Trump Is Resetting The Paradigm

The thing that struck me about Trump's moves on the migration crisis was that they simply removed at least two legs of the stool that held the whole situation up -- he closed the border by eliminating the policy of paroling anyone who wanted to come in, and he ended the funding to the dozen or so faith-based NGOs that ran the migrant programs, both the ones that settled groups into small cities and towns in the interior and the ones that ran the camps at the border.

That transformed the whole situation within weeks. At the same time, he's working to knock legs off the stool that's held up the Ivy League and other prestige universities.

The Trump administration’s drive to clean up woke elite universities continues, with Princeton and the big tuna, Harvard, both under the microscope.

Princeton reportedly faces a pause on some $210 million in federal funds as the Department of Education investigates it for allowing antisemitism to fester unchecked, concealed as pro-Palestinian protests.

Harvard has even bigger financial woes possibly in train, with the feds probing some $8.7 billion in grants and $255 million in contracts with the world’s richest university and premier destination for whiny rich kids, Jew-hating keffiyeh thugs and the rest of the ugly left-wing panoply.

These are some of the marquee moves in the Trump admin’s 60-school probe.

But the drive against the Ivies and other well-endowed universities is just part of another agenda, which appears to be elimination of the income tax. Ferdinand Lundberg in The Rich and the Super-Rich understood that the advent of the income tax in 1913 underlies the whole current structure of university and other charitable endowments:

Prior to 1913 at least, the problem of taxes could not have influenced Rockefeller in his philanthropies because business and wealth were subject then only to piddling local taxes. Nor can it be held that the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation was a direct reflex to the advent of federal taxes in 1913 because the Foundation had long been planned, at least since 1905. The community of Big Business, it is true, was opposed to the new taxes and Rockefeller's chief attorney, Joseph H. Choate, had been the lawyer who in 1893 convinced the Supreme Court that income taxes were unconstitutional; it was therefore necessary to amend the Constitution to enact income taxes. However, even though the advent of federal taxes did not influence the idea of the Foundation, it was gradually noticed by others that there were distinct tax advantages in making philanthropic allocations. This fact is now part of standard tax doctrine, set down in many tax treatises. Gifts to philanthropic funds pay no taxes, the income on such funds pay no taxes, and there is no inheritance tax on such funds. Furthermore, stocks placed in such endowments carry corporate voting power--a nice point. It should be recalled here that it is power really, rather than money or property, that we are concerned with.

So what does Trump intend?

President Donald Trump has stated multiple times that he wants to eliminate income taxes and replace them with tariffs. Such a decision would be one of the most significant changes to the tax code in decades, and it could help Americans save a lot of money.

Eliminating the income tax is a death knell for university endowments and charitable foundations as we know them. But the paradigm shift goes beyond that; Trump's tariff agenda is generally recognized as applying to issues beyond just income taxes and trade deficits. According to the BBC,

President Trump's critique of the post-1945 international order dates back decades. Nearly 40 years ago he took out full-page advertisements in three US newspapers to criticise the United States' commitment to the defence of the world's democracies.

"For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States," he wrote in 1987. "Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?

"The world is laughing at America's politicians as we protect ships we don't own, carrying oil we don't need, destined for allies who won't help."

It's a position he has repeated since his second inauguration.

According to The Guardian,

Overarching all of this, say experts, is a US president who is not only prepared to approve annexation elsewhere but has an imperialist outlook, which has led some, including Ivo Daalder, the former US ambassador to Nato, to declare that with “Trump in office, the rules-based order is no more”.

As analysts have noted, Trump’s policy on both trade tariffs and territorial acquisition harks back to the 19th century – the era of president William McKinley, who presided over the acquisition of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Hawaii.

So far, it looks as though Trump has been able to move so quickly with a comprehensive strategy that his opponents have been able to attempt only minor individual points of resistance. Judge Boasberg tries to return deported Venezuelans to the US, when Trump's overall policies have already stopped mass migrations and begun to reduce the numbers of illegals -- something disputes over the legal rights of a few dozen gangsters won't affect. Vandalzing Teslas here and there will be an equally feckless gesture. Cory Booker's marathon speech on the Senate floor will be of equally nil effect.

This will be very, very difficult to stop, in some measure because Trump's opponents don't have his imagination. His solutions immediately knock legs away from stools that simply can't be replaced.