Wall Street analysts recently began joking that the best way to predict the behavior of President Donald Trump — and make money in the process — was by practicing the “TACO trade,” which stands for “Trump always chickens out.” You can always bet on Trump rolling back a reckless tariff.

This mocking of Trump’s inconsistency, which drives him nuts — “Don’t ever say what you said,” he told a reporter who asked him about it — not only is accurate but also deserves to be more widely applied.

One day he is pushing Ukraine away; the next day he is shaking Ukraine down for its minerals; the next day Ukraine is back in the fold. One day Russian President Vladimir Putin is Trump’s friend; the next day he’s “crazy.” One day Canada will be the 51st state; the next day it is the target of tariffs. One day he brags that he hires only “the best” people; the next day more than 100 experts at the National Security Council are pushed out just weeks after many were hired. One day the president hosts a gala at his Virginia golf club for the biggest buyers of his meme coin, who spent a combined $148 million for the chance to hear him give a talk standing behind the presidential seal, and the White House spokesperson suggests it’s not corruption because the president was “attending it in his personal time.”

Trump is governing by unchecked gut impulses, with little or no homework or coordination among agencies. He respects no real lines of authority, has his golfing buddy (Steve Witkoff) act as secretary of state and his secretary of state (Marco Rubio) act as his ambassador to Panama. He compels anyone who wants to stop him to take him to court, while blurring all lines between his legal duties and personal enrichment.

What is this telling us? We are not being governed anymore by a traditional American administration. We are being governed by the Trump Organization Inc.

In Trump I, the president surrounded himself with some people of weight who could act as buffers. In Trump II, he has surrounded himself only with sycophants who act like amplifiers. In Trump I, he ran a standard, but chaotic, administration. In Trump II, the president is unchained and running the U.S. government exactly the way he ran his private company: out of his hip pocket and with only the markets or the courts able to stop him.

That is especially true because today Democrats are too weak, Republicans are too craven, big law firms like Paul, Weiss and Skadden Arps are too morally bankrupt and government bureaucrats are too defenseless to do anything.

So if the motto of Trump I was “It’s our turn to rule,” the motto of Trump II is the kind preferred by dictatorial African regimes: “It’s our turn to eat.”

Consider …

If you think all of this is funny or exaggerated, it’s not. Consider just a few examples of Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip — “fire, ready, aim” — style of governance, where there is zero second-order thinking.

Weeks after taking office, Trump announced a series of global tariffs without any serious consultation with the U.S. auto industry. Along the way, he discovered that only about one-third of the parts of the popular Ford F-150 are made in America and cannot be replaced anytime soon. The tariffs have been such a blow to the whole auto industry that Ford, General Motors and Stellantis announced they could not give earning predictions for the rest of 2025, citing tariff uncertainty and possible supply-chain disruptions.

Then China reacted predictably to Trump’s 145% tariffs on all Chinese exports to America. As The New York Times’ Beijing correspondent Keith Bradsher reported Monday, Beijing abruptly halted exports of rare-earth magnets that go into U.S.-made cars, drones, robots and missiles. If Trump doesn’t find a way to strike a deal (“chicken out”) on some of his China tariffs, U.S. car factories may have to cut back production “in the coming days and weeks,” Bradsher reported.

What do you think are the chances that Trump had gamed out in advance these second-order consequences of his tariffs on China? I bet zero. He just shot from the hip.

Right-wing woke

It gets worse. As I have been arguing since Trump came to office, his ridiculous right-wing woke obsession with destroying the U.S. electric vehicle industry that President Joe Biden was trying to build up undermines U.S. efforts to compete with China in electric batteries. Batteries are the new oil; they will power the new industrial ecosystem of AI-infused self-driving cars, robots, drones and clean tech.

