Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

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Aug. 8

The New York Times say Trump is letting TikTok, and China, win

Not so long ago, the confrontation between the U.S. government and TikTok looked to be a rare 21st-century example of bipartisan seriousness to protect the national interest.

In President Trump’s first term, he was among the earliest political leaders to point out the security risks of having a Chinese company control one of the largest American social media platforms. After President Joe Biden took office, he adopted a similar stance. Last year Congress passed a bill by overwhelming votes — 360 to 58 in the House and 79 to 18 in the Senate — requiring that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, sell it, and Mr. Biden signed the bill. In January the Supreme Court upheld the law’s legality in a unanimous vote. Every branch of the federal government seemed aligned.

But this bipartisan resolve collapsed in a matter of days, as Mr. Biden left office and Mr. Trump began his second term. For the past six months, the Trump administration has simply refused to enforce the law. TikTok continues to operate as before. ByteDance (which, like all Chinese companies, answers to the ruling Communist Party) continues to amass personal data about Americans and shape national discourse through its secretive algorithm for promoting videos. The Chinese government has long exercised tight control and censorship in its own country — and now potentially has outsize influence over information in the United States.

Legal scholars, be they liberal or conservative, have criticized Mr. Trump’s nonenforcement as illegal. Among the many lawless acts of his second term, the disregard for a recently passed federal law is among the most brazen. It is also a gift to the world’s most powerful authoritarian government.

Two alarming features of the current political scene have carried us to this point. The first is Mr. Trump’s tendency to put his interests ahead of the rule of law and national security. He reversed his position on TikTok last year after meeting with Jeff Yass, a major donor to Republicans whose company owns part of ByteDance. (Mr. Trump said they did not discuss the app.) The president’s announcement lacked any coherent justification, though he did note that he had become “a big star” on the platform. By Inauguration Day, he had amassed nearly 15 million followers, and he clearly recognized that the platform helped him spread his message.

Mr. Trump’s approach empowers him in key ways. Not only can he and his allies continue using TikTok, but he also has leverage over ByteDance and the tech companies that host TikTok on app stores or servers, including Google, Apple and Oracle. Under the law, the Justice Department can fine companies that keep TikTok on U.S. app stores and servers. After Mr. Trump delayed the ban, the department promised that it would not penalize the companies for disobeying the law, but that promise is hardly binding. As a result, these companies, including ByteDance, have reason to want to remain in the good graces of the administration. “Corporations operate under a sword of Damocles in every interaction with the White House,” Alan Z. Rozenshtein of the University of Minnesota Law School has noted.

The second factor is broader than Mr. Trump. It is the meekness of Congress, especially in response to his power grabs. The founders intended Congress to be the most active of the three branches of government. That is why it is the subject of Article I of the Constitution. The founders worried about the rise of another king, and they saw a powerful legislature as protection against that possibility.

The passage of the TikTok law seemed like an example of Congress living up to the founders’ aspirations. Lawmakers worked across party lines and acted decisively on a security risk. The aftermath of the law’s passage, however, has highlighted the founders’ fears. Mr. Trump has ignored the law, and Congress has done little in response. It has not held new hearings to highlight the TikTok threat. It has not sued Mr. Trump for refusing to enforce the law. It has not made enforcement of the law a condition of passing other legislation, such as on tax cuts and enhanced border security. While some lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have spoken out, they cannot do much when the Republican majority is intent on acceding to Mr. Trump.

This timidity has become the norm for Congress, in areas far beyond this law. Legislators have voluntarily surrendered their power to the president and frequently act not as the heart of the American government but as a rubber stamp for one man.

If anything, the evidence that TikTok presents a security threat has grown since Congress passed the law. After its enactment, a study published last August used an elegant design to conclude that TikTok’s algorithm is biased. The researchers, at the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University, evaluated the number of likes that a video received as a measure of its popularity with users.

