The Cost of Dying and the Cost of Living
The growing public outrage at ICE thuggery, culminating in two murders, not only forced Trump to change course, but upended his strategy of keeping everyone off-balance by relentlessly changing the subject. Even more than the missing Epstein files, ICE is now the subject that refuses to go away.
Even if ICE operations in Minneapolis are decapitated by the dismissal of Greg Bovino, the zombie will live on—unless ICE is defunded or otherwise dismantled. A tactical pause won’t stop the outrage. Trump and border czar Tom Homan plan only cosmetic changes to get ICE rampages off TV. Only a wholesale capitulation by Trump will alter the mass revulsion—and then Trump’s capitulation, and the issue of whether it’s real, will become the subject.
Meanwhile, the subject that Trump would like to shift to is another fiasco in the making. Trump wants the public to believe that he cares about the cost of living and can do something about it. But the political cost of dying, at the hands of ICE, has crowded out Trump’s inept embrace of the cost of living.
Today, the Federal Reserve refused to cut interest rates. The vote was 10-2, with only Trump allies Stephen Miran and Christopher Waller voting for a quarter-point rate cut.
Trump’s effort to hijack the Fed was another clumsy caper that blew up in his face, when the Supreme Court refused to accept his rationale for firing Fed governor Lisa Cook mid-term. That failed foray plus the aborted criminal prosecution of Fed chair Jay Powell only stiffened Powell’s resolve.
The Fed quite reasonably refused to cut rates because prices are creeping up, and there is nothing that Trump can do about it. He was far away from having a majority on the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee. And if you unpack each of his alleged attempts to restrain prices, none of them is real.
Despite token gestures, there is little Trump can do about drug prices or mortgage costs or credit card interest rates without demolishing his own corporate coalition. When Trump, a developer, threatens to try to ban corporate ownership of single-family housing, it’s a mark of his desperation.
Other Trump policies have only made inflation worse. His refusal to extend Affordable Care Act tax subsidies is massively increasing health insurance premiums for millions of Americans, and his blunderbuss tariffs raise consumer prices.
A report published last week by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a respected German think tank, analyzed $4 trillion of export shipments between January 2024 and November 2025. Institute researchers found that foreign exporters absorbed only about 4 percent of the cost, while American consumers and importers paid 96 percent.
The revulsion against ICE has reached a tipping point where growing numbers of Republicans and the Wall Street Journal editorial page have turned against Trump, and the senior federal district judge in Minnesota, Patrick J. Schiltz, summoned acting ICE director Todd M. Lyons to his courtroom and threatened to hold Lyons in contempt.
“The Court’s patience is at an end,” wrote Judge Schiltz, an appointee of George W. Bush and former clerk to archconservative Justice Antonin Scalia. Schiltz cited several instances in which ICE failed to grant detained immigrants bond hearings that had been ordered by the courts.
It is too early to say that we have reached a turning point in the containment of Trump, only that he has been compelled to reverse course on issue after issue. When Europe united, Trump backed down in his bizarre claim to Greenland. The old regime continues to govern Venezuela. Trashing Canada is just not that sexy, much less effective.
Trump is fast running out of subjects to change.
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