2026-04-09 18:30:00
“占领华尔街”示威者于2011年10月3日占据纽约华尔街附近的公园。| 法新社/Getty Images
“高技能”工人的黄金时代正在终结。随着企业不断用机器替代人力，越来越多的专业人士发现自己的高学历不再具有价值，许多人被迫从事低薪工作，而另一些人则只能通过接受更剥削性的雇佣条件来维持其高地位。
关键要点
• 近年来大学毕业生的“隐性失业”（即从事非专业工作）比例低于1990年代。
• 大学毕业生群体因人口结构变化、文化战争等因素逐渐左移。
• 知识型工作者目前状况良好，但未来可能因人工智能而发生变化。
• 随着技能阶层与普通劳动者之间的界限逐渐模糊，高技能工人开始认同无产阶级的政治立场，呼吁结构性变革，而非温和改革。
马克思的预言是否应验？
尽管马克思在1848年曾预言高技能工人将沦为无产阶级，但过去170年资本主义并未完全实现这一趋势，反而创造了更多技能、收入和地位的层次。然而，近年来一些迹象表明，高技能工人可能正在经历类似无产阶级化的现象。
为何大学毕业生左移？
AI可能改变未来
尽管目前高技能工人的经济状况并未出现全面恶化，但人工智能的崛起可能改变这一趋势，使马克思的预言在未来成为现实。然而，当前的左翼政治转向更多源于文化战争和政党认同，而非经济崩溃。
总结
大学毕业生政治左移的现象并非单纯由经济困境驱动，而是人口结构变化、文化议题的极化以及政党认同转变的综合结果。尽管AI可能在未来加剧这一趋势，但目前的经济数据并未显示大规模的无产阶级化，更多是社会和政治因素的推动。
The heyday of the “high-skill” worker is ending.
As corporations find new ways to replace labor with machines, more and more professionals are seeing their vaunted credentials lose their value. Many have been forced into menial jobs — while others cling to their prestigious positions only by accepting ever more exploitative terms of employment.
• Recent college graduates are less likely to be underemployed than they were in the 1990s.
• College graduates have moved left due to demographic change, the culture war, and other factors.
• Knowledge workers are doing fine today, though that could change in the future due to AI.
The class distinctions that once cleaved skilled workers from common laborers are therefore eroding. And as they do, the former are starting to embrace the politics of proletarians: identifying with the masses instead of management — and demanding structural change instead of milquetoast reforms. Today, “high-skill” workers’ declining fortunes are a problem for them; tomorrow, they will be one for the oligarchic elite.
Or so Karl Marx argued in 1848.
The ensuing 17 decades weren’t kind to Marx’s prophecies. Instead of melting every strata of worker into a uniform proletariat, capitalism generated myriad new gradations of skill, pay, and prestige. And rather than immiserating professionals and proles alike, market economies drastically raised living standards for workers in general, and the highly educated in particular (or at least, they did so once leavened with a spoonful of socialism).
Nonetheless, some now suspect that Marx’s predictions may have been less wrong than premature. The steam engine might not have devalued all skilled labor, but artificial intelligence sure seems like it might. What’s more, even before the past decade’s AI breakthroughs, many college graduates were already struggling to find white-collar work, growing disillusioned, and drifting left.
In a recent New York Times essay, the (very good) labor reporter Noam Scheiber argues that the past 15 years of economic change have taken a toll on young college graduates, bequeathing them “the bank accounts — and the politics — of the proletariat.”
In his telling, recent grads feel they were sold a bill of goods. Throughout their childhoods, every authority promised that they could attain a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle, so long as they secured a university diploma. But too many students took this offer. The economy started minting more knowledge workers than white-collar jobs, thereby consigning a historically large share of graduates to unemployment or low-wage service work.
As a result, in Scheiber’s telling, the politics of college graduates have been transformed. In the Reagan and Clinton eras, the highly educated tended to see themselves “as management-adjacent — as future executives and aspiring professionals being groomed for a life of affluence.” Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, university graduates voted to the right of working-class Americans, while holding more conservative views on economic policy.
Now, grads are more likely to identify with rank-and-file workers than their employers. In fact, overqualified baristas, discontented coders, and precariously-employed journalists have spearheaded a boom in labor organizing.
Meanwhile, college-educated voters have become slightly more economically left-wing — and much more Democratic — than those without degrees.
Scheiber acknowledges that these political shifts have multiple causes. But his account of college graduates’ realignment is still largely materialist: The demographic was increasingly “proletarianized” — which is to say, shunted into working-class jobs — and moved left as a consequence.
There’s much truth in Scheiber’s reporting. And in his new book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, he offers keen insights into the radicalization of the overeducated and underemployed.
But his big-picture narrative about college grads’ shifting fortunes and politics is a bit misleading. A variety of forces have been pushing highly educated voters to the left. But a broad collapse in the economic position of the well-educated is not one of them.
Without question, the past two generations of college graduates have faced some unique economic challenges. The cost of a university education has risen sharply since the 1990s, forcing students to shoulder larger debts. And in the cities where white-collar jobs are concentrated, housing costs have soared.
Nevertheless, there is little evidence that college-educated workers have been proletarianized, en masse. To the contrary, by some metrics, graduates are doing better today than they were in the 1990s.
In painting the opposite picture, Scheiber leans heavily on anecdotes. Much of his reporting centers on college-educated workers who are stuck in low-wage service jobs. And he suggests that the fate of these scholarly waiters and well-read retail clerks is becoming increasingly common.
To make this case, Scheiber cites Federal Reserve data on the types of jobs held by “underemployed” college graduates — meaning, graduates whose occupations don’t require a degree. He notes that, among this subset of young grads, the percentage with well-paying, non-college jobs — such as insurance agent or human resource worker — has declined over time, while the share with low-wage jobs has increased.
This is true. But Scheiber’s presentation of the data point is misleading.
Low-wage workers do account for a rising share of underemployed college graduates. And yet, the percentage of college grads who are underemployed has declined over time. For this reason — according to Scheiber’s preferred data set — recent college graduates were less likely to hold a low-wage job in 2023 than they had been three decades earlier.
More critically, throughout this period, the share of recent graduates in low-wage jobs was always tiny. In 2023 — the most recent year in the Fed’s data — just 4.5 percent of young college-educated workers held such positions. Among college graduates of all ages, meanwhile, that figure was 2.2 percent. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s early career as a struggling bartender saddled with student loans is a key part of her political biography, but it’s not the typical experience for the diploma set. Nor has it become more common over time.
Of course, just because a job requires a college degree doesn’t mean it’s well-paid. But college grads’ wages have also trended upward over time. And the gap between the pay of workers with a degree and those who only completed high school has widened slightly since 2003.
Scheiber argues that such wage data obscures as much as it reveals. He concedes that college grads earn much more than working-class Americans “on average.” But he suggests that these averages are skewed by the knowledge economy’s inequalities: If a small minority of workers in tech and finance reap massive pay gains, then the average wage for college graduates can go up, even if most are treading water or falling behind.