The consequence of this, economics writer Noah Smith observed, is the weakening of America’s capacity to build the kind of cheap, battery-powered drones that Ukraine just used to destroy part of Russia’s air fleet — and that China could use the same way against our aircraft carriers. “Trump and the GOP,” Smith noted, “have decided to think of batteries as a culture-war issue instead of one of national security. They think they’re attacking hippie-dippy green energy, sticking it to the socialist environmentalist kids and standing up for good old red-blooded American oil and gas. Instead, what they’re actually doing is unilaterally disarming America’s future drone force and ceding the key weapon of the modern battlefield to China.”

Do you think Trump connected any of these dots? Not a chance. It was fire, ready, aim.

Jobs that use steel, not make steel

Here’s another example of that failing. Trump just announced that he would double U.S. steel tariffs to 50%. Surely the president would not have made such a move without studying what happened in his first term when he suddenly raised steel tariffs to 25%. Fortunately, others have. It was a total failure.

At first, the 2018 Trump steel tariffs added about 6,000 jobs to the U.S. steel industry’s workforce, according to the Census Bureau, The Wall Street Journal reported. But by the end of 2019, it added, those gains evaporated, leading to the loss of about 75,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Why? Well, as The Journal wrote in a May 17, 2021, editorial titled “How Trump’s Steel Tariffs Failed,” his 25% tariff “hurt industries that buy and use steel, plus their workers and millions of consumers.” That’s because so many more American jobs are held by people who use steel than make steel.

I challenge anyone in this administration to show me that Trump gamed out his new 50% steel tariff and proved that it would work better this time around.

Driving STEM students elsewhere

How about Trump’s education strategy? You cannot put up a meaningful trade wall against China unless you also have an education strategy to increase our advanced manufacturing.

China’s universities put so much emphasis on STEM education — science, technology, engineering and math — that every year China produces some 3.5 million STEM graduates, just under the number of graduates from associate, bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral programs in all disciplines in the United States.

To compete in the AI-driven economy of the future, a country cannot have too many engineers. But we have a glaring shortage. How have we been filling that hole? By admitting tens of thousands of engineering students and engineers from China and India in particular.

So, surely Trump thought this all through in advance?

Fat chance. He started a technology trade war with China — which controls about 30% of global manufacturing, almost double that of the United States — at the same time that he is trying to crush America’s premier research centers like the National Institutes of Health, while having his secretary of state vow to “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students.” On top of it all, he has appointed a former professional wrestling executive who once referred to AI as “A1” — like the steak sauce — as education secretary.

Not just Chinese, but now many other international STEM students, seeing all of this, are deciding to stay away. The United States will not feel the negative effects of that tomorrow while we still reap the benefits of decades of welcoming the most brainy or energetic immigrants. But we will a decade from now.

What has distinguished and enriched the United States for so many years — and kept it the dominant global economic and military power — has been the ability to consistently attract that extra scientist or ambitious immigrant, that extra dollar of investment and that extra dollop of trust from allies. As the biggest economy in the world, we benefited disproportionately from a stable, global free market.

“Any conventional understating of U.S. power would say that we would be crazy to put all three at risk, but that is exactly what we are doing today,” Nader Mousavizadeh, a founder of the geopolitical consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners, told me.

“We are behaving as if we are outsiders and outliers to a global order that we are in fact the architects of,” he added. “For now, we are still the preferred destination for savings, investment and talent, but the sound you hear out there today is the beginning of a global workaround for all three. Because more and more people are starting to wonder: Are we really the rock they thought we were?”

Congess on bended knee

In sum, what you are seeing from this Trump II administration, and its bended-knee Congress, is a dangerous, undisciplined, intellectually inconsistent farce that we will pay dearly for in the future. Major geoeconomic moves are being made by one man who has done no homework, modeling or stress-testing and has fostered little apparent interagency process, with no congressional oversight or apparent reference to history.

If you think this is not dangerous, just keep in mind that the Trump Organization Inc. over the years filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for six different businesses. There was a reason for that: the operating style and values of its boss.

Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.

Historian Nancy Baker Jones was a child when her father, who was serving in the U.S. Army in Europe, was called home in 1953 to testify at U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings on an alleged communist spy ring at an army laboratory in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. 

