The Trump administration has become increasingly creative—and ruthless—in its use and abuse of existing policy tools to further its agenda. It has, for instance, weaponized the Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights to reverse its historic mission. Instead of promoting diversity, it’s now working to end it. More recently, Trump has threatened to use legislation passed in 1980—the Bayh-Dole Act—to take over Harvard’s patents. While intended to give government the ability to compel the licensing of patents in fairly narrow circumstances—such as to protect health and safety—the law, in Trump’s hands, has become yet another cudgel to use against Harvard (and, potentially, other elite universities).
In this week’s politics roundtable, editors Paul Glastris, Bill Scher and Anne Kim talk about Trump’s creeping authoritarianism, as well as the false promise of revenues from Trump’s tariffs. They also discuss how Democrats should respond to the escalating arms race over redistricting.
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This transcript has been edited for length and clarity:
Anne Kim:
Let’s talk first about Trump’s tariffs, which have finally gone into effect. On average, we’re talking about 15 percent baseline tariffs on most goods coming to United States now, plus higher tariffs against certain countries that Trump is targeting for a variety of reasons. That includes a 50 percent potential tariff on Brazil for its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who was accused of staging a coup after losing an election, and a threatened 50 percent tariff against India for buying Russian oil. Bill, you wrote a recent column for the Washington Monthly that disputes the president’s conclusion here. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Bill Scher:
Trump talks as if the federal government collects more revenue in tariffs that we’re a wealthy country. That’s not how most people really look at wealth. It doesn’t mean that you and I get more money if the federal government collects more money in revenue.
And it does seem like we are collecting more revenue from tariffs than before. If the July 2025 tariff number of $29.6 billion reflects what we will be paying going forward, the annual cost will be $355.2 billion. So that’s a lot more money into the federal government coffers.
But remember, we’re paying that.
Businesses have been trying to absorb the cost but now they’re saying they can’t keep doing this.
Anne Kim:
It does seem like every day there’s a new story about how small businesses in particular are getting hit by this. And it seems that even large companies like Walmart and Amazon are beginning to announcethat they’re going to be doing price increases. And let’s not forget that these are incredibly regressive taxes.
Bill Scher:
Well, not only are the tariffs regressive, if you’re middle class or working class, you pay a larger share of your wealth in goods than someone who’s a mega-millionaire. And this has been known about tariffs going back to the 19th century. This is why we got rid of these tariffs because people understood it was a very regressive system.
Trump also just passed a tax cut—the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—but the tax breaks in that law are also skewed to the wealthy. In fact, there are analyses that say if you’re in the bottom 40%, you’re actually going to pay more or lose more of your income. So it’s regressiveness on top of regressiveness. And I think it’s a huge opportunity for Democrats going into 2026 and 2028 to say, “We’ve got a great way to relieve you on taxes—we’re to make those tariffs go ‘poof.’” Instant tax cut for the working class. And if we need that revenue so badly to alleviate our debt burdens, well, we can replace that with tax increases on the wealthy who got a sweet deal from the Trump administration.
Anne Kim:
Republicans are starting to propose tariff “rebates” as a way of, well, acknowledging that tariffs are going to take a bite out of people’s budgets. It hearkens back to maybe 10 years ago when we were all talking about carbon taxes and consumption taxes, and proposing rebates as way to make these taxes less regressive.
Paul Glastris:
Yeah, it’s sort of how you put the lipstick on the pig of an unpopular policy.
Well, the other thing that’s going on here is that the public is beginning to see price increases. The BIG newsletter has a piece out today about the freak out that’s happening on TikTok as people perceive that back-to-school prices this year are way higher.
And on top of that, the big retailers are using this moment to bring in what’s called “dynamic pricing.” First of all, you look at these TikToks and people are saying, “Look, they’ve scratched out the old price or they’ve whited out the old price,” and the new price is now 30 percent higher on everything from swim trunks to home decor to groceries. But what they’re also doing is taking off the prices. Now you go into Walmart and other retailers and use your phone to scan a code to get the price, and that price can change by the hour or by the day.
