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Updated at 5:37 p.m. ET on March 27, 2025

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence” in the federal government “and seize them,” Russ Vought told The New York Times in 2023. As the Trump administration’s first two months prove, he wasn’t bluffing.

Back then, Vought was a leading figure in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s effort to provide a blueprint for a Republican presidency. Now Vought is the head of the Office of Management and Budget—which he’s described as “a president’s air-­traffic control system”—and Donald Trump is following Project 2025’s plans to quash any part of the executive branch that doesn’t bend to his will. One key step in that plan is coaxing the Supreme Court to throw out a ruling that has shaped the government for 90 years.

Last week, Trump announced that he was firing two Democratic federal trade commissioners, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya. The FTC, which enforces antitrust law, has five seats, and no more than three may belong to any party. It is what’s known as an “independent agency” or “independent regulatory agency”—a part of the executive branch whose members are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate but, beyond that, are not directed by the White House.

As I write in my forthcoming book about Project 2025, that concept is anathema to the right-wing thinkers in Trumpism’s intellectual clique. They believe that a president should have full control over anyone in the executive branch. “The notion of an independent agency—­whether that’s a flat-­out independent agency” such as the Federal Communications Commission “or an agency that has parts of it that view itself as independent, like the Department of Justice—­we’re planting a flag and saying we reject that notion completely,” Vought told NPR in 2023.

This is not the first time that Trump has moved to fire an official whose job is supposed to be secure, save in cases of misconduct. This includes Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger, whose case I described earlier this month; Federal Election Commission Chair Ellen Weintraub, who is challenging her dismissal; and the National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, who was reinstated by a court this month. All of these dismissals appear to plainly violate statutes, but the FTC firings are an even more direct provocation. That’s because the Supreme Court precedent that protects officials at independent agencies specifically refers to a president’s attempt to fire an FTC commissioner in 1933. (Today, the two fired FTC commissioners sued Trump, arguing that the dismissals violated federal law. A spokesperson for the White House said in a statement that “the Trump administration operated within its lawful authority” in firing the commissioners.)

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s power struggle with the Supreme Court is well known, but he also feuded with other officials who opposed his major overhaul of the government. One was William Humphrey, who’d been appointed to the FTC by Calvin Coolidge, a fierce small-government conservative. Roosevelt tried to pressure Humphrey to quit, but he refused, so Roosevelt attempted to fire him—not for any specific cause, but simply because they disagreed on policy.

Humphrey once again refused to acquiesce and sued. He died the following year, but his estate continued to fight the case, taking it to the Supreme Court. For this reason, the case is known as Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. (Certain officials at Columbia University and the law firm of Paul Weiss could learn from this persistence in the face of adversity and even death.) The court ruled 9–0 against the president in 1935. The justices found that although the FTC was housed in the executive branch, it also served some independent legislative and judicial functions. “Such a body cannot in any proper sense be characterized as an arm or an eye of the executive,” they wrote, adding, “It is quite evident that one who holds his office only during the pleasure of another cannot be depended upon to maintain an attitude of independence against the latter’s will.”

Roosevelt was furious—this was one of the Supreme Court decisions that led him to attempt to pack the court two years later—but Humphrey’s Executor became an important pillar of the federal government as we know it for decades. For most of that time, conservatives have viewed Roosevelt’s presidency as an example of the evils of a president with excessive power.

The right is no longer so skeptical about presidential power. Some right-wing thinkers have espoused the “unitary executive theory,” which holds (to oversimplify) that the president should have control over all executive-branch actions. The George W. Bush administration brought this theory into the mainstream. Yet even though the Supreme Court has somewhat narrowed the reach of its 1935 ruling over time, Humphrey’s Executor remains an important limitation on the president’s powers.

Now, however, Trump allies—frustrated by how the checks and balances of independent agencies (among other things) prevented him from enacting much of his agenda during his first presidency—are seeking greater control than any modern president has. For this reason, I argue in my book that Project 2025’s approach is not conservative but self-consciously radical. In Project 2025’s chapter on the FTC, Adam Candeub (now the general counsel of the FCC) writes, “The Supreme Court ruling in Humphrey’s Executor upholding agency independence seems ripe for revisiting—and perhaps sooner than later.” In another chapter, the former Justice Department official Gene Hamilton argues, “The next conservative Administration should formally take the position that Humphrey’s Executor violates the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

This may be the purpose the most recent firings serve for the White House. As the Trump administration lines up test cases for the courts, it would only be fitting to try to get the Supreme Court to overrule Humphrey’s with a case from the FTC. But if the precedent is overturned, much of the executive branch would be transformed from watchdogs or independent actors into the president’s foot soldiers, raising the risk of tyranny—either of the majority or of the president himself. Having established that independent agencies functioned as parts of the legislative and judicial branches, the unanimous majority in 1935 laid out the principle at work: “The fundamental necessity of maintaining each of the three general departments of government entirely free from the control or coercive influence, direct or indirect, of either of the others, has often been stressed and is hardly open to serious question.”

