“This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House,” US president Donald Trump claimed the day after an armed would-be assassin attempted to charge through a security barricade at the Washington Hilton. “It cannot be built fast enough!”

US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) agreed: “America has a problem. That problem is, it is very difficult to have a bunch of important people in the same place unless it is really, really secure.”

I partly agreed with Trump, Graham, and other prominent Republicans at the time: By all means, I wrote, make the White House as secure as possible, and even build a ballroom and other amenities … so long as the other half of the deal is that the president enters the White House grounds immediately upon his or her inauguration and doesn’t leave them for the four years of his or her term in office.

I was sincere in that suggestion, but it turns out Trump was less worried about the whole “security” thing than he and his supporters pretended.

On June 8, less than two months after the Hilton incident, Trump traveled to New York City so that he could grab a nap. At Madison Square Garden. During game three of the National Basketball Association finals. In front of 20,000 screaming fans.

The fans weren’t just screaming for their favorite teams (the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs). They were screaming at — and communicating via hostile hand signals with — Trump himself.

Why all the negativity, b-ball aficionados?

Statistically, any New York crowd will likely lean “anti-Trump” on politics, policy, and personality grounds, but even MAGA diehards had good reason to rage over this particular event … and that reason had a lot to do with my ballroom proposal.

The Secret Service locked down Madison Square Garden, and the surrounding streets, hours before Trump’s arrival.

Public events scheduled for the area were canceled or moved.

People who had already paid outrageous prices to attend — tickets averaged nearly $5,000 each — had to arrive hours earlier than normal so they would have time to stand in line and get screened (read “harassed”) by Secret Service agents before the game.

They eventually got the event they paid to see, but probably didn’t enjoy the last-minute addition of a circus to the schedule.

Then the source of their annoyance fell asleep, right in front of them.

Anyone with the bad luck to have things to do when and where a president or other Very Special Important Politician decides to go (I’ve been through several such incidents myself), or even lives along a presidential motorcade route, knows what a hassle all of that is.

Thus my proposal that presidents spare America such inconveniences while in office through mandatory (if necessary) sequestration on the White House grounds for the durations of their terms.

Trump clearly didn’t believe his own claims concerning presidential security, or he wouldn’t have decided to catch 40 winks in front of thousands of angry basketball fans.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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US president Donald Trump, Reuters reports, is “looking into” a US government stake in leading artificial intelligence firms. “There’s something very interesting about it, where it almost becomes a partnership with the American public,” Trump says.

This isn’t his first such initiative. Since beginning his second term, Trump has announced 15 such “equity stake” deals between the US government and various companies, at least ten of which have so far been formally consummated.

This time, though, his logic differs somewhat. He’s justified previous “equity stake” agreements on alleged national security concerns and on a supposed economic need to create jobs by “reshoring” industries which have moved production to other countries in recent decades.

This particular proposal feels more like the basis for some kind of “Universal Basic Income” scheme, or at least for funding increased welfare state entitlements, and doesn’t seem to differ markedly from a proposal by openly “socialist” US Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) to seize equity in AI firms for a “Sovereign Wealth Fund.”

So, let’s talk about Trump and “socialism.”

“Socialism,” he said in a 2019 speech, “promises prosperity but delivers poverty. Socialism promises unity but delivers hate and division. Socialism promises a better future, but always returns to the darkest chapters of the past.”

“Socialism” suffers from too many, and too incompatible, definitions — ranging from direct worker ownership of businesses, to welfare statism financed through heavy taxation of those businesses, to the government ownership of  those business as a supposed proxy for those workers — but Trump’s points are fair ones with regard to, at least, the latter two types.

Yet Trump frequently argues those points with himself … and loses, agreeing that he was wrong in that speech. When it comes to actual policy, he’s arguably the most “socialist” American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, even exceeding FDR in some areas.