And yet, the median wage data tells the same general story as the averages: Between 2000 and 2025, the median college graduate’s earnings rose both in absolute terms, and relative to the median worker with a high school diploma (albeit only modestly).
All this said, Scheiber identifies one indisputably concerning trend in the college-educated labor market: For five years now, the unemployment rate for recent college grads has been higher than the overall jobless rate. This is highly unusual; historically, young grads have had an easier time finding jobs than the typical worker.
Still, it’s important to put this trend in context. Young college graduates remain much less likely to be unemployed than other workers of the same age. And joblessness still afflicts only a small fraction of graduates. In December 2025, the unemployment rate among recent grads was 5.6 percent; among all grads, it was only 3.1 percent.
None of this means that young college graduates have no legitimate grounds for complaint or concern. The point is merely that, in the aggregate, college-educated workers’ economic circumstances have not dramatically deteriorated, even as their political behavior has drastically changed. The “proletarianization” experienced by some college graduates therefore can’t explain more than a small fraction of the demographic’s leftward shift.
So, what can? Why have college graduates become so much more left-wing — in their economic attitudes, issue positions, and voting behavior?
There are many right answers to this question. Here, I’ll just sketch four:
1. The demographics of America’s college-educated population have changed.
“College-educated voters” are not a fixed caste of immortals, drifting through time — backing Calvin Coolidge in one era and Kamala Harris in another.
Rather, that phrase denotes a demographic category, whose internal composition is constantly changing. Over the past four decades, America’s college-educated population has grown less white and more female. In 1980, just 13.6 percent of American women over 25 had a college degree, while just 7.9 percent of Black Americans did, according to US Census data. By 2024, those figures had jumped to 40.1 percent and 29.6 percent respectively. (Rates of college attendance among white and male Americans also rose over this time period, but at a much slower rate.)
This shift surely pushed the college-educated population leftward. Since the 1980s, women have been more likely than men to espouse progressive views on the economy and vote for Democrats in elections. And the same is true of nonwhite voters relative to white ones. Thus, the feminization — and diversification — of the college-educated electorate likely accounts for much of its liberalization.
Put differently: If nothing else had changed about America’s society or economy since 1980, the changing demographics of college-educated voters would have been sufficient to move that population to the left.
2. The culture war led many socially liberal college graduates to become Democrats.
College graduates have been more socially liberal — and cosmopolitan — than less educated voters, since at least the 1950s. In the mid-20th century, however, cultural issues were less politically salient. Republicans and Democrats didn’t have uniformly divergent positions on immigration, feminism, racial justice, or the environment.
But the major parties began polarizing on those subjects in the 1970s. And such issues became increasingly central to our politics in the ensuing decades. In part for this reason, college graduates have been drifting toward Democrats — and working-class voters, toward Republicans — for half a century.
The French economist Thomas Piketty illustrated this trend in 2018. In the following chart, negative values mean that Democrats did better with working-class voters than college-educated ones in that election year; positive values mean the opposite:
In other words, the highly educated’s realignment began long before the (real and supposed) 21st-century economic trends that Scheiber describes.
To be sure, the “diploma divide” widened dramatically in recent years. Yet the inflection point for that shift was not the Great Recession, but rather, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign — which associated the GOP with an unprecedentedly anti-intellectual, authoritarian, and xenophobic brand of nationalism.
And there are other signs that it was the culture war — not economic strife — that drove college graduates toward Democrats.
For one thing, across Western countries, there is a tight correlation between how central social issues are to political conflict and how likely college-educated voters are to support left-wing parties.
For another, the college-educated voters who’ve joined the Democratic coalition in recent years are disproportionately affluent. Of the 57 counties that have consistently moved toward the Democratic Party in all three presidential elections since 2012, 18 have a median household income above $100,000.
The same pattern shows up in individual-level voting data. In 2012, white voters in the top 5 percent of the income distribution voted to the right of Americans as a whole. In every presidential election since 2016, however, rich whites have been more Democratic than those in the bottom 95 percent of the income distribution.
Simply put, Greenwich did not swing toward Democrats because its people were proletarianized, so much as because the GOP was Trumpified.
3. When socially liberal college graduates became Democrats, many adopted the economic orthodoxies of their new coalition.
To his credit, Scheiber acknowledges that the culture war played a big role in college graduates’ partisan realignment. But he suggests that this can’t explain the transformation of educated voters’ economic views.
Which is reasonable. Perhaps, the rising salience of immigration, feminism, and authoritarianism have made college grads more likely to vote Democratic. But why would it have rendered them more pro-labor? Surely, one may think, the latter must have more to do with changing economic circumstances than culture war allegiances.
As I’ll note in a minute, I do think that college graduates’ shifting economic views partly reflect their material challenges.
But it’s also plausible that, to a large extent, the demographic has become more economically progressive because it’s grown more Democratic.
Voters often switch parties on the basis of a few key issues — those core to their political identities — and then take dictation from their new coalition on other subjects. One can see this anecdotally in the evolution of “Never Trump” Republican pundits like Bill Kristol or Jennifer Rubin. Each broke with the GOP over Trump’s authoritarianism and foreign policy views, but subsequently embraced a variety of liberal policy positions.
This dynamic — in which partisanship can drive economic ideology — is arguably visible in some of the polling that Scheiber cites. In his essay, he notes that college graduates are much more likely to approve of labor unions today than they were in the 1990s. And he interprets this as a sign that graduates have stopped seeing themselves as “management-adjacent.”
And yet, in the Gallup survey he references, college graduates were 15 points more likely to support unions than those with a high school degree or less. Meanwhile, Americans with annual incomes above $100,000 were 6 percentage points more pro-labor than those earning less than $50,000.
Notably, this appears to be a novel development. According to American National Election Studies data, college graduates expressed warmer feelings for “big business” than for “labor unions” virtually every year between 1964 and 2012. Then, in 2016, they abruptly became more pro-union than pro-business. By 2024, America’s most educated workers were its most pro-labor.
Conversely, the least educated segment of Americans —– those without a high-school degree —– went from being the most pro-union segment of the workforce in the early 1980s to the least in 2016 (although, they still approved of labor unions by more than big business in that year).
This pattern of support is difficult to explain, if we assume that a voter’s opinion on unions is a reliable index of their (perceived or actual) adjacency to management. On the other hand, if voters’ economic opinions are shaped by both their material interests and partisanship, then the disparities make perfect sense. Labor unions are associated with the Democratic Party. So, as college graduates have grown more Democratic, they’ve looked more kindly on unions. As the “poorly educated” (in Trump’s famous phrase) became more Republican, they became less likely to approve of labor than other Americans.
If true, this would be consistent with a large body of political science data showing that partisans express more sympathy for groups that favor their political party.
4. Millennials and capitalism got off on the wrong foot.
In saying all this, I don’t mean to deny that some college-educated voters have embraced radical, pro-labor politics, in response to material difficulties.
Although recent graduates have not been proletarianized en masse, many millennials did graduate into a labor market scarred by the Great Recession. During our first, formative years as workers, we often struggled to secure well-paying jobs, as a direct consequence of Wall Street’s malfeasance.
Millennials’ earnings and net worths eventually caught up to those of prior generations. But people’s political beliefs are typically forged during late adolescence and early adulthood. The 2008 crisis therefore left many millennials persistently skeptical of capitalism, even when it didn’t render them durably underemployed. The 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests, which crystallized these grievances for many recent graduates, were an important precursor to today’s left-wing activism.
Separately, young professionals in the media and academia have seen a genuine collapse in their economic prospects: It was much harder to earn a middle-class living at a magazine or humanities department in 2016 than it was in 1996. And it is harder still to do so in 2026.
The “ideas” industries comprise a small share of the overall economy. But they exert wildly disproportionate influence over political discourse. Thus, the declining fortunes of aspiring journalists and academics has likely colored the worldviews of other politically engaged millennials and zoomers, even if their own industries are fairly healthy.
This said, these factors probably don’t have that much to do with the movement of college-educated Romney 2012 voters toward the Democratic Party. Rather, the Great Recession — and jobs crises within journalism and academia — help explain why perennially left-of-center subsets of the college-educated electorate have gravitated toward socialism in recent years.
Capitalism still hasn’t turned educated professionals into immiserated proletarians — or unified the working class in opposition to the bourgeoisie.
This may be about to change. Certainly, AI poses a greater threat to knowledge workers’ class status than any previous technological breakthrough. Indeed, many tech CEOs are explicitly promising to put millions of white-collar workers out of a job. So, reports of the college-educated’s economic dispossession — and political mutiny — may prove prescient. But such declarations remain, for the moment, ahead of their time.
2026-04-09 18:00:00
美国俄勒冈州威拉米特国家森林中的北方斑 owl | Greg Vaughn/Getty Images
森林生态系统对环境至关重要，它们为美国提供清洁的水和空气，吸收温室气体，并为濒危野生动物提供栖息地。因此，环保组织强烈反对特朗普政府去年春季提出的扩大公共森林采伐的计划。该计划通过行政命令要求增加采伐，认为不充分利用森林资源会损害经济安全、破坏野生动物栖息地，并增加野火风险。随后，农业部长布鲁克·罗林斯宣布超过一半的森林进入紧急状态，允许USFS（美国森林局）在更少限制下进行采伐。环保组织认为此举是为木材行业提供便利，而特朗普的政策在历史上并未表现出对森林的真正保护意图。
然而，文章指出，采伐并不总是对环境有害。例如，选择性采伐或间伐可以改善森林健康，减少树木间的竞争，增强其抗旱和抗虫害能力，同时降低野火风险。印第安部落曾通过控制燃烧实现类似效果，而自然生态中树木也会因生长而自我调节密度。此外，某些森林（如以针叶树为主的西部森林）依赖火灾维持生态平衡，合理采伐可能模拟这一自然过程。
尽管如此，特朗普的政策面临经济挑战。目前，美国90%的木材来自私人林地，而公共林地附近缺乏足够的采伐基础设施和锯木厂。同时，环境法规（如《濒危物种法案》和《国家环境政策法案》）也限制了公共林地的采伐。此外，当前木材市场需求疲软，美国住房市场因高利率而停滞，部分国家（如中国）也因关税减少进口。若需求回升，私人林地可灵活应对，但公共林地采伐可能需依赖政府补贴，经济回报有限。
特朗普政府还试图废除“无路区规则”（Roadless Rule），该规则保护未被近期采伐的荒野和原始森林。专家认为此举可能对环境造成灾难性后果。同时，政府试图绕过《濒危物种法案》的保护措施，例如通过“上帝小组”（God Squad）推翻对濒危鲸类的保护，以促进木材生产。
尽管森林管理可通过采伐减少野火、虫害等威胁，但特朗普政府的政策已导致USFS（美国森林局）员工和科研设施大幅减少，削弱了可持续管理的能力。专家担忧，当前的环境和资源管理条件正在恶化，未来森林保护面临更大挑战。
The value of forest ecosystems is hard to overstate. Blanketing roughly a third of the US, they supply clean water and air, absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide, and provide homes for imperiled wildlife and a tranquil place for Americans to hunt and fish.
It’s for this reason that environmental advocates widely opposed a plan announced by the Trump administration last spring. In an early March executive action, he ordered his administration to ramp up logging in our public forests, including those managed by the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Failing to “fully exploit” forests for timber, Trump said, weakens our economic security, degrades fish and wildlife habitat, and sets the stage for wildfire disasters.
A month later, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who also oversees the US Forest Service (USFS), declared an unexpected emergency across more than half of the agency’s forests, citing the risk of wildfire, disease, and other threats. The emergency declaration allows USFS to log those lands with far fewer restrictions.
These moves drew unsurprising reactions from environmental groups.
“The Trump administration is brazenly sacrificing our forests and the species that depend on them,” Robert Dewey, former VP of government relations at Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit conservation group, said last spring after the Trump announcement. “There is no legitimate reason or emergency to justify rubberstamping logging projects.”
Defenders of Wildlife and other organizations called the emergency declaration a gift to the timber industry.
It is indeed hard to see a good intention for our nation’s forests through Trump’s track record. At face value, his administration’s logging push seems like multiple environmental disasters waiting to happen.
Yet there are two important points these concerns tend to overlook, starting out with this: Logging isn’t always the environmental boogeyman it’s made out to be.
Logging is one of those things that seems universally and irrefutably awful for the environment. It brings to mind nightmarish images of giant machinery flattening pristine forests filled with helpless critters, à la movies like FernGully and Avatar. And in some parts of the world — and historically in the US — those images are not far off the mark.
But the reality today is more complicated.
The first thing to know is that many of our public forests are already not in a truly “natural” state. Decades of misguided fire suppression and a period of widespread logging in the wake of World War II produced forests today that are dense with trees of similar age, which makes them prone to intense wildfires and attacks from pests.
While it may sound counterintuitive, selective logging or thinning — i.e., removing some but not all of the trees — can actually make these forests healthier. In thinned-out forests, trees face less competition for water and sunlight, boosting their tolerance to drought and beetles, and fires aren’t as destructive, according to Mark Ashton, a professor of silviculture and forest ecology at Yale University. No one in this country knows this better than Indigenous Americans. Tribes were practicing thinning thousands of years ago using controlled burns, which prevent the buildup of fuel.
Absent a history of industrial logging and fire suppression, forests can thin themselves out on their own; when one tree grows big, for example, its canopy can shade out and kill those around it.
This raises another important point: Logging, and sometimes even clear-cutting, can mimic natural disturbances that shape forest ecosystems. Many Western forests, such as those dominated by lodgepole pine, evolved with fires that wipe out large tracts of trees. The cones of some of those trees only release seeds during a fire. In the right ecosystem, clear-cutting — followed by burning — can mimic this process, while also producing usable timber.
“It’s gotten a bad rap, but, I mean, basically you’re emulating a natural process,” Todd Morgan, a forest industry researcher at the University of Montana, said of strategic clear-cuts.
Of course, slashing trees in one area doesn’t mean a fire won’t just burn them in another. And as fossil fuels heat up the planet and rainfall patterns change, loads of forests are going up in smoke with or without logging. In the age of climate change, clear-cutting is only adding to the existing loss of wildlife habitat — amid an extinction crisis.
Still, logging, when done thoughtfully, isn’t always an environmental disaster. This is to say nothing of the valuable product it also produces: timber. Wood is a renewable material, unlike some of the alternative construction materials, like plastic, most of which still comes from oil and gas. Turning trees into lumber also keeps the planet-warming carbon they store locked up for longer than if they were burned.
Regardless of potential impacts of logging, Trump’s plan to expand timber production on public lands may run into challenges anyway. And the main reasons for that are not as much environmental as they are economic.
A big one is the lack of logging infrastructure near public forests. After World War II — when home-building was booming — the US intensively logged its national forests, the bulk of which are in the American West. Toward the end of the century, however, environmental regulations and a conservation ethic took hold, shifting most logging onto private lands that have fewer environmental protections.
That’s still the reality today: Around 90 percent of all timber currently comes from private forests, including tree plantations, which are concentrated in the southeastern US. As a result, there simply aren’t a lot of operational sawmills near public forests anymore, said Brent Sohngen, an environmental economist at Ohio State University. Many of those forests, meanwhile, are remote and hard to access. “There’s just not going to be an easy route for getting those logs out of the woods into a mill at a cheap price,” Sohngen said.
Yes, companies could always build new mills in anticipation of more logging, but such projects are expensive and only tenable if it’s clear that public lands will remain open to substantial exploitation for years to come. That’s in no way guaranteed, Sohngen said. Policies change from one administration to the next, not to mention from one month to the next in the Trump administration.
“I don’t think there’s enough certainty that [demand] will be there long-term that you will see an increase in infrastructure,” said Chris Wade, a research economist at RTI International, a research organization.
Another obstacle is environmental regulation — laws like the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act that pushed the industry into private lands in the first place. “Whenever someone proposes a timber harvest [in public lands], it’s going to get litigated,” Sohngen says. It’s for similar reasons that opening up Alaska wilderness and ocean to oil drilling has drawn few takers.
But perhaps the largest impediment to logging public lands is due, in part, to knock-on effects from Trump administration actions themselves — and that is that there’s simply not much demand for timber right now.
One reason is that the US housing market is stagnant due to high interest rates, and that market is a key driver of lumber demand. (Those high rates are, in turn, linked to inflation, which is expected to increase more due to the Trump administration’s war on Iran and its upward pressure on oil prices.) Some countries like China are also importing fewer logs from the US, due in part to retaliatory tariffs, further chilling demand, Wade said.
What’s also worth noting is that, should timber demand rise again, private forests can easily ramp up production, Sohngen said. Logging in federal lands, meanwhile, will likely have to be subsidized by taxpayers. In other words, there seems to be little economic incentive or payoff to actually cut more trees on public lands.
Even with these obstacles in place, public lands will likely see a bump in timber harvesting under Trump. Again, there’s a way to log that wood responsibly, but doing so requires smart, experienced people, extensive planning, and resources — things the Trump administration has been clear-cutting with impunity.
Last year, the US Forest Service lost at least 5,800 of its some 35,000 employees (as of late 2024). That includes more than 20 percent of its scientists with PhDs, according to an analysis by Science News. Late last month, meanwhile, the Trump administration announced sweeping changes at the agency — among them, moving its headquarters from Washington, DC, to Utah and closing 57 of its 77 research facilities.
Do you have a story tip or feedback on our reporting? Reach out to [email protected].
“Here’s my worry: Where are all the foresters in the forest service?” Ashton told me last fall, before the recent reorganization. “The whole institution has been gutted. That’s ominous. If you want to manage these forests sustainably, you have to have the knowledge and technical professionalism to do it right.”
Trying to manage forests without staff and research facilities is like “trying to fly a plane without a pilot,” said Martin Dovciak, a forest ecologist at the State University of New York.
At the same time, the administration is also trying to rescind what’s known as the Roadless Rule, which protects vast stretches of wilderness and old-growth forests from logging — those that haven’t been logged in the recent past and often don’t need active management. “It would be really crazy to do timber harvesting there,” Sohngen said. “There would be places there that [logging] would be disastrous for the environment.” And it’s not clear that logging old-growth trees even makes economic sense, foresters told me.
What’s more is that the Trump administration has been attempting to skirt safeguards that ensure logging on public lands minimizes environmental harm. The administration may once again, for example, convene the so-called God Squad — a panel with the power to overrule the federal Endangered Species Act — to sidestep protections for the nation’s most threatened species, should they interfere with logging plans (as it recently did to avoid protections for very endangered whales that happen to share territory with oil extraction in the Gulf of Mexico). “I think it’s on the table,” Wade, of RTI International, said of calling on the God Squad to avoid protections for species in peril.
In response to an email detailing our reporting, a spokesperson for the Forest Service reiterated that active forest management (which includes logging) helps reduce the growing threats of wildfire, insects, disease, and drought. The agency did not address claims that Trump administration policies, and the loss of expertise, would make it hard to manage forests sustainably and in a way that is economically feasible.
A spokesperson for the Interior Department, which oversees the Bureau of Land Management, similarly told Vox that wildfires and other disturbances have razed vast amounts of forest in the West. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of the Interior is committed to providing opportunities for the timber industry to boost supply chain stability and support local economies, clear dead and dying timber, protect lives and property, and defend communities from the devastation of wildfire,” the spokesperson said.
The White House deferred to the Interior Department when asked for comment.
This is all to say: While logging can be conducted to minimize harm and even benefit forest ecosystems, the Trump administration has shown no sign of making the environment a priority, experts told me.
“I do not doubt that there are still going to be good people left in the agency who are going to try to do the best they can under the circumstances,” Dovciak said. “But the circumstances are getting worse. I really worry about that.”
2026-04-09 05:20:00
2026年3月8日，伊朗德黑兰的沙赫兰石油仓库因美国和以色列的袭击发生火灾，导致该地区大量油罐车和车辆无法使用。数月来，美国与伊朗的冲突逐渐压垮全球经济。3月，伊朗关闭霍尔木兹海峡——连接波斯湾石油储备与全球市场的关键航道，引发能源价格上涨，股市和增长预期下滑。分析师警告称，若海峡不尽快重新开放，全球经济可能陷入严重衰退。然而，周二晚间，美伊达成停火协议，表面上暂停美国对伊朗的攻击，以换取海峡航运恢复。此举迅速促使油价下跌约20%，道琼斯指数上涨逾1000点。但一些人担心，华尔街的乐观情绪可能超前于实际的地缘政治局势。周三，以色列继续攻击黎巴嫩的伊朗代理人，而伊朗则指责美国违反协议，并称与美国的谈判“不合理”。为了解这一局势，我于周三采访了石油市场专家罗里·约翰斯顿。他指出，尽管停火协议是积极的一步，但许多问题仍未解决。目前，霍尔木兹海峡的航运尚未恢复，且停火期间仍有多次袭击和爆炸事件。他推测，特朗普可能因市场压力而最终单方面缓和局势，但伊朗仍可能保持对海峡的控制。伊朗强调仅允许每天10至15艘船只通过，并由革命卫队掌控航道。若停火谈判未能达成持久协议，海峡可能继续关闭，导致全球油价飙升，甚至出现每桶200美元的极端情况，进而引发全球范围内的经济衰退和能源短缺。尽管美国作为能源出口国可能在一定程度上受益，但其国内消费者仍将面临价格压力，尤其是沿海地区。此外，美国的能源安全地位可能缓解部分影响，但全球能源市场整体下滑仍会对美国产生连锁反应，最终导致民众负担加重，经济出现严重衰退。
For months, America’s war with Iran has been slowly suffocating the global economy.
In March, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow waterway that links the Persian Gulf’s oil reserves to global markets. As a result, energy prices steadily rose while stock markets and growth forecasts fell. Analysts started warning that, if the Strait did not reopen soon, the global economy could slide into a deep recession.
And then, Tuesday night, these storm clouds scattered: The US and Iran reached an agreement on a ceasefire, one that would ostensibly pause American attacks on the Islamic Republic, in exchange for a resumption of transit in the Strait.
Oil prices swiftly fell by as much as 20 percent, while the Dow jumped more than 1,000 points.
And yet, some fear that Wall Street’s mood has brightened faster than geopolitical reality. Israel continued attacking Iranian proxies in Lebanon on Wednesday, in alleged defiance of the ceasefire agreement. Iran, meanwhile, kept the Strait shuttered, accused the US of violating the terms of their understanding, and declared negotiations with America “unreasonable.”
To get a clearer picture of what all this means, I spoke with the oil market expert Rory Johnston on Wednesday. Author of the popular newsletter, Commodity Context, Johnston has long argued that investors are underpricing the risks of the US-Iran conflict.
We spoke about why time may be on Iran’s side in a war of attrition, what a postwar global economy could look like, and how US consumers will fare in the most optimistic — and pessimistic — scenarios. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.
Now that there has been a ceasefire — sort of — what do you think is the most likely scenario for this war, the Strait of Hormuz, and oil markets going forward?
I think we’ve taken a step in the right direction. But there are many unresolved questions. As of Wednesday afternoon, it does not appear that there has been any resumption of flow through the Strait. And in fact, we’ve seen many, many, many explosions and attacks continue during the ceasefire.
My core assumption about this crisis was always that [President Donald] Trump was the actor most likely to cave — he is the one most sensitive to external market pressures. Given that, the most likely course of the war was that Trump would, eventually, unilaterally de-escalate. And Iran would retain quasi-control of the Strait of Hormuz.
And that seems to be the situation that we are trending toward, which — while problematic — is much better than the doomsday scenario.
But Iran has stressed that it is only allowing a limited number of ships through the Strait and that the waterway will remain under control of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. We had accounts last night that Iran would only be allowing 10 to 15 ships through a day. If true, then that wouldn’t be much of a change from the status quo.
But would that be temporary? If the ceasefire leads to an actual peace agreement — which allows Iran to collect tolls on ships in the Strait — wouldn’t Tehran want a lot of traffic to move through that waterway?
Yeah. If the US Navy withdrew — and the bombing stopped and Iran felt safe and secure — then it would have an interest in resuming a moderate level of flow.
The issue is: Trump has been saying, “Let’s negotiate. And while you’re negotiating, just do us a favor and reopen the Strait, so that the global economy doesn’t crash while we’re talking.” But that’s basically asking Iran to forfeit its main source of leverage. Iran has its foot on the aorta of the global hydrocarbon market. It’s probably not going to step off before securing a more durable agreement.
So, the question is: Can the negotiations that begin Friday lead to such an agreement? And I think that’s the trillion-dollar question right now.
Let’s say we do get a peace deal, in relatively short order. In the most realistic version of that scenario, what can Americans expect to experience economically? What happens to the prices of gasoline, travel, and other energy-related commodities?
If this holds up, then we’re going to avoid the scenario where America’s average gallon of gas costs $6. But even if everything goes perfect from here, the world will still be operating with about half a billion fewer barrels of oil than it would have had, were it not for this war.
And that’s because the Gulf states had to ramp down oil production — since, without the Strait, they had no way to transport or store all of that crude.
Right. And even if flow through the Strait resumes today, it’s going to take weeks to months for them to get that production back to pre-war levels.
What would that mean for products that are downstream from fossil fuels — jet fuel, plastics, semiconductors, etc.? Would it take longer for the prices of those things to normalize?
Yeah. For one thing, there haven’t been many confirmed attacks against oil fields or oil processing facilities in the Gulf. But there have been attacks on refining assets and petrochemical facilities. So productive capacity is down.
At the beginning of the year, a barrel of diesel was $30 more than a barrel of crude oil. As of right now, it’s nearly $70 more. But that’s down from a high watermark in late March of about $90 a barrel. So, the prices of both crude and products have come down. But markets for the latter remain very tight. And they will likely remain tighter relative to crude going forward.
Let’s talk about the more pessimistic scenario. At this point, what’s the most plausible, worst-case outcome? What are you worried about?
The most obvious answer is that we get to Friday, no one can agree, and then we’re back in the same place as we were before the ceasefire.
Of course, we now know that there’s some appetite from the White House for an agreement. We can see that they’re responsive to market pressure. But Iran can see that too.
From Tehran’s strategic point of view, they have an interest in dragging this out.
So, let’s say that Iran decides that time is on their side and feels no rush to back off its most audacious demands. If the Strait remains effectively closed for another two months, what would that mean for US consumers?
By that stage, I think we will see things like $200-a-barrel crude. And that’s assuming that there is no escalation in tit-for-tat attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure.
But if we just get pre-ceasefire conditions continuing until June, we’ll be in a situation where prices will need to rise until they force demand destruction.
In other words, prices will need to be so high that consumers have no choice but to use less energy.
Right. Let’s say we have a 10-million-barrel-a-day deficit in the market. There’s no way that supply can react fast enough to fill that hole. So, to stop the global oil market from basically cannibalizing itself — and drawing inventories down to zero — you’ll need to ramp up prices until people just stop consuming.
In Western countries, that will manifest as extremely high prices. But people will manage. In the developing world and the Global South, that will manifest as outright shortages. Ultimately, you would need a large drop in consumption. If that doesn’t happen in the West, then it will happen in poor countries.
And the same will happen with diesel and jet fuel.
How much would America’s status as an energy exporter protect us in that scenario? After all, high oil prices are good for oil producers. So America’s terms of trade would improve: The stuff we export would become more valuable, relative to the stuff we import. And oil-rich regions of the country would presumably reap some benefit.
