New Future

Donald Trump is granting tariff exemption deals to wealthy donors and politically connected businesses, echoing the corrupt tactics of his first term. But this time, he’s fired the government watchdog that raised the alarm about them.

What caused Donald Trump to walk back on many of his tariffs last week was not domestic pressure but a run on the market for US Treasuries led by large institutional savers. If US debt is no longer a safe asset, then American hegemony is also at risk.

Donald Trump’s nominee for Internal Revenue Service director, Billy Long, just had his six-figure debt paid off by campaign donors whose firms are under scrutiny by the IRS for potential tax fraud.

The Left’s predicament today is not that there is no opposition or resistance and not that the Right has all the power. It’s the sense that we lack the levers of power we once wielded.

Europe’s wealthiest individual, Bernard Arnault, is head of luxury goods empire LVMH — and has a lot to lose from a spiraling global trade war. His reported direct line to the Trump administration shows how the superrich are working to defend their billions.

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain explains his union’s position on tariffs and argues that we need a political movement that puts working-class people first to address the current political crisis in the US.

Factory jobs are not inherently good jobs. Even if Donald Trump’s trade policies bring factories back to the United States, workers need unions to make those jobs well-paying and safe — and Trump has been the most anti-union president in years.

Vladimir Mayakovsky was a great poet of the October Revolution. Yet at the start of World War I, the young futurist had embraced the spirit of war — before seeing what it really meant.

Donald Trump is hoping his tariffs will goad his liberal opponents into touting free trade and scoffing at the working class. Democrats don’t have to take the bait.

Donald Trump’s attorney general Pam Bondi’s call for Luigi Mangione to receive the death penalty is a dangerous political intervention in support of the indefensible.

In Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, Donald Trump sees a far-right authoritarian who has something he doesn’t: an actual popular mandate.

Democrats are hoping Trump will discredit himself with a recession, while the Left sometimes fantasizes about crisis destabilizing capitalism itself. But economic crises cause massive human suffering and have recently redounded more to the Right than the Left.

In the United States, like in most countries, critics of Marxism present it as a rootless foreign import. Yet both American admirers of Karl Marx and conservatives’ attacks on him have granted Marxism a distinctive place in US public life.

Socialists can’t give up on the future.