Commentary

President Trump declared that April 2 will be ‘Liberation Day’ for America. Just as we celebrate our political independence on the Fourth of July, we now have occasion this Second of April to celebrate America’s economic independence.

At a town hall question and answer with Elon Musk in Green Bay, Wisconsin on Sunday on behalf of Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel, the White House Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) revealed that since 2021, 5.5 million non-citizens have been given Social Security numbers.

When Donald Trump entered office, he faced a number of choices that had confronted the last three Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. They all had the choice to either shrink government and reduce deficits or slow government growth while cutting taxes. They had the choice of using American power to restore deterrence by invading belligerents (e.g., Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan) or targeting enemies without deploying ground troops to change governments.

President Donald Trump has expanded his tariffs to include new 25 percent tariffs on all trucks and cars and automobile parts being imported into the U.S. in a March 26 proclamation, citing national security concerns with outsourced automobile production, stating, “automobiles and certain automobile parts are being imported into the United States in such quantities and under such circumstances as to threaten to impair the national security of the United States.” Trump cited a February 2019 report by then-Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross that highlighted defense production interests being upheld by a strong U.S. auto industry, stating, “Many of the most important innovations and technological advancements over the past 100 years have come from the automotive sector, and the strength of this sector drives technological advancements in the defense sector. Today, the defense sector is heavily interconnected and reliant on the automotive industry for R&D to meet current and future military requirements such as vehicle electrification, autonomous driving, hydrogen fuel cell products, advanced semiconductor utilization, radar, laser and sonar ranging, global positioning system (‘GPS’) navigation, anti-lock brakes, reduction in vehicle weight (‘lightweighting’), and fuel efficiency efforts. Product development in partnership between U.S. automotive manufacturers and defense agencies results in technological advancements in military aircraft, space aircraft, unmanned aerial systems, missiles, and submarines.”

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in a case testing the limits of the nondelegation doctrine, an issue that may sound lawyerly, but which is of the utmost importance in ensuring separation among the federal branches and accountability for the important decisions that affect us all. Nondelegation is the principle that one branch of government may not give away its power to another. Thus, Congress, vested by the Constitution with the “legislative powers,” cannot give those powers to the executive branch. And yet it appears to do so routinely with broadly-written laws that invite bureaucrats to make the decisions and set the rules that will bind the public.

According to the United Nations, “Climate change is a global emergency that goes beyond national borders.” From the World Economic Forum, “Urgent global action must be taken to reduce emissions and safeguard human health from the multi-pronged negative impacts of climate change globally.” From every multinational institution in the world, we hear the same message. From the World Bank, “The world is battling a perfect storm of climate, conflict, economic, and nature crises.” From the World Health Organization, “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat.”

Fresh off its decision to claw back $20 billion in “greenhouse gas reduction” money the Biden Environmental Protection Agency parked at Citibank, the Trump administration is setting its sights on another massive chunk of planned green spending receiving less attention. The $7 billion Solar for All program – part of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund -- is meant to “enable over 900,000 households in low-income and disadvantaged communities to benefit from distributed solar energy,” according to the EPA’s website. 

For decades, K-12 schools have wandered away from a time-tested, research-based method of teaching reading: phonics. Student scores have plunged to historic lows, but some states are turning back to the practice of teaching letter sounds—if teacher unions do not spoil the efforts first. Phonics instructs children to identify letters and their pronunciation to construct words, supplying the tools needed to tackle combinations of letters. “Cueing” and its related methods, such as “look-say” and “whole word,” show children a picture with a word beneath it (such as a picture of a dog with the letters “d-o-g” beneath). Students are supposed to connect the visual with the word below. American Public Media reporter and podcaster Emily Hanford has documented the widespread failure of cueing that has haunted schools and students nationwide for generations.

Bidenomics is over, and Trump 2.0 means that America’s entrepreneur president puts citizens to work, literally. For instance, the latest manufacturing numbers for February show that factory jobs just grew by the biggest jump in 15 months. Unlike his predecessor Joe Biden, who shed manufacturing jobs at a pace of -9,000/jobs per month in 2024, Trump proves the efficacy of his on-shoring approach. Moreover, 93% of the total job gains were in the private sector, rather than budget-busting government bloat positions. How is Trump achieving this renewal?

During President Trump’s address to Congress last month, he announced a crucial new initiative to defend the U.S. homeland—the Golden Dome, a next-generation missile defense shield to be “all made in the USA.” Trump noted that President Reagan had wanted to build such a system, but the technology was not yet available. He said that we now have the technology. Israel has such a system, and the United States should have one too.

For years, the left has advanced utter untruths for cheap partisan purposes that it knew at the time were all false. And now when caught, they just shrug and say they were lying all along.

In 2020, the concept of home-based “pandemic pods” went viral. At the time, Cato Institute scholar Jason Bedrick and EdChoice fellow Matthew Ladner released “Let’s Get Small: Microschools, Pandemic Pods, and the Future of Education in America,” a report on the phenomenon.

At his recent address to a joint session of Congress on March 4, President Donald Trump noted that upon taking office he had “imposed an immediate freeze… on all foreign aid” via a January 20 executive order.

The Wall Street Journal has consistently criticized Trump’s economic policies, particularly his ongoing “trade war” with Canada, over the past several weeks. And certainly, the tensions are regrettable. Trump’s trolling of the insufferable Justin Trudeau, with talk of Canada becoming the “51st state,” perhaps only galvanized the Canadian left. It unfortunately may ensure that the only real hope for a Canadian return to normality, the election of Pierre Poilievre, may be lost. That said, does the WSJ truly believe that the current $1.7 trillion budget deficit stacked on top of $36 trillion in national debt and an annual $1 trillion trade deficit are sustainable in any fashion? Do they believe any Republican president would have survived the midterms if he cut or “reformed” Social Security? If so, consult the fate of the recommendations of left-wing Barack Obama’s 2010 Simpson-Bowles commission (“The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform”).

St. Patrick’s Day usually conjures images of partying, Catholicism, Irish nationalism and, perhaps most famously, the color green: green clothes, green shamrocks, green beer and green rivers. So my students are often surprised when I tell them that St. Patrick’s Day was once a solemn feast day when you’d be far more likely to see the color blue. In fact, there’s even a color known as St. Patrick’s blue.