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Politics Trump’s Free-Speech Warrior? Behind the curtain with Darren Beattie, one of the new president’s most provocative personnel picks. (U.S. Department of State) “Everything is possible with Donald Trump,” one State Department source familiar with the hiring told The American Conservative.  This person was speaking of the shock retention of Darren Beattie as the acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Amid the blitzkrieg—“days of thunder” as the former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon has put it—of policy shake-ups, outré cabinet selections, and vintage populist bluster that have characterized the new administration in its early months, perhaps no move is more “Trump 2.0” than the elevation of Beattie.  Because after years in the veritable digital wilderness (where his profile only grew, and, some might say, became a legend), Beattie is back in the saddle at Washington.  Ousted from the White House speechwriter’s office in late summer 2018 during Donald Trump’s first stint in power, the original scandal that did Beattie in now seems downright passé—like something that the key Trump backer Elon Musk might post out unedited in 2025, and or Vice President J.D. Vance would engage with on X. Beattie’s (even then openly Googleable) address to the obscure H.L. Mencken Club was excavated by CNN, and he was sacked from the Trump team by establishment apparatchiks that are a far rarer, more cowed breed in Trump’s second tour as president.  In the years since, the scandal (perversely for opposition-minded, liberal journalists) seems to have served only to bolster Beattie’s myth and enhance his profile.  Few figures showcase the flipside of cancellation in American life better than Beattie; few notables better embody the “post-woke” moment America has supposedly now entered. In exile, 2018–25, Beattie founded Revolver News: a no-holds-barred right-wing aggregator that aimed (with no small success) to supplant Drudge Report, which many in the Trump fold see as utterly wayward. Beattie became a “friend of the show” on Bannon’s instrumental War Room podcast, where he cultivated a Strangelovian presence and mystique.  I’ve known Beattie for years. During the previous administration, I would greet him as “my favorite Biden administration official” for his service on the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, which extended into the 46th president’s term. A shotgun appointment in the helter-skelter final days of the first Trump tour, it would take a year before the Democrats either got around or figured out how to fire him.  Behind closed doors, as a government official or as a civilian philosopher, Beattie is careful, diplomatic, even reserved. Bar none, he was the most professional, ideologically-committed interlocutor I dealt with in the early Trump White House, which otherwise could be characterized, with few qualifications, as a shocking clown show of mandarins who had little idea, and little real interest in, why Donald Trump had just been elected president. But this characterization of Beattie the person—surgical, not garrulous—may shock those only familiar with Beattie the persona. In a way, his story and style are inescapably 2020s: Bolt-from-the-blue exclusives with Imran Khan, the jailed Pakistani cricket star-turned–prime minister–turned-opposition leader, “for the ’gram” are interspersed with cartoon degradations of the Dispatch editor Jonah Goldberg. Both are put to the side when working for the U.S. secretary of state.     When Beattie initially shot to attention, in the 2015–16 era, he was the only non-tenured academic in the country publicly to endorse Trump for president. It was a considerable risk. Beattie had been a math prodigy at UChicago before pivoting to a political theory PhD at Duke, where he later taught. A protege of the Leo Strauss guru Nathan Tarcov, Beattie’s choices meant breaks not only with the well-worn (if precarious) path of American academia, but also with the malfunctioning conservative clerisy that Trump’s rise has so humiliated.  There are other details that are peculiar about Beattie. Originally from Denver, he was actually partially reared in Palau, the Micronesian island even few State Department officials could locate on a map. His father was recruited to be a supreme court justice in that republic. (Elon Musk could only dream that the U.S. judiciary were so anarcho-capitalist.) In private correspondence over the years, one gets the sense from Beattie that upon his return to the States, he barely recognized the country he had left behind. What motivates his politics then is perhaps unsurprising, and perhaps little different than many of the “forgotten men and women” the president says he represents.  But why this job, why this role and why now? To allies, it’s no real surprise. Beattie is perhaps a better fit here than he ever was at the speechwriter’s office, a den of influential but often thankless work. In comments on the circuit in 2016, Beattie made clear that his shock support for Trump was based on two reasons: the future president’s revolution in Republican foreign policy, and the then-candidate’s adamance on the immigration issue.  