Separately, we’re less reliant on the Gulf’s energy supplies than Europe or Asia. So, might those factors save us, if this ceasefire falls apart?
The United States — and North America, more broadly — remains the most energy secure area in the world. We likely won’t see shortages here, although we will feel the price pressure.
So yes, that will benefit America’s terms of trade in a way. But the distributional effects will be extreme. You could see a boom in Texas and New Mexico, for example. But it will hit consumers across the entire United States. And it will hit them much harder on the coasts because you have more trade exposure there than mid-continent.
More fundamentally, at the end of the day, if prices continue to spiral upwards, and we do have shortages throughout the Global South, that is a world of deep, deep recession. Much of the planet would probably be in an economic depression.
No matter how energy-secure the United States is, it is still part of a global economy. And it will ultimately feel the economic ramifications of that economy downshifting in all sorts of ways. This would not be good for the median voter, by any means. It would feel like a massive tax increase. Markets would tumble. The world would simply be forced to consume less than it did before this war began.
2026-04-09 05:15:00
2026年4月6日，特朗普在白宫南草坪与记者会面。这则新闻出现在《Logoff》每日简报中，旨在帮助读者了解特朗普政府的动态，而不会让政治新闻占据生活。欢迎阅读《Logoff》：读者们，昨日简报发布后不久，美国与伊朗达成了一项临时停火协议，避免了特朗普此前威胁的“文明毁灭”。虽然我们可能错过了昨日的突发新闻，但今天仍有诸多值得关注的内容。以下是关键信息：最新进展：截至周三下午，美伊停火协议似乎已生效，但局势仍不稳定。伊朗已指责美国违反协议中的多项条款，且双方对协议内容的理解尚不一致。特别是以色列对黎巴嫩的军事行动仍在继续，周三有超过250人死于以色列的空袭。伊朗和巴基斯坦（近期美伊谈判的调解方）均表示黎巴嫩应受昨日停火协议的保护。然而，谈判似乎仍在推进：副总统JD·范斯及另外两名美国谈判代表史蒂夫·维特科夫和贾里德·库什纳计划于周六在巴基斯坦与伊朗官员会面。特朗普对此有何表态？周二晚间，特朗普在推文中表示，他已同意“暂停对伊朗的轰炸和攻击两周”，因为美国“已接近达成一项关于与伊朗实现长期和平以及中东和平的最终协议”。周三早些时候，他补充称：“美国将协助缓解霍尔木兹海峡的交通拥堵，将采取大量积极行动，创造巨大经济利益。”然而，截至目前，霍尔木兹海峡仍未完全恢复通航：据彭博社报道，周三仅有三艘船（数百艘中）通过该海峡。至此，今日简报结束。我想要正式为这篇来自《华盛顿邮报》的近期文章提供《Logoff》的推荐（我们是否有官方推荐？我得问问编辑）：《5种方法为你的日常增添一点不便，从而提升大脑功能》（一如既往，这是一个赠阅链接）。文章指出，虽然听起来有些反直觉，但适度增加生活中的摩擦（比如自己做饭而非点外卖，或尝试挑战大脑的新事物）实际上对大脑有益。如果您有类似建议，欢迎分享。祝您有一个美好的夜晚，我们明天再见！
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Hi readers, big news broke just after yesterday’s newsletter went out: The US and Iran reached a temporary ceasefire agreement, averting President Donald Trump’s threats of civilization destruction.
While we may have missed the breaking news yesterday, there’s still plenty to catch up on today. Here’s what you need to know:
What’s the latest? As of Wednesday afternoon, a US-Iran ceasefire appears to be in place, but shaky. Iran has already accused the US of violating several points of the agreement, and it’s not clear whether the sides are even on the same page about what has been agreed to.
In particular, Israel’s offensive into Lebanon is still ongoing; on Wednesday, more than 250 people were killed by Israeli strikes. Both Iran and Pakistan, which has served as a mediator for recent US-Iran talks, have said Lebanon is supposed to be covered by yesterday’s ceasefire.
Nonetheless, talks appear to be moving forward: Vice President JD Vance and two other US negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, are set to meet with Iranian officials in Pakistan on Saturday.
What has Trump said about this? On Tuesday evening, Trump wrote in a post that he had agreed “to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks” because the US was “very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East.”
Early Wednesday morning, he added that “[the] United States of America will be helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz. There will be lots of positive action! Big money will be made.”
So far, however, it doesn’t seem like the strait has reopened: According to Bloomberg, as few as three ships — out of hundreds — may have passed through on Wednesday.
I’d like to extend an official Logoff endorsement (do we have those? I’ll have to ask my editor) to this recent article from the Washington Post: 5 ways to add a little inconvenience to your day — and improve your brain (as always, it’s a gift link).
It might sound counterintuitive, but as the piece explains, adding a little bit of friction — whether that means cooking a meal instead of ordering one, or trying something new that challenges your brain to work in a different way — is ultimately beneficial. If you have any other suggestions in the same vein, I’d love to hear them. Have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
2026-04-09 04:05:00
2026年4月6日，美国总统唐纳德·特朗普在白宫简报室的新闻发布会上模仿开枪动作，谈及伊朗战争。这一事件引发了对美国宪法第25修正案的讨论。根据NBC新闻的统计，超过70名民主党议员呼吁特朗普内阁援引该修正案，暂时阻止特朗普行使总统职权，因为他在威胁要“摧毁整个伊朗文明”。值得注意的是，一些极右翼人士，包括前美国众议员马乔丽·泰勒·格林、电台主持人亚历克斯·琼斯以及MAGA影响者坎德斯·欧文斯，也支持这一方案。然而，第25修正案的实际操作极为复杂，需要内阁多数成员同意副总统宣布总统无法履职，并且国会需以三分之二多数通过。即便总统本人声明自己无碍，国会仍需在21天内决定是否恢复其职权，否则总统将自动恢复权力。因此，通过该修正案罢免特朗普几乎不可能，因为这需要内阁和国会的广泛共识，而特朗普目前仍掌握多数支持。
相比之下，议会制民主国家（如加拿大、英国、德国、印度和日本）的领导人更容易被罢免，通常只需议会简单多数通过不信任投票即可。美国的总统制体系将行政与立法权力分开，导致总统即使失去国会和民众支持，仍可完成任期。这种制度也容易引发权力僵局，使总统难以被有效罢免。尽管2021年国会曾讨论过通过第25修正案罢免特朗普，但当时他已是“跛脚鸭”总统，任期仅剩两周，理论上可能在21天内被罢免。然而，如今特朗普任期尚未结束，且国会两院难以达成两党共识，因此他很可能继续执政至2029年。即便民主党在中期选举中夺回国会两院，也难以在参议院获得三分之二多数席位。除非出现几乎全党一致要求罢免的极端情况，否则特朗普不会轻易下台。
The 25th Amendment is having a moment.