A video with more likes should receive more views, if the algorithm worked normally. Instead, the researchers found, pro-China videos (including those with patriotic scenes and tourism promotion) received more views than their number of likes suggested they should. Anti-China videos (such as those honoring the Tiananmen Square protests) received fewer. This combination is a sign that TikTok’s algorithm amplifies pro-China videos and suppresses anti-China content. Tellingly, the same patterns do not hold on YouTube.

Other studies also found evidence of TikTok’s bias. These findings suggest that TikTok is already a vehicle for propaganda, potentially influencing Americans’ opinions about issues like the future of Taiwan and China’s repression of predominantly Muslim Uyghurs.

We know that forcing the sale of a popular app is no small step. Critics of a TikTok ban argue that it violates First Amendment protections for free speech. But the Supreme Court considered this argument, and its unanimous ruling persuasively rejected it. The justices noted that the law did not target speech based on its content, function or purpose. It targeted TikTok because a foreign adversary owns it and could use it against Americans. And there is a long history of Congress and the president being able to protect national security without violating the First Amendment. A historical comparison is instructive: During the Cold War, Soviet organizations would not have been allowed to own Life magazine, NBC or American radio stations.

It is also worth remembering that the law does not shutter TikTok; it can continue operating if ByteDance sells it. As entertaining and informative as TikTok can be, its value does not depend on its parent company answering to the Chinese government.

China policy has been a rare area of bipartisan consensus in recent years. China’s leaders have made clear that they seek to weaken the United States globally and strengthen other authoritarian leaders, most notably Vladimir Putin of Russia. Both Democrats and Republicans have warned about China’s aggressive behavior, including in the South China Sea, its attempts to corner the market on some rare minerals and its widespread theft of intellectual property. To leave TikTok off the list is naïve.

Mr. Trump has shown himself unwilling to confront China on TikTok for selfish reasons. Congress should step up. It should do what the founders intended and act as a bulwark of American democracy. It should insist that Mr. Trump enforce the law.

ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/opinion/trump-tiktok-ban-china-congress.html

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Aug. 10

The Wall Street Journal on Trump's nominee for seat on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors

President Trump likes to stir things up, and he’s done it again with his choice of Stephen Miran to fill an open seat on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. We can’t recall when a President nominated to the Fed someone whose abiding policy conviction is to weaken the U.S. dollar.

Mr. Miran has been chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers in Mr. Trump’s second term. He’s an ardent promoter of the President’s economic policies, especially tariffs. For Mr. Miran, this is a matter of conviction. Before his White House days he offered a detailed case for rewriting the rules of the global trade and financial system.

He summed up his central argument in a widely cited November 2024 essay: “From a trade perspective, the dollar is persistently overvalued, in large part because dollar assets function as the world’s reserve currency.” Foreign central banks hold huge dollar reserves and most of the world’s goods are traded in dollars. He says this global demand for dollars results in an overvalued greenback that leads to trade imbalances and harms Americans.

His solution? Manage a decline in the dollar’s value over time by reducing the global demand for the U.S. currency, or at least mitigate the effects of its overvaluation. Tariffs do the latter in his view by forcing foreigners to pay for the fact that their currencies are undervalued and boost their exports to the U.S.

But his ambition goes beyond tariffs. In that 2024 essay he laid out other policy options for negotiating a weaker dollar and diminishing its reserve-currency status. One idea is to tax foreigners who hold U.S. Treasury debt as an incentive to hold less of it. This would amount to a de facto default on current debt.

More ambitiously, Mr. Miran floats a “Mar-a-Lago Accord” in which leading nations would negotiate a new global financial system to rebalance currency values. This echoes the Plaza and Louvre accords of the 1980s that coordinated monetary policies to arrest the surging dollar amid the rush of capital and goods into the U.S. during the Reagan economic boom. Mr. Miran says his essay wasn’t “policy advocacy,” but when you land something like this after an election it’s intended to get the attention of policy makers. It did, and Mr. Miran got the White House job.

