The Index

The Trump doctrine: tweet tariffs into being, walk them back when the market flinches, and pretend volatility is strategy.

Scott Bessent sold you trickle-down garbage in 2017. It didn’t work. Now he’s selling it again—with tariffs, fewer rules, and more lies.

The president is confused, slurring, repeating himself, fixated on Obama, and openly unsure if he’s bound by the Constitution.

The Daily Caller, a right-wing propaganda mill masquerading as a news outlet, published an op-ed by Lila Rose on May 2, 2025, titled “The Abortion Pill Is Poison, Not Medicine.” That headline tells you everything. It’s an ideological manifesto loaded with pseudo-medical jargon, emotional blackmail, and outright misinformation. The Caller has long been a vessel for reactionary drivel, but this piece is a particular case study in how the anti-abortion movement launders theological doctrine through the language of public health.

The international immune system is activating. Democracy, flawed and fragile, is developing antibodies against a very specific kind of viral politics. The backlash is electoral, cultural, and institutional. And it is spreading.

The executive order says “protect the innocent.”

Instead of confronting fascism, Thomas Friedman invented a whole new political identity based on... squints at notes... Google's self-driving car subsidiary.

The U.S. didn’t get conned. It chose the con.

Today in The Index's Meta Media series: Marco Rubio wrote a sweaty little op-ed claiming fact-checking is tyranny. Turns out when you can’t tell the truth, the next best thing is banning anyone who can.

“Freeze the conflict” = Let Putin keep the land he stole.

The Cold War blocked exports.

The exhausted majority didn’t leave democracy.

We don’t respond to crises anymore - we run on them.

Wall Street is used to volatility. It prices risk. It lives and dies by the future tense. But even volatility has its rules—some logic, some signals. Today, the signal is the volatility.

Tariffs are not policy. They are performance—symbols—flags planted in the wreckage of a global order Trump and his far-right allies are intentionally dismantling. Anyone still thinking this is about protecting American steelworkers or rebalancing trade with China hasn't been paying attention—or worse, is clinging to the fairy tale that this movement is tethered to any rational economic theory.

The Republican Party isn’t “drifting toward authoritarianism.” It’s sprinting. Third term talk, coup blueprints, Constitution in the shredder. This is the endgame and they’re laughing.

Trust doesn't return with a photo op, a handshake, or deals signed under duress. It is built slowly, consistently, through a pattern of behavior. Trump broke that pattern. He salted the earth. And now he struts through the wreckage, calling it a win.

If you had told me a decade ago that a former president would waltz back into the White House, torch the global economy, slap double-digit tariffs on damn near everything, spook the markets into evaporating over three trillion dollars in a single day, and call it a "booming economy" with a straight face—I would've thought it a particularly cruel and poorly conceived joke.

Trump and his gang of limp, trite supremacists are creating a narrative in which he alone is the liberator from foreign theft, domestic betrayal, and historical decline.

Every time an authoritarian con-artist is held accountable, every time the mask slips in a courtroom, the spell weakens.

Donald Trump doesn't understand soft power. He doesn’t trust it, doesn’t believe in it, and certainly doesn't know how to wield it. To him, power only works when it bruises. If it doesn't punch, it doesn't count. As a man, as a leader, as a bully, he is too weak to see the power in speaking softly.

Donald Trump doesn't understand soft power. He doesn’t trust it, doesn’t believe in it, and certainly doesn't know how to wield it. To him, power only works when it bruises. If it doesn't punch, it doesn't count. As a man, as a leader, as a bully, he is too weak to see the power in speaking softly.

Car prices: up Jobs: down Allies: pissed Economy: unstable Trump: still convinced tariffs are cheat codes

Pete Hegseth is unfit to serve as Secretary of Defense. He is a clown, a security risk, a buffoon and a living symbol of everything rotten in the bones of Trump's attempted administration. His recklessness and ideological zealotry have put lives at risk, insulted veterans, erased history, undermined basic principles of military integrity, and - most recently - handed classified military intelligence to a journalist.

The Democrats need to stop acting like they're in a friendly game of chess.

The architecture of American power, built painstakingly over seventy-five years, has been abandoned. This will be remembered as the moment when America's Pacific century came to an end.

Every "partial ceasefire" that leaves tanks rolling and bombs falling isn't a step toward anything except prolonged suffering and cynicism. It’s just a used-car sale repackaging of diplomatic half-measures as humanitarian achievements.

Authoritarians never mention what happens after the "strong leader" consolidates power.

MAGA has nothing left to offer except more of the same: more screaming, more outrage, more rot. It's all downhill from here.