According to a tally by NBC News, over 70 Democratic lawmakers called for President Donald Trump’s Cabinet to invoke an obscure constitutional provision that would allow them to temporarily prevent Trump from acting as president, after Trump threatened to wipe out “a whole civilization” in Iran. (Trump has backed away from that threat, at least for now.)
Notably, their call for a 25th Amendment solution was echoed by some voices on the far right, including former US Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, radio host Alex Jones, and MAGA influencer Candace Owens.
It’s not the first time the amendment has come up. There’s been a regular background hum of Trump critics demanding its invocation throughout both his terms in office, which peaked in the days after January 6, 2021, with real conversations in his Cabinet and in congressional leadership about the process.
As a practical matter, Trump is not going anywhere, even if he didn’t command the near-universal loyalty within his party that he currently does. By international standards, it is extremely difficult to remove the president of the United States, and much harder than it is to remove the leaders of many of our peer democracies. And the 25th Amendment is not a viable shortcut around this problem, which is rooted in the fundamental structure of America’s government.
Let’s cut to the chase: Trump is about as likely to be removed via the 25th Amendment as he is to be deposed by an army of unicorn-riding elves.
While it is theoretically possible to remove Trump from office (or, at least, to strip him of his powers permanently) using the amendment, the removal process is too cumbersome, has too many failure points, and requires too much of a bipartisan consensus to be an effective method of removing a president who is merely bad at being president, rather than one who is literally incapable of performing their duties.
The 25th Amendment was enacted shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, and was intended to solve a different problem than the one the United States faces today — what if the president of the United States was still alive, but was physically or mentally incapacitated in a way that prevented him from exercising the powers of office?
Before the 25th Amendment was ratified, the Constitution provided that the vice president shall assume the powers of the presidency should the president show “Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office.” But the original Constitution did not lay out a process to determine when the president was unable to exercise their duties. That created a risk that the president may be unfit for duty, but no one could be sure how to formally transfer power to the vice president.
The process laid out in the 25th Amendment is, to put it mildly, complicated. It allows the vice president to declare the president unfit for duty, provided that a majority of the president’s Cabinet officers consent. Once the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet inform Congress that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”
But such a declaration is unlikely to amount to much if the president is still capable of clinging to power. The 25th Amendment also provides that the president may regain their authority merely by transmitting his own “written declaration that no inability exists” to congressional leaders. If that happens, the vice president and the Cabinet may force a congressional vote on whether the president should retain power, but if two-thirds of both houses of Congress do not agree that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” then the president remains president. And they can’t stall the vote for too long: if Congress does nothing in 21 days, the president regains his executive powers.
To even begin the process of removing Trump, in other words, a majority of Trump’s hand-picked Cabinet officials (plus Vice President JD Vance) would need to agree that he was unfit. Then, when Trump inevitably told Congress that he was resuming his duties, a supermajority of both the US House and the Senate — both of which are controlled by Trump’s Republican Party — would have to vote to install Vance as acting president.
There really was some limited bipartisan chatter in the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the Capitol about removing Trump via the 25th Amendment. But Trump was a lame duck with only two weeks left in office then, meaning a Cabinet vote to strip him of his powers, combined with the 21-day time limit in Congress, could actually run out the clock on his presidency.
That wouldn’t be a possibility this time. Indeed, because the 25th Amendment requires a two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress to remove Trump against his will, it is even more cumbersome than the impeachment process, which only requires a simple majority in the House and a two-thirds majority in the Senate. In 2021, the Senate couldn’t even secure a two-thirds majority to disqualify Trump from office while he was on trial for stirring up a violent attack against the Senate itself.
The United States is unusual in that it elects its chief executive separately from its legislature. The US often elects a Congress that is controlled by a different party than the one that controls the White House. And the Congress has only limited power to remove a president — a power it has never successfully used in all of US history.
Compare this system to parliamentary democracies such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, India, and Japan. In these systems, the people elect the members of the legislature, but the legislature chooses the official who will run the government. That official also can often be removed by a no-confidence vote in the legislature, frequently by a simple majority.
The founders saw this as a key feature: The executive branch and legislative branch were expected to each jockey for control in order to keep either from consolidating power. But as the late political scientist Juan Linz observed in 1990, presidential democracies such as the United States have proven inherently unstable, because the president and the legislature may deadlock on some crucial issue and both can simultaneously claim to have a popular mandate if such a deadlock occurs. The US system also locks in place a president who may have lost the confidence of both the Congress and the people, but who is nonetheless entitled to serve out their entire term.
One additional advantage of parliamentary democracy is that it allows a political party to remove an unfit or unpopular leader without triggering a political crisis. In 1990, for example, British Conservatives replaced unpopular Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with John Major, and then retained power for seven more years under new leadership. A similar drama recently played out in Canada, where the governing Liberal Party replaced former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with current PM Mark Carney — allowing Carney to lead the Liberals to another electoral victory in 2025.
In parliamentary systems, in other words, removal of a head of government isn’t an unheard-of event that humiliates the outgoing leader and places them in a class of one. It is a normal political tactic that allows the outgoing prime minister to leave office gracefully. That sort of system gives political parties an incentive to remove bad leaders.
Meanwhile, the United States is almost certainly stuck with Trump until his term expires in 2029 — even if Democrats win back both houses of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections, there is no plausible outcome where they win two-thirds of the seats in the Senate. Some new controversy would have to generate near-universal bipartisan demand for his removal, and it’s frankly not very pleasant to imagine what the world looks like in that scenario.
2026-04-09 02:40:00
2026年4月6日，特朗普在白宫简报室举行新闻发布会，谈及伊朗战争问题。文章指出，特朗普周二决定接受伊朗停火协议，而非兑现其威胁对伊朗平民实施大规模破坏性攻击的承诺，这一行为再次引发了“TACO”（特朗普总是退缩）的讨论。该理论源于特朗普经常发出极端威胁却未能兑现，被用来反驳自由派认为他是个狂躁独裁者的观点。然而，这一理论在伊朗事件中并不完全适用，因为特朗普此前已发动持续一个月以上的战争，导致伊朗多名领导人及数百名平民死亡，并引发中东局势紧张和全球经济受损。因此，文章提出“软TACO”理论，认为特朗普虽会撤回部分极端威胁或逐渐缓和危机，但并非完全退缩，且其政治和经济承受力有时较高。例如，在任期内，他一度放任马斯克在联邦机构中肆意行事，但随后在舆论压力下限制其权力；又如，他宣布“解放日”关税后，虽暂停部分措施，但整体税率仍高于此前水平；再如，他在明尼阿波利斯加强移民执法，但因引发公众强烈抗议而最终撤回。尽管特朗普在某些事件中表现出退缩，但其行为仍可能引发新的危机。此次伊朗战争是其“软TACO”策略的最大考验，因为对手具备实际反击能力，且可能具有不同的承受底线。目前停火协议可能难以维持，且与伊朗达成永久协议的难度较大。若谈判失败，特朗普可能再次采取行动。此外，伊朗的袭击已对全球经济造成严重损害，而特朗普的“软TACO”策略或许能缓解部分影响，但无法彻底修复所有问题。
President Donald Trump’s decision Tuesday to accept a ceasefire in Iran — rather than following through on his threats to escalate the war further with massively destructive attacks harming Iranian civilians — is being greeted with what’s become a familiar refrain: TACO.
