America

MAGA has a problem, in the form of Donald Trump. Put simply: MAGA wants to define what MAGA (or “America first”) means, and Donald Trump wants it to mean whatever he says at any given moment.

I should offer a little definitional clarity and political nuance. Make America Great Again means different things to different people. The Trump coalition is not monolithic, it contains factions that do not necessarily consider themselves to be MAGA. But as shorthand, MAGA is an identifiably distinct bloc on the right, and it’s the dominant faction in the broader GOP coalition. Its internal diversity notwithstanding, it still has a worldview or ideology. And the MAGA faithful are increasingly frustrated by the fact that Trump doesn’t always share, or prioritize, that ideology.

They believed that if you could just “let Trump be Trump” he would follow their conception of MAGA. In Ronald Reagan’s first term, many movement conservatives were frustrated by what they perceived as the Gipper’s drift toward centrism. They blamed moderates in the administration. “Let Reagan be Reagan” became a rallying cry on the right.

“It’s a piece of conventional wisdom on the new American right that Donald Trump struggled in his first term because he hired the wrong people — old-think Bush Republicans, figures like Rex Tillerson and Steven Mnuchin, who didn’t have a populist bone in their bodies,” the news website Semafor’s Ben Smith offers in an astute analysis.

As a result, Smith continues, “Trump’s most passionate supporters weren’t going to make that mistake again. They created initiatives like American Moment, Project 2025, and others aimed at grooming and credentialing a cadre of MAGA appointees. When Trump took office, the America Firsters moved en masse into the Department of Defense. Big Tech avengers seized the antitrust apparatus. Conspiracy-minded podcasters took over the FBI.

“And yet — just as Trump often ignored his conventional advisers in the first term, he’s stunned loyalists by sweeping aside this carefully assembled apparat in 2025.”

Trump said as much to the Atlantic magazine last month: “I think I’m the one that decides” what “America first” means.

“It turns out that personnel isn’t policy,” the executive director of the American Conservative, Curt Mills, “glumly” told Smith. The idea that “personnel is policy” is another Reagan-era mantra; put Reaganites in important positions and you’ll get Reaganite policies. Putting Trumpists in powerful positions doesn’t yield the same results.

Immigration hawks have been panicking over the president’s suggestion that farm and hotel workers should be excluded from his deportation schemes. As Trump told Fox News, “I’m on both sides of the thing.” Foreign policy “restrainers” were beclowned by his support of Israel’s strikes on Iran and his apparent about-face on helping Ukraine.

On China, Trump’s been a hawk as promised, except when he hasn’t, allowing NVIDIA to sell chips to China, and ignoring the law by refusing to sell or shutter TikTok.

Then there’s the Jeffrey Epstein fiasco, which has bedeviled Trump for weeks. It’s intensity and durability can best be explained by the fact that it divides those who define Trumpism as loyalty to Trump and those who believe that loyalty would be, must be rewarded by a cleansing of corrupt globalist elite — or something.

In short, there is no “Trumpism” that is an analogue to Reaganism. Reaganism is a philosophical approach. What defines Trump’s reign is better understood as a psychological phenomenon both as an explanation of his behavior and of his fans’ cultish and performative loyalty. To the extent Trump has a philosophy it is to follow his instincts, which are most powerfully informed first by his own ego but also the dramaturgy of professional wrestling, reality TV and Norman Vincent Peale’s prosperity gospel.

He’s said many times that he considers unpredictability a virtue in itself, which by definition means he is going to disappoint anyone who expects philosophical coherence. When Trump was a bull in a China shop, the people most excited by the sound of breaking vases and dishware assumed there was a broader method to the madness. But now the same people are learning that Trump won’t be saddled by his fans any more than he is by norms.

This was always going to be the case (as I noted in 2017), but what adds to MAGA’s frustration is that anyone can see and copy the bull-handling techniques that are most likely to work. Compliment him, call him “daddy,” celebrate his genius and expertise, and you too can manipulate him with at least moderate success.

Perhaps most significant, it’s becoming clear that a movement defined by loyalty to a mercurial personality is bound to split apart once that personality leaves the stage — if not sooner.

X: @JonahDispatch

There were three television characters who really mattered to me as a kid: Michael, Leroy and Theo.

In elementary school, “Good Times” was the television show that most closely resembled my family. And seeing reruns of Ralph David Carter’s portrayal of a precocious young boy learning what it means to be poor, gifted and Black is what moved his Michael from fiction to family for me.

By middle school, I was no longer wearing cornrows like Gene Anthony Ray, but I tried everything else to be like his character Leroy from the television show “Fame.” For some of my classmates, the performing arts were a fun way to express themselves, and the show was inspirational. For me, it was my way out of the hood, and Leroy was the blueprint. Through the Detroit-Windsor Dance Academy, I was able to take professional dance lessons for free and ultimately earned a dance scholarship for college.

