Editorials from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and others

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

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Sept. 5 – The New York Times says Trump’s trade policies are damaging U.S. economy and it’s global leadership

When the United States pushed to reduce tariffs and other trade barriers in the wake of World War II, much of the world followed its lead, embracing the argument from America’s leaders that increasing trade would increase prosperity.

Now, as President Trump pushes to reverse that history, raising new barriers to limit imports, it is increasingly clear that the world is no longer persuaded by America’s approach to economic policy. Other nations are not, for the most part, retaliating against the Trump administration’s policies by imposing higher tariffs on American goods. They also are not, for the most part, imposing higher tariffs on goods imported from countries other than the United States. The rest of the world is rejecting Mr. Trump’s protectionism.

Mr. Trump’s top trade adviser, Jamieson Greer, recently wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion that the Trump administration is forging a “new global trading order.” In reality, the United States is walking out of the system it created. While other nations regret its departure, they are not inclined to follow in its self-destructive footsteps. Fears of a global trade war have not materialized because the leaders of other nations have recognized what Mr. Trump seems unable to grasp – that by raising tariffs, they would be hurting their own countries. The result, as the World Trade Organization reported last month, is that “a broader cycle of tit-for-tat retaliation that could be very damaging to global trade has so far been avoided.”

A sign of the folly of Mr. Trump’s trade policy is that it has inspired no apparent envy.

One reason that other nations are not raising their own tariffs is that Mr. Trump’s policies are not delivering the promised benefits. The president has long insisted that higher tariffs would protect American manufacturers from unfair foreign competition, leading American consumers to buy more goods produced in American factories, which in turn would expand domestic employment. But the number of Americans with factory jobs has declined by 28,000 since Mr. Trump took office. While the administration has cited some big, high-profile investments in new factories, the broader pattern is that companies are canceling or delaying their expansion plans. Spending on factory construction in the United States, a good indicator of the outlook for domestic manufacturing, declined in each of the first six months of Mr. Trump’s second term, ending a period of rapid growth under President Joe Biden.

Factories are long-term investments, and Mr. Trump has given companies little reason for confidence in his own constancy. Moreover, because he has imposed the tariffs by fiat, rather than obtaining congressional approval, what he has done can easily be undone by a future administration. And a federal appeals court ruled in August that many of the new tariffs are illegal. The Trump administration is appealing that decision to the Supreme Court.

Tariffs also are a double-edged sword for American manufacturers, raising the prices of imported materials and components. Many of the products “Made in America” include a significant share of parts and materials made in other countries.

As we wrote earlier this year, reviving domestic manufacturing is a worthy goal. The post-World War II expansion of global trade delivered on its promise of prosperity, but it also caused real problems in the United States and other developed countries. The distribution of benefits was uneven; millions of factory workers lost their jobs. Today, tariffs could be deployed judiciously to support the development of new industries and to protect critical technologies. Some of America’s trading partners have used tariffs to pursue these kinds of goals.

Mr. Trump, however, has raised tariffs indiscriminately. The average effective tariff rate for the United States has soared to 18.6 percent from 2.5 percent when Mr. Trump took office in January, according to the Yale Budget Lab. The new level is far higher than in any other developed nation. The Trump administration boasts that the tariffs are raising billions of dollars in new revenue – perhaps as much as half a trillion dollars per year. But American consumers are largely paying the cost of these new taxes. The tariffs could reduce the purchasing power of the average American household by $2,100 by 2027, the Budget Lab calculates.

Mr. Trump also has argued that tariffs will serve as a cudgel to secure concessions from trading partners, expanding access to foreign markets, and the administration has pointed to agreements with the European Union, Japan and several other nations. Some smaller countries have not even waited to get to the bargaining table to offer deals. After the United States imposed a 33 percent tariff on imports from North Macedonia, for example, the tiny Balkan nation announced that it would eliminate all tariffs on American imports in the hope of better terms.

The willingness of other nations to reduce their own trade barriers, however, actually reflects their continued commitment to the principles that Mr. Trump is rejecting. When Israel announced this spring that it was eliminating tariffs on American imports and easing other kinds of import controls, officials acknowledged that they were acting to appease Mr. Trump. But they emphasized that Israelis would benefit. “What is good for the U.S. is certainly good for the Israeli consumer,” Nir Barkat, the Israeli minister of economy and industry, said in announcing the policy. “Expanding imports from the U.S. will encourage competition, introduce new players into the market, and lower prices for the Israeli people.”