The court’s logic remains convincing, but its confident assertion that the need for balance is a given has not aged so well.

Related:

Presidents may not unilaterally dismantle government agencies. The whistleblower for the whistleblowers

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The worst thing a MAGA warrior can do The tariff man is coming for America’s entrepreneurs. It’s not easy being (Marjorie Taylor) Greene.

Today’s News

President Donald Trump withdrew his nomination of Representative Elise Stefanik as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, citing the razor-thin margin that Republicans have in the House. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced that 10,000 full-time employees will be laid off across health agencies. President Trump told reporters that America will “go as far as we have to go” to gain control of Greenland, “for national security and international security.”

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: The prospect of a journey to China turned Susan Sontag’s gaze toward her own family, Sam Fentress writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

You Can Do Leisure Better, Seriously

By Arthur C. Brooks

As a professor, my primary vocation is to teach young adults skills that will prepare them to excel in their careers. The implicit assumption society makes is that professional excellence requires formal training, whereas excellence in the rest of life does not. There is no Harvard School of Leisure, after all. Work demands discipline and training; nonwork is easy and enjoyable and comes naturally.

Our higher-education system, including my university, operates on this assumption. But to me, it’s very questionable.

Read the full article.

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Take a sip. Americans will never quit soda—Poppi and its “health-conscious” ilk are just new versions of the same old thing, Ellen Cushing writes.

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The United States is rapidly dismantling the world order that it built and maintained over the past 80 years. Donald Trump’s administration is demolishing America’s foreign-aid system, weakening its transatlantic alliances, and curtailing military assistance for key partners, all in the name of putting “America First.”

These decisions emerge in part from a belief that has a growing appeal today: The U.S. should fix its own problems before worrying about everyone else’s. But this view fails to recognize that America’s international relationships are indispensable to its strength and stability. In nearly 15 years working on foreign-aid efforts across continents, I’ve seen that when America withdraws from the world, the world’s problems come knocking on its door.

Trump’s policies resemble those of some American leaders in the early 20th century who withdrew from international commitments, restricted foreign assistance, and pursued objectives mainly through threats and limited force rather than engagement and support. Both American and foreign leaders typically expended blood and treasure abroad only when they sensed a near-term payoff, or when catastrophes had already broken out. Using one’s resources to stabilize the international system and prevent bad outcomes was the exception.

[Brian Klaas: DOGE is courting catastrophic risk]

The costs of this approach became clear soon enough. Even though the U.S. had the world’s largest economy and an exceptional military, the country was deeply vulnerable to international crises, including wars, epidemics, and economic tumult, all of which inflicted great harm on Americans.

Now, in fraying the international order, Trump threatens to reinstate some of the conditions that made the U.S. so unsafe a century ago. The administration claims to want to reduce wasteful spending and inefficiency. I know firsthand that these problems are real, and that effective reforms exist. But tearing down the system isn’t one of them.

Aiding other countries may seem like charity, but it protects American interests in concrete ways. Containing Ebola or Marburg outbreaks before they reach American soil, for example, is clearly preferable to addressing them once they’re already here. But even the more routine work that the U.S. has now halted—such as training nurses and supporting hospitals—ultimately makes Americans more secure. My own experiences illustrate the point.

In 2019, I worked with government officials and medical professionals in Tanzania to curb the excessive use of antibiotics, and thereby reduce the potential for drug-resistant pathogens. In a stuffy conference room four hours outside Dar es Salaam, we created a system that could help stop the next MRSA infection from emerging in Tanzania and coming to America.

During my work in Nigeria in 2016, I saw how training teachers, providing textbooks, and rehabilitating schools not only benefited locals but also promoted America’s strategic priorities. Because we conducted all of our activities with the Nigerian government, we established relationships that could be used to encourage security cooperation, combat local insurgents, and counter Chinese influence in the country.

And while working on tax reform in Tunisia in 2017, I was one small piece of an effort to ensure that the government had sufficient revenue to pay its employees and provide basic services. This wasn’t bleeding-heart altruism: The project ultimately helped equip the country’s emerging democracy to fight extremism, reduce migration that was destabilizing Europe, and pay its debts to Western creditors.

The connection between foreign assistance and U.S. national security was even clearer in Afghanistan, where I spent several months from 2010 to 2013. I was part of a team that reestablished local government offices and cooperated with officials to rebuild schools, repair roads, and improve water systems. The initiative was demanding and dangerous: Local militants attacked our workplaces and—on a day I wasn’t there—car-bombed our Kabul office. Our work benefited the local population, but that wasn’t our primary objective; we were there to convert our military’s gains into lasting security for America. As long as terrorists who opposed the West continued to find refuge in Afghanistan, the U.S. wouldn’t be safe. The Afghan government had to be rehabilitated in order to neutralize them.