But it wasn’t a linear journey. Despite being gifted, I struggled academically and required summer classes to graduate from high school. That’s why I connected with Theo, whose challenges in the classroom were one of the running jokes on “The Cosby Show.” The family never gave up on him, and more importantly, he didn’t stop trying.

Through the jokes about his intelligence, the coming-of-age miscues (and the dyslexia diagnosis), the storylines of Theo — like those of Leroy and Michael — often reflected struggles I foolishly thought no one else was experiencing when I was growing up. It is only through distance and time are we able to see moments like those more clearly. In retrospect, the three of them were like knots I held onto on a rope I had no idea I was climbing.

This is why the Black community’s response to the death of Malcolm-Jamal Warner this week isn’t solely rooted in nostalgia but also in gratitude. We recognize the burden he’s been carrying, so that others could climb.

When “The Cosby Show” debuted in 1984, there were no other examples of a successful two-parent Black family on air. We were on television but often trauma and struggle — not love and support — were at the center of the narratives. So even though Black women had been earning law degrees since the 1800s — beginning with Charlotte E. Ray in 1872 — and Black men were becoming doctors before that, the initial response from critics was that the show’s premise of a doctor-and-lawyer Black couple was not authentically Black.

That narrow-minded worldview continued to hang over Hollywood despite the show’s success. In 1992, after nearly 10 years of “The Cosby Show” being No. 1 — and after the success of “Beverly Hills Cop II” and “Coming to America” — the Eddie Murphy-led project “Boomerang” was panned as unrealistic because the main characters were all Black and successful. The great Murphy took on the Los Angeles Times directly in a letter for its critique on what Black excellence should look like.

However, Black characters like Michael, Leroy and Theo had been taking on the media since the racist film “The Birth of a Nation” painted all of us as threats in 1915. It could not have been easy for Warner, being the face of so much for so many at an age when a person is trying to figure out who he is. And because he was able to do so with such grace, Warner’s Theo defined Blackness simply by being what the world said we were not. This sentiment is embodied in his last interview, when he answered the question of his legacy by saying: “I will be able to leave this Earth knowing and people knowing that I was a good person.”

In the end, that is ultimately what made his character, along with Leroy and Michael, so important to the Black community. It wasn’t the economic circumstances or family structure of the sitcoms that they all had in common. It was their refusal to allow the ugliness of this world to tear them down. To change their hearts or turn their light into darkness. They maintained their humanity and in the process gave so many of us a foothold to keep climbing higher.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

President Trump announced a trade framework with Japan on Tuesday, placing a 15% tax on goods imported from that nation.

“This Deal will create Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs — There has never been anything like it,” Trump posted on Truth Social, adding that the United States “will continue to always have a great relationship with the Country of Japan.”

The president said Japan would invest “at my direction” $550 billion into the U.S. and would “open” its economy to American autos and rice. The 15% tax on imported Japanese goods is a meaningful drop from the 25% rate that Trump, in a recent letter to Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, said would be levied starting Aug. 1.

Early Wednesday, Ishiba acknowledged the new trade agreement, saying it would benefit both sides and help them work together.

With the announcement, Trump is seeking to tout his ability as a dealmaker — even as his tariffs, when initially announced in early April, led to a market panic and fears of slower growth that for the moment appear to have subsided. Key details remained unclear from his post, such as whether Japanese-built autos would face a higher 25% tariff that Trump imposed on the sector.

But the framework fits a growing pattern for Trump, who is eager to portray the tariffs as win for the U.S. His administration says the revenues will help reduce the budget deficit and more factories will relocate to America to avoid the import taxes and cause trade imbalances to disappear.

The wave of tariffs continues to be a source of uncertainty about whether it could lead to higher prices for consumers and businesses if companies simply pass along the costs. The problem was seen sharply Tuesday after General Motors reported a 35% drop in its net income during the second quarter as it warned that tariffs would hit its business in the months ahead, causing its stock to tumble.

As the Aug. 1 deadline for the tariff rates in his letters to world leaders is approaching, Trump also announced a trade framework with the Philippines that would impose a tariff of 19% on its goods, while American-made products would face no import taxes. The president also reaffirmed his 19% tariffs on Indonesia.

The U.S. ran a $69.4-billion trade imbalance on goods with Japan last year, according to the Census Bureau.

America had a trade imbalance of $17.9 billion with Indonesia and an imbalance of $4.9 billion with the Philippines. Both nations are less affluent than the U.S. and an imbalance means America imports more from those countries than it exports to them.