The most telling evidence that countries are not merely putting a brave face on a bad situation is that they are not raising tariffs on other trading partners. They are rejecting Mr. Trump’s approach to trade even in relationships in which they hold the upper hand. The European Union, to take just one example, has not only refrained from significant retaliation against the United States. It also has not emulated Mr. Trump by imposing tariffs on low-income Asian nations in an attempt to bolster the prospects of European manufacturers.

Instead, Mr. Trump has prompted a wave of efforts to negotiate lower tariffs for trade that does not involve the United States. South Korea is pushing to deepen economic ties with Southeast Asia. Canada has resumed long-stalled talks on a free-trade agreement with South American nations. And a number of nations, including India and Spain, are seeking to expand trade with China, undermining the strategic interests of the United States. Mr. Trump’s trade policies are causing our allies to become closer with our rivals.

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, summed up the prevailing mood after hosting a meeting of world leaders in July. “If the United States doesn’t want to buy, we will find new partners,” he said. “The world is big, and it’s eager to do business with Brazil.”

Other nations continue to pursue the example established by the United States decades ago because they continue to see trade, managed judiciously, as a path to greater prosperity. The Trump administration, by rejecting this global consensus, has damaged both the American economy and American global leadership.

ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/opinion/trump-tariffs-international-reaction.html

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Sept. 5 – The Wall Street Journal says tariffs, uncertainty have led to a stall in hiring

President Trump fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner last month because he didn’t like the monthly jobs numbers. He claimed the numbers were “rigged.” But Friday’s monthly report for August confirms that job creation has stalled amid his tariff barrage.

Employers added a mere 22,000 jobs last month while the numbers were revised down for the previous two by a combined 21,000. This means only 107,000 new jobs were created in the last four months-an average of 27,000. Monthly job gains averaged 167,000 last year.

Nearly all of the new jobs last month were in social assistance and healthcare (46,800), which rely on government spending. Industries with high tariff exposure shed workers, including manufacturing (-12,000) and wholesale trade (-11,700). Transportation equipment manufacturing lost 14,500, and manufacturing jobs overall this year have declined by 38,000. That tariff golden age is still over the horizon.

The Occam’s razor explanation is the uncertainty and additional costs from Mr. Trump’s border taxes. Caterpillar estimates that tariffs will cost the equipment maker $1.8 billion this year. Deere projects a tariff hit of about $600 million, mainly from higher steel and aluminum costs. Deere is also hurting because soybean farmers have seen their market share in China shrink after its trade retaliation. Tariffs are slamming U.S. auto makers like Ford ($2 billion tariff cost this year).

Jobs in mining also notably declined last month by 6,000. Oil and gas producers say the tariffs have increased prices for materials and caused them to pull back on drilling. Construction job growth has stalled since January and fell last month by 7,000, likely owing to the President’s immigration crackdown and higher building costs from tariffs.

Nearly all industries on the Institute for Supply Management survey last month reported a slowdown from tariff uncertainty. “All decision making is currently dominated by tariff considerations,” a retail company said. A transportation equipment maker noted: “This current environment is much worse than the Great Recession of 2008-09.”

Unfilled jobs on the National Federation of Independent Business survey in August were also the lowest since July 2020. Nurses and social workers can still find jobs, but they’re rare hiring bright spots. Of the 511,000 net new private jobs since January, 453,000 have been in social assistance and healthcare. While corporate profits have held up well overall, why hire if you don’t know what your supply lines or margins will look like?

Mr. Trump blamed the Federal Reserve, as he always does, and he told Americans to look for the “real” jobs numbers a year from now when companies supposedly finish building new plants. The jobs report probably does lock in a 25-basis point cut in interest rates this month. The Fed may even do 50, but this won’t revive the jobs market even if Mr. Trump and Wall Street approve.

What Mr. Trump needs is a broad revival in business confidence of the kind that accompanied his November victory and appeared before his tax on imports and willy-nilly interventions in private business decisions. Repeat after us: Tariffs are taxes, and taxes hurt economic growth.

Mr. Trump this week asked the Supreme Court to hear the legal challenge to his tariffs on a fast track. The best news for the economy would be if the Court takes up his challenge and finds them unconstitutional.

ONLINE: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/august-jobs-report-hiring-donald-trump-tariffs-federal-reserve-23606e84?mod=editorials_article_pos6

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Sept. 7 – The Guardian on precedent set by US strike on speedboat

More than five decades ago, Richard Nixon launched a “war on drugs”. The drugs won. Now Donald Trump is turning a failed metaphor into a worse reality.

On Tuesday the US president claimed that the military had killed 11 drug traffickers from Venezuela, posting footage of the strike that US officials said took place on a speedboat in international waters in the Caribbean. The administration supplied no evidence for its claim that the boat contained Tren de Aragua members, or drugs, and gave varying accounts of its destination. It also warned that there was more to come, with the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, arguing that intercepting boats had not curbed the drugs problem: “What will stop them is when you blow them up.” Earlier this year, Mr Trump secretly ordered the use of military force against cartels internationally.

