A tip of the cap to Martin Luther King Jr., the Civil Rights Movement, and all the other fights and fighters for equality that today's holiday is meant to honor.

Trump Unilaterally Imposes 10% Tariffs on Allies

When Donald Trump doesn't like someone, he has one standard playbook that he uses over and over: punish his enemy financially. Sometimes it is a lawsuit that costs his enemy money to defend against, sometimes it is something different, but money is almost always part of it. Right now, Trump is focused on acquiring Greenland—buying it if possible, otherwise conquering it. He is getting a lot of pushback from European countries, so once again he is reaching for his weapon of choice, this time manifesting itself in tariffs. He has decreed that eight European countries will face a 10% tariff on their exports to the U.S., starting Feb. 1. It will climb to 25% on June 1 if the U.S. does not own Greenland by then.

Back when the Constitution was in force, only Congress could impose tariffs, except in very limited situations. Now the president can just do it on a whim without a peep from the so-called "Legislative Branch." The targeted countries are Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. These are the countries that have sent or will soon send troops to Greenland to defend the island. However, the Supreme Court is considering a case in which it might decide that indeed, the power to levy tariffs belongs to the Legislative Branch, not the Executive Branch.

After Trump announced the tariffs Saturday, there were immediate protests outside the American consulate in Nuuk. They yelled "Yankee go home!" and other things and chanted: "Kalaallit Nunaat," which means "Land of the Greenlanders." There were also large protests against the U.S. in Copenhagen and other cities in Denmark. Here is the protest in Nuuk:

Trump will travel to the World Economic Forum in Davos tomorrow, where he will likely encounter some of the leaders of these countries and get an earful. He will undoubtedly tell them: "You have no cards. You have to obey me." They are likely to point out that they actually have quite a few cards. One of them is the China card. French President Emmanuel Macron visited China a few weeks ago. Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin went there last week. British P.M. Keir Starmer is going later this month. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is going in February. Other will surely follow. All of them are seeking individual or collective trade deals so instead of being dependent on the U.S. for their exports, they will do business with China, who they are coming to see as a more reliable partner.

Another card the European countries have is South America. On Saturday, the E.U. formally signed a trade agreement with Mercosur, a bloc of a dozen South American countries. It is the South American analog to the E.U. Here is E.U. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the signing ceremony:

The treaty will open an almost-free-trade zone with 700 million people. The initial focus will be on exporting European industrial products to South America in exchange for cheap food, but it could expand later. And the U.S. has nothing to say about it. In fact, in an increasing amount of world trade, the U.S. will be left out.

Although Trump hasn't threatened Canada with a new round of tariffs, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney can read the writing on the wall and has already visited China and made a deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Among other things, China will slash its tariff on Canadian canola oil and Canada will reduce its tariff on Chinese electric cars. Carney has been actively working on diversifying Canadian trade away from the U.S. Carney said that Canada's relationship with China has been more "predictable" in recent months and he found Chinese officials realistic and respectful.

The new tariffs have already had a tangible effect. Trump had previously bullied the E.U. into agreeing to a tariff regime in which U.S. products sold in Europe would have 0% tariffs but European products sold in the U.S. would be subject to a 15% tariff. Von der Leyen felt this was the best deal she could get. The European Parliament was set to ratify the treaty. Now the treaty is on hold indefinitely. Swedish MEP Karin Karlsboro, the trade coordinator for one of the parties in the E.U. governing coalition, said: "I see no possibility for the European Parliament to give the green light to move forward with the tariff agreement when we take a decision on Wednesday. Instead, the E.U. must prepare to respond to President Trump's tariff attacks, including those targeting Sweden."

If Trump responds to the pause in ratification, the E.U. could use its "trade bazooka," the Anti-Coercion Instrument This would let the E.U. use weapons like restrictions on investments and even putting limits on intellectual property protections. Emmanuel Macron is in favor of using the bazooka, but other European leaders aren't there yet. If Trump keeps responding, a full-blown trade war is not out of the question, even though it would hurt both sides. Keep in mind that most leaders, in contrast to Trump, do not start trade wars unless they intend to stay the course. So, if the Europeans do pull the trigger on the bazooka, the Rubicon will have been crossed, and things are all-but-guaranteed to get very ugly. (V)

Trump Is Destroying the Future

Donald Trump's efforts to browbeat U.S. universities into submission may have massive consequences for the country for decades to come. Some of his attempts to beat back DEI will have short-term effects, like not having talented women and minority students studying at elite universities. But the long-term effects are far, far worse. Much of the U.S. success since World War II has resulted from discoveries and inventions made at U.S. universities (especially elite ones) that later became products or services that changed the world. One example that both (V) and (Z) know about, albeit from different angles, is the Internet. It wasn't invented by the telephone companies. In fact when AT&T, was offered a chance to build it, the company turned it down, saying POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) was just fine, thank you, and there was no need to do research on improving it. The research that led to the ARPAnet, which became the Internet was done by a handful of elite universities, led by MIT, UCLA, and Stanford, and was paid for by grants from a DoD agency, ARPA. Only after the ARPAnet was up and running for years did the phone companies get belatedly interested.