America’s efforts obviously failed in Afghanistan, but that was a function of too little involvement, not too much. The U.S. had steadily withdrawn military, economic, and diplomatic support—a long, slow slide that led to the Afghan government’s collapse and our disgraceful withdrawal in 2021. We now face a similar situation in Ukraine, where the elimination of U.S. support may produce the very failure that America says it’s trying to avoid.

Even a purely self-interested America should invest in the world’s security. But it has to improve how it carries out those investments. As with any government program, America’s foreign-aid system suffers from a little fraud, some waste, and a lot of inefficiency.

[From the April 2025 issue: The Trump world order]

Let’s start with fraud. Though I never witnessed any directly, some undoubtedly occurs, and the administration is right to want to eliminate it. But firing inspectors general is not the way to do so. These independent watchdogs minimize abuse and make sure Congress knows precisely how taxpayer money is being spent. For example, they identified billions of dollars in misdirected or poorly utilized spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. To actually root out fraud and inefficiency, the federal government must empower IGs, not remove them. Tying IG budgets to the size of the programs they oversee would ensure that their resources are commensurate with the tasks they are asked to perform, including targeting fraud.

In my experience, however, fraud is far from the biggest problem. I saw many projects fail either because they didn’t fully account for local context—in fairness, it’s difficult to hold community meetings under mortar fire—or because they didn’t have enough resources to achieve their aims. But even when projects succeed on their own terms, they don’t always advance America’s interests as clearly as they could. Every foreign-assistance effort should be linked to specific foreign-policy goals, such as decreasing the number of refugees fleeing a given country, or building up a local alternative to Chinese foreign investment. The Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Reviews of recent decades have tried to unite projects with broader objectives, but they’re too cumbersome to be effective.

Simply meeting goals and advancing the national interest aren’t enough, though; America’s foreign-aid system needs to do both much more efficiently than it has in the past. I was part of several efforts that languished under review for well over a year before being canceled. Worse, some applications sat pending for so long that when they were awarded, the circumstances on the ground had changed so dramatically that the original plan had no chance of succeeding. Even when applications are assessed and approved quickly, other onerous processes stand in the way: contracting mechanisms, acquisition regulations, and compliance and reporting requirements all tend to result in lots of wasted money, time, and brainpower.

In theory, some of DOGE’s reforms might help in this regard. Subsuming USAID and other foreign-aid offices within the State Department could allow the government to make sure that more projects meet their goals and promote American priorities. One could also argue that reducing America’s foreign commitments might help the country focus on its most important interventions. The current administration, however, has given little indication that it is carrying out these reforms in good faith—or even wants to improve foreign aid in the first place.

A thoughtful version of DOGE that truly wants to create a leaner, more effective foreign-policy apparatus could use AI to accelerate and improve the many regulatory steps that slow down the provisioning of aid. AI might also help the government identify which applicants are most likely to meet their targets.

But at the moment, DOGE seems less inclined to excise waste and inefficiency than to implode the government. Its impact on American security is already coming into view—in a resurgence of tuberculosis in Kenya, for example, and a measurably growing risk of nuclear war.

By ostensibly putting itself first, America is really dragging the world back to a leaderless, atomized era that undermined its own interests. The administration can continue to disengage and watch chaos fill the void. Or it can make America safer.

One might think the Trump administration and its supporters would be dismayed to learn that top personnel discussed military strikes against Yemen on a group chat that mistakenly included a journalist. And indeed, they are furious. But the rage is not directed at the cavalier sharing of presumably classified intelligence. It is instead reserved mainly for the journalist: The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.

The response to the scandal reveals a disjuncture between the seriousness with which MAGA treats foreign enemies and perceived domestic ones. The prospect of being compromised by the likes of Iran or China is distant in comparison to the visceral horror of giving a victory to the dread mainstream media. Marxists have a slogan: “No war but class war.” The MAGA version might be “No war but culture war.”

As Goldberg explained in an article published Monday, he was added to a Signal chat called “Houthi PC small group” by Michael Waltz, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. Discussing a secret military strike on an unsecure channel, and mistakenly inviting a journalist into the chat, is a shocking breach of operations security. But in the world of Trump, the far more shocking breach is that the person invited into the chat was the reporter who first revealed that Trump had referred to dead American soldiers as suckers and losers.

And so the focus for Trump and his allies has been on explaining to the MAGA faithful how it is that a journalist found himself in the middle of a military planning meeting. Those explanations have gone as awkwardly as you might expect.

Trump put the blame on an unnamed staffer. “Somebody that … worked for Mike Waltz at a lower level had, I guess, Goldberg’s number, who called through the app, and somehow this guy ended up on the call,” he told Newsmax’s Greg Kelly.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans]

Waltz, appearing on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program Tuesday night, denied that one of his staffers put Goldberg’s contact information on his phone.