During McCarthy’s four-year reactionary crusade to root out “card carrying Communists,” hundreds of government, Hollywood, and university employees were imprisoned, and thousands more lost their jobs and were blacklisted despite a lack of evidence they were subverting the government. After what came to be known as the Army-McCarthy hearings, the senator’s meteoric popularity just as quickly plummeted, and in December 1954 he was censured by the U.S. Senate for behavior that worked to “obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate.”

Reading from an excerpt of her autobiography at the Alliance for Texas History’s first annual conference, which 400 people attended at Texas State University May 15-17, Jones recounted her lifelong career helping to build African-American and women’s history programs in Texas universities during the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and expanding the state’s historical encyclopedia, called the Handbook of Texas, to reflect diverse narratives starting in the 1980s. Jones warned the audience of a new McCarthyism arising and reminded them of the role historians can play to combat it. 

“The Alliance for Texas History was created from our own messy reality of history at a time when war appears to have been declared on our profession. We have already faced a difficult truth and started something new in the world, so that we will not repeat the past.” 

This alliance was formed last year after Jones, who was serving as board president of the 128-year-old Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), was sued and ousted by TSHA’s executive director and oil tycoon J.P. Bryan. Bryan sought to stack the board with conservative, non-academic historians over professional historians who he told the Galveston Daily News want to “demean the Anglo efforts in settling the western part of the United States for the purpose of spreading freedoms for all.” 

The struggle to chronicle our state and national past, to determine whose history is told or not told, continues to play out across Texas from the state Capitol to libraries, museums, and the classroom. Concerns about state action that could restrict the work of academic historians arose in conversations and presentations during the historical conference. 

Ben Johnson, co-editor of the Alliance’s Journal for Texas History, opened the conference with a speech describing the current climate for historians: “Until the last few years, never in my lifetime did state officeholders cancel book signings, did legislatures create laws banning the teaching of particular historical texts or concepts, or crowds gather to protest and sometimes remove statues of historical figures. Nationally and in many states, particularly Texas, history has become a venue for political and social combat.”

Two weeks after the May conference, state lawmakers passed Senate Bill 37, a new law that will strip from university faculty members their control over curricula and faculty hiring and hand this decision-making power to an institutional governing board. A statewide “curriculum advisory committee” chosen by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board will also have the power to decide required curricula for all higher education institutions from community colleges to medical schools. Under the new law, governor appointees will also be empowered to investigate and recommend the withholding of funding for universities found to be noncompliant with SB 37 or Senate Bill 17, a 2023 law that banned diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in Texas’ public colleges and universities. In the final version of SB 37, lawmakers removed a provision mandating faculty “not advocate or promote the idea that any race, sex, or ethnicity or any religious belief is inherently superior,” language that professors testified could have been used to censor conversations in government and history courses, especially. 

During one of the conference’s panels, “Teaching LGBTQ History in Texas,” academic historians grappled with how to include the topic in their classrooms during a time of increasing state surveillance of universities. Lauren Gutterman, a University of Texas at Austin American Studies professor shared how SB 17 has already had a “chilling effect” among UT students and faculty, even though the law did not impact curricula or research. Guest lectures on LGBTQ topics were canceled by UT administrators due to “preemptive over-compliance with SB 17,” and faculty were “self censoring out of fear,” Gutterman told attendees. 

“SB 37 is going much further in increasing government oversight of what happens in our classes. So I can only imagine the kind of self-censorship, and then the actual censorship that we experience from the government, is just going to be heightened,” Gutterman told the Texas Observer. 

Over the past year, it’s been more difficult for her department to recruit graduate students, and the UT faculty regularly ask each other. “‘Are you in the market?’ ‘Are you leaving?’ It’s just a kind of ubiquitous concern,” Gutterman said. 

She and other historians at the conference encouraged their colleagues not to self-censor. Gutterman told the Observer that faculty members need to “push back against the kind of anticipatory compliance or over-compliance … beyond what the law required.” 