With US warships patrolling the coast of Venezuela – and F35 fighter jets reportedly dispatched to Puerto Rico – some fear that this could be pretext for a disastrous intervention, as its president, Nicolás Maduro, has suggested. Alternatively, Washington may hope it unnerves other regime members into unseating him, or prompts Mr Maduro himself to flee – two longstanding dreams. The US has already offered a $50m bounty for his arrest. At best, this may be political theatre, with both Mr Maduro and Mr Trump posturing for their bases.

If this campaign truly targets the drugs trade, it is dangerous and misguided. Like rebranding the Department of Defense as the “Department of War”, it speaks to Mr Trump’s love of macho spectacle. But it sets a precedent for launching military strikes on whomever the US authorities wish, without congressional approval or a UN mandate, simply by declaring that they are “at war”.

The Obama administration stretched the boundaries of executive power, and any plausible definition of self-defence and imminent threat, with its campaign of drone assassinations, including those of American citizens far from battlefields, under the hazy label of the “war on terror”. Despite the high civilian toll and minimal transparency, it met lamentably little political pushback.

The Trump administration has gone even further. Cartels are spreading and entrenching themselves in Latin America, devastating communities. But arbitrarily designating them as terrorists is plainly a nonsense. Extrajudicial killings of this kind are always wrong. Offenders who would not face the death penalty if charged are executed without due process. Innocents inevitably fall victim too. Many children were among the thousands killed in Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs” in the Philippines. The former president is now awaiting trial for crimes against humanity at the international criminal court.

Summary executions are also counterproductive. They make it harder to gather information, and strikes on foreign soil would make governments less likely to cooperate with US efforts, due to the domestic backlash – especially in Mexico. That would not only hamper the fight against drugs, but also Mr Trump’s efforts to curb migration.

To tackle its devastating fentanyl epidemic, the US must ultimately tackle demand: an immense task, since it means addressing the conditions that birthed this crisis, as well as entrenched addictions. In the meantime, carefully targeted action and financial disruption would be more effective than killing cartel members. Above all, the administration should stem the flow of US arms, which have supercharged violence in Mexico and elsewhere.

ONLINE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/07/the-guardian-view-on-the-war-on-drugs-donald-trump-is-turning-a-failed-metaphor-into-a-more-dangerous-reality

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Sept. 5 – The Washington Post on the rebranding of the DoD as the Department of War

Euphemisms distort thought, and no entities are more adept at producing euphemisms than governments. President Donald Trump’s rebranding on Friday of the Department of Defense as the Department of War is a worthy blow against government euphemism. Perhaps it can be followed by clearer thinking about the military’s role at home and abroad.

President George Washington created the War Department as a Cabinet-level agency in 1789 to oversee the Army. It was joined by a Cabinet-level Navy Department in 1798. In 1947, the service branches were merged under the National Military Establishment, headed by a defense secretary. Two years later, Congress created the Defense Department, headquartered in the Pentagon.

Trump’s executive order cannot undo the legislation enacted in 1949, but it authorizes “Department of War” for use in labels and communications. Trump also proposes that Congress make the change official, and the National Defense Authorization Act (which normally passes in December) would be a natural vehicle.

It is more delicate to say that the Pentagon’s mission is defense than war. But the former depends on the latter. The extent to which the Pentagon can defend U.S. interests around the world is tied to the expectation that the United States can fight and win wars. That expectation is what shapes the calculations of rival states. As Trump said Friday afternoon in the Oval Office: “I’m going to let these people go back to the Department of War and figure out how to maintain peace.”

Concepts such as “defense” and “security” have a tendency for bureaucratic mission creep. The Biden administration’s 2022 National Defense Strategy mentioned “climate” 19 times. Climate change is a problem, but fighting it is not the military’s job. Nor is nation-building.

Clarifying that the Pentagon is in the business of war-fighting could have other salutary effects. Congress has not declared war as the Constitution contemplated since World War II, even as U.S. troops have fought and died in wars large and small around the world. Renaming the Pentagon won’t cause Congress to suddenly change its ways, but at least it is a reminder that the powers the Pentagon exercises are subject to legislative oversight.

The change won’t necessarily have the political effects Trump desires. He is making a point of using National Guard troops for domestic purposes – in D.C. and perhaps other cities soon. If those troops are commanded by the War Department, rather than the Defense Department, might it prompt more opposition to their deployment? By stripping away the euphemism, the name change bluntly highlights for the citizenry the power that these troops represent: They are not police officers but soldiers.