“But how did it end up on your phone?” Ingraham asked. Waltz said “the best technical minds” were at work answering this mystery. Ingraham, obviously dissatisfied, persisted. “But you’ve never talked to him before, so how’s the number on your phone?”

“If you have somebody else’s contact,” he explained, “and then somehow it gets sucked in, it gets sucked in.” Planning a military operation on a device that sucks in phone numbers from complete strangers sounds like a bad idea. But Waltz seems to have calculated that acknowledging this vulnerability would be less damning than admitting that he had spoken with Goldberg at some point in his career.

“I can tell you for 100 percent I don’t know this guy,” he added. “I know him by his horrible reputation, and he really is the bottom scum of journalists.” Again, this explanation would seem to make the security breach worse. Waltz is saying the person who penetrated his chat is not merely an unauthorized civilian, but “scum”—bottom scum! Not even top scum! This strategy makes sense only if the priority is to prove that Waltz wasn’t chummy with a representative of the liberal media elite.

The Fox News host Jesse Watters appeared to have the same prioritization in mind when he shared the story with his audience. “This wouldn’t surprise me if Goldberg sneaked his way in,” he suggested, implausibly,. “He’s the lowest of the low.” From a national-security standpoint, this theory is the opposite of reassuring. If Goldberg could “sneak his way in” to a highly sensitive discussion about a secret military operation, shouldn’t we worry that Chinese or Russian or Iranian spies, who possess espionage capabilities perhaps even greater than those of a journalist, might also sneak their way in? But the fear of infiltration by foreign enemies pales beside the much deeper fear of a Trump adviser having spoken with a journalist.

[Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris: Here are the attack plans that Trump’s advisers shared on Signal]

One might wonder why Trump and his allies have devised such fantastical explanations. Why not simply blame everything on Waltz, finger him as a secret “deep state” agent, and fire him?

The answer is that doing so would violate another MAGA principle, which is that the independent press must be treated as completely illegitimate. As Will Chamberlain, a conservative lawyer, posted, “Under no circumstances should the Trump administration fire anyone based on anything published in the pages of The Atlantic.”

The retired army colonel and conservative columnist Kurt Schlichter advanced a similar argument: “The idea that we’re going take Jeffrey Goldberg’s word and throw one of our own over the cliff to please the likes of faux-fussy Tim Walz, Pete Buttigieg, a bunch of ex-generals who’ve never won a war, and the rest of these dorks is inconceivable to a based conservative.”

MAGA world believes it erred in Trump’s first term by legitimizing mainstream media and must now act upon Trump’s rhetoric that reporters who don’t faithfully promote him are “enemies of the people.”

Accordingly, after first confirming the veracity of the story, the administration has settled on minimizing it by disputing Goldberg’s characterization of what he inadvertently learned. Goldberg first described the information shared on the group chat as “war plans,” but the actual plans, Trump world now says, merely involved a military strike against a designated foreign enemy. “The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT ‘war plans,’” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed, sharing the headline of an Atlantic story describing “attack plans.”

[Tom Nichols: The Trump team’s denials are laughable]

If you describe them as attack plans, they cannot be war plans. We have never been at war with the Houthis, as Big Brother might say. The distinction between these terms is new enough that Trump himself wrote, when he touted the strike, “Our brave Warfighters are right now carrying out aerial attacks on the terrorists’ bases, leaders, and missile defenses to protect American shipping, air, and naval assets, and to restore Navigational Freedom.” Perhaps he should delete this message and replace the reference to “brave Warfighters” with “brave attackfighters.”

To be generous to the White House, though, administration officials may not envision the conflict with the Houthis in terms of war. War is something they may be able to imagine only in a domestic context. Chamberlain is fond of calling the Trump-era style of political combat “wartime conservatism.” Explaining why The Atlantic’s story could not be legitimated by firing anyone for the irresponsible behavior it exposed, he posted, “Wartime conservatism means your adversaries get no scapegoats and no scalps.” No war but culture war.

Over the past two months, Stuart and Susan Rosen say they have paid nearly $30,000 in tariffs to the American government. Their Burbank–based small business designs costume jewelry, manufactures it in China, imports it to the United States, and sells it to department stores and online boutiques. When Donald Trump took office, he slapped a 10 percent tariff on their imports, and then another 10 percent.

Tariffs cause “a little disturbance” and require “a little bit of an adjustment period,” the president has conceded—and the Rosens confirmed. Their retail partners have declined to increase in-store prices for their necklaces and earrings, leaving their business with no choice but to eat the cost of the levy. “Trump gets online and says, This is great! These tariffs, we’re going to make a lot of money,” Susan told me. “Well, you’re stealing money from me.”

After this adjustment period, Trump has promised, the tariffs will “protect our businesses and our people.” Business owners will dump their foreign trading partners and foreign firms will invest in the United States. Companies will hire American workers, open American factories, and buy American goods. The trade deficit will decline and employment will go up. “Tariffs are about making America rich again,” Trump said, addressing a Joint Session of Congress earlier this month. “It’s happening.”