While the state is narrowing what students can learn in the classroom, the Alliance for Texas History has opened up their call for diverse histories to be presented at their conference and in their publication. During the conference, historians, faculty members, and graduate students shared their research and concerns and received feedback from their colleagues without fear of reprisal. 

The Alliance for Texas History is “taking the broadest possible approach to the Texas past,” Gutterman said. “It’s  particularly important at a moment when our state leaders have demonstrated that they don’t want students to have a really full, inclusive accounting of our state or national past.”  

Alliance for Texas History conference (Courtesy/Adam Clark)

Johnson said in his speech, “The irony of all of these restrictions on history is that they come at a time when the study of the Texas past in public is robust, more inclusive, more expansive, and more nationally prominent than ever before.”

Over the three days of the conference, academic historians, museum curators, public school students, and other individuals selected from a program of 45 panels to attend on topics as diverse as “New Deal Texas,” “Trailblazers in Twentieth-Century Texas Sports,” “Racial Ideology, Eugenics, and the State Fair of Texas,” and “The Revitalization of the Karankawa.” 

In closing the conference, Jones assured attendees the Alliance for Texas History would continue to embrace the histories of all Texans: “Facing difficult truths about the past, moving forward with new understanding and assuring that we do not repeat what should not be repeated. This is what [historian and philosopher] Hannah Arendt called the messy reality of history. There is no finality. She said that it is a story with many beginnings but no ends. We are free to change the world and to start something new in it, and when we do that, that is a healing act.”

The post Amid New McCarthyism, the Alliance for Texas History Embraces Diverse Scholarship appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The Minnesota Department of Public Safety is warning Minnesotans to watch out for scam text messages that appear to be from the “Minnesota Department of Motor Vehicles” or “DPSMN.”

These fake messages claim the recipient needs to pay for outstanding traffic tickets and threaten consequences if they do not pay. Some Minnesotans have received several messages that became more and more demanding, according to the Department of Public Safety.

Public Safety will never communicate about traffic tickets or ask for payment through text message. If a Minnesota resident receives one of these texts, here is what the department recommends doing:

Do not click on any links in the message, give personal information or send money.
Mark the text as spam and delete it without responding.

If a recipient is concerned the message is real, they can reach out to the Driver and Vehicle Services division of DPS at drive.mn.gov with questions.

If people have already paid for these fake tickets, they can file a report with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov.

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The five social housing proposals, known together as the Community Land Act, are the latest attempt to create affordable housing by removing real estate from the speculative market.

Advocates held a “Social Housing Festival & Speak-Out” at Foley Square in Downtown Manhattan Tuesday, ahead of a City Hall hearing on the bills. (Photo by Adi Talwar)

Social housing advocates rallied in Foley Square on Tuesday ahead of a City Council hearing on a package of bills aiming to de-privatize residential properties across the five boroughs. 

The bills would, among other things, give qualifying nonprofits priority to buy privately held residential real estate that comes up for sale, and receive grants to develop affordable housing on government land. They would also establish a land bank through which the city could acquire distressed properties for public benefit.

The package, known as the Community Land Act, represents the latest attempt to create affordable housing by removing real estate from the speculative market. The New York City Community Land Initiative Coalition says this is vital to ensure the development of low-income housing, that rent stabilized apartments are properly maintained, and that tenants control their communities.

“When you own the land, you decide how and what’s developed on the land and how it’s dispersed out into the community,” said Debra Ack, special projects coordinator at the East New York Community Land Trust, a nonprofit that bought a dilapidated rent-stabilized building at 248 Arlington Ave. last year and is converting it to co-ops. “[Developers] say they’re building 200 units, but out of those 200 units, maybe 5 percent of them will go to very low income people. And that’s not fair. That’s total displacement in our neighborhood.”

If distressed properties or city land were in the hands of community groups, rather than private developers, they would be used for the benefit of the community, advocates say.

The first bill discussed at the hearing was the Public Land for Public Good Act, which was introduced by District 33 Councilmember Lincoln Restler. It would require the city to prioritize nonprofits when searching for outside parties to develop affordable housing on public land. 