Our point is keeping a technological edge over other countries is crucial for keeping an industrial edge, which leads to a military edge. A key factor here is a strong university system, where researchers are free to explore what they think may be the next big thing in their respective fields, certainly in the STEM fields. Having politicians or government bureaucrats ordering them around is deadly. Starving university researchers of funds or allocating funds on any basis other than merit also leads to eventual decline. The latter has been going on slowly for years, but Trump has made the problem much worse.

Technology is often underrated. The North won the Civil war not because it had better politicians but because it had a stronger industrial base and infrastructure. The Allies won World War II not because FDR was a brilliant military strategist but because they could produce more and better war materiel than the Axis powers. Weakening the universities is the key to a declining future, and that is the road Donald Trump wants to travel.

There are various rankings of world universities out there. One of them is CWTS from Leiden University in the Netherlands. It uses multiple bibliometric indicators, including number of publications, number of citations, and other factors. Here are the top 10 universities worldwide in 2012 and in 2025:

2012 Rank University Country 1 MIT United States 2 Princeton United States 3 Harvard United States 4 Rice United States 5 Stanford United States 6 Caltech United States 7 UC Santa Barbara United States 8 UC Berkeley United States 9 Carnegie Mellon United States 10 UC San Francisco United States

2025 Rank University Country 1 Zhejiang China 2 Shanghai Jiao Tong China 3 Harvard United States 4 Sichuan China 5 Cent S China 6 Huazhong China 7 Sun Yat-sen China 8 Xi'an Jiaotong China 9 Tsinghua China 10 U. of Toronto Canada

The Leiden ranking isn't the only one, but the shift from U.S. universities on top to Chinese ones on top is visible even without a sophisticated statistical analysis. Part of the decline happened during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but also during Trump's first term. It is a long-term trend due to underfunding of U.S. universities coupled with aggressive funding from China of its best universities.

Now Trump is accelerating the problem greatly by cutting off research funding to universities that won't let him run the university and won't let him dictate who will teach there, what will be taught there, and who will be allowed to study there. If a university president thinks he or she is better at running the place than Trump, well, there go your research funds. Trump's actions (and those of Elon Musk) cost Johns Hopkins, a leading university in health sciences, $800 million, which forced the university to lay off 2,000 staff.

The rise of Chinese universities is not an accident. In a speech in 2024, Xi Jinping praised Chinese universities' progress in fields from quantum technology to space science. He particularly noted work at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, which has developed a method for creating starch from carbon dioxide. This could eventually lead to ways to convert air to food. Xi has also made sure the top universities are well funded. In China, the educational system is largely merit-based and very competitive. Only the best survive. That is fine with him.

Besides threatening or withholding funding from universities, another thing Trump has done to weaken them is blocking visas of students from all over the world who have been admitted to U.S. universities. This has three effects. First, really smart students from Europe, India, China and other countries will look for other countries to study in, which reduces the average quality of the students at the top U.S. universities. Second, since foreign students rarely get scholarships from U.S. universities and have to pay full tuition (even if the money comes from their governments), it deprives U.S. universities of another source of funding, in addition to the direct cutbacks of federal research money. Third, some of foreign students stay in the U.S. and become productive workers in many fields and some go back to their own countries, generally with a very positive view of democracy, capitalism and America in general. This is a major source of America's soft power. Trump has decided to throw it in the garbage can because he doesn't like foreigners. Little good will come of this, but once patterns of where students study change, they will be hard to reset.

On a personal note, (V) understands this model very well. After the Berlin Wall fell and countries in Eastern Europe joined the E.U., he helped set up structural programs in which top professors in some of the Eastern European countries would feed their best students to his university for graduate study. Some got masters or Ph.D.s and stayed, benefiting the Netherlands, and some went home, knowing about Dutch companies and institutions and generally having a positive view of their time in Amsterdam. This is the sort of "soft power" arrangement Trump wants to kill off. As an aside, a number of European countries have created programs to lure the very best foreign scientists who don't feel comfortable working in the U.S. anymore to their country with large initial grants to allow them to build a top research group quickly. They understand that today's research leads to tomorrow's products and services. Trump doesn't. Welcome to the new brain drain. (V)

Be Careful What You Wish for ...

When Elon Musk bought eX-Twitter, conservatives were delighted. Now they had a platform where conservative thoughts (and lies) would be tolerated, even welcomed. Nothing would be censored. It was a great day.