Most of all to some of his now-colleagues, Beattie vaulted to prominence by insisting that  sponsoring “color revolutions” in foreign countries is a staple of contemporary U.S. statecraft and heavily insinuating the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol was an inside job. The latter claim’s prominence peaked with a 60 Minutes interview with Senator Ted Cruz asking publicly, “Who is Ray Epps?” Nor on the third leg of the traditional Trumpian stool, reforming “free” trade, has Beattie been bashful.  Writing in National Review in 2017, Beattie argued,  [BLOCK]From the immediate abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), to the recent ‘hire American buy American’ executive order, to the strong likelihood of serious and important steps to renegotiate NAFTA, there is much in President Trump’s actions thus far in his term to encourage his economic-nationalist base.[/BLOCK] He continued,  [BLOCK]Conservatives and libertarians who remain shackled to a Cold War economic ideology ought to take note that Milton Friedman himself stated that his chief purpose was not to advocate for one specific economic agenda over another but rather to protect individual liberties and free enterprise from the threats of concentrated power.[/BLOCK] “Protecting individual liberties” appears to have become Beattie’s self-justification in recent years. To friends, Beattie has praised (with some apparent surprise) the leadership of his boss, Marco Rubio. The secretary has deployed Beattie as the tip of the spear on what is increasingly being termed “free speech diplomacy” by not only the Seventh Floor at Foggy Bottom, but also the vice president’s office. (See Vance’s “shock and awe” address at the 2025 Munich Security Conference denouncing European speech and democratic controls.)  Rubio’s own commitment to free speech appears robust enough that he hasn’t sacked Beattie for past baiting comments about the now-secretary. (Beattie’s allies would insist he was in “shock jock” mode, but critics might complain that it’s convenient that he gets to pick and choose). This is no sideshow work. Beattie appears to be in the thick of it. In late March, Trump’s government made clear that there would be no free trade agreement with the lumbering post-Brexit British state if London didn’t comply with free speech standards. An article in the Telegraph to this effect roiled Westminster, despite Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s surprisingly convivial relationship with Trump.  The vulnerability here, of course, is that the administration is cracking down in parallel on criticism of Israel’s forever war in Gaza and the broader Middle East. The risk for free speech warriors in this administration is the appearance of hypocrisy, and building a two-tiered moral system. Beattie, the political philosopher, is said to see it pragmatically: You don’t throw out the good with the bad, and such decisions are above his pay grade. Which raises the question: Is he playing the long game, and in DC to stay? Beattie decamped to South Florida, the world headquarters of Republican exile, in the Biden years. Is this second tour a victory lap or the start of something bigger? Not yet 40, the president is twice his age. Might Beattie ride the rails of government for years and administrations to come? It’s suddenly a startling plausibility.  The administration is unlikely to subject him to any Senate confirmation battle (although seeing Beattie joust with certain members of the upper chamber would be must-watch). If the Trump personnel carousel starts revving up again, anyone who survives could profit. Indeed, if Trump eventually dispenses with National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, State Department Policy Planning Director Michael Anton is seen as a ringer for the role. Could Beattie replace Anton? Whatever the contingencies, Beattie’s bet on Donald Trump might only now be maturing. The post Trump’s Free-Speech Warrior? appeared first on The American Conservative.Read more

Politics Will Trade Policy Be America First’s Iraq War? There are better and worse ways to do things, and there is no reason to dig in on the worse ways. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) There’s a fine line between conviction and partisanship. A helpful rubric is whether you have stopped asking the question, What if we’re wrong?  The Iraq War is an example of choice around The American Conservative’s offices, for good reason. That misadventure’s architects ignored credible criticisms of the project from start to finish, from disqualifying examination of the “intelligence” about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program from the Bureau of Intelligence and Research to the CIA’s opposition to “debaathification” (perhaps the only worthwhile major analysis that organ has produced in its entire history). The results were predictable and have been thoroughly discussed elsewhere, not least in these pages (please subscribe!). Such an error, defended and persisted long past its expiration date, is permanently damaging to an ideological tendency, even discrediting. Of course, nobody has the market cornered on this kind of thing. The “Liberation Day” tariff package, of which I offered a qualified defense earlier this week, has not been what you’d call a smashing success. Nor is the anomie limited to Trump’s opponents. (Anyway, doctrinaire neoliberals’ carping about tariffs simpliciter is undercut in large part by that crowd’s quietness about Joe Biden’s trade protectionism, which built on measures from the first Trump administration.) Jamie Dimon, the chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase and so not exactly a bastion of economic heterodoxy, was broadly supportive of the Trump tariff policy at the beginning of the administration. Lately, however, he has argued that the iteration we got is misguided, and has started to make gloomy noises about the chances of a recession. Of course, a recession may well have been in the offing anyway—it has been a decade, give or take, since there was a natural correction to the economy—but there are more and less politically painful ways to stop the run and slide into second base. I support tariffs, broadly speaking, as one of the tools in the protectionist policy kit; as noted before, for better or worse, tariffs are currently the least politically constrained tool available. There is a case to be made even for radical changes in tariff policy. Yet statesmanship is the craft in which the ideal meets the real. Sometimes something, even something that should be done, because of quirks of circumstance or execution, doesn’t work very well. Trump has shown a willingness to cut bait when the fish aren’t biting or are threatening to capsize the boat; improvisation is going to be part of any effort to reorient a system as massive as the world economy.  But improvisation is not a good in itself, and the current approach to trade policy seems to threaten to elevate it to the pantheon; it is not encouraging that the final Liberation Day rate card was settled only the night before its announcement, or that Trump’s cabinet seems at odds with itself over what the tariff message actually is. (It is worth emphasizing that the uncertainty per se is in large part what is roiling markets.) The tariffs that arguably made the most sense, on high-technology goods from China, have been given an exemption, albeit a temporary one per a new Sunday missive from the White House. This isn’t inspired pragmatism; this is a disco. Entrenching this approach threatens to become America First’s Iraq War—an avoidable catastrophe that renders permanent political damage to the camp, constricting future bites at the apple of power. Just because a situation is dire and urgent—as I have argued it is—does not mean that things can’t be done in better or worse ways. The White House has not made its case well to the American people and has done little to mitigate the disruption its policy was bound to cause. Time is short, and some amount of damage may be irrevocable, but there is still some room to maneuver. A clear, unified message about ends and means, probably spearheaded by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has emerged as the most serious, articulate voice for Trump economic policy; an implementation timetable; abstention from ad-hoc carveouts: These would go a long way. Nor is there any reason to dismiss out of hand the pending trade deal negotiations shaken from the global tree, so long as they do not actually fundamentally undercut the program.  “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” These words, widely attributed to George W. Bush’s advisor Karl Rove, should haunt every policymaker. Hubris does not take a side. The post Will Trade Policy Be America First’s Iraq War? appeared first on The American Conservative.Read more

Foreign Affairs On Iran, Trump Should Ignore Netanyahu A nuclear deal with Tehran would serve U.S. interests. Credit: KPG-Ivary President Trump has made a habit of dropping major news when Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the White House. In early February, during a joint news conference with the Israeli leader, Trump debuted his plan for the U.S. to take over Gaza and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Last week, with Netanyahu making an emergency trip to Washington to discuss tariffs, Trump broke the news that direct negotiations with Iran over the country’s nuclear program would begin in Oman over the weekend. “Everyone agrees that doing a deal is preferable to doing the obvious,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, the “obvious” referring to military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. There was one person in the room, sitting just a few feet away, who has made clear over and over again that he would prefer that obvious option: Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump is making the right call by kickstarting diplomacy to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. Preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon through diplomacy advances U.S. interests in the Middle East. A new accord would not only put Iran’s nuclear program in a box, but give Washington a better shot at retrenching from a region of declining strategic importance. The president would be smart to ignore Netanyahu’s advice about the talks and the contours of a potential deal.  