President Trump and his new transportation secretary, Sean P. Duffy, made it sound as if their power to pull the plug on New York City’s six-week-old congestion pricing program was absolute.
Mr. Duffy, who has been on the job for less than a month, wrote to New York’s governor on Wednesday that “I have concluded” that the tolling program, implemented after a grueling, years long process, was not “eligible” under the federal statute used to enact it.
Mr. Trump’s explanation was even less complex: He hit the caps-lock button and invoked his authority as “king.”
“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD, Manhattan,” the president wrote on social media, “and all of New York is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”
Long-time readers know that I’m not President’s Trump’s biggest fan. But in this case, I give him credit for honesty. In the past, commenters have raked me over the coals for claiming that Trump had authoritarian tendencies. I’m glad that I no longer have to make those arguments; I can merely quote from the president’s own statements.
New York’s congestion pricing plan had reduced traffic congestion, despite being poorly designed relative to congestion pricing in some other big cities. If the courts uphold Trump’s decision (which is not at all certain) then we can expect NYC traffic to get worse.
I’ve noticed a recent trend in American politics/policymaking. Politics increasingly seems to be a sort of performance art. Thus trolling is no longer merely a technique used in some situations, it has become a part of the policymaking process. While Donald Trump is the master of the art of trolling, the trend has filtered down to the local level.
A few miles from where I live is the famous surfing town of Huntington Beach. (BTW, California suburbs are big–HB has 200,000 residents.) Huntington Beach recently decided to put a plaque outside the city library. In addition, they decided to spend some money defending the plaque:
Councilmember Gracey Van Der Mark, who submitted the updated design, also said the council had raised an extra $1,000 to pay for a spotlight installation to protect the plaque from vandalism.
You might wonder why a city would assume that they needed to spend taxpayer funds defending a plaque outside a library. See if you can guess why the city council was nervous:
Public policy as trolling.
PS. A brief follow-up to my previous post. Niall Ferguson recently had this to say (replying to JD Vance):
I have said more than once in the past three years that the war would not have happened if President Trump had been reelected in 2020. I supported his campaign for reelection last year, consistently predicted his and your victory, and welcomed the “vibe shift” that victory represented. I have also supported the President’s previous calls to negotiate peace between Russia and Ukraine. So I am not sure I really qualify as a globalist. In fact, I agree with all five of the points you make. Indeed, I praised your Munich speech. . . . But I simply cannot understand the logic of beginning a negotiation this difficult by conceding so many crucial points to Russia.
Those of us who have understood Trump from the beginning are not at all surprised by what we see. Trump has repeated praised Putin, even when he was campaigning back in 2016. It’s a pity that so many intellectuals failed to take his comments seriously, and now find themselves bewildered by what is happening.