Until it wasn't. It has become a cesspool or hate and lies, but that is not the problem. The real problem is that now MAGA folks have a big megaphone to attack ... other MAGA folks. That wasn't the game plan. Rather than unite the right, it is helping to divide them, and some of them are getting sick of it.

Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (R) recently announced his plans to leave eX-Twitter due to what he calls its "warped projection of reality." Former Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam deleted the app from his phone and wrote: "X is a post-apocalyptic cesspool of bots, pedophilia and political illiteracy. I deleted it from my phone because it was making me dumber."

When Musk rolled out a new feature earlier this year to show which country a tweet was coming from, many MAGA militia members were surprised to learn the most active pro-Trump and pro-MAGA accounts were coming from abroad, largely Russia. Oops.

A new algorithm promotes short video clips over links to serious conservative articles. According to conservative activist Christopher Rufo: "That's a troublesome trend for the right in particular, because you have actual lunatics like Candace Owens that have garnered the biggest audiences in the business." What he means is that crazy people like Owens see no value in actually winning elections, getting power, and using it, which is what Rufo wants. He finds it wasteful that he and other people who care about implementing conservative policy issues now have to fight on eX-Twitter with lunatics like Owens who care only about getting a bigger audience and monetizing it.

The infighting on eX-Twitter is getting so bad that J.D. Vance had to devote most of his speech at TPUSA's AmericaFest gathering in December trying to tamp down intra-MAGA feuds like those between America Firsters such as Tucker Carlson and more conventional conservatives such as Ben Shapiro.

This is a change from how the old Twitter was, with liberals fighting progressives and conservatives just laughing on the sidelines. Now the script has flipped. (V)

Party Identification Now Favors the Democrats by 8 Points

Pollsters often ask respondents which party they favor. Some people claim to be independents, but most of them lean one way or the other. During the first year of Trump v1.0, the percentage of Americans calling themselves "Republicans" or "Republican-leaning" dropped slightly, from 42% to 40%.

In Trump v2.0 though, the Republican Party is shedding members and supporters at a much faster clip than the first time around. This time, it has dropped 6 points in the first year, triple the dropoff last time. Similarly, more people are identifying as Democrats now than a year ago. A year ago, 43% of the country identified as Democrats. Now it is 48%. In Q1 2025, the parties were tied at 45% apiece. Now the Democrats have an 8-point lead:

A lead of 8 points is high for recent times. This is the largest lead either party has had since 2009. What is the most likely reason for this change? First, voters gave Trump a second chance in 2024 because they thought: (1) Joe Biden was too old and feeble, (2) Kamala Harris was too female and Black and (3) Trump was telling the truth when he said he would lower prices. Now they know better about the third point. Trump's victory was not a win for the Republican Party. It was a defeat for Biden and Harris personally and a win for Trump personally. This is not the same as party loyalty.

People generally vote for all the candidates of the party they identify with. With all the usual caveats about a week is a long time in politics, if there is a gap of 8 points in November, that will result in a large blue wave and almost certainly Democratic capture of the House and gains in the Senate (maybe even enough to run the place). (V)

Giving in to a Bully Rarely Works, Part I: Bill Cassidy

Sen. Bill Cassidy is an M.D. specializing in treating liver disease. He did that work for over 20 years, during which time he was a Democrat. When he ran for public office in 2006 for the first time, he ran as a Republican for the Louisiana House. He was then elected to the U.S. Senate in 2014. In 2021, when Donald Trump was impeached for the second time, Cassidy voted to convict him, saying: "Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person. I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty."

When the nomination of Robert Kennedy, Jr. as secretary of HHS came before the Senate, Cassidy grilled Kennedy on vaccines. Kennedy lied through his teeth, Cassidy pretended to believe the answers, and then voted to confirm him. As a doctor, Cassidy knows very well that vaccines are one of the greatest advances in public health in all of history. But he also knew that if he voted to sink Kennedy's nomination, Donald Trump would endorse someone to run against him in the Republican primary and he would soon have to go back to treating people with liver disease. Cassidy bit his lip, voted for Kennedy, and hoped the danger to his career was now gone.

Wrong. When you give in to a bully, he always comes back for more. Despite Cassidy giving Trump what he wanted, Trump has now endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA) for Cassidy's seat. She may formally announce her challenge as soon as today.

Now Cassidy will go down in history as an enabler of all the medical disasters that Kennedy is causing, and will cause in the future, and he probably still won't even get to keep his seat. If Cassidy had done the right thing and voted Kennedy down, he would still have lost his seat, but the history books would then have recorded that he went down trying to protect the American people from a charlatan who could cause great harm. Instead it will be written that he went down trying to appease a bully and the bully was not appeased.