During COVID, he launched a socialist scheme to develop and deploy a vaccine. Early on, he temporarily invoked what the Russian Bolsheviks called “war communism,” using the Defense Production Act to temporarily nationalize several companies for production of ventilators (that ended when it turned out the market had solved the problem quickly and efficiently without such “help”). And of course we all remember the budget-busting  “stimulus” checks and “payroll protection” loans.

During both of his terms, he’s tried to cover up the devastating effects of his tariff schemes with handouts and bailouts for the worst victims of those effects, like farmers who saw world markets for their goods virtually disappear overnight.

By virtually any metric, Trump is devoted to central economic planning and government control of American industry.  To, that is, socialism.

What separates him from other, actually admitted, socialists like Sanders and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani isn’t that they’re any more or less committed to “socialism,” it’s the specific TYPE of socialism.

As “democratic socialists,” Sanders and Mamdani focus on a class warfare theory in which wealth needs to be redistributed from a capitalist “owner” class to an exploited “worker” class. It’s a dumb theory, with exactly the same effects as those described in Trump’s speech.

Trump, on the other hand, is a “national socialist” (you may have seen that term elsewhere; I won’t belabor the implication). His theory is less about internal economic class divisions than about a collectivist imagining of the “nation” as an indivisible unit. It’s not “the workers” who are exploited by “capitalists,” it’s “the nation” which is exploited by, and requires protection from, foreigners who make cheaper and/or better widgets of this or that kind.

Those seemingly different “socialisms” historically lead to the same results. Trump’s version is no exception.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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It may be 64 years after the New York Mets losing 120 baseball matches in their debut season led manager Casey Stengel to plead “Can’t anyone here play this game?” Yet The Wall Street Journal columnist William A. Galston notes that the same question could still apply to another “two monumentally inept teams.”

He doesn’t have in mind the Chicago White Sox, whose 121-loss season in 2024 led first-year Met Ed Kranepool to confess to the Journal that  “I feel sorry for them,” or the Colorado Rockies beating the equally longstanding Mets record for rock-bottom run differential last year.  Instead, Galston has in mind the Democrats and Republicans, “Capitol Hill’s Unlovable Losers” (May 27).

Less than two full years after the 2024 presidential election, Galston has merely to nod at the former party’s abject failure to learn from their loss, and the latter’s squandering of what little momentum remains from their win. UCLA School of Law professor Stephen Bainbridge adds: “at least we’re better off than the UK, which has about half-a-dozen incompetent teams.”

The iconic cinematic line from WarGames about it being “a strange game” if logic dictates that “the only winning move is not to play” applies not only to nuclear war, but the nuclear-option scorched-earth tactics that increasingly dominate electoral and cultural wars. While the suggested alternative of “a nice game of chess” offers at least a level playing field and an even chance to win — and even the most underdog of sports teams at least have some real if slim possibility of an upset — all-encompassing politicization fares even worse than such comparison implies.

After all, the psychological investment into two-sided competitive games isn’t quite as zero-sum as the scoring suggests. John Astin’s Dr. Gangreen in the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes animated episode “The Great Tomato Wars” finds “the agony of defeat” to be as appealing as “the thrill of victory” — as he also puts it: “I hate ties! I like winners and losers” — and one need not go that far to appreciate a well-played contest. Affairs of state divert resources from win-win voluntary deals to sports arenas whose business doesn’t need them to earn consumer dollars, and other battlegrounds where the vintage 2004 Alien vs. Predator tagline “whoever wins … we lose.” perpetually applies to a closer-to-home species of space invaders.

For a less unlovable political loser, Galston could have turned to Jimmy Breslin, the author of a book about the 1962 Mets named after Stengel’s remark. While Kranepool helped take his team from last place to triumph in the 1969 World Series, Breslin finished in penultimate place as Norman Mailer’s running mate for NYC mayor.

Observing that “the last thing that New York can afford at this time is a politician thinking in normal politicians’ terms,” Breslin offered not just a long-shot chance of change at the top (Mailer optimistically estimated a chance of winning the race around 5%) but the promise of moving much of daily life to local community decision-making by neighbors — and so out of the control of elected, and unelected, officials entirely.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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