It sounds great. But it is not happening. Many entrepreneurs, such as the Rosens, have no practical way to onshore their supply chain. If they managed to do so, their jewelry would cost more than imported jewelry, making their business uncompetitive. If the tens of thousands of American firms relying on imported goods did the same, the country’s rate of productivity growth and consumers’ purchasing power would go down. “If we try to make every damn thing here, it’s a road to poverty,” Kimberley Clausing, an economist at UCLA, told me. “The idea that there’s going to be some sort of long-term benefit is hogwash.”

The White House is not creating a little disturbance in service of making America rich again; it’s creating a huge disturbance in service of making America poor again. Tariffs will encourage American firms to use more American products and American workers. Yet that still does not mean they will bolster American employment or improve American lives.

Washington’s yen for onshoring is bipartisan, and predates Trump by more than a decade. After the Great Recession, Barack Obama pushed a “Make It in America” plan, praising businesses that created manufacturing jobs stateside. In 2016, Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton issued competing policies to promote factory employment. In 2021, Joe Biden called industrial production the “engine of American prosperity” before spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tax credits and subsidies for semiconductor factories and clean-energy plants.

This 21st-century push for 19th-century industry is about hope for the future and, perhaps even more so, fears from the past. From the 1970s to the 2000s, deindustrialization and globalization eviscerated the country’s heartland, the Steel Belt corroding into the Rust Belt. It would be hard to overstate the financial and social ramifications: persistent depopulation, permanent income loss, severe regional inequality, increasing drug overdoses, rising political polarization, ascendant right-wing populism. Moreover, studies have indicated that the erosion of the country’s manufacturing base might have reduced productivity and innovation economy-wide. The dislocations caused by the coronavirus pandemic and rising tensions with Beijing gave Washington a strong security justification for supporting domestic supply chains too.

A self-proclaimed “tariff man,” Trump has taken these arguments to extremes, bellowing that foreign countries are ripping off Americans and promising to eliminate the country’s trade deficit. “Globalization has made the financial elite, who donate to politicians, very, very wealthy,” he said while campaigning against Clinton. “It has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.” During his first term, he implemented tariffs on aluminum, steel, and $380 billion in Chinese imports, and renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement. In his second, he has levied tariffs on Chinese, Mexican, and Canadian goods, and is preparing tariffs on trillions of dollars of imports from around the globe.

But there is a difference between using trade policy to generate new jobs and to restore old ones, as Trump wants to do, promising to take the country back and make it great again. “Rectifying the bad things we went through in the past—and I am not minimizing that there were costs—this is not going to fix that, and I fear that it’s holding out false promise,” Chad Bown of Peterson Institute for International Economics told me. Tariffs aren’t reparations.

Trump’s nostalgia notwithstanding, the American economy was not more prosperous when a large share of its workers were toiling on assembly lines. Fifty years ago, the middle class was larger and inequality was lower. But wages and household incomes were smaller, and consumer goods were much more dear. Trade liberalization and automation made most Americans better off.

Trump’s crackbrained understanding of trade economics threatens to reverse those welfare gains, and without aiding the Rust Belt. He insists that tariffs are paid by foreign exporters, when they are paid by domestic businesses and consumers, as the Rosens show. He argues that the United States’ trade imbalances indicate that other countries are taking advantage of us, when it simply means that we sell fewer goods and services to foreign nations than we buy from them. (Savings rates, currency prices, industrial policy, trade barriers, and labor costs figure into countries’ trade imbalances.) He argues that making everything in America would bolster GDP growth rate, when it would reduce it.

China’s ascension to the World Trade Organization and decades of automation beforehand did damage the Rust Belt economy. But economists told me that trade policy has no way to reverse the phenomenon. Washington cannot dictate where business executives choose to build new plants; those decisions take into account not just tariffs but tax incentives, labor rules, the location of ports and highways, and local employment conditions. “If we try to undo the China Shock, those jobs are probably going to go to the South or Southwest”—where wages are cheaper and labor laws are laxer—“not the industrial heartland,” Douglas Irwin, a trade economist at Dartmouth, told me. Placed-based policies could help, he said, but “trade barriers just aren’t going to do it.”

When companies build plants in the United States today, they look nothing like the Manhattan garment factories and Big Three assembly lines of yore. Automation has diminished the number of manufacturing positions globally; countries such as Ethiopia and Bangladesh have seen most of their job growth in the service sector. Given the high cost of labor in the United States, manufacturing firms tend to invest heavily in robotics, machine tools, and AI systems. In the 1930s, the biggest Detroit auto plant employed more than 100,000 workers. Hyundai’s new electric-vehicle plant outside Savannah is expected to employ 8,500.

