Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Presidents

Presidents Republican Liberty

FATHER:

The Man Who Would Not Be King (David Boaz, 2/20/26, Cato)

What values did Washington’s character express? He was a farmer, a businessman, an enthusiast for commerce. As a man of the Enlightenment, he was deeply interested in scientific farming. His letters on running Mount Vernon are longer than letters on running the government. (Of course, in 1795 more people worked at Mount Vernon than in the entire executive branch of the federal government.)

He was also a liberal and tolerant man. In a famous letter to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, he hailed the “liberal policy” of the United States on religious freedom as worthy of emulation by other countries. He explained, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”

And most notably, he held “republican” values – that is, he believed in a republic of free citizens, with a government based on consent and established to protect the rights of life, liberty, and property.

From his republican values Washington derived his abhorrence of kingship, even for himself. The writer Garry Wills called him “a virtuoso of resignations.” He gave up power not once but twice – at the end of the revolutionary war, when he resigned his military commission and returned to Mount Vernon, and again at the end of his second term as president, when he refused entreaties to seek a third term. In doing so, he set a standard for American presidents that lasted until the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose taste for power was stronger than the 150 years of precedent set by Washington.

Cheeto Jesus

DONALD KILLS EVERYTHING HE TOUCHES:

Did Slovakia Just Switch Sides?: Robert Fico’s sudden enthusiasm for the EU shows Trump’s influence is waning. (Dalibor Rohac, Feb 06, 2026, Persuasion)

Reporting by Politico and an earlier testimony by one of Fico’s coalition partners, Andrej Danko, suggest that Fico’s own European awakening was prompted by his 45-minute conversation with U.S. President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on January 17. According to sources privy to conversations at the recent European Council, Fico described Trump as “dangerous” and was frightened by his “psychological state.”

Days later, Slovakia turned down Trump’s invitation to join his Board of Peace. On January 24, the country’s foreign ministry issued an unusual, strongly worded statement about Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. And then there was a two-hour conversation with Macron in Paris.

Cheeto Jesus Identitarianism

BERNIE BRO IN CHIEF:

The ‘Affordability’ Horseshoe: The president is stealing progressive Democrats’ worst economic ideas. (Scott Lincicome, February 4, 2026, The Dispatch)


Trump was never a doctrinaire Reaganite supply-sider, of course, but his embrace of domestic economic policies championed by U.S. progressives is the clearest evidence yet that the “horseshoe” theory of politics—i.e., that the extreme left and extreme right have more in common with each other than with the moderate center—is alive and well in the United States. The similarities have been clearest on trade, where both the far left and far right uniformly disdain “globalization” and the “elites” who supposedly use it to profit at The People’s expense. But we now see the same parallels in domestic economic policy, too—both in the details and the script that each policy follows: target common enemies and offer easy solutions to complex problems—solutions that don’t actually work and, in fact, can often make things worse for the very people that they claim to be helping.

Trump’s “affordability” proposals follow the “horseshoe economics” script to the letter. Smacking institutional investors (aka “Wall Street”) might make for a great populist soundbite, but as housing expert Jay Parsons explained at considerable length (and as we’ve discussed here at Capitolism), there’s simply no good case for the ban, which would likely harm rental markets yet have a minimal effect on the supply of single family homes—even in investor-rich markets. (My Cato Institute colleague Norbert Michel has more on this myth in The Dispatch this week.)

Trump’s populist attack on Big Meat would be similarly ineffective: As Reason’s Jack Nicastro explains, there’s no evidence that meatpackers are, as Trump alleges, “criminally profiting at the expense of the American People,” because the real culprit for high beef prices is the greatly reduced supply of cattle in the United States and from Mexico, which is struggling to stave off the New World screwworm. (More bad news on that front today, unfortunately. Sorry, fellow carnivores.)


Other proposals, meanwhile, would be downright bad for most Americans

Cheeto Jesus One Economy to Rule Them All

TRUMPISM VS ECONOMICS:

Tariffs Are More Destructive Than You Think (Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan, 1/26/26, Project Syndicate)

In today’s economy, tariffs are not just a demand shock; they are also a supply shock. While it is still true that tariffs shift demand toward domestically produced goods, domestic production now relies heavily on imported intermediate inputs. From manufacturing components to energy, logistics, and business services, firms source inputs globally and depend on complex cross-border supply chains. When tariffs raise the cost of imported inputs, they directly increase firms’ marginal costs.

These higher costs then propagate across sectors and countries through production networks. Industries that appear only indirectly exposed – such as services or downstream manufacturing – can experience substantial cost increases and price pressures. As a result, tariffs distort not only what consumers buy, but also how firms produce. As output contracts, productivity falls and inflationary pressures emerge well beyond the initially targeted sectors.