Trump’s opponents complain about the aggressive connotations of the new name. But the United States is protected by the most lethal and vigilant fighting force ever assembled, no matter what it’s called. The new name could prompt more focused debate about how to use it.

ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/09/05/war-department-defense-trump-rebrand/

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Sept. 5 – The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says both parties should demand RFK Jr.’s removal from post as HHS Secretary

How many times is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. going to be allowed to lie right to U.S. senators’ faces about his deliberate dismantling of America’s vaccine shields before they finally insist that President Donald Trump remove this dangerous anti-science zealot from the nation’s top medical post?

Kennedy, who never should have been but is Trump’s secretary for Health and Human Services, was at it again Thursday morning. In unhinged, ranting testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, the nation’s foremost anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist repeatedly claimed to be rescuing the very health infrastructure he has been busily destroying.

Predictably true to form, Kennedy lobbed lie after lie at senators – about the documented success of COVID vaccines in saving millions of lives; about the efficacy of vaccination science generally; about his own very public crusade to discredit and limit access to vaccines; and about the reliability of mainstream medical organizations that represent the combined expertise of hundreds of thousands of physicians and other medical experts.

Significantly, even some Republican senators seemed to have had enough.

Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo. – who, unlike RFK, is an actual physician with actual medical training – noted that vaccines have saved more than 150 million lives worldwide in the past half-century. Barrasso asked Kennedy if he supported the kind of “clear, evidence-based and trustworthy” vaccine guidance that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has long provided.

“We’re going to make it clear, evidence-based and trustworthy for the first time in history,” Kennedy responded, breezily slandering the tireless work of generations of federal medical experts.

That comment perfectly encapsulates the upside-down universe in which Kennedy operates. It’s a place in which the truly astonishing accomplishments of mainstream medical science over the past century – much of it spearheaded by the CDC and related federal agencies – are to be diminished, denied or even condemned in favor of quack science and conspiracy theories that impugn the motives of some of the most accomplished and selfless medical professionals in the world.

Thursday’s hearing unfolded against a backdrop of Kennedy’s determined sabotage of the CDC and other mainstream entities.

He has used his pulpit as the nation’s health czar to downplay the effectiveness of measles vaccines even amid fresh outbreaks in anti-vax enclaves in Texas and elsewhere. He has canceled almost $500 million in federal funding for mRNA technology, the most promising weapon in the arsenal against future pandemics.

He has removed respected top medical experts, including CDC Director Susan Monarez, and replaced them with vaccination skeptics like himself. Most damning, he has presided over the restriction of COVID vaccine availability to young people against the advice of the best minds in medicine.

This was all predictable. When Kennedy sat before senators in January for confirmation to his current post, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who also is a physician, extracted from RFK a promise that he wouldn’t limit access to vaccines. That he has so clearly violated that promise shouldn’t have surprised anyone, given his history.

Cassidy called him out on Thursday: “We’re denying people vaccines,” he said.

“You’re wrong,” retorted Kennedy – another lie. In fact, the move under Kennedy to narrow COVID vaccine recommendations to exclude healthy children and pregnant women (in complete defiance of expert medical advice) will inevitably limit access, because health insurance providers use CDC guidance to determine what treatments their policies will cover.

In the past, Kennedy has promoted the debunked claim of a link between vaccination and autism. He once called the miracle of COVID vaccines “a crime against humanity.”

And, no, he hasn’t climbed out of that rabbit hole. On Thursday, he continued to claim – falsely – that there’s some mystery regarding just how effective the initial COVID vaccines were because “they didn’t have the data.” Wrong again. The National Institutes of Health and many other respected entities, using various scientific models, put the numbers of lives saved in the U.S. alone in the millions.

The most illuminating part of Thursday’s hearing was when Kennedy was asked whether Trump deserves a Nobel Prize for his first administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” COVID vaccine development. In fact, that unprecedented success will stand as that administration’s best accomplishment, despite Trump’s current refusal to play it up to his anti-vax base.

RFK, having already cast unsupported doubt on the efficacy of that success, nonetheless had to declare that, yes, his boss deserves a Nobel Prize for it. This is Trump we’re talking about; had Kennedy been asked whether the president can walk on water, he likely would have had to find a diplomatic way to answer in order to keep his job.

Still, the logical disconnect there is illuminating. Like most presidents, Trump is no doubt obsessed with how history will view him – and his COVID vaccine success could balance out a lot of much darker narratives. He should consider whether it’s in the interest of his own legacy to continue employing a top health official who seems determined to do as much or more damage to America’s health than those vaccines mitigated.

ONLINE: https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/article_62395043-e9fe-4559-a231-56a82dc5edc1.html