Modern factories tend to be not unitary production facilities but nodes in complex, globe-spanning networks. A car finished in Illinois might contain components from Mexico, Canada, Japan, and Germany,  with parts crossing in and out of the United States multiple times during assembly. “If you don’t have tariff-free access to those parts, your car is going to be more expensive than the same-quality car made in South Korea or Germany,” Clausing told me. Tariffs would make it “harder to make things in America, not easier,” she added: A company would pay only a single tariff to import a car made entirely abroad, but multiple rounds of tariffs on a vehicle produced inside and outside the United States. Tariffs, she told me, “could decimate the U.S. auto industry.”  

Trump’s proposed tariffs do not emphasize strategically important or high-tech industries, as prior administrations have done. As a result, “we’re going to reallocate production away from stuff we were good at making and towards stuff that we’re not good at making,” Clausing told me, and away from crucial goods and toward trivial ones. Trump’s policies could squeeze capital away from weaponry, batteries, and semiconductor chips and toward toasters, sports equipment, and, well, costume jewelry. Other countries that have engaged in this kind of autarky have generally given up, Clausing noted. “You realize that you can’t make everything yourself and it ultimately makes your citizens poor.”

Trump’s enormous tariffs would increase consumer prices and limit the quantity and quality of goods available for American households to purchase. The policies would kill off firms reliant on imported goods or parts. The misallocation of investment capital would make the country less vibrant in the long term.

Trade experts anticipate that Trump will reduce or withdraw his tariffs before that happens; business executives are likely to wait out the administration rather than scrambling their supply networks. “To really bring manufacturing back in a big way, tariffs have to be permanent,” Irwin told me. “Firms are not going to spend millions of dollars on a plant if they think the policy is going to change in three years.”

The Rosens told me that they would love to commission costume jewelry from an American factory or produce it themselves, as they used to do. Before they owned their import business, they operated a firm called Accessories du Jour. A “very vertical business,” as Susan put it, Accessories du Jour designed pieces and fabricated them in a 72,000-square-foot factory with as many as 800 employees. “We made the plastic stones. We did our own plating, our own color, our own gluing of stones, our own assembly,” Susan said. “There wasn’t anything we didn’t do.”

The cost of hiring American workers and operating in one of the most expensive regions on Earth made it impossible for the company to compete with imports from South Korea and China. “It was so sad to watch that evolution happen,” Susan told me.

Trump’s tariffs would not make Accessories du Jour a viable business today, the Rosens thought. “Reassembling that factory would take years, years, years,” and millions of dollars of investment, Susan said. “Where do you get the actual workers who want to plate, and work with chemicals all day, and glue with epoxy?” she added. “The employees that we would probably need are all being deported.”

The Rosens were looking into getting an exemption from Trump’s tariffs, on the basis that they could not find a domestic fabricator for their jewelry. I asked what would happen if the exemption did not come through. “That’s the question,” Stuart told me. “We’re very loyal to our employees. I mean, we’re stupid! What can you do?” They hope that their retailers would agree to raise retail prices. If they don’t, the Rosens might not make it through Trump’s adjustment period. They would go out of business again.

Over its 75-year history, the People’s Republic of China has suffered numerous traumas, but perhaps none with longer-lasting consequences than land reform—a violent campaign of torture, murder, and mob rule that the Communist Party enacted in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The program’s stated intent was to redistribute property to landless farmers, but in reality it was used to bring huge swaths of Chinese society to heel through the brutal persecution of landowners.

This history is the governing party’s ultimate taboo, its unspoken original sin. Over the decades, independent historians and ordinary people in China have at times managed to publicly criticize some of the party’s actions—even major upheavals such as the Cultural Revolution—without facing reprisal. But land reform is so fundamental to how the current government took power that no citizen may portray it as anything other than a benevolent campaign that brought fairness and prosperity to China’s long-suffering farmers.

This context is what makes Fang Fang’s novel Soft Burial, recently translated into English by Michael Berry, so electrifying. Starting around the turn of the 21st century, independent historians began to explore land reform, drawing on oral histories to challenge the party’s narrative. But their works were either quickly banned or circulated only underground. Soft Burial, first published in China in 2016, was different. Fang is one of her country’s best-known novelists, and a longtime member of its literary establishment. After Soft Burial was published, it won a sought-after literary prize and was widely discussed in mainstream Chinese media, until backlash prompted censors to ban it.

Although many people have written China off as a completely closed, authoritarian country, it has a broad movement of independent writers, thinkers, and filmmakers—some on the fringes of society but some, like Fang, firmly part of the establishment. Her novel is one of the first works to gain a mainstream readership in China that uncovers the buried reality of land reform, the reasons the party pushed it so brutally, and the inherited pain it has visited upon Chinese people. The widespread, if short-lived, conversation surrounding the book shows that even a powerful authoritarian state can’t fully erase history.