When campaigning for the bill, Restler said his constituents are generally “shocked that there wouldn’t [already] be an incredibly high threshold that ensures that we are demonstrably achieving a public good every time public property is redeveloped.”

City Councilmember Lincoln Restler speaking at Tuesday’s rally. He’s the sponsor of the Public Land for Public Good Act, which would prioritize nonprofit developers to build on city-owned land. (Photo by Adi Talwar)

The New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) opposes the bill, saying the measure would add barriers to an already bureaucratic process, and that for-profit developers are not necessarily worse for tenants if there are clear restrictions on how they use the land.

But advocates cite studies showing that nonprofit developers are almost twice as effective at creating deeply affordable housing as for-profit developers. “I feel like we keep having the same conversation but we don’t seem to be making progress,” Restler vented in response to HPD’s opposition.

Another proposal, introduced by District 2 Councilmember Carlina Rivera, is the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), which would require property owners to report plans to sell residential buildings to HPD before listing them publicly. 

Qualifying non-profits would then have the opportunity to purchase the sites before private developers got a shot. The proposal is based on legislation enacted in San Francisco designed to ensure land is used for public benefit when possible, as nonprofits must demonstrate a commitment to affordable housing and community representation, as well as ability to pay, in order to qualify.

While the bill has the support of the majority of councilmembers, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who has the authority to bring it up for a vote, is not among its co-sponsors this year (though she was in previous legislative sessions). Her office said this is no indication of her level of support for the measure, though.

“The creation and preservation of affordable homeownership and housing continue to be Council priorities,” a spokesperson for the speaker said in a statement.

The New York Apartment Association, a trade group representing property owners, argues that the bill’s time requirements would be overly burdensome and throw the market into chaos. As written, property owners would have to offer buildings to qualifying nonprofits for 180 days before listing them to private developers, and would have to give nonprofits 90 days to match any private offers after that. 

“If the goal is to help nonprofits buy apartment buildings, then let’s create a bill that actually helps nonprofits,” said CEO Kenny Burgos in a statement.

The other major proposal of the day, Int. 0570, came from District 6 Councilmember Gale Brewer and would create a land bank, a government corporation that could buy and warehouse land, as over 30 municipalities across the state have created. It was first proposed over a decade ago, and if passed in conjunction with the Public Land for Public Good Act, would allow the city to more seamlessly funnel properties to nonprofit developers. 

This would also create an alternative to the city’s controversial lien sale, which took place the same day as the hearing for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. Without the land bank, liens placed on properties with outstanding debt are sold to the highest bidder, who then proceeds with foreclosure, rather than managed by the city, which could’ve helped the owner avoid foreclosure or developed the site for public benefit. Legislators also say a land bank would have enabled the city to purchase properties during the price crash of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“When you own the land, you decide how and what’s developed on the land and how it’s dispersed out into the community,” said Debra Ack, special projects coordinator at the East New York Community Land Trust. (Photo by Adi Talwar)

“If we’re able to pass the land bank bill and set it up in a way that it could take the liens that are delinquent and find a way to work with the homeowners to get them right, or if necessary, transition them to community control or permanently affordable housing, then that would be a good outcome,” said Will Spisak, senior policy strategist at the New Economy Project, a nonprofit leading the campaign. 

Much of the change needed to put housing in the hands of tenants is beyond the jurisdiction of the City Council, so lawmakers introduced two resolutions that call on the state to take action too. 

One introduced by Public Advocate Jumaane Williams advocates for passage of a state bill that would require landlords to sell buildings to tenants before third parties. The other, introduced by District 1 Councilmember Christopher Marte, calls for the state to establish a public authority that could actually build social housing directly, rather than depend on outside developers.

“Every politician talks about Mitchell Lama 2.0, but we won’t get there unless we have the authority to actually build that type of housing and build new public housing,” said Marte. “We are putting the building blocks together through these bills and resolutions.”

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Tareq@citylimits.org. The reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

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The post Social Housing Supporters Revive Push to Boost Nonprofit & Community Ownership appeared first on City Limits.