The president is set to impose the broad tariffs listed in his recent letters to other world leaders on Aug. 1, raising questions of whether there will be any breakthrough in talks with the European Union. At a Tuesday dinner, Trump said the EU would be in Washington on Wednesday for trade talks.

“We have Europe coming in tomorrow, the next day,” Trump told guests.

The president earlier this month sent a letter threatening the 27 member states in the EU with 30% taxes on their goods to be imposed starting on Aug. 1.

The Trump administration has a separate negotiating period with China that is currently set to run through Aug. 12 as goods from that nation are taxed at an additional 30% baseline.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he would be in the Swedish capital of Stockholm next Monday and Tuesday to meet with his Chinese counterparts. Bessent said his goal is to shift the American economy away from consumption and to enable more consumer spending in the manufacturing-heavy Chinese economy.

“President Trump is remaking the U.S. into a manufacturing economy,” Bessent said on the Fox Business show “Mornings With Maria.” “If we could do that together, we do more manufacturing, they do more consumption. That would be a home run for the global economy.”

Boak writes for the Associated Press.

Canadian Press

Morgan Birch

How measles spread in Canada

Vaccine hesitancy on the rise

Believe it or not, France has had a form of social security since the 1600s, and its modern system began in earnest in 1910, when the world’s life expectancy was just 32 years old. Today the average human makes it to 75 and for the French, it’s 83, among the highest in Europe.

Great news for French people, bad news for their pensions.

Because people are living longer, the math to fund pensions in France is no longer mathing, and now the country’s debt is nearly 114% of its GDP. Remember it was just a couple of years ago when protesters set parts of Paris on fire because President Emmanuel Macron proposed raising the age of legal retirement from 62 to 64. Well, now Prime Minister Francois Bayrou has proposed eliminating two national holidays, in an attempt to address the country’s debt.

In 2023, before Paris was burning, roughly 50,000 people in Denmark gathered outside of Parliament to express their anger over ditching one of the country’s national holidays. The roots of Great Prayer Day date all the way back to the 1600s. Eliminating it — with the hopes of increasing production and tax revenue — brought together the unions, opposing political parties and churches in a rare trifecta. That explains why a number of schools and businesses closed for the holiday in 2024 in defiance of the official change.

This week, Bayrou proposed eliminating France’s Easter Monday and Victory Day holidays, the latter marking the defeat of Nazi Germany. In a Reuters poll, 70% of respondents didn’t like the idea, so we’ll see if Paris starts burning again. Or maybe citizens will take a cue from the Danes and just not work on those days, even if the government decides to continue business as usual.

Here at home, President Trump has also floated the idea of eliminating one of the national holidays. However, because he floated the idea on Juneteenth — via a social media post about “too many non-working holidays” — I’m going to assume tax revenue wasn’t the sole motivation for his comments that day. You know, given his crusade against corporate and government diversity efforts; his refusal to apologize for calling for the death penalty for five innocent boys of color; and his approval of Alligator Alcatraz. However, while I find myself at odds with the president’s 2025 remarks about the holiday, I do agree with what he said about Juneteenth when he was president in 2020: “It’s actually an important event, an important time.”

Indeed.

While the institution of slavery enabled this country to quickly become a global power, studies show the largest economic gains in the history of the country came from slavery’s ending — otherwise known as Juneteenth. Two economists have found that the economic payoff from freeing enslaved people was “bigger than the introduction of railroads, by some estimates, and worth 7 to 60 years of technological innovation in the latter half of the 19th century,” according to the University of Chicago. Why? Because the final calculations revealed the cost to enslave people for centuries was far greater than the economic benefit of their freedom.

In 1492, when Christopher Columbus “discovered America,” civilizations had been thriving on this land for millennia. The colonizers introduced slavery to these shores two years before the first “Thanksgiving” in 1621. That was more than 50 years before King Louis XIV started France’s first pension; 60 years before King Christian V approved Great Prayer Day; and 157 years before the 13 colonies declared independence from Britain on July 4, 1776.

Of all the national holidays around the Western world, it would appear Juneteenth is among the most significant historically. Yet it gained federal recognition just four years ago, and it remains vulnerable. The transatlantic slave trade transformed the global economy, but the numbers show it was Juneteenth that lifted America to the top. Which tells you the president’s hint at its elimination has little to do with our greatness and everything to do with the worldview of an elected official who was endorsed by the newspaper of the Ku Klux Klan.

If it does get to the point where we — like France and Denmark — end up seriously considering cutting a holiday, my vote is for Thanksgiving. The retail industry treats it like a speed bump between Halloween and Christmas, and when history retells its origins, it’s not a holiday worth protesting to keep.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow