The comprehensive case against Trump

By Bentham's Bulldog @ 2025-08-16T17:31 (+35)

1 Introduction

Crosspost of my blog. 

There isn’t much attempted political persuasion these days. Most political discussions devolve to what Scott Alexander has called ethnic tension—vaguely attempting to smear the other side, to give them bad karma, without arguing against their preferred policy on the merits. Much of it involves personally smearing people who vote for the other candidate.

I think it is often possible to convince people by simply laying out arguments in a straightforward and factual manner. Though that’s often less entertaining than the hundredth Tweet about how Republicans are racist or Democrats hate hot women, it’s a lot more likely to be persuasive. Thus, I thought I’d lay out, in fairly comprehensive fashion, the reasons I think Trump is a bad president, especially this term. I’d encourage you to share this post with Trump supporters and to restack it—while persuasion doesn’t always work, simply laying out the case, in detail, for true things is important, and it can often convince people.

In my view, the case against Trump is overwhelming, so much so that the two most prominent people who tried to lay out careful and evidence-based cases for Trump in 2024 both walked their position back. I debated Richard Hanania about whether to vote for Trump—he now regrets his vote. Trump is completely horrible on numerous fronts; he does many different things, each of which would be enough by themselves to make him a horrible president.

In case you want to skip ahead, here’s the title of every section:

1. Introduction.
2. Foreign aid.
3. Vaccines and medical research.
4. Donald Trump attempted a coup.
5. The weaponization of government and creeping authoritarianism.
6. Immigration.
7. Trade and the economy.
8. Donald Trump, corrupt, lying, crypto-scammer.
9. The animal torturer in chief who blew out the deficit.
10. The pro-Trump talking points are all wrong.
11. Conclusion.

2 Foreign aid

Trump has gutted foreign aid. This decision is likely to kill millions of people, many of them children.

At the start of his administration, Trump signed an executive order shutting off nearly all foreign aid. Then, Elon Musk and DOGE spent the next several months feeding USAID into the woodchipper—dismantling most of it. As a result, the Trump administration has blocked billions of dollars of funding for foreign aid, including for efforts to combat malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV.

This included cuts for PEPFAR which is arguably the most effective government program in recent history. It annually costs about 14 dollars per American, and saved somewhere around 19 million lives since its implementation under George W. Bush. The Trump administration has seriously undermined it in several ways.

1. The initial 90-day shutdown of foreign aid shut PEPFAR down. This was reversed by a waiver signed by Rubio, but despite the waiver, functionality was still decreased. Many funds were not properly disbursed.
2. Around 60% of PEPFAR funding and deployment was through USAID. When USAID shut down, most of PEPFAR disappeared with it.
3. The federal government has dramatically decreased grants for PEPFAR.
4. The state department has a plan to reorganize PEPFAR to limit its effectiveness (making it about stopping threats to U.S. markets rather than saving lives).

The PEPFAR cuts alone could very well cost millions of lives. It’s already conservatively cost around 100,000 lives, and numbers of deaths are only increasing. And while it’s hard to figure out exactly how many lives PEPFAR saved, it’s easy to see it saved many—just look at this chart of HIV deaths before and after PEPFAR:

You have to screw up pretty badly to eviscerate the best government program in the last 30 years. And this is just one of the many programs Trump has undermined. Foreign aid—despite taking up less than 1% of the budget—has been significantly wrecked.

This will likely cause millions of deaths, according to the studies that have been done on the topic. One report claimed USAID (eliminated by Trump) saved 92 million lives in the last two decades. Another study estimated that 7.9 million extra children would die in the next 15 years, and a lower end estimate guessed foreign aid saves about 3 million lives a year. If we assume Trump will halve the lives saved by foreign aid and go by the low-end estimate, this means his cuts would cause over 22 million deaths in the next 15 years—consistent with another study estimating 25 million excess deaths from foreign aid cuts.

So, on its face, it looks like Trump’s foreign aid cuts will bring about over ten million extra deaths if not reversed. However, there are various defenses that people give of the foreign aid cuts. Let me address them in turn.

A first defense: why should we spend so much on foreign aid? Why can’t the rest of the world pay for stuff, when we disproportionately foot the bill? In reality, we spend less per capita on foreign aid than other industrialized nations. America isn’t getting taken advantage of and giving too much—we give far too little. Also, even if other countries were slacking, it would still be good to prevent millions of deaths.

A second defense: the millions of deaths numbers are inflated because other countries will fill in. If the U.S. stops funding these programs, it is argued, other countries will take them up. In reality, however, other countries have tended to cut aid in response to the U.S. cuts. While some countries have spent more, others have cut their aid budgets after we cut ours. 2025 is the first time in nearly 30 years that France, Germany, the U.S., and the UK have all cut foreign aid budgets.

So this defense backfires. If anything, it makes foreign aid cuts even worse!

A third defense: why can’t other countries pay for these programs? If African countries love AIDS medicine so much, can’t they fund it? This isn’t a defense so much as a question. And it ignores that:

1. These countries are often very poor, so it’s hard to fund medical projects. PEPFAR has a budget of around 6 billion. U.S. GDP is about 30 trillion. Malawi, one of the recipient countries, has a GDP of about 11 billion dollars. For us, PEPFAR is a tiny investment—for them, it’s a lot of their GDP.
2. Even aside from funding, these countries don’t have the doctors and medical infrastructure needed for these programs.
3. Even if the reason why PEPFAR and other foreign aid programs weren’t funded was because other countries sucked, it would still be good to fund PEPFAR and save millions of lives. PEPFAR wasn’t funded before the U.S. came in and hasn’t been funded in other similar places.

A fourth defense: the PEPFAR recipients are homosexual. Why should we fund them? This response has been popular on the right. However:

1. Most PEPFAR recipients are women and children. While HIV in the west disproportionately affected gay men, not so in other places.
2. Even if it was mostly gay men, it’s bad for gay people to die!
3. This obviously doesn’t apply to the rest of foreign aid.

A fifth defense: foreign aid doesn’t work that well. Various people have claimed that foreign aid isn’t particularly effective and often backfires, making countries dependent on us. Now, overall I don’t think that’s super plausible. My read of the literature is that development aid tends to be positive.

But more importantly, the kind of foreign aid that’s controversial is economic development aid that comes with strings attached. There’s basically no serious dispute about the efficacy of PEPFAR or anti-malaria programs. The most famous critics of aid like William Easterly support these programs.

A final defense: why spend money helping out people in other countries? A nation’s obligation is to its own! The people saved by foreign aid aren’t Americans, so why should we bother to help them? In response:

1. I think this is quite ethically objectionable. Imagine we could spend .5% of the budget annually to stop the Nazi holocaust every decade or so. It seems obvious that we should do that. Thus, it seems we have at least some obligations to foreigners! And this looks similar to the number of lives saved by foreign aid. Similarly, it’s widely regarded as a great failure that we didn’t act to stop the slaughter in Rwanda, even though the number of lives we would have saved would have been far less great than the number PEPFAR has saved. Maybe we have stronger obligations to Americans than to people in other countries, but the idea that we shouldn’t care at all about foreigners dying by the millions is deeply wicked, and one who seriously adopts it has lost part of their soul.
2. Even if our only concern was for America, there’s still a strong case for foreign aid. Disease does not respect borders—epidemics have a way of making it to the U.S. We also trade with other countries. If entire countries are devastated by disease, they won’t be trading with us, and this will be bad for the economy. Foreign aid is also a tool of soft power that helps shore up our influence with other countries and makes it easier to achieve foreign policy objectives.
3. People who make this argument tend not to be consistent. When complaining about foreign wars, they’ll often note that wars kill large numbers of foreigners, and treat this as a relevant consideration. They’ll talk at length about the scourge of Muslim grooming gangs in Britain, and seem to think it would be worth doing something about that at low cost. But the victims of such gangs are, of course, foreigners. It can’t be that people in other countries only matter when they’re the victims of policies you don’t like.

Thus, the facts are clear: Trump’s foreign aid cuts will cause large numbers of people to die. Depending on exactly when they’re reversed, they are likely to kill millions of people, potentially tens of millions.

3 Vaccines and medical research

The federal government has declared war on vaccine development and medical research. The death toll of this decision could number in the millions.

Vaccines have saved about 150 million lives in the last 50 years. They are a marvel of modern medicine, and among our best defense against new diseases. Despite this, the Trump administration has been systematically undermining vaccine development and distribution.

The recent mRNA vaccines have been particularly effective, saving millions of lives (see here for the comprehensive case that they’ve been extremely beneficial and here for more detailed rebuttals to all the anti-vaxxer objections). The evidence for the effectiveness of mRNA vaccines comes from:

1. Randomized controlled trials showing both no increase in death and rapid drop in hospitalizations and death after receiving them.
2. Studies showing rapid divergence between Democrat and Republican all-cause mortality that appeared only after vaccines became available (this makes sense if the vaccines guard against death because Democrats have significantly higher vaccine intake).
3. A consistent historical pattern of vaccine administration being stopped when vaccines had dangerous side effects. Even J&J was halted when it caused 9 deaths.
4. The absence of any coherent mechanism by which vaccines might cause mass death.
5. There being no vaccine-associated excess deaths (the excess deaths have consistently tracked COVID waves, not vaccine rollouts).
6. There being other high-quality studies on the subject that show no increased risk of death after receiving vaccines.

mRNA technology is also one of the most promising forthcoming technologies for curing cancer. This means that the administration’s targeted war on vaccines—especially mRNA technology—increases the probability that you and your loved ones will die of cancer. Once again, the body count of the current administration’s policies could very well number in the millions. Specifically, the administration has:

1. Terminated 500 million dollars in grants for mRNA vaccine research. As Noah Smith notes “Cancer researchers are terrified that this move will derail their whole field, and with good reason. The chilling effect of this funding cancellation will cause a general loss of enthusiasm for the technology.” In addition to this, a 766 million dollar contract with Moderna to develop a mRNA-based bird-flu vaccine was terminated, signaling broader unwillingness to go along with mRNA. RFK Junior has justified this by producing a bogus report that, among other things, cites studies on COVID risk as if it was evidence of vaccine risk.
2. Pulled out of GAVI, an international program that vaccinates young children overseas. GAVI has been incredibly effective; cutting U.S. funding for it is likely to kill about a million young children.
3. Trump has more broadly undermined medical research. Despite not succeeding in cutting the NIH (responsible for the initial development of nearly all new drugs) by 40%, Trump has managed to change how NIH funding works in a way that makes it harder to fund new medicine. He’s also enacted broader cuts to basic science research at the federal level. This means that new cures for cancer, stroke, and heart disease will be less likely to hit the market.
4. RFK Junior fired the entire board tasked with approving vaccines and replaced them with antivaxxers. This is likely to make it much harder to approve vaccines.
5. As part of their fight with universities, the federal government has terminated billions of dollars in grants to universities for scientific research.
6. Trump also pulled out of the World Health Organization, a decision that is likely to undermine global pandemic preparedness and response to disease outbreaks more broadly. The WHO has been supremely effective at stopping disease internationally—being significantly responsible, for instance, for smallpox eradication efforts that saved around 200 million lives.

I seriously don’t know what the defense of these cuts is supposed to be—unless one is an anti-vaxxer who is broadly opposed to modern medicine. Funding medical research is one of the best things the federal government does because it’s a public good; companies don’t capture the full benefits of new medical innovation and so pharmaceutical innovation is drastically underfunded. Slashing it for no reason is idiotic! Even on purely economic grounds, every dollar spent on medical innovation returns around $2.56. American medical innovation has saved millions of lives from cancer alone.

I’ve been pelting you with a lot of statistics, so let me just say one thing to make concrete how completely horrendous this is: the GAVI cuts are likely to kill a million children. That means its death toll, if not reversed, will be worse than that of the Iraq War, Ukraine war, and Gaza war combined. This is absolutely despicable behavior.

4 Donald Trump attempted a coup

Here is a troubling fact that I think is not discussed often enough: Donald Trump attempted a coup.

A coup occurs when a non-legitimately elected leader attempts to illegally seize power. Trump attempted this after he lost in 2020. I’ve laid out the evidence in more detail, so let me just review the basic facts.

First, Trump lost and he knew he lost. We know he knew he lost because:

• Everyone around him told him he lost.
• He lost 60 of his 61 court cases, and the one he won was later overturned.
• Trump declared that there was massive fraud before he’d gotten any evidence of fraud, on election night. It was obviously a bad-faith ploy. People around him, including Bannon, ahead of time confirmed that if Trump lost, he’d claim there was fraud.
• Trump would constantly repeat claims, even after they’d been debunked, and he’d been presented with the debunking. He showed a total disregard for the truth.
• Cassidy Hutchinson, former assistant to Mark Meadows, testified that Trump admitted he lost but didn’t want it to be known publicly.
• Trump has been claiming fraud in every single election since 2012—he said the Romney election had tons of fraud too!
• So ironclad was the case against fraud that Dominion sued Fox News for lying about Dominion voting machines, and Fox had to settle for about a billion dollars.
• For there to be fraud, you’d have to think that Trump with the most powerful investigative body in the world knew about upcoming fraud months ahead of time and couldn’t stop it, in a display of superhuman incompetence.

Second, in all the contested swing states, Trump tried to get the state legislatures to certify totally fake and fraudulent electors who would declare him the winner. This is insane. Because he lost in the real electoral college, he tried to get totally fake electors certified. When state legislatures didn’t go along with his plan, he Tweeted intimidatingly about them, causing them to face serious security risks. He also lied to the fake electors, telling them that they were a backup if the court challenges went through, when he was really planning to get the state legislatures to approve them even if the challenges didn’t go through.

Third, after his plan failed in the legislatures, he tried to get Mike Pence to illegally certify the fake electors rather than the real ones. He tried to get Pence to act on the totally bogus legal theory that the VP gets to unilaterally declare the winner of the election. If Pence had gone along with it, this would have triggered a serious constitutional crisis, with the president who controls the military carrying out a totally illegal scheme.