People hate it because they can’t plan their budgets if they don’t know going into the store what the price is going to be. And the larger context here is that it’s true that a lot of companies have held off increasing prices until now. But what’s also happening is that companies are using this as an excuse to bring in this dynamic pricing to be able to essentially extract more profit. They can know by your phone what your income is and charge you more for diapers and then the next person, right? Or they can see that there is a diaper shortage coming in two weeks and jack up prices. This is a pricing power that big retailers have wanted to use, and they’re going to use it now whether they need to be passing on prices from tariffs or not.
Anne Kim:
It’s like airline pricing coming to your school notebooks and backpacks!
So let’s turn to redistricting. Texas has been trying to redraw its map in order to gain five Republican seats. Democratic lawmakers have fled the state in order to break the quorum and prevent this plan from succeeding. Abbott has issued civil arrest warrants. Meanwhile, blue state governors in California and New York, for instance, are talking about hatching their own redistricting plans and there are even some strategists who think that Democrats should go further.
For example, I was kind of struck by this op-ed in the Washington Post over the weekend arguing that Democrats should “go nuclear” by retaliating against Texas based companies. For instance, they say, “blue states could band together to divest pension fund investments from and bar state contracts with Texas companies.”
What do you guys think about that particular escalation of tactics?
Bill Scher:
Well, I think Democrats doing the right thing so far. Texas Democrats have no obligation to be handmaidens for what Republicans are trying to do. But having said that, I suspect the Republican gerrymander is going to backfire on them. It’s very heavily reliant on gains in Latino majority districts, which has not been a reliable group for Republicans, and those gains could easily recede in a in a wave election
That’s why this op-ed that you shared struck me as very excessive, because they’re talking about things like having other states punish Texas economically. But there’s not a lot of explanation about they could actually execute that and escape being slapped down by courts. So it would probably involve a lot of years of litigation and for what?
Texas is trying to squeeze out five more seats. They may not even successfully do it on Election Day. The average pickup for the opposition party is 25 seats, and Democrats need three to win back the House. And if other states fight fire with fire with their own gerrymandering, I’m totally fine with that because I generally feel that gerrymandering ends up being largely a wash at the end of the day. So I don’t see the need to try to push the envelope to economic warfare, which could really backfire politically and may not even be necessary.
Anne Kim:
It seems reflective of some broader frustration among rank-and-file Democrats that the party “just isn’t doing enough.” The Democrats are always playing by the rules, playing nice, etc. etc.
Bill Scher:
Those who are prone to complain that Democrats aren’t fighting hard enough come up with wilder and wilder ideas to prove that they mean business, and it’s always a balancing act between fighting hard and fighting smart. But economic warfare is going to really rub a lot of people the wrong way.
Paul Glastris:
To be fair to the authors, what they’re saying is you threaten this in the same way that during the Cold War, each side threatened the other with destruction of their cities, not because you want to destroy their cities, but because you want to strike enough terror that neither side uses the weapon.
What they’re arguing is that blue states have far bigger economic footprints than red states, so if they band together and threaten economic warfare, that might be enough for Republicans to sort of think twice about turning their side “up to 11.”
But look, Democrats have used pension funds for many years to advance political interests. In some sense, this isn’t that new.
But what I would say is the Trump administration is being aggressively creative with policy in a way I don’t think very many people foresaw. We see every day some new use of federal power that may or may not be constitutional, but there’s no one there to tell them not to do it. And Democrats have to be thinking, if not now – because their power is limited to states and backbench press releases in Congress – what are the policies that they’re going to pursue that are creative and aggressive now that the administration has set a precedent and the Supreme Court has allowed a lot of this expansion of power.
It’s a setup for when Democrats come back to use those levers themselves, and I do think there’s a ripe opportunity here, if not in the moment, to plan for the future about what the Democratic agenda will be.
Anne Kim:
Speaking of economic warfare and creative uses of policy, let’s turn to Trump’s escalation in the fight against higher ed. So there have been a couple developments here. The first is that the administration is now demanding that colleges hand over all admissions data, including on race, grades, and standardized test scores. Columbia and Brown have actually agreed to do this as part of their “settlements” with the government.
