Jeremy Carl: Trump is demonstrating "what actual political leadership looks like." [brief]

Sent: Friday, April 25, 2025 at 03:15:29 AM EDT

Subject: Jeremy Carl: Trump is demonstrating "what actual political leadership looks like." [brief]

Claremont Fellow Jeremy Carl lives in [censored] and is a friend.  He's also a shrewd observer and prolific writer.  I think the recent tweet below is a good example.

https://x.com/realJeremyCarl/status/1915068981570113584

It doesn't surprise me that he has gotten zero credit for it from the regime media, but it's stunning that, for an alleged "populist," Donald Trump and his administration have taken on a huge number of thorny problems for which there is really not a lot of political upside.

From cutting government jobs and spending through through DOGE (the only alternative to America going bankrupt, as Musk has stressed repeatedly) to actually attempting to play peacemaker in the Ukraine-Russia war (as opposed to paying hundreds of billions in taxpayer $ for an endless stalemate) to making deadbeat student loan payers pay up, to attempting to deport large numbers of illegals (even though he knows the Democrats will demagogue him), to massive reforms of corruption and incompetence at DoD, Trump has taken on a huge number of difficult problems. And he gets no credit for it from the so-called "responsible" centrists.

DOGE critics, for example (and the smart ones almost all know better), alternatively claim that we are cutting absolutely critical government services and we're all going to die, and saying that his cuts aren't nearly enough to close our massive deficit. This talking out of both sides of their mouths is not remotely serious or credible.

Even the controversial tariffs are an example of Trump's acting on a difficult, thankless task.

We have got to re-shore a significant amount of critical manufacturing. Even honest critics of Trump's tariff policies acknowledge this. But doing so is inevitably going to cause some pain for American consumers -- who are also American voters. Yet those same critics -- those who have for decades championed neoliberal trade policies that got us here -- invariably have no excuses for why they failed to act, and very few of them I have heard have super-compelling AND politically realistic alternatives to Trump's approach.

This doesn't mean that the tariffs will work. I am not an economist and so I've stayed out of the entire tariff debate. But Trump is acting to try to solve a politically difficult but absolutely necessary problem to solve, one that his critics, for all of their airy rhetoric and faux-reasonableness (and this is the specialty of political establishments everywhere), have utterly failed to act on when they had power. That is what actual political leadership looks like.

The Biden administration knew how to *sound* reasonable at times, but their actions were (at best) those of spoiled children -- letting millions of unvetted foreigners flood the country, blowing the deficit sky high and propping up the economy with an explosion of government jobs and spending we had no long-term way to pay for -- saddling taxpayers with paying off hundreds of billions of $ of student loans rather than making the people who took those loans out pay them.

So many of my allegedly well-meaning liberal acquaintances complain that politicians won't make hard choices. But the Trump administration is making more tough choices in an average week than Joe Biden and his handlers did in four years.

The adults are finally in the room. And the fact that sometimes they send mean tweets doesn't make them any less adult or their opponents any less spoiled, entitled, and hypocritical children.