Trump is now weighing sending in the US military. This presidency looks like an extension of George W. Bush’s. 

The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meets this week and is expected to keep its target policy interest rate (the federal funds rate) unchanged at 4.5 percent.

This is unlikely to please Donald Trump who has repeatedly pushed Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and the FOMC to adopt a lower target interest rate and further force down interest rates on federal debt. Moreover, Trump has signaled that he wants the US central bank to be more like the European Central Bank which has been more aggressively forcing down interest rates in recent months.

The Trump administration is spending more than the Biden administration, compared to the same period last year. This is no small feat, as the proxies that stood in for the senile and incontinent former president spent at an extravagant pace in their final year, even by federal government standards.

Fiscal year 2025 is virtually guaranteed to produce a deficit in excess of $2 trillion. The current year-to-date deficit stands at $1.05 trillion seven months in, with the April surplus now behind us.

On March 20, President Trump signed an executive order “Eliminating Information Silos.” The order directed heads of federal agencies to make sure officials designated by the president “have full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems.” The executive order did not attract much attention until it was more recently revealed that the administration was working with tech company Palantir to create a database containing all information collected by all federal agencies on all US citizens.

Hunter DeRensis writes at The American Conservative, “Israel is a rogue nuclear state that is aggressive abroad and despotic at home. Like so many other bad things in the world, it is not the responsibility of Washington to fix this faraway problem. But it is a moral duty that our government cease enabling its criminal and destabilizing behavior.”

Tucker Carlson opposes Trump’s new war, so Trump claims to have invented “America First” and repeats banal slogans about weapons of mass destruction. 

Remember the glamorous days of train travel? Like the 20th Century Limited connecting New York and Chicago? In 1928, the popular 20th Century Limited exemplified the profitability of passenger rail. Yet, times have changed, and America’s passenger trains have lost money since 1946.

“The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program.”

Japan‘s economy contracted at a higher pace than expected in the first quarter of 2025, according to official data for the January to March period released on Friday.