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Economics

Checks and Balance newsletter: What is Trumpism, actually?

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This is the introduction to Checks and Balance, a weekly, subscriber-only newsletter bringing exclusive insight from our correspondents in America.

James Bennet, our Lexington columnist, considers the difficulty of defining Trumpism

“It’s not the Trump Party quite yet” was the headline on a Lexington column I wrote back in January. Well, it is now. Donald Trump has locked up the nomination. He has installed loyalists, including a daughter-in-law, atop the Republican National Committee, and Republican politicians who once resisted him, having capitulated, are flaunting his endorsement. Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, ran a good campaign, but primary voters mostly rejected her message, which was basically that of the politician who defined the party from the 1980s into the Trump era, Ronald Reagan.

But I don’t think voters can be certain just what this new Republican Party stands for, because, as Mr Trump demonstrated in the past few days, he remains such an opportunistic and transactional politician. He suggested he favoured “cutting” entitlements, then insisted he would do no such thing, and he reversed a position he held as president: while in office he issued an executive order to ban TikTok, a social-media app, if its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, did not sell the app’s American operations. But this week he opposed a bipartisan bill in the House seeking the same outcome. The Economist endorsed the bill in this week’s issue.

Mr Trump explained that he wanted to combat a domestic adversary instead: “I don’t want Facebook, which cheated in the last Election, doing better,” he wrote on his own social-media platform, Truth Social, with his odd, or maybe Germanic, capitalisation. “They are a true Enemy of the People!” Later, he suggested another political rationale: a lot of young people love TikTok. A third possibility is that the former president is courting donations from a billionaire investor in TikTok; Mr Trump has denied discussing the app with him. 

Whatever his motive, or mix of motives, none speaks to protecting Americans’ data or countering China. Yet Mr Trump said he still considers TikTok a national-security threat. It is this slipperiness about ends and means that makes Trumpism, unlike Reaganism, so hard to define apart from the man himself. Mr Trump calls himself pro-life, and he was able to appoint enough justices to overturn Roe v Wade, but what will his position on abortion be in the end? I wonder if he knows. 

Despite having served a term Mr Trump still offers less a set of principles than a mush of private and public aspirations and interests. That is a squishy new foundation for the grand old party. The fact that House Republicans overwhelmingly ignored Mr Trump’s opposition and supported the ban suggests that, while they may bow to him as their political champion, they do not take him as seriously when it comes to policy. Let’s hope some can show similar sense when it comes to aid for Ukraine and other matters.

Economics

Andrew Bailey on why UK-U.S. trade deal won’t end uncertainty

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Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey attends the central bank’s Monetary Policy Report press conference at the Bank of England, in the City of London, on May 8, 2025.

Carlos Jasso | Afp | Getty Images

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey told CNBC on Thursday that the U.K. was heading for more economic uncertainty, despite the country being the first to strike a trade agreement with the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s controversial tariff regime.

“The tariff and trade situation has injected more uncertainty into the situation… There’s more uncertainty now than there was in the past,” Bailey told CNBC in an interview.

“A U.K.-U.S. trade agreement is very welcome in that sense, very welcome. But the U.K. is a very open economy,” he continued.

That means that the impact from tariffs on the U.K. economy comes not just from its own trade relationship with Washington, but also from those of the U.S. and the rest of the world, he said.

“I hope that what we’re seeing on the U.K.-U.S. trade side will be the first of many, and it will be repeated by a whole series of trade agreements, but we have to see that happen of course, and where it actually ends up.”

“Because, of course, we are looking at tariff levels that are probably higher than they were beforehand.”

Trump unveils United Kingdom trade deal, first since ‘reciprocal’ tariff pause

In Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Report released Thursday, the word “uncertainty” was used 41 times across its 97 pages, up from 36 times in February, according to a CNBC tally.

The U.K. central bank cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point on Thursday, taking its key rate to 4.25%. The decision was highly divided among the seven members of its Monetary Policy Committee, with five voting for the 25 basis point cut, two voting to hold rates and two voting to reduce by a larger 50 basis points.

Bailey said that while some analysts had perceived the rate decision as more hawkish than expected — in other words, leaning toward holding rates elevated than slashing them rapidly — he was not surprised by the close vote.

“What it reflects is that there are two sides, there are risks on both sides here,” he told CNBC.

“We could get a much more severe weakness of demand than we were expecting, that could then pass through to a weaker outlook for inflation than we were expecting.”

“There’s a risk on the other side that we could get some combination of more persistence in the inflation effects that are gradually working their way through the system,” such as in wages and energy, while “supply capacity in the economy is weaker,” he said.

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Economics

Trump knocks down a controversial pillar of civil-rights law

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IN THE DELUGE of 145 executive orders issued by President Donald Trump (on subjects as disparate as “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” and “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads”) it can be difficult to discern which are truly consequential. But one of them, signed on April 23rd under the bland headline “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy”, aims to remake civil-rights law. Those primed to distrust Mr Trump on such matters may be surprised to learn that the president’s target is not just important but also well-chosen.

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Economics

Harvard has more problems than Donald Trump

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A Programme at Harvard Divinity School aspired to “deZionize Jewish consciousness”. During “privilege trainings”, working-class Harvard students were instructed that, by being Jewish, they were oppressing wealthier, better prepared classmates. A course in Harvard’s graduate school of public health, “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health”, sought to “interrogate the relationships between settler colonialism, Zionism, antisemitism, and other forms of racism”: Will these findings by Harvard’s task-force on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, released on April 29th, shock anyone? Maybe not. Americans may be numb by now to bulletins about the excesses, not to say inanities, of some leftist academics.

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