Issuing extreme threats has been central to Trump’s governance strategy. But, as many have noticed, he often doesn’t follow through on these threats. This led to the famous acronym TACO, or “Trump Always Chickens Out,” coined by the Financial Times’ Robert Armstrong about Trump’s tariff threats last year.
TACO became a shorthand, especially among investors, to rebut the conventional wisdom among liberals that Trump was an unhinged madman. “It’s an antidote to the wrong-headed view that Trump is a monster of authoritarian ideology,” Armstrong wrote in December, “rather than a gifted reality TV star without any political commitments worthy of the name.”
So TACO is a reading of Trump’s psychology. “I meant it to signify the plain fact that the president has a low tolerance for political or economic pain,” Armstrong wrote. In other words, don’t worry too much about the president’s extreme words or impulses — because a bad market reaction, or a whiff of unpopularity in the base, will spur him to back down quickly.
Viewed through one lens, Trump’s ceasefire in Iran is just the latest in a series of TACO examples. He threatened to end an entire civilization… but, knowing a full-scale war would be massively unpopular and disruptive, he backtracked and resumed negotiations.
And yet — the TACO theory also doesn’t quite fit what happened in Iran. Trump launched a war that lasted over a month, killed many of the country’s leaders and hundreds of civilians, set the Middle East aflame, and did great damage to the global economy. It’s hard to characterize a mere two-week ceasefire as proof that Trump “always chickens out” when he had gone so far already, and done so much harm.
Indeed, it points to a risk of TACO thinking: The theory can become a kind of coping mechanism, lulling people (and perhaps markets) into a complacent denial of the damage Trump can do.
It might be more helpful, then, to look beyond what we might call — with apologies — the “hard TACO” theory, in which Trump always chickens out, and craft a more limited “soft TACO” theory instead.
The “soft TACO” theory of Trump is that, yes, he will often back away from the most extreme threat he’s made, or try eventually to wind down a crisis he caused. But contrary to Armstrong’s assertion that Trump has a “low tolerance for political or economic pain,” his tolerance can sometimes be quite high — even if it isn’t unlimited. And it’s important to pay attention to the very real damage he can do before he decides it’s time to climb down.
Trump’s second term has been chock-full of aggressive action from his administration, pushing the boundaries of presidential power in controversial and disruptive ways.
But a pattern has developed in which, sometimes, his actions cause a level of blowback — either political or economic — that he concludes is too intense. So he tries to roll things back at least somewhat. Examples include:
1. DOGE: Trump let Elon Musk run rampant through the federal bureaucracy for roughly the first six weeks of this term, firing civil servants and cutting contracts as he saw fit — at one point, he even urged Musk to “GET MORE AGGRESSIVE.”
But after Musk-induced chaos kept dominating the headlines — and after Trump’s own Cabinet officials pushed back against Musk’s power — Trump leashed DOGE in early March, saying future cuts should be done with Cabinet secretaries’ approval and with “the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’”
The change stuck and Musk headed for the exits. But other Trump officials, like Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, have continued to try and remake the federal bureaucracy — albeit in less dramatically headline-grabbing ways.
The scale of the damage will also be difficult for a future president to reverse: Entire agencies were effectively shut down and the federal workforce shrank by 10 percent in Trump’s first year, with nearly 350,000 people fired, quitting, or retiring. And there’s no remedy for people in the world’s poorest countries who already suffered and died waiting for lifesaving aid from programs that were eliminated in Musk’s purge.
2. Liberation Day: Trump stunned the world on April 2, 2025, by announcing “Liberation Day” tariffs on dozens of countries, set at levels that seemed to many to be arbitrary and downright bizarre.
After a week of deepening market turmoil, though, he blinked — announcing a 90-day “pause” on many of those exorbitant tariffs, to allow for negotiations with the targeted countries. This gave rise to the “TACO” concept.
But this wasn’t a complete climbdown. The Budget Lab at Yale calculates that the daily effective tariff rate was 2.3 percent when Trump took office — and it’s at 11.05 percent now. That’s down from the peak of 21 percent after Liberation Day, but it’s still quite a lot higher than pre-Trump levels, and it sat between 14 and 16 percent for much of the last year before the Supreme Court ruled some Trump tariffs illegal. He’s still seeking to institute new tariffs under different legal authority.
3. Minneapolis: Beginning around June 2025, the Trump administration escalated its mass deportation agenda by pursuing highly visible, militarized, and aggressive immigration enforcement in specific cities — provoking and apparently welcoming tense confrontations with protesters in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis.
But in Minneapolis this January, two Americans — Renée Good and Alex Pretti — were shot dead by immigration officials; videos of the killings provoked viral outrage. Pretti’s killing proved a particular flashpoint, particularly when DHS officials falsely portrayed him as an aggressor.
At that point, Trump decided he’d had enough. He removed top DHS officials from their posts (including, eventually, Secretary Kristi Noem). He empowered less hard-line officials to end the enforcement surge in Minneapolis. More broadly, he appears to have abandoned the idea that immigration enforcement should be carried out via street battles in blue cities.
Trump’s climbdown here shows he was not entirely captured by hardline advisers or ideology — and that he did not feel so insulated from political consequences that he could ignore such intense backlash. But it took months — and two deaths — to get him to back down. And he hasn’t backed away from mass deportation; he’s just doing it more quietly.
Whenever Trump backs down from one crisis of his own making, he provokes another soon afterward.
Minneapolis was barely out of the headlines when Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on February 11 to hear his pitch on attacking Iran. And he’d just pulled another TACO on Greenland only weeks earlier, once again reluctantly backing down only when the markets began taking his threats seriously.
According to a new report by the New York Times’ Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, Tucker Carlson urged Trump not to go through with the Iran attack — but Trump told him “it’s going to be OK,” adding, “because it always is.”
Trump appears to have internalized the lesson that he can act to provoke crises — and always, eventually, rein things in if they get too out of control. That is: that he can do a soft TACO, and it will be okay.
But the Iran war is proving the biggest test of that idea to date, in large part because there’s another player involved this time that can veto a TACO with missiles, drones, and mines if they want, and may have different pain thresholds. That’s a different dynamic than his other self-provoked crises and, regardless of how the war ends, it’s an important demonstration of how one rash, binary decision can spiral out of control despite Trump’s intentions.
It’s unclear if the ceasefire will even hold — some attacks continued in the region Wednesday morning. It will also be quite challenging to strike a permanent deal with Iran that satisfies Trump’s demands on nuclear material, the Strait of Hormuz, and other issues. And if such a deal remains elusive, might he be tempted to strike again?
Finally, the attacks and retaliation from Iran have done a great deal of damage to the global economy that will be felt for months or years. Trump’s soft TACO may be able to reverse some of that — but it can’t fix everything that’s been broken.