Fourth, Trump called a mob to the capitol. The express purpose of January 6 protestors was to pressure Pence to overturn the election. Then, while the mob stormed the capitol, chanting “hang Mike Pence,” Trump Tweeted:

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”

He then sat around for hours doing nothing as the mob continued storming. Multiple people around him begged him to call off the mob. He did nothing. Trump defenders answer me this: why did Trump not call off the mob when the people around him begged him to? Why was his response to Kevin McCarthy’s request to call off the mob “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

Fifth, this almost triggered a constitutional crisis. If Pence or the state legislators had gone along with it, there would have been an obviously illegal action done by the president to hold on to power. The Democrats would obviously sue, the courts would overturn it, and then there would be a conflict between the sitting commander in chief and the courts. Violence could have very well broken out in the streets. That’s what happens when coups happen; a coup is what he attempted. And he got frighteningly close.

If you attempt a coup, you should never be within a one-hundred mile radius of power. And no, whining about Trump derangement syndrome does not do anything to challenge the factual record.

5 The weaponization of government and creeping authoritarianism

Here is one of the things that makes you sound like an annoying resistance lib but is undeniably true: Trump has a great many alarming, authoritarian tendencies.

Imagine if Joe Biden had sued a pollster for publishing a poll he didn’t like. That would have been alarming; the president should not be discouraging honest publications of polls. Well, Trump has sued Ann Selzer for publishing a poll that had him losing Iowa. The poll was wrong, but the president should not be using his power to sue private citizens for political reasons.

This is not the extent of his retribution—other efforts are even more frightening. He’s ordered a criminal investigation into those behind previous investigations of Trump, including Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Eugene Vindman, and Alexander Vindman; he’s also sued Jack Smith and Letitia James.

This sets an alarming precedent that those who investigate the president face legal jeopardy. Imagine how you would react if Hillary Clinton criminally investigated the people who investigated the emails affair. You should be vastly more alarmed that across the board, Trump is using the power of the federal government to target all of the people who investigated him.

Trump has repeatedly declared totally bogus national emergencies, including using them to enact tariffs (traditionally the purview of congress) and put troops on the ground illegally in American cities. Now, sending troops into American cities doesn’t automatically make you authoritarian, but when you combine it with a president who has demonstrated profound disregard for procedures (including ignoring the law on multiple occasions) and attempted retribution against his political opponents, there’s a serious risk of authoritarianism.

In addition, the government is increasingly being staffed by pansies and loyalists whose sole devotion is to Trump and others in his administration. Kash Patel went so far as using lie detector tests to ask people if they’d spoken badly about him (Patel). Trump has appointed Fox News hosts to high levels of government (if you’re against DEI programs that appoint incompetent people because of their skin color, then you should also be against DEI programs that appoint incompetent people because they were on Fox).

The administration dropped corruption charges against Eric Adams in exchange for cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. This is pretty blatant corruption, and signals the administration’s willingness to use heavy-handed tactics to get what it wants.

Then there is the recent redistricting action. In short, Trump wanted extra seats in the house, so he called up Abbott—who was initially reluctant—to gerrymander and get a few extra districts (the flagrant corruption is astounding). When Texas lawmakers left the state in order to avoid a congressional session, Trump sent in the FBI to track them down. So in short, Trump used federal power to directly involve himself in state-level issues, so he could have extra members in the House of Representatives.

This is very different from normal gerrymandering, which occurs in an orderly way after new census data comes in every decade. This is midway through the decade, flagrant gerrymandering to pick up new seats.

When Democratic states moved to retaliate by their own redistricting, federal troops were sent in to monitor the California press conference. This was an act of clear political intimidation (once again, take a moment to reflect on what your reaction would be if Democrats did such a thing).

Then, there are, of course, the deportations. Rümeysa Öztürk was kept in detention for months because she wrote a mild op-ed criticizing Israel. Similar things have happened to other students, who have been deported for being critical of Israel. I oppose cancel culture, wherein people face serious negative consequences for speech. This is the mother lode of cancel culture and a serious assault on free expression. Again, imagine how you’d feel if Biden deported immigrants for being critical of his foreign policy.

Trump also fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he published a job report that Trump didn’t like. This is North Korea stuff—firing a person for publishing accurate jobs data, because it made Trump look bad, and replacing him with a lackey sycophant. This is also likely to be very bad for the economy, because investors rely on accurate data.

Then there are the federal actions that are far outside his purview. The federal government has been suing universities for alleged anti-semitism—forcing them to pay millions of dollars in the settlement. These deals have given the federal government a role in determining how students are admitted at private universities. Federal attacks have explicitly targeted universities that don’t go along with federal directives on diversity programs, transgender athletes, and Israel protests. He’s even tried to block Harvard from accepting international students.

He’s also tried to disbar various universities from being non-profits, attempted to tax college endowments, withheld federal funds from universities, and threatened universities’ ability to receive financial aid. This is a clear attempt to have the federal government involved with the running of colleges. If you support small government, you should support getting the federal government the hell out of deciding what’s taught in college.

Even more alarming has been the assault on journalism. Voice of America, a U.S. based journalism broadcaster, has been largely dismantled, with many of its journalists deported. Trump has cut funding to PBS and NPR, in a clear display of partisanship (it’s no coincidence that these are groups that he’s felt are unfairly critical of him). Even if you oppose funding journalists—which you shouldn’t, because journalism is a public good, and thus likely to be underproduced in a free market—cutting funding for journalists you don’t like is worrisome. He’s also blocked journalists from the White House for refusing to repeat the dumb “Gulf of America” propaganda line.

The record is clear: Trump has been engaged repeatedly in alarming and authoritarian actions on many different fronts. Perhaps one or two of these could be excused, but them coming all at once makes it clear that he’s threatening serious authoritarian overreach.

6 Immigration

I think the case for more immigration—especially legal immigration—is quite strong. When people immigrate to the United States, they become many times more productive. Innovation is the primary engine of increased wealth, and about half of new innovation comes from the children of immigrants. As Ian Hathaway notes “Almost half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by American immigrants or their children.”

Immigration restrictions are also immoral. They keep productive people in poor and destitute countries with high crime rates. You need a strong moral justification to justify keeping someone in Mexico when they want to come here. Seriously harming people requires serious justification. Remittances—money sent back overseas—make up a non-trivial portion of GDP in developing countries, and have a significantly positive impact on growth. Immigration restrictions are the most significant inhibitor of growth in the world, by far.

And contrary to what’s sometimes claimed, immigration doesn’t hurt wages. It boosts economic growth, positively contributing to long-run wage growth, and generally has zero or positive short term effect. Restrictive immigration has cost around 500,000 jobs. Nor does immigration undermine the culture; immigrants tend to assimilate rapidly, and generally come with more American values than traditional Americans. And the other objections to immigration are just as mistaken.

For these reasons, it’s alarming that Trump has declared an all-out war on immigration. Waiting times for green cards are up. Tens of thousands of people are being deported monthly, the vast majority with no criminal record. The Trump administration has moved to deport half a million legal immigrants, after stripping them of legal status. Almost a million people have been stripped of legal residence already and directed to self-deport. Trump has filed an executive order overturning birthright citizenship, meaning that people born here could be declared illegal and deported.

ICE has huge quotas it has to meet—3,000 deportations a day—so it’s been deporting people without due process. One person, after serving his criminal sentence, who was born in Laos was deported to Sudan—a place he’d never lived. He’d, in fact, lived in the U.S. for his entire life. ICE even deported a young boy with cancer.

And while some have claimed that these immigration policy shifts have created a boom in jobs for Americans, the data behind this is shaky (it’s likely based on reporting shifts in how people answer BLS questions and/or a statistical fluke). The data would also seem to indicate population growth nearly three times as fast as what’s also been observed, and the group from which the data is sourced has explicitly said that the data shouldn’t be used to illustrate job growth.

It’s one thing to oppose allowing in more immigrants. But yanking immigrants already here off the street—after they’ve worked here for years and immigrated legally—is unconscionable.

Then, there is the profound reduction in legal immigration. America has halted refugee intake entirely. Afghan immigrants have been detained for minor traffic violations. Andy Romero and others have been shipped to an El Salvadoran dungeon, rife with abuse, for having tattoos, where people have been beaten and sexually assaulted.

Now, one defense of Trump’s immigration policy is that he’s reduced border chaos and illegal immigration. But he’s done that by eliminating all asylum-seeking! And the only reason that immigration remained such an issue under Biden was that Trump killed a popular bipartisan border bill because he wanted to run on immigration. Republican justifications for opposing the bill were complete nonsense—for instance, people claimed it allowed 5,000 illegal immigrants in per day, when it really shut down the border if there were more than 5,000 border crossings on average per day over the course of a week, or more than 8,500 in a day. In other words, it placed a cap on the number of people who could be processed so that immigration wouldn’t be overloaded.

You’ll also get more illegal immigration if it’s harder to enter the country legally. That’s a reason for allowing in more legal immigrants and doing the opposite of what Trump has done.

Even if you support more restrictive immigration, the actions of the current president are a hideous blot on the soul of our nation. It has to stop. One cannot, in good conscience, support a president who yanks legal asylum seekers off the street to send them to an El Salvadoran torture dungeon. One cannot support a president who deports international students on a whim and tries to let fewer of them in—holding us back economically.

7 Trade and the economy

Under Trump, the economy hasn’t been doing that well.

Recent job-growth numbers have been vastly below expectations (though GDP has been doing better). However, in the first six months of the year, the GDP grew just 1.2%.

Economic growth appears to be slowing down. Consumer spending under Trump has leveled off:

Now, I don’t want to mislead: the economy isn’t doing catastrophically poorly. The sorts of economic indicators I’ve cited don’t make it obvious what effect Trump is having (the president is not the only cause of economic stagnation). But they’re at least mild causes of alarm. They at least rubbish the argument that the economy was doing badly under Biden but turned around under Trump.

Aside from shredding immigration, the main thing Trump has done to harm the economy is impose sweeping tariffs. The chart below illustrates the countries hit hardest by tariffs:

Early on in his presidency, Trump imposed totally insane, sweeping tariffs. Then he sort of walked them back and replaced them with 10% tariffs across the board, except on China where tariffs were higher. Now he’s adopted new, sweeping tariffs displayed above.

This is evil and stupid.

It’s evil because many of the countries hardest hit by tariffs are desperately poor countries. Take Laos, as an example. Laos has a GDP per capita of about $2,000 per year, and it’s largely because we bombed them back to the stone age during the Vietnam war. It’s immoral to tax desperately poor people who are poor because America destroyed their society. We similarly shouldn’t tax desperately poor South Africans, Libyans, and Iraqis. Poor countries are likely to be hit extremely hard by the tariffs. Lesotho’s economy, for example, is being completely shredded by tariffs, leading them to declare a state of emergency.

And the decision is stupid because tariffs are self-destructive. Economists overwhelmingly agree that tariffs are bad for the economy, and studies have borne this out. Even Garrett Jones, in a book book all about how terrible immigration is, notes that trade restrictions hurt growth, and that this result has confirmed by someone running 4 million regressions. Tariffs even tend to lower overall revenue, by leading to import contractions. The abstract of one study reads:

We study the macroeconomic consequences of tariffs. We estimate impulse response functions from local projections using a panel of annual data that spans 151 countries over 1963-2014. We find that tariff increases lead, in the medium term, to economically and statistically significant declines in domestic output and productivity. Tariff increases also result in more unemployment, higher inequality, and real exchange rate appreciation, but only small effects on the trade balance. The effects on output and productivity tend to be magnified when tariffs rise during expansions, for advanced economies, and when tariffs go up, not down. Our results are robust to a large number of perturbations to our methodology, and we complement our analysis with industry-level data.

Among economists, support for trade is about as uncontroversial as support for continental drift is among geologists. The Econ 101 is simple: tariffs make it so that people don’t engage in win-win exchanges because of the tax (and the reality is likely even worse than the econ 101 model predicts).

Suppose you have a product that you can produce for a dollar. I value it at two dollars. So you sell it to me at a price of $1.50. That’s win-win. But if there’s a tariff, then even though the exchange would have been worth it and benefitted us both, it can’t go through because we’re not willing to do it with the tax. Maybe I’ll buy the product from Americans, and you’ll sell it to someone in your home country, but that means Americans will be doing things they’re worse at, and you’ll be selling to people who want a product less. If one country is better at producing goods than another, then both benefit if they both do what they’re best at—tariffs, unfortunately, prevent comparative advantage from working.

The main defense of Trump’s tariffs is that because they’re reciprocal, they’ll get other countries to drop their tariffs. This, however, is a profound inversion of reality—the truth is precisely the opposite.

First of all, the tariffs are not reciprocal. There isn’t a positive relationship between the tariffs we impose on other countries and the tariffs they impose on us. In fact, disturbingly, we have higher tariffs on average against countries with lower tariffs against us, which is so profoundly idiotic it’s almost beyond belief.

The earlier round of tariffs was based on the trade deficit, which was stupid—the trade deficit has no relationship with how well an economy is doing, and is just an accounting feature of us buying a lot of stuff from other countries. We had a surplus throughout the great depression. But even that level of stupidity is surpassed by current tariffs, which don’t even correlate with the trade deficit.

So the first big problem with the argument that reciprocal tariffs work to get other countries to drop tariffs is that the tariffs imposed aren’t reciprocal. Instead they inversely correlate with tariffs, which is a bit like getting someone to stop slapping you by paying him money when he slaps you.

But the second problem is that the tariffs have had exactly the opposite effects. When countries are tariffed, they tend to impose tariffs back. And while a few countries like Zimbabwe and Cambodia have eliminated tariffs in response to U.S. tariffs, the general response has been the opposite. Places that have responded with tariffs of their own include Canada, Mexico, the EU, and China. Also, even if the tariffs worked, aggressively bullying countries has long-term unintended consequences; threatening to invade unless countries dropped tariffs would also lower tariff rates, but no one thinks it’s a good idea.

While it’s often claimed that Trump brought down inflation, this just isn’t true—inflation was going down before he was elected and he had little effect.

Overall, I think claims that Trump is good because he’s good for the economy are nonsense. The economy hasn’t gotten noticeably better under him—and he’s done lots of things that are bad for the economy like restricting immigration and imposing tariffs. All of this is likely to be outweighed by his long-term negative effects on growth by undermining innovation.

8 Donald Trump, corrupt, lying, crypto-scammer

The current president of the United States is an openly corrupt liar.

Don Junior founded a nightclub called Executive Branch, which has a 500,000 dollar entry fee. By paying this fee, you can talk to and influence members of the administration who will hang around the club. Influence is openly bought and sold. Hunter Biden was accused of peddling his father’s influence in exchange for political favoritism; Don Junior is doing it out in the open and no one seems to care!

Trump was gifted a private jet by Qatar. He now flies around on a nice jet, given by a hostile administration that sponsors terrorism. The reason Qatar paid for this jet is obvious; the rest of the world thinks they can get in Trump’s good graces by bribery. And they’re right.

The president has also:

1. Rolled back restrictions on executive branch briberies.
2. Made billions of dollars personally off of crypto that only has value because he’s the president. This is open corruption.
3. Implemented a pump and dump scheme through his crypto token, wherein early investors made lots of money, leaving gullible individuals who purchased the coin later to lose millions of dollars. The president is a crypto scammer.
4. Trump has made tens of millions of dollars by selling NFTs of himself looking jacked. This means that he is invested heavily in an industry that he’s a chief regulator of. In fact, around the time of the election, he was given millions of dollars from wealthy crypto-investors who he was about to regulate; that would have otherwise been illegal! You can openly bribe the president by buying crypto.

Then, there are the lies. Nearly all politicians lie, but Trump’s supporters often praise him for his honesty. So let’s look at a random list of his stunningly large number of false statements:

1. He said he’d end the Ukraine war on day one.
2. He said he’d end the Gaza war on day one.
3. He claimed he’d build the wall.
4. He said his 2020 court cases were only rejected on a technicality.
5. He said that he only got a million dollars from his father, when in fact he got hundreds of millions.
6. He claimed that the unemployment rate was 42% when it was 5%.

There are many, many more. Trump lies vastly more than other politicians.

I remember in 2016 reading someone make the case that Trump was marginally better than Hillary because she was pure evil. I don’t agree with that case, but I can at least understand how one who was aware of the facts would think that. But what one aware of the facts cannot think is that Trump is non-corrupt or honest or decent. He is blatantly corrupt and a liar.

He’s also a complete moron. He’s suggested that America has invisible airplanes and took over airports during the revolutionary war. He forgot the word origins for minutes on end, and suggested that you need an ID to buy groceries.

9 The animal torturer in chief who blew out the deficit

Tens of billions of animals are hideously tortured and killed every year. The Trump administration is trying to make that worse. Various states have enacted laws that prohibit particularly hideous kinds of animal cruelty—making, for example, it illegal to cage a hen or a pregnant mother pig. The Trump administration has attempted to enact federal laws that would overturn those state laws. Bondi has carried out legal action against those states that prohibit animal cruelty.

It’s not clear exactly how likely these initiatives are to succeed. But there is a sizeable chance that the federal government will overturn decades of progress on animal welfare and confine billions of animals to a lifetime in a cage.

He also added hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal deficit. While he claimed DOGE would shrink the debt, it hasn’t even shrunk the deficit. The rate at which the debt increases has increased. The recent big beautiful bill increased federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, while cutting Medicaid and SNAP. There was more spending on tax cuts for wealthy people, less on food and medicine for poor people. I support cutting entitlements, but I think that Medicaid is the most defensible entitlement—unlike the others, it’s actually targeted at the poor!

10 The pro-Trump talking points are all wrong

I’ve already addressed most of the pro-Trump talking points. Claims that he’s good for the economy or a singularly honest politician are a complete inversion of reality. But there are other things that Trump supporters say that I don’t think are correct.

First, they suggest that Trump is anti-intervention and/or quite successful on foreign policy. In reality, however, Trump is quite hawkish without much success. He’s continued supplying weapons to Israel, slightly increasing them, in fact. During his first term, he vetoed a congressional resolution to stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia, as the Saudis carried out a war in Yemen that butchered half a million Yemenis. He attacked Iran, and while I’m not sure what I think about that decision, it certainly was not the decision of a dove.