Netanyahu, the longest-serving premier in Israeli history, has an extensive history of providing counsel to U.S. policymakers that turns out to be at odds with U.S. interests. Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Netanyahu said there was “no question” that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. He famously said that taking out Saddam’s regime would “have enormous positive reverberations on the region” and lead to a democratic uprising in Iran. As almost everyone now agrees, that advice has proven to be spectacularly wrong. Since 1995, Netanyahu has been warning that an Iranian nuclear weapon was just around the corner. Thirty years later, Tehran has yet to develop an atomic bomb, though Netanyahu has pushed for policies that make Iran more likely to achieve a nuclear weapons capability. Netanyahu opposed President Obama’s signing of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (aka, the Iran nuclear deal), which curbed the country’s program. And he encouraged Washington to pull out of the deal despite Iran’s compliance with it, which Trump did in 2018. One reason Trump is having difficulty getting a new, better deal is that Tehran understandably fears another U.S. abnegation. Netanyahu is touting the so-called “Libya model” as the basis for a U.S. position on a deal with Iran. This seems like a bad faith recommendation, a poison pill designed to kill negotiations. Netanyahu knows Iran would never agree to take the steps that Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi announced in late 2003. Bowing to Western pressure, Tripoli dismantled its nuclear program in exchange for the promise of sanctions relief. Less than a decade later, NATO provided air cover as a rebel militia overthrew the Libyan government and, ultimately, captured and killed Gaddafi in gruesome fashion. Iran would be foolish to take the same path. Even if the “Libya model” didn’t lead to a collapse of the Islamic Republic, it would involve Tehran’s giving away all its negotiating leverage. The Trump administration should recognize that demanding the full dismantlement of Iran’s civilian nuclear program serves Netanyahu’s interests, not America’s. The United States has already done more than enough to support Israel’s war on Gaza since Hamas’s October 7 atrocities, providing roughly $30 billion in military support. The costs of U.S. support go beyond the financial expenditure. The State Department has warned that U.S. support for Israel has galvanized terrorist organizations’ recruitment efforts and ignited anti-American sentiment. As the U.S. wages war against Yemen’s Houthis, who are attacking ships in the Red Sea to protest Israel’s assault on Gaza, Washington is in the midst of a dramatic military buildup in the region, moving missile defense systems and long-range stealth bombers from Asia to the Middle East. While such moves may be aimed at deterring Iran and forcing it to the negotiating table, they also heighten the risks of regional conflict. A new nuclear deal would allow the United States to reduce its military footprint in the Middle East. The original accord may not have been perfect, but it placed limits on Iran’s nuclear program and put inspectors on the ground. With Iran considerably weakened over the last year and a half, its incentives to develop nuclear weapons are considerably higher—and so is its willingness to negotiate. President Trump thus has an opportunity to pull the Middle East back from the brink of regional conflagration. Even before the ongoing military buildup began a few weeks ago, there were some 40,000 U.S troops in the region. A war with Iran would put them at grave risk. A deal with Iran would significantly mitigate that risk—and provide an opportunity to bring them home. A new Iran deal would also stymie proliferation risks. If Tehran were to acquire nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia and other regional rivals might seek to build nuclear weapons of their own, igniting a dangerous arms race with dire implications for global security. The Trump administration has made clear that the alternative to an Iran nuclear deal is war. Such a conflict would further destabilize a Middle East already in chaos. Moreover, since the American people reelected Trump in part because they viewed him as the anti-war candidate, a new Forever War against Iran could tank his approval ratings. If the administration truly intends to prioritize peace and the interests of the American people, it should resist Netanyahu’s attempts to undermine diplomacy with Iran. The post On Iran, Trump Should Ignore Netanyahu appeared first on The American Conservative.Read more

Economics Cold Breakfast in America From corn flakes to Legos, the consumer is on the business end of “economics.” ((Photo by Sebastian Gollnow/picture alliance via Getty Images) Not long ago I found myself flipping through a biography of John Harvey Kellogg, the impresario of dry breakfast cereal. It was a very dull book. But it had all the necessary materials for a good one—an old-fashioned Lytton Strachey sort of biography, full of ludicrous contrasts and lurid scenes and catty, sniping humor. Like Edison and Bell, Kellogg was one of those geniuses, half skeptical, half credulous, who seemed to appear out of nowhere during the turn of the last century. All of them combined an experimental temperament with a lunatic energy. In Kellogg’s case, alas, the result was not the lightbulb or the telephone but the yogurt enema. A general history of American enthusiasm—Transcendentalists, Shakers, Christian Scientists, followers of the late Dr. Hubbard—would be a worthy object for a historian. There is no mania—vegetarianism, pantheism, temperance, anti-smoking, eugenics, racism, sexual abstinence—with which Dr. Kellogg was not associated in his day. Practically the only cause he ever disclaimed was the Seventh-Day Adventist religion of his youth, and then only because the authorities grew tired of him. In our own speculatively impoverished age, I am afraid the most visible American cult is the anti-tariff one. Its house organ—its Adventist World or Muhammad Speaks—is, of course, the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, of which I am a dedicated reader. Though I am never entirely certain the authors know what tariffs are; their frightened language suggests Piglet’s immortal description of a Heffalump as “A huge big—well, like a—I don’t know—like an enormous big nothing.”  The problem with the WSJ types, most of whom are well meaning, is that they do not understand what economics is. They think that it is a hard science, like chemistry or (better yet) electrical engineering, with established, perhaps even immutable laws which can be proved by clearly discernible relationships between input and output. This attitude is an old and pernicious one. Keynes knew better. Economics, he told Roy Harrod, his pupil and future biographer, was indeed a science, but only if you can imagine that in, formulating his laws, Newton had assumed that “the fall of the apple to the ground depended on the apple’s motives, on whether it is worth while falling to the ground, and whether the ground wanted the apple to fall, and on mistaken calculations on the part of the apple as to how far it was from the centre of the earth.” And, he might have added, whether the tree had noticed that its apple-bearing capacity had significantly declined relative to its rivals, to say nothing of whether the tree might toss off its apples with perverse glee simply because the editors of the Wall Street Journal find it annoying. It is a great mistake to assume that there is something incongruous about cultists behaving scientifically. Indeed, their mistake is usually the opposite one. It is the cultist who, presented with the evidence of Ecclesiastes, feels that he must discover the reason why the race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong; who, after plotting the relative distribution of bread and riches against Gross National Wisdom and Understanding, respectively, thinks he has hit upon the inverse causal relationship between them; and who assumes that men of skill who lack favor are simply ignorant of the latest OECD recommendations. This is why one should never agree to argue with cultists on their own terms; it means tacitly acknowledging that their facile reasoning bears any relation to sense, when it is really just magical thinking. Some years ago Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest published a long-ish essay called “Sod the Public,” which they described as a “consumer’s guide” to the various ways in which the average Briton was being shafted by idiotic advertisements, poor design, planned obsolescence, the metric system, and many other evils. Much of it was practical and, by their standards, apolitical: ʟɪɢʜᴛ sᴡɪᴛᴄʜᴇs: When carrying a tray, you used to be able to put the light on with your wrist or elbow (and also sometimes open the door catch in the same sort of way), but now you have to put the tray on the ground. I for one would welcome an updated list for modern American consumers. One worthy entry would be the decline of children’s toys. Has anyone else noticed that Lego sets have gotten smaller while having more pieces and requiring more time to assemble, in addition to being far more expensive? The basic units of Lego construction in a large-ish set are no longer 2×2 and 4×2 colored bricks, which in my childhood were clearly meant (and always were) repurposed after the model on the box had been built and taken apart. Now a comparable set contains thousands of microscopic pieces; they are engineering projects that require adult attention spans but child-sized fingers. Worse still, they no longer come with instructions. Instead, children are directed to use the Lego app and follow along with video, PDF, etc. The consultant responsible for the no-instructions thing was probably the same one who came up with those menus that can only be consulted by taking a picture of something that looks like a Pac-Man ghost after a serious car accident. Consultants, by definition, know nothing about the actual enterprises in which their clients are engaged but a great deal about what used to be known as the Microsoft Office “suite” of “tools” (notice how these people always mix their metaphors?). Their so-called expertise always comes to the same thing: lowering costs by depriving the consumer of something hitherto recognized as essential. The post Cold Breakfast in America appeared first on The American Conservative.Read more