[Read: Chinese leaders are scared of their country’s history]

Abroad, Fang is best known as the author of Wuhan Diary, an account of the city’s 2020 COVID lockdown, which initially controlled the virus’s spread but set the stage for years of arbitrary, harsh, and increasingly ineffective shutdowns across China. Berry had begun translating Soft Burial shortly after it was published in China but shifted to Wuhan Diary in 2020 because of its topicality. Now Soft Burial has been published alongside Berry’s translation of The Running Flame, one of Fang’s other novels, which tells the story of a woman on death row for killing her abusive husband.

Soft Burial’s title comes from the practice of interring someone without a coffin, which in traditional China would happen to the very poor, or after a war or disaster—the sort of catastrophe that befell rural China when land reform became a tool for social revolution and authoritarian control.

The novel begins in the present, centering on the story of an old widow in the Chinese city of Wuhan. As a very young woman, in 1952, she had been pulled unconscious out of a river, after nearly drowning. When she awoke, she had no memory. She evidenced some education—she could recognize storylines from a classic novel and some mythology—but China had been taken over by a Communist Party that was intent on violent struggle against elites. And so a kindly doctor advised her to hold on to her amnesia: Illiteracy and ignorance, he told her, were the best forms of protection.

After several years, the doctor was widowed, and he married the rescued woman. They had a son, who found success in China’s southern boomtowns, eventually returned to Wuhan, and bought an opulent villa for his family. But when he moves his mother in, the wealth and prosperity trigger something in the old woman—it all reminds her of something dangerous, something she can’t quite put her finger on. Exhausted and bewildered, she falls into a coma, and while unconscious, she travels through the 18 levels of hell, a concept found in many Chinese religious traditions—each revealing more of her past. We learn that the old woman was from a landowning family, and lost her first husband’s family, as well as her own parents and brother, to mass suicide and murder.

The novel’s other storyline revolves around her son, who discovers diaries revealing that his father, the doctor, was also born into a landowning family but had hidden his background. When the son travels to Sichuan province with an academic friend who intends to create an inventory of old villas, he discovers the house where his mother had lived with her first husband and in-laws, and begins to piece together his family’s repressed history.

Long before the Communists took power, reformers of all stripes had advocated land redistribution. In the mid-20th century, about 80 percent of Chinese lived in the countryside, and many lacked property. But in numerous cases, landholders were not exactly fat cats. Independent research has shown that in the eastern part of Sichuan province, where parts of Soft Burial take place, landholders owned on average just 2.4 acres, and many worked the fields alongside hired hands.

In the late 1940s, as the Communists gained the upper hand in China’s civil war, they began to aggressively pursue their goal of radically restructuring Chinese political, economic, and cultural life. The biggest obstacle standing in the party’s way was the landed gentry, or shi.

This mostly educated group had been the backbone of traditional China. They built schools and roads, managed temples, and raised militias to provide local security. Because the imperial bureaucracy wasn’t large and did not penetrate to small towns or villages, much of local life was run by this gentry. So if the party was going to succeed, this class had to be destroyed and replaced with a new bureaucratic caste of Communist officials.

After taking power in October 1949, the party stoked the flames of anger and hatred against landowners, resulting in the first mass campaign of violence in the People’s Republic. Historians estimate that at least 2 million people were killed, including entire families. Survivors were beaten, tortured, and sexually assaulted, and the former gentry and their descendants became a class of formal outcasts for the next 30 years—denied jobs, promotions, and higher education.

Over the following decades, rural China plunged into ever-greater crises. In the mid-’50s, the party expropriated the land it had given to the farmers, eventually leading to the Great Famine, which killed as many as 45 million people. Even today, farmers have land-use rights but do not own their land, which deprives them of capital and subjects them to party directives on how to use it. During the party’s push to urbanize China in the 2000s, many farmers had to surrender even these meager rights in exchange for an apartment and a welfare check.

[Michael Albertus: How authoritarians turn rural areas into their strongholds]

As Fang unravels her characters’ stories, she also reveals the complexity of examining the past. In their own ways, both mother and son are reluctant excavators of these buried memories. The woman has almost completely repressed them, revisiting them only at the very end of her life. For the son, digging into his family’s history is a risky enterprise; he has made good in modern China and doesn’t want to rock the boat. When his friend encourages him to explore further, he hesitates. The safest choice, he thinks, is to forget the past and move on with life.

As a work of literature, the novel has its flaws. The stories are almost too perfectly synchronized, with every loose end tied up. Not only does the young man coincidentally travel to the same part of the country where his mother was born, but he finds the very villa where she once lived with her in-laws, and the secret tunnel she used to escape. At one point, part of this story is told to a character in the novel who exclaims, “It sounds like a television drama!”

Still, it is a riveting read, and an illuminating one; it shows how China’s independent thinkers often feed on one another’s work. Soft Burial echoes the work of Tan Song, a scholar who spent years researching land reform in Sichuan province. Other writers and artists have also begun to mine this era for clues to China’s current authoritarian malaise. At last year’s Berlin Film Festival, the independent filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai screened a movie on land reform that drew a direct line from those events to the impoverishment of rural life today.