Interestingly enough, the changes in Louisiana election law that Gov. Jeff Landry (R) rammed through last year will probably be Cassidy's undoing. In the past, Louisiana had a jungle primary, but that is no more. In a jungle primary, the top two finishers met in a runoff a few weeks after the primary. Under that system, Cassidy would probably have faced off against Letlow in the runoff—and won due to Democrats who see him as the least-bad option. Now Louisiana has closed partisan primaries for Senate elections, so if he makes a kamikazi run he will probably lose the partisan Republican primary to Letlow and go back to treating sick livers. (V)

Virginia Advances New Congressional Map

When Texas did a midcycle redistricting, that caused the dam to burst and set off a redistricting flood in many states. California was the first blue state to do something to counteract the Texas move, but Virginia was not far behind. The Virginia state Constitution has a provision intended to slow down constitutional amendments. A proposed amendment has to be approved by the legislature and then approved a second time after there has been an election for the House of Delegates, so if the voters don't like the amendment, they can elect delegates who will oppose it in Round 2. This time, the opposite has occurred. The legislature approved a redistricting amendment in 2025 then in November 2025, the Democrats flipped 13 seats in the House.

Early last week, the new state House approved a redistricting amendment. Then on Friday, the state Senate also approved it. This will lead to a referendum in the early Spring. If it is approved, the Democrats are likely to flip some U.S. House seats. The intended map has not been released yet, but just knowing the current districts, we can make a pretty good guess where the action will be. Look:

District	PVI	Incumbent
VA-08	D+26	Don Beyer (D)
VA-03	D+18	Bobby Scott (D)
VA-11	D+18	James Walkinshaw (D)
VA-04	D+17	Jennifer McClellan (D)
VA-10	D+6	Suhas Subramanyam (D)
VA-07	D+2	Eugene Vindman (D)
VA-02	EVEN	Jen Kiggans (R)
VA-01	R+3	Rob Wittman (R)
VA-05	R+6	John McGuire (R)
VA-06	R+12	Ben Cline (R)
VA-09	R+22	Morgan Griffith (R)

Clearly Kiggans, Wittman, and McGuire are likely to be unemployed come next January. Meanwhile, Subramanyam and Vindman will be able to sleep much better at night after the new map comes into force. So this stunt is likely to net the Democrats three House seats. All in all, the net result of all the redistricting so far including Virginia is roughly a wash. However, if Florida also redistricts, that could give the Republicans potentially as many as five extra House seats, making the whole maneuver a net win for them. That said, it remains the case that in a blue wave, red gerrymanders could become dummymanders. If a state trades a smaller number of "not at all competitive" districts for a larger number of "slightly competitive districts," as Texas has done, that can go south if there's a big shift in the electorate. (V)

Gov. Abbott, Meet Gov. Newsom

When the late Texas representative Sylvester Turner died on March 5, 2025, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) wanted to keep the seat in Turner's Houston-based district open as long as possible. So he scheduled the special election for Nov. 4, 2025. That meant that in the best case, the seat would remain open for 8 months. But in the likely case a runoff was needed (which it was), Abbott scheduled the runoff for Jan. 31, 2026. Two Democrats will be on the ballot then and one of them will replace Turner.

Some people thought that keeping a House seat open for 8 or 10 months wasn't a nice thing to do to the people who live there. One of the people who thought that was perfectly fine and dandy was Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who now finds himself in the opposite situation from Abbott. Former representative Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) died Jan. 6, and Newsom has now scheduled the special election to replace him for Aug. 4, 2026, the last date allowed by California law. However, the all-party primary is June 2, 2026, and if someone gets over 50% of the vote then, that person is elected and the Aug. 4 election is canceled. Multiple contenders are already in, so anyone getting 50% in June seems unlikely. That means House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will be denied one seat for 7 months. Two can play this game, so it seems.

Marjorie Taylor Greene's resignation on Jan. 5 and LaMalfa's death the next day brought the House partisan balance to 218R, 213D. After the Texas special election, it will be 218R, 214D. The vote of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) can't be taken for granted. That doesn't leave much margin for error. Upcoming special elections balance out. On March 10, Georgians in GA-14, an R+19 district, will pick a new Republican to replace Greene. Then on April 16, New Jerseyans in NJ-11, a D+5 district, will likely pick another Democrat to replace Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), bringing the balance to 219R, 215D until the August election in LaMalfa's CA-01 (R+12) district. In September, everyone will be out on the campaign trail. Don't expect the House to pass a lot of bills this year. (V)

---

Previous report         Next report

---

If you wish to contact us, please use one of these addresses. For the first two, please include your initials and city.

• questions@electoral-vote.com    For questions about politics, civics, history, etc. to be answered on a Saturday
• comments@electoral-vote.com   For "letters to the editor" for possible publication on a Sunday
• corrections@electoral-vote.com To tell us about typos or factual errors we should fix
• items@electoral-vote.com            For general suggestions, ideas, etc.

To download a poster about the site to hang up, please click here.

---

Email a link to a friend.

---The Votemaster and Zenger