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  • The Week's Saturday Wrap
    Trump’s trade triumph, Democrats’ self-loathing, and Columbia’s surrender

     
    controversy of the week

    Tariffs: Is Trump winning his trade war?

    President Trump is getting results from his “Hulkamania” approach to international trade, said John Authers in Bloomberg. At his golf course in Scotland this week, Trump sealed what he modestly called “the greatest deal of all time” with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Under that agreement, most EU imports to the U.S. will face a 15% tariff—down from Trump’s threatened 30%— while the bloc will impose zero tariffs on many American exports. The EU is just the latest trading partner to cave to Trump’s bullying rather than punch back with retaliatory tariffs: Japan made a one-sided 15% deal last week, while Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines have agreed to tariffs of about 20%. Trump’s “hard-power” tactics are a welcome change of pace, said Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal. For decades, U.S. presidents “sought to cajole American allies” to open their markets more to American goods—“and got nowhere.” But Trump bet that access to the world’s biggest economy and security guarantees were “so valuable” that countries would “pay a much higher price than his predecessors ever got.” He bet right. 

    But it’s not clear exactly what’s in Trump’s deals, most of which “have yet to be committed to paper,” said Daniel Desrochers in Politico. His administration has touted an EU commitment to purchase $750 billion in U.S. energy and invest an extra $600 billion in America by 2028, and a pledge by Japan to invest $550 billion. But a senior EU official said its investment number was based on the “intentions” of private companies, over which the bloc has no control. And Japanese officials have said their country will invest a maximum of $11 billion, with most of the rest made up of loans. These conflicting details are “raising doubts about how much Trump has really succeeded in lowering foreign barriers or drawing in foreign investment for U.S. businesses.” 

    Sure, the details are “vague,” said Nicole Russell in USA Today. But if the final investments “happen at anywhere close to the levels promised,” they’ll usher in a “golden age” for American workers. That influx of cash should drive “job growth in agriculture, energy, and other vital sectors.” The success of Trump’s tariffs was “undeniable” even before his EU triumph, said Daniel McCarthy in the New York Post. What’s “more remarkable” is how they’ve defied “the very laws of economics—or rather, the law as laid down by economists,” who predicted an inflationary disaster. Instead, the U.S. economy has motored along, with consumer prices barely ticking up and tariffs adding more than $27 billion to federal coffers last month alone. 

    America will eventually pay the price for tariffs, said Eric Boehm in Reason. The 15% toll on Japanese car imports, for example, is supposed to boost domestic auto manufacturing. But it will only encourage companies like Toyota—which has spent billions of dollars on U.S. factories—to build elsewhere. With a Trump-imposed 50% tariff on steel and aluminum, and a 25% tax on imported car parts, it will be cheaper for Toyota “to import finished cars from Japan.” And don’t count out inflation just yet, said Ana Swanson in The New York Times. Consumers have largely been spared price hikes so far because companies stockpiled goods before tariffs kicked in and then swallowed the costs of import taxes. But economic research suggests that will change over the next six to 18 months, as stockpiles disappear and firms pass on tariff fees for appliances, autos, toys, and more. Only then will we know if “the president’s plan for global trade” is an “economic success.”

     
     
    VIEWPOINT

    Blue-on-blue crime

    “America hates the Democratic Party. Polls have shown Team Blue’s favorability (33%) crashing to record lows. Even Democrats have learned to hate Democrats. Hating the Democratic establishment has always been a core part of progressives’ political identity, but mainstream liberals have had good reason lately to sour on it, too. Their party just lost to a felonious authoritarian miscreant again. And not only did it lose, its leaders sabotaged its chances by covering up Joe Biden’s declining health until the issue blew up in their faces four months before the election.”

    Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch

     
     
    briefing

    ICE in the fields


    American agriculture relies on undocumented workers. What happens now that they’re being deported?

    How many workers are undocumented? 
    About 40% of the nation’s nearly 1.2 million hired farmworkers lack legal status, according to the Agriculture Department. In California, which produces over a third of the nation’s vegetables and three-quarters of its fruits and nuts, undocumented migrants make up more than 75% of agricultural labor. Some are skilled supervisors who oversee planting and harvesting; others operate and maintain tractors, irrigation systems, and other machines crucial to modern farming. Other food production industries also rely heavily on migrant labor, with 30% to 50% of the country’s 500,000 meatpacking workers lacking visas. All are now at high risk of detention and deportation, because workplace raids have proved to be one of the easiest ways for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to fulfill the Trump administration’s quota of 3,000 migrant arrests a day. American farmers have warned that those raids are causing labor shortages across the agriculture sector, leaving them without enough workers to pick crops or milk cows. “If we deported everyone here that’s undocumented,” said Idaho onion grower Shay Myers, “we would starve to death.” 