Not surprisingly, the subject remains taboo. In 2021, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued a list of 10 “historically nihilist” rumors that must be banned—one of them, of course, was land reform. The government’s goal is to keep its people in a state of amnesia over the country’s history, but novels such as Soft Burial show that in China, the past will always get dug up.

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Some of Susan Sontag’s photographs: Corpses of tortured Chinese rebels (“Five white men standing behind them,” she writes, “posing for the camera”). A woman whose right foot has been transplanted onto her left leg (“This is not a surgical miracle”). Her father in a Tianjin rickshaw, 1931 (“He looks pleased, boyish, shy, absent”). Her father posing with his business partners, his wife, his mistress (“It is oppressive to have an invisible father”).

These images are the narrative ligaments of “Project for a Trip to China,” a fragmentary and diaristic short story that appeared in The Atlantic in 1973. Although it was taxonomized as fiction, it turns out to be one of the most plainly autobiographical pieces of writing that Sontag published. This is partly why it has often been considered not only in relation to her other short stories, but also to an earlier essay: “Trip to Hanoi,” a roughly 25,000-word recounting of her visit to North Vietnam, printed in Esquire just a few weeks after Richard Nixon was elected president and a few months before he ordered the bombing of Cambodia. In “Hanoi,” Sontag recounts a visit east; in “Project,” she anticipates one. Each work is concerned with the reliability of the images she carries in her head: a foreign country, a far-off war, a people visible to her only in photographs and newsreels.

Already an intellectual celebrity for her collections Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will (which included “Hanoi”), Sontag had not begun to publish the essays that would form her third anthology, On Photography, in which she dramatized the question of what a person could take away from the images consumed daily in newspapers, television, art galleries, and advertisements. Sontag composed “Project” around the same time that she made a series of visits to a retrospective of the photographer Diane Arbus. Arbus’s portraits of unconventional subjects—in Sontag’s term, “freaks,” or sufferers who do not quite know they are suffering—struck her for their inability to arouse “any compassionate feelings”; the images became the subject of a central critique in On Photography. “Project,” meanwhile, illustrated Sontag’s growing preoccupation with the medium and can be read as an elegiac prologue to those essays.

In “Hanoi,” she’d described “napalmed corpses, live citizens on bicycles, the hamlets of thatched huts, the razed cities like Nam Dinh and Phu Ly,” depicted in newsreels and The New York Times. Before she arrived in North Vietnam, the media’s images had been her only means of “seeing” the conflict; already she’d sensed that the same images might also be alienating her from it. In “Project,” she adjusted her focus. “A China book? Not Trip to Hanoi—I can’t do the ‘West meets East’ sensibility trip again … I’m not a journalist,” she recorded in a 1972 journal entry. Instead, she turned to her own collection of photographs, at the center of which was her father, a Manhattan-born Jewish fur trader who operated an office in Tianjin, China, and died of tuberculosis there shortly before her sixth birthday. The loss was the onset of an enveloping obsession, and the story evinces the way in which she long fantasized about China from the tinted vantage of the West as a mecca of salvation and annihilation, metaphorically and (she believed) literally “the place where I was conceived.”

The surprise of “Project” is that photographs are less a force of alienation and moral quandary than they are a means of writing through the peculiar pain of absence. Sontag went on to argue that photos aestheticize human suffering by nature; at the same time, our condition of image-inundation dulls our reactions, limiting any capacity to meaningfully respond to them. “To suffer is one thing,” she wrote in the opening essay of On Photography. “Another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them.”

Sontag did not actually visit China until January 1973, when the Chinese Communist Party entreated a handful of members of the American press to tour the country’s schools, hospitals, and factories. She composed “Project” in a few weeks, when she’d been told the trip was canceled. “I wrote a story that started ‘I am going to China,’” she recalled the summer after her visit, “precisely because I then thought I wasn’t.”

Not much is extant in Sontag’s journals from her trip. Reflecting on it years later, in an essay that became On Photography’s final chapter, she described observing a gruesome operation unfold in a Shanghai hospital without flinching. A less gory surgery in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film about Maoist China, by contrast, made her wince. “Like a pair of binoculars with no right or wrong end,” she concluded, “the camera makes exotic things near, intimate; and familiar things small, abstract, strange, much farther away.”

“Project” is about suffering; it is also about how to live with images of suffering. In the story, Sontag casts off critical distance and finds relief in lingering over the photos. “Travel as decipherment,” goes one of her fragments. “Travel as disburdenment.” The pivotal metaphor is not travel but excavation. Sontag introduces her collection of fragments as an “archaeology of longings”; by unearthing them, she prepares the ground for a poetic interment. “By visiting my father’s death, I make him heavier,” she wrote. “I will bury him myself.”

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