Identitarianism Joe Biden

THE SHARED WEIRDNESS OF THE LEFT/RIGHT:

Great Power Politics: Adam Tooze on Bidenomics (Adam Tooze, 11/07/24, London Review of Books)

We are left asking how this four-year period fits into recent American history and what legacy it leaves. The National Defence Industrial Strategy (NDIS) offers to do some of the work for us. Like other, better-known documents of the Biden era – Jake Sullivan’s speech on ‘Renewing American Economic Leadership’ at the Brookings Institution in April 2023, for instance – the NDIS is historically self-conscious. The basic Biden narrative was of America’s fall from greatness, starting in the 1990s, when the industrial fabric of the nation began to fray and China’s manufacturing capacity surged. Now China and other competitors are rising fast. The home front is undermined by polarisation and social dysfunction. But, with measures such as the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act (which increased spending on semiconductor research), the bipartisan infrastructure law and the NDIS, the Biden administration was attempting a national rebuilding centred on industrial production and a revalorisation of manual work.

One of the sleights of hand this narrative performed was to claim the current moment, and Biden’s response to it, as unprecedented. In his Brookings speech, Sullivan announced that the administration was calling time on neoliberalism. In his farewell letter, Biden described the IRA as the biggest climate measure in history. The NDIS is supposed to be the first document of its type ever issued by the Pentagon. In fact, neoliberalism lives on precisely because it continuously reinvents itself. The IRA may be a first in the US, but Europe puts more money into climate solutions and China’s subsidies for its microchips industry are four times those of the US. The facts were less important, however, than the claim of novelty. Bidenism wanted to respond to America’s many crises not with orthodoxy but by making a historically significant break.

In October 2023, Sullivan wrote in Foreign Affairs, the house journal of the US foreign policy establishment, that the world had entered the third era of American power since the Second World War. The article seemed to be modelled on one of George Kennan’s famous memos staking out the terrain of the Cold War. As a source of inspiration, the Kennedy moonshot moment has some appeal. But within the Biden administration, it was the 1930s and 1940s that captured the imagination. Jigar Shah, who runs a $400 billion loan programme at the Department of Energy, liked to evoke the Second World War in his attempts to inspire America to do ‘big things in a very short period of time’.

The irony, of course, is that this narrative is anything but new. In all but name, this is MAGA, and credit for it belongs to the Trump team in the 2016 campaign. If we were to date it precisely, as good a moment as any would be Trump’s speech to the Republican National Convention on Thursday, 21 July 2016, in which he portrayed the nation as besieged by violence and terrorism. That moment was telling because President Obama responded in the following days that he saw a very different country. Americans weren’t living in a gothic world of doom. They were taking their kids to school and to sports camp. They were getting on with finding real solutions to real problems. Trump wasn’t all that Republican or even conservative, he implied; Trump was just weird.

Founding Presidents

JUST THREE BRANCHES:

Justice Barrett, Trump v. Slaughter, and Presidential Removal Power from 1881 to 1901: Every president from 1881 to 1901 successfully defended presidential at-will removal power. (Steven Calabresi, 1.6.2026, Volokh Conspiracy)

During the oral argument in Trump v. Slaughter, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked counsel for respondent Slaughter how long independent agencies had existed for and counsel suggested to her, incorrectly, that they dated back to the last twenty years of the 19th Century. In fact, as I will show in a series of posts on this blog, no truly independent agency ever existed prior to the decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States in 1935. My full account of the history of presidential resistance to the creation of independent agencies during this period appears in: Steven G. Calabresi & Christopher S. Yoo, The Unitary Executive: Presidential Power from Washington to Bush (Yale University Press 2008). This blog post will discuss presidential removal power from 1881 to 1901. Subsequent posts will examine presidential removal power from 1901 to 2009. None of these posts could have been written by me without consulting and quoting from the excellent work done by my book co-author, Professor Christopher S. Yoo. He gets all the credit, and I take all the blame for whatever is said below.

In recounting our actual practice from 1881 to 1999, I do not mean to endorse the view that this practice is constitutionally relevant to deciding Trump v. Slaughter. I believe that President Trump should win this case because of the original public meaning of the text of the Constitution. I recognize, however, that only two of the nine justices on the current Supreme Court follow exclusively the original public meaning of the Constitution’s text. All the other seven justices on today’s Supreme Court think, to various degrees, that arguments from practice are sometimes relevant to the question of whether Humphrey’s Executor (1935) should be overruled. Since I have co-published the book with Christopher Yoo cited above on our actual practice, and since the issue is now pending before the Supreme Court, I want to explain why the arguments from presidential practice that Christopher Yoo helped me to write about 18 years ago support overruling Humphrey’s Executor (1935).

Ownership Society

THE SAVINGEST PEOPLE ON EARTH:

401(k)s Built America’s Wealth and Proved All the Critics Wrong: The rise of defined contribution accounts has given workers portability, flexibility, and a stake in America’s capital markets. (Judge Glock, December 24, 2025, Daily Economy)

A recent Wall Street Journal story highlighted the hundreds of thousands of “401(k) millionaires” just at the Fidelity brokerage. Far from being a refuge just for the wealthy, individual retirement accounts have become a widespread and secure way to save for retirement. They have also become one of the main reasons for America’s national wealth. […]

Around the time of the 401(k) tax code change, there were about 30 million defined benefit plan participants in the private sector, an all-time peak. That was nearly double the total in “defined contribution” or individual retirement plans, such as the 401(k).