    Why don’t farmers hire legal migrants? 
    Because it’s easier and cheaper to use undocumented workers. To secure seasonal H-2A agricultural visas, farmers must navigate a tangle of 200-plus regulations, first proving they tried to hire Americans, and then agreeing to provide housing, transportation, and meals for the guest workers. Farmers must also prove each H-2A recipient will be paid at least the prevailing farm wage, which at nearly $20 an hour in California is higher than the $16.50 minimum wage made by most farmworkers in the state. Those costs and bureaucracy mean the H-2A program favors large agribusiness firms, and while H-2A employment has increased tenfold since 2005, it still accounts for only 17% of the agricultural workforce. 

    How have workers responded to the raids? 
    Many foreign-born laborers, both those with and without legal status, are choosing to stay home rather than risk being caught in the dragnet. After federal agents arrested 76 workers during a mid-June raid on an Omaha meat-processing plant, most of the remaining workers failed to turn up the next day, leaving the plant to operate at 15% capacity. That same week, dozens of migrants were arrested in a series of ICE raids on Southern California farms. “We’re being hunted like animals,” one undocumented farmworker told The Guardian. “You can’t go out peacefully to do things, or go to work with any peace of mind.” The raids frightened off many workers in California’s Ventura County, with some farms losing up to 70% of their workforce, according to local farmer Lisa Tate. That means “70% of your crop doesn’t get picked and can go bad in one day,” she said. “Most farmers here are barely breaking even. I fear this has created a tipping point where many will go bust.”

    Have officials addressed those fears?
    President Trump has wavered between trying to assuage the worries of farmers—many of whom voted for him—and appease his MAGA base. After the June raids, Trump posted online that he’d heard from “our great Farmers” that they were losing “very good, long-time workers,” and pledged that “changes are coming!” Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security ordered a pause of arrests at farms, restaurants, and hotels. But those carve-outs were opposed by top White House aide Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s immigration crackdown, and DHS ended its pause the following week. Trump has more recently floated letting migrant farmworkers stay “if a farmer is willing to vouch for these people,” and the Labor Department has established a new service to help farmers get visas. But ICE still has quotas to meet, and migrants have no protection against raids. 

    What does this mean for our food supply? 
    With fewer workers to harvest and package fruit and vegetables, the domestic production of crops will likely drop. That will lead to more food imports—many of which will be hit with Trump’s double-digit tariffs—and higher costs; the nonpartisan Peterson Institute expects deportations to raise food prices by 10%. Labor shortages could so significantly raise the cost of handpicked produce, especially delicate fruits such as strawberries and blueberries, that those items could become “luxury goods,” said Harvard economists Willy C. Shih and Veronica Chua. Smaller farms, already battered by pandemic labor shortages, are increasingly struggling to stay afloat—farm bankruptcy filings in the first quarter of 2025 were double that of the same period last year. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently argued that any pains would be temporary and cited the “34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program” as potential replacements for migrant laborers. But experts say that won’t work. 

    Why not? 
    Because about 60% of Medicaid recipients are already employed, and most of the others are either children, disabled, in school, or full-time caregivers. The remaining 2.1 million adult Medicaid recipients are unlikely to want to pick vegetables in hot fields or carve up animal carcasses—the type of jobs that Americans have shunned for decades. To comply with H-2A regulations, the North Carolina Growers Association advertised some 6,500 jobs in 2011 but received only 268 applicants. Of the 245 hired, 163 arrived for their first day’s labor, and more than half quit after a month. Only seven worked the whole growing season. With Americans unwilling to take the place of migrants at farms and slaughterhouses, that leaves only one option, said Matt Teagarden, CEO of the Kansas Livestock Association. “We can use imported workers in our food production, or we can import food,” he explained. “And, from a national security, food security standpoint, we don’t want to import food.”

     
     

    Only in America

    A Tennessee school district will no longer accept illness as a reason for students to miss school. Lawrence County School System’s new attendance policy exempts students with chronic conditions, but for everyone else, “you can bring all the doctor’s notes you want, but [absence] is still unexcused,” said director Michael Adkins. “If you have the sniffles, that is fine. You are going to have them when you go to work one day.”

