Noah Smith’s piece on the UK as a cautionary tale for the US is worth your time. He’s ex-Bloomberg, now freelance, and he knows exactly what he’s walking into - an American criticising Britain is guaranteed to get the “shut up, Yank” treatment.

He addresses it head on: “If you bring up the UK’s flaws on social media, you’re going to get an earful about how America elected Trump, Americans have no health care, American kids are constantly dodging bullets… Any criticism from an American is seen as giving free ammunition to the local enemy.” He’s right that it’s unhelpful, and he’s also right that it’s inevitable.

I don’t agree with everything he argues. It’s a stimulating read nonetheless.

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I love a good chart. This one hits hard. It is also doing rather more arguing than the data can support.

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Trump just hit Canada with an extra 50% tariff, and the detail that matters isn’t the number. It’s that these tariffs apply even to goods fully compliant with USMCA, the very trade deal Trump renegotiated and signed himself. The escape hatch that shielded most Canadian trade through 2025 just got welded shut. Justin Wolfers, the Australian-American economist behind Platypus Economics, walks through how the White House got there: a 1930 statute barely used since Herbert Hoover was president, deployed to justify a 50% duty on everything from wine to hockey sticks, tied to disputes that have nothing to do with the goods actually being taxed.

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You have seen the move a thousand times. Someone lays out clear, well-researched evidence and the reply comes back: “that’s just your opinion.” Vaccine safety, climate data, the economics of a trade decision - the subject barely matters. The move puts a measured finding and a gut feeling on the same shelf, equally weighted, free to be picked up or put down depending on which one feels better that morning.

It looks like a debating trick. It is actually a worldview. And Brexit is the cleanest proof we have of what that worldview costs, because unlike most arguments about science and reason, this one came with a bill you can add up.

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I just tasked Claude Opus 4.8 to extend a chart, first drawn by Axios, to show the comparative performance of US presidents in their term up to the equivalent of the end of May in their second year, as we have just passed that point for Trump II. The longer I looked at it the more it bothered me.

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