Last May, Donald Trump  bragged on Truth Social that “IF PRESIDENT, I WOULD BE ABLE TO NEGOTIATE AN END TO THIS HORRIBLE AND RAPIDLY ESCALATING WAR WITHIN 24 HOURS” (all-caps styling his).

Last October, Trump upped the claim at an Iowa campaign rally: “I will end the war in Ukraine before I even step foot in the White House again.”

The war didn’t end prior to January 20. Nor did the war end by January 21.

However, on February 12, Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin finally held what Trump called a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call, after which Trump touted coming negotiations (with a possible assist from China, the Wall Street Journal reports) to end the war.

That’s a bad idea for at least three reasons.

One reason is the Russian regime — like other regimes, and for good reason — considers the US regime “not agreement capable.”  Going all the way back to its treaties with Native American tribes and continuing up to the present day, the US has a terrible record on holding up its end of deals and complying with provisions of treaties it signs on to.

Another  reason is Putin’s attitude toward negotiating with Trump specifically. Pepe Escobar characterizes that attitude as “negotiating with Team Trump is like playing chess with a pigeon: The bird walks all over the chessboard, sh*ts indiscriminately, knocks over pieces, declares victory, then runs away.”

The third reason, however, is the biggest: The war in Ukraine is not and never has been the US regime’s business.

The war might well have been averted if the US hadn’t fomented a coup in Ukraine in 2014, leading to the secessions of Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk, followed by eight years of US-Russia proxy war in the latter two areas and the US throwing gasoline on the fake fire of Ukraine as a prospective NATO member state.

The following full-on war might well have ended quickly — with only those seceded areas in Russian hands — if the US and its NATO lackeys hadn’t simultaneously armed/funded the Ukrainian forces, while leaning on Ukraine to refuse further negotiations after the Russian rejection of an early ceasefire draft.

Donald Trump negotiating with Vladimir Putin on behalf of Ukraine can’t plausibly produce an agreement which either side — let alone the Ukrainian side —  considers itself bound by.

The best course for the US, for Ukraine, and arguably for Russia, is for Trump to tell Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelenskyy that US involvement in the war — arms, funding, and supposed mediation assistance — is drawing to a close.

That would free Zelenskyy to drive the best deal he can and Putin to declare victory, settle for what he has, and pull Russia’s teat out of the Ukraine wringer.

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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So much going on! Will Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency  succeed in their supposed quests to shut down everything from USAID to the Department of Education to God knows what else?

As the establishment crowd moans and the MAGA crowd rejoices over the sketchy claims of cuts and eliminations, I’m adopting (and strongly suggesting that others adopt) a wait-and-see  attitude, a posture of sangfroid rather than swivet or schadenfreude (sorry if you have to look those terms up).

Just because someone associated with the government says X, one needn’t, and probably shouldn’t, unquestioningly believe X.

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete,” CIA director William J. Casey allegedly told US president Ronald Reagan at a 1981 White House meeting, “when everything the American public believes is false.”

Nearly four decades later, Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, put it a different way to journalist Michael Lewis: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.”

The fecal matter in question seems to be “disinformation” on an industrial scale. Not just false claims, but conflicting claims and stage magic style misdirection — so much of it all that any attempt at figuring out what’s really going on feels like a 24/7 game of Whac-A-Mole [TM].

Neither of those formulations are really new, nor is the phenomenon limited to Republican administrations. The old saw, “how can you tell a politician is lying? His lips move!” remains perennially popular for good reason.

Politicians, policy-makers, and all too many “thought leaders,” lie.

They lie about their actions.

They lie about the motives behind their actions.

They lie about the effects, both prospective and retrospective,  of their actions.

They lie knowingly, they lie constantly, and they lie for the most obvious reason: Telling the truth wouldn’t get them what they want. What they want, of course, is power. Ever more power, over more people and more things, world without end.

It’s not an occasional case, it’s a systemic attribute. As Friedrich Nietzsche noted in the 19th century, “everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.”

A collective entity built on lies must necessarily be made up of individual liars.

How can we know whether Trump, Musk, and friends are serious about cutting the size, scope, and power of government, or, if so, successful at doing so?

Figuring that out won’t be easy. Neither they, nor their opponents, nor their media hangers-on, are people any sensible American would ask for directions if lost, or leave alone in a room with their wallet.

Question everything. Then question the answers. Then hope for the best.

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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As January bled into February, Lora Kelly notes at The Atlantic, US president Donald Trump “announced 25 percent tariffs on the country’s North American neighbors, caused a panic in the stock market, eked out minor concessions from foreign leaders, and called the whole thing off (for 30 days, at least).”

Cue collective sigh of relief, but the title of the piece — “How the Tariff Whiplash Could Haunt Pricing” — tells an even more disturbing tale.

Yes, tariffs are terrible (btw, they’re not taxes on “the country’s North American neighbors,” but on the American consumers who buy goods from those neighbors), but there are worse things.

One of those worse things is regime uncertainty.

In his 1997 paper published under that title (and subtitled “Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed after the War”), economist Robert Higgs explains:

“[T]he insufficiency of private investment from 1935 through 1940 reflected a pervasive uncertainty among investors about the security of their property rights in their capital and its prospective returns. This uncertainty arose, especially though not exclusively, from the character of federal government actions and the nature of the Roosevelt administration …”

A long-term tariff is certainly economically damaging. It both raises prices on imports and enables domestic producers to raise THEIR prices on the same kinds of goods. It makes everyone (except the politically connected domestic producers who lobbied for it) poorer.

But at least a stable tariff can be planned for. Investors just factor it in to their decisions.

Suppose, however, that tariffs were set on a daily basis by spinning a roulette-type wheel. One day the tariff on, say, imported cars was 0%. The next day, 100%. The day after that, 29%.

Existing auto manufacturers would factor the maximum POSSIBLE tariffs into their prices rather than risk losing money on sudden changes, and few would invest in the risky business of building new plants to build more cars.

Consumers would get screwed on car prices every day; investors wouldn’t risk getting screwed on profitability going forward.

The actual effect of Trump’s tariff shenanigans might not be as stark as the daily roulette wheel hypothetical, but uncertainty will inevitably drive consumer prices up and interest/investment in producing potentially tariffed goods down.

“In this world,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1789, “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

Tariff roulette removes even that second element of certainty. And all we get in exchange is reduced general prosperity.

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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