Paul, you’ve been the arbiter of the College Guide for 20 years now for the Washington Monthly. What do think the long-term implications of this particular move are going to be for college accessibility all the things that the College Guide has stood for the last two decades?
Paul Glastris:
Well, the way I look at it is that the Trump administration is following everyone else in putting all its focus on elite universities, which educate 5 percent of students. A lot of this battle that the administration is waging against these hated elite institutions is trickling down to damage the universities and even the community colleges that educate 90 percent of college students. And most of these universities don’t have big DEI budgets. They didn’t have big protests during Gaza. They’re not rife with “woke” classrooms. They’re mostly people going to marketing classes taught by adjunct professors who have normal politics.
But there is a kind of a conspiracy in in the media and in politics to make everything about Columbia. So part of me is upset that this battle is going to again screw the average college student.
Anne Kim:
One small consolation is that the New York Times reported that there’s literally no one actually available to collect all the race and admissions data anyway because of the 100 people who worked for the National Center on Education Statistics, only four of them are left. So it may end up being kind of a toothless thing, but it does set a bad precedent.
The second thing I wanted to ask about was the government’s threat to seize control of Harvard’s patents under the compulsory licensing regime outlined under the Bayh-Dole Act. And this is actually something that the Monthly has supported in the past in different contexts. So Paul, I would love for you to clarify the intent of the statute and how that’s an abuse in this particular context.
Paul Glastris:
Well, I’m not a patent lawyer. I’m not even a lawyer. But we have at the Monthly done considerable reporting by people who know the subject. And yes, the federal government has the ability to utilize this clear statutory power to force the use of patents in ways that advantage the American people. And we were arguing that they should do so to lower drug prices by taking the patents away from drug companies that misuse them and providing other means of producing these drugs in order to lower prices.
The Trump administration is not going after the drug companies, it’s going after the universities using the same statutory language. So it could well be legal with a pliant Supreme Court – maybe it becomes constitutional – but it’s for a very different cause.
But it does go to the point that there seems to be more aggressive use of policymaking on the Republican side than the Democratic side. When we started writing about this issue, arguing for march-in rights to bring down drug prices, it was when the Obama administration spent years debating it internally and not doing it. Then Biden comes in and they spent several years actually advancing the ball but left office without doing it. Donald Trump’s been in office six months and they’re already doing it. So that gives you a pretty good measure of the willingness of one party to push the envelope versus the other.
Anne Kim:
So to wrap things up, Donald Trump is making announcements as we speak about the pending militarization of DC. So what are you guys expecting from that? What are you expecting the response to be and what else are you watching for this week?
Bill Scher:
It’s another case of Donald Trump inventing an issue out of nothing. Crime is down in DC. There was a high profile incident involving someone he knew personally, and so he’s made that into a giant issue to give a justification for federal intrusion.
And to Paul’s point, this is how the Trump administration operates. They’re on full tilt all the time to aggressively deploy and weaponize the power of federal government when it suits their political games. Otherwise, they’re hyper-libertarian. They’re denying disaster relief even not just in blue areas, but in red areas. They’re decimating the federal workforce. They’ve decimated the Medicaid program, which is going to affect a lot of people again, not just in blue areas, but in red areas. They want to take down the Department of Education.
You can credit them for their diabolical creativity, but I think Democrats can be very well positioned to say these folks want to use the federal government to serve their own ends. And they don’t want to use it at all to help you.
Paul Glastris:
I agree that what may in the end bring down the Republican Party and Donald Trump is this aggressive policy overreach. But I wouldn’t take away from that the lesson that Democrats shouldn’t be aggressive because it’s going to take real aggressive policymaking to deliver to voters what they clearly want, which is affordability, lower prices, better incomes.
All of that is going to take much stronger use of federal power than the Biden administration even used. So Democrats have to think very hard about how to do that, and how to deliver on the promises that they make when they next have a shot at voters.
Anne Kim :
Well, thanks very much, gentlemen. See you next week.
The post Trump’s Increasingly Creative Authoritarianism appeared first on Washington Monthly.
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