imagine it is somehow able to intimidate," he said.
"Although Congress planted the administrative state within the executive and only Congress can extirpate it, nonetheless Elon Musk has been set loose to move fast and break it," the commentator wrote.
"The fact that payroll, for example, represents only 5% of federal expenditures makes many of his targets look more like the cape than the bullfighter. Rather than savings quietly accomplished by attrition and carefully deliberated reductions, a lot of political capital is evaporating in exchange for frissons and provocations," he said.
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Helprin went on to say that "the things that are broken belong to the American people, not to Messrs."
He said Trump and Musk's "defiant enjoyment of being bad boys is unseemly and undignified."
"The Republican Party, or what is left of it, will suffer for years to come as a result of the gross overestimation of impermanent political advantage," he added.
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