Today, the number of active participants in defined benefit plans is down to about 10 million, but there are almost 90 million in defined contribution plans. Thanks to 401(k)s, the total number of workers with any retirement plan is at an all-time high, even accounting for population growth. […]

Despite periodic cries about a retirement crisis, people with the option to save for retirement are saving a lot. Fidelity estimates that people with 401(k)s are saving over 14 percent of their income in them, including both employer and employee contributions. The median retirement savings for the recently retired is $200,000, which helps explain the all-time record net worth for this group. The amount of savings will go up as more people retire who only know of defined contribution accounts. The number of people with individual accounts at middle age is actually higher than it is for older groups.  

Beyond the benefits to individuals, there are social benefits to individual retirement accounts. In countries with more expansive collective safety nets and social security, most people don’t have to save as much for retirement. Although for some individuals that could work out fine, for society as a whole, it can be devastating.

Founding Presidents Religion Uncategorized

IT’S A PURITAN NATION:

Calvin Coolidge’s “Hebraic Mortar”: Henry Ford sought to mainstream anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States. In a 1925 address, Coolidge decisively broke with Ford’s movement. (Devorah Goldman, 12/22/25, Public Discourse)

But he argues that the colonial character was nonetheless marked by a common religious liberalism: “From its beginnings, the new continent had seemed destined to be the home of religious tolerance.” This, he suggests, is because of the Bible, “the work of literature that was common to all of them.” Scripture was everywhere in the colonies. Citing “the historian Lecky”—presumably the nineteenth-century Irishman William Lecky—Coolidge contends that “Hebraic mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy.”

For the “sturdy old divines of those days,” the Bible served as a patriotic rallying cry:

They knew the Book. They were profoundly familiar with it, and eminently capable in the exposition of all its justifications for rebellion. To them, the record of the exodus from Egypt was indeed an inspired precedent. They knew what arguments from holy writ would most powerfully influence their people. It required no great stretch of logical processes to demonstrate that the children of Israel, making bricks without straw in Egypt, had their modern counterpart in the people of the colonies, enduring the imposition of taxation without representation!

The idea of America as a kind of Israel, an “almost chosen nation,” in Abraham Lincoln’s words some generations earlier, was not new. William Bradford, founder of the Plymouth colony in 1620, compared his personal study of Hebrew to Moses seeing the Promised Land, yet not being permitted to enter. John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, founders of the New Haven colony in 1637, were expert Hebrew scholars; around half of the dozens of statutes in the New Haven code of 1655 contained references to Hebrew scripture. Davenport ensured that the first public school in New Haven included Hebrew in the core curriculum and encouraged broad engagement with, as Coolidge puts it, the “great figures of Hebrew history, with Joshua, Samuel, Moses, Joseph, David, Solomon, Gideon, Elisha.” The United States is peppered with place names sourced from the Bible: Salem, Sharon, Jericho, Bethlehem, Goshen, Shiloh, and Hebron are just a few examples.

George Washington famously sent warm greetings to Jewish congregations, most notably to a synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, where he offered a blessing inspired by Hebrew prophets: “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

This biblical rootedness, Coolidge suggests, remains vital to maintaining a cohesive polity. A shared attachment to the Bible bolstered the patriot cause, drawing together scattered sympathies and interests and “divergencies of religious faith.” It is no wonder, he notes, that Jews—who first arrived on America’s shores in the 1650s—formed an integral part of the Revolutionary War effort, giving ample blood and treasure.

Cheeto Jesus

IT’S NOT AMERICAN:

2025 was a political disaster for MAGA: And 2026 could be even worse. (Justin Glawe, Dec 17, 2025, Public Notice)

From the Epstein files, to the economy, to the deadly military airstrikes on alleged drug boats in international waters, Trump and his entire administration are engaged in a desperate battle against the truth at the end of politically disastrous year for the MAGA movement.


But the lies aren’t really working anymore, and polls reflect this. Against the backdrop of a sluggish economy that’s been made worse by his own policies, Trump is less popular than he’s ever been. Instead of actually doing something to combat stubborn inflation and stagnant job growth, the president and his surrogates are just trying to lie their way out of it.

Meanwhile, despite having power in both the House and the Senate, congressional Republicans have failed to accomplish anything of note since the passage of Trump’s (also deeply unpopular) “Big Beautiful Bill.” Right now, they’re doing nothing to prevent healthcare premiums from rising for 21 million Americans when enhanced Obamacare subsidies expire at the end of this month.

Cheeto Jesus

THIS IS THE WAY:

Jack Smith, Trump’s Target, Shifts From Defense to Counterattack (Glenn Thrush, Nov. 3, 2025, NY Times)

Mr. Smith, who spent more than two years aggressively collecting evidence to prove Mr. Trump mishandled classified documents and tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, appears eager to publicly challenge a foundational pillar of MAGA canon: that the president was a sinned-upon innocent who did nothing to deserve scrutiny, much less two prosecutions.

Mr. Smith has told people in his orbit that he welcomes the opportunity to present the public case against Mr. Trump denied to him by the Supreme Court decision asserting broad presidential immunity from prosecution and adverse rulings from a Trump-appointed judge on the federal bench in Florida.

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