     
     
    talking points

    Columbia: A justified surrender to Trump?

    The “MAGA takeover of higher education” is underway, said Chris Lehmann in The Nation. Columbia University agreed last week to pay $221 million to settle allegations from the Trump administration that it indulged “antisemitism in student protests against the Gaza war and in academic curricula.” The school also agreed to a raft of Trump-imposed restraints, including a ban on diversity considerations in hiring and admissions, the reporting of expelled foreign students to the federal government, and a “resolution monitor” who will scrutinize Columbia for “the whiff of anything resembling affirmative action.” The university’s acting president, Claire Shipman, presented this “rushed capitulation” as a victory for academic independence that will let Columbia reclaim $400 million in frozen federal funding. In fact, all Shipman has achieved is creating a template for the shakedown of other schools: Harvard is now mulling a $500 million settlement to recover $2.6 billion in frozen funds. 

    “For all its flaws, the Columbia settlement is not nearly as bad as it could have been,” said Stephen L. Carter in Bloomberg. The school did not have to admit any wrongdoing, the government relented on demands for information on students’ immigration status, and the agreement does not give the government license to outright “dictate faculty hiring, university hiring, admission decisions, or the content of academic speech.” Columbia could have easily avoided this punishment, said National Review in an editorial. Decades ago, it should have stopped the spread of antisemitism in its corridors and cracked down on a progressive ideology that tolerates the persecution of “disfavored minorities.” That hatred became visible to many Americans only after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacres in Israel, when antisemitic protesters subjected Jewish students and faculty to venom and violence. The Trump administration has now forced Columbia back to “normalcy,” and “other schools should follow in its footsteps.” 

    “This deal won’t end Columbia’s torture,” said Columbia economics professor Suresh Naidu in The New York Times. University leaders are fooling themselves if they think they can trust a capricious administration that rips up trade deals it negotiated with longtime U.S. allies such as Canada and Mexico. And the agreement won’t placate the administration’s “Project 2025 apparatchiks,” who are explicitly out to transform U.S. higher education into a tool for ideological control. All it will take to shatter this deal is “a campus protest, an edgy syllabus, or even an acerbic student opinion piece.” Then “new vistas of anti-Americanism on campus will be discovered, and the attacks will continue.”

     
     

    It wasn't all bad

    In June, landscaper Kyle Lukowski woke up to find his trailer, with $10,000 worth of tools and a ride-on mower, had been stolen. The 32-year-old disabled Orlando resident had built a successful landscaping business to support himself, so initially he borrowed a push mower and attempted to service his 13 clients. But he struggled to stay afloat. His mother, Jennifer Sexton, appealed for help on the local news, and residents donated a ride-on mower and a brand-new trailer to restart his business. Lukowski even raised $6,500 through a GoFundMe campaign. “We couldn’t ask for better people,” said Sexton. “There are still good people in the community to make up for the bad ones.”

     
     
    people

    Why Jones fell out of love with men

    During her five years on Saturday Night Live, Leslie Jones won plenty of laughs by relentlessly flirting with—and manhandling—co-star Colin Jost, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian (U.K.). But that onscreen crush was no joke. “People don’t understand in that first year, maybe the first two seasons, I was really in love with Colin,” says the comedian, 57. “I didn’t know how it was going to happen, whether we would just work late together and make out in his office and drink whiskey. I had all the visions. He was so cute, and funny, and he was just so white. Such a white nerd frat boy, that I was like: ‘I want him.’” Jones says she’d shout, “I love you, Colin, you beautiful white stud!” whenever she passed him in the halls of 30 Rock. Alas, nothing came of it; Jost, 43, started dating actress Scarlett Johansson in 2017, and the pair married in 2020. Jones, meanwhile, has since sworn off men—too many of whom, she says, are stuck in an unlovable state of perpetual adolescence. “People talk about society going through a ‘lonely man’ phase.” But that’s because men “won’t do the work to become the person that you really can be. You’re waiting for me to solve your problems. You’re waiting for me to give you permission. Grow up—I’m not Build-A-Bear.”

     
     

    Saturday Wrap was written and edited by Theunis Bates, Bill Falk, Mark Gimein, Allan Kew, Bruno Maddox, Tim O'Donnell, and Hallie Stiller.

    Image credits, from top: Getty Images; Getty Images; Getty Images; Getty Images
     

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