He imposed extra sanctions on Cuba and various other countries. Sanctions are one of the worst U.S. foreign policy actions—they tend not to be effective and they kill huge numbers of people. U.S. sanctions on Iraq killed similar numbers of people to the war in Iraq. Sanctions are worse than military intervention because they’re targeted against the civilian population. Trump also pulled out of the Iranian nuclear deal—a decision opposed by nearly all foreign policy experts—leading to extra sanctions on Iran and greater likelihood of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Trump’s Ukraine policy has been similar to Biden’s. If anything, it has been worse from a non-interventionist perspective, because it has given Putin false hope, making him likelier to scale up intervention. Like Biden, he’s sold weapons to Ukraine after the brief pause and supported them militarily in other ways.

In fact, even if Trump stopped every single war around the world, that would save only around 80,000 lives a year, which is a lot less than the number killed through foreign aid cuts alone. He is bad enough that he’d still be bad if he brought about peace on Earth.

The worst foreign policy decisions have stemmed from callousness towards the lives of foreigners, even if we just stick to the crimes of Democratic presidents. Albright supported sanctions on Iraq because she didn’t care much about the people starving to death (they were, after all, not Americans). Bill Clinton murdered thousands via his assault on Al-Shifa because it was politically convenient, and he didn’t care much about the victims. The U.S. didn’t intervene to stop the Rwandan genocide (or even easily jam the radio signal) because the massacres in Rwanda weren’t regarded as very important by Americans. The distant murder of Africans does not trouble the median voter.

The worst foreign policy blunders come from American leaders who don’t care about the impact their policies have on foreigners. And this is almost the defining characteristic of Trump’s foreign policy. After all, he pushed through Saudi arms sales explicitly because he wanted to sell more American weapons. I don’t know whether, say, Harris would have intervened in Rwanda but I know that Trump would not have. He is a man singularly immune to moral appeals.

Second, Trump has been praised for negotiating for lower drug prices. In fact, Biden also negotiated for lower drug prices, and Harris probably would have as well. In addition, this was a bad idea—pharmaceutical price controls are horrible policy. In 2024, I thought this was one of the best arguments for Trump over Harris—that Harris would be more likely to impose price controls (I didn’t think any of the arguments for voting for Trump were very good, to be honest).

Pharmaceutical price controls make drug development less profitable. Drug development is often a touch-and-go thing. Most new drugs don’t make money. For this reason, price controls would likely make Americans so much sicker that we’d spend more money on healthcare and would cause people to live almost a year less on average.

Ironically, while this is cited as a major achievement, if Trump weren’t so bad, it would probably be one of the worst things he did.

Third, many people support Trump’s federal actions that, they argue, will prevent mutilation of minors via transgender surgery. Now, I have an ideological disagreement with such people; I think there are people who have genuine gender dysphoria, and that they should have access to gender affirming care, even if they are minors.

But we don’t need to debate this because Trump hasn’t been very effective on this front. His early executive order got rolled back. The other actions he’s taken like banning trans people from the military seem pointlessly cruel and won’t have any significant effect on young gender-confused children. There’s just no way to think this issue is anywhere near as important as all the horrible things he’s done; even if he stopped all gender affirming care, this would only affect about 20,000 people a year, most of whom are just getting hormones and puberty blockers. The number receiving bottom surgery is around 100.

11 Conclusion

Donald Trump is the worst president of my lifetime. His administration is staffed with incompetent lackeys whose horrible policies are likely to kill millions of people. He has eliminated life-saving foreign aid, undermined vaccine development, harmed the economy, made life hell for millions of legal immigrants, and done much, much more. While he’s been okay in a few areas, his policies have been consistently disastrous. The best of his policies are arguably maybe slightly good—the worst of his policies will kill millions.

The world is likely to be poorer, sicker, and more horrific because of the current administration. It targets the weak and the vulnerable: animals on factory farms, sick children, cancer patients, and immigrants. We, as a nation, can do better and ought to do better.

When the facts change, so too should our minds. If you’re a Trump supporter, I’d encourage you: seriously think about the arguments that I have made. Can you really find it in yourself to support a man who terminated most of PEPFAR? Who is cutting cancer research? Who is eliminating international vaccination funding? A man who attempted a coup, who lies as easily as he breathes, who is imposing tariffs on desperately poor countries like Lesotho? A man who is as clearly authoritarian as Trump? There’s no shame in changing your mind after learning what he is like.

But the one thing we must not do is vote for him or any of the people around him. I did not claim this the first time around, but I would now; he is very likely the worst president in history. The current president’s hands are stained with the blood of millions at the low end.

Though Americans are spared from many of his worst policies and can conveniently forget about the horrors he commits daily, the parents of sick children cannot forget them so easily. The blood that stains his hands should also stain our conscience, and make it so that no one like him is ever allowed anywhere near the levers of power.