One question is whether Mr. Miran has talked to Mr. Trump about all this. The President likes a weak dollar for protectionist purposes, but he also likes the dollar’s reserve-currency status. That status lets the U.S. borrow more cheaply to fund its deficits and gives him leverage to impose sanctions to pursue U.S. security interests.

China and Russia in particular want to break the dollar’s hold on global trade so U.S. sanctions won’t matter. Mr. Trump has gone out of his way to impose higher tariffs on countries that are trying to diminish the dollar’s global status—see Brazil.

Others have written on these pages about the burden of being a reserve-currency country, notably Lewis Lehrman and John Mueller. But their answer is a global monetary reform that links the dollar to gold. Their goal is a stable dollar, not a weak one.

This is a debate worth having, as improbable as such a reform is. But Mr. Miran gives no indication he has given any thought to such a global monetary reform. His preoccupation is devaluing the dollar to reduce the flow of capital and imported goods to the U.S.

None of this is at stake any time soon, since Mr. Miran would for now only fill the remaining term of Adriana Kugler, who resigned Friday and whose term ends in January. Mr. Miran would be only a single vote on the Federal Open Market Committee.

But Mr. Trump is also looking to replace Fed Chair Jerome Powell, and as Chair Mr. Miran would have a global platform and influence. Senators can do the country a favor by exploring Mr. Miran’s views and whether a dollar devaluationist at the Fed is in the U.S. national interest.

ONLINE: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/who-is-stephen-miran-federal-reserve-economy-trade-dollar-tariffs-08b77cf4?mod=editorials_article_pos1

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Aug. 8

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says a gerrymandering arms race is coming

“I just want to find 11,780 votes,” President Donald Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger during a recorded phone call two months after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s goal was to retroactively inflate his Georgia vote total in order win a state he’d lost and tip the Electoral College his way — to cheat his way to reelection, in other words.

Raffensperger, to his eternal credit, refused that corrupt directive from a president of his own party. If only Republican state lawmakers in Texas, Missouri and other red states today had that kind principled dedication to the rules and norms of democracy.

But alas.

Trump is currently engaged in a similar vote-cheating scheme but on a much larger scale: In an effort to hold onto the GOP’s slim congressional majority through next year’s midterm elections, Trump is pressing Republican-led states across the country to redraw congressional district lines that were just decided after the 2020 census. And unlike Raffensperger, key Republicans from Austin to Jefferson City and beyond are responding not with principled refusal but with:

Yes, sir.

Trump isn’t even pretending this is anything other than a calculated power grab. Because Trump easily won Texas last year, he told an interviewer this week, “We are entitled to five more (congressional) seats” from that state.

That’s not how it works, of course, but whatever.

Democratic governors of California, Illinois and other blue states are now contemplating responding by redrawing their own district lines to give Democrats more seats from their states next year. This is what a redistricting arms race looks like — and it promises to sow even more chaos into America’s electoral politics than Trump already has.

The chaos is most evident in Texas, which is on the verge of redrawing its districts on direct orders from Trump. Legislative Democrats responded by fleeing the state to prevent a vote. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has welcomed them to hunker down in his blue state like refugees from some third-world dictatorship. Texas Republicans are threatening them with expulsion or even arrest.

Here in Missouri, Trump’s call for corrupt redistricting was initially rejected by top Republicans as an invalid scrambling of the normal process. This page even lauded them for their adherence to principle — prematurely, as it turns out.

Missouri Republicans who initially expressed reservations about the idea are now suggesting it’s possible, even likely, that Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe will call a special session to do Trump’s bidding. Kehoe hasn’t yet committed to that, but he hasn’t ruled it out, either.

Where (or where?) are the Brad Raffenspergers in today’s GOP?

Ironically, there’s at least one of them in Congress right now: Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., has introduced a bill to ban mid-decade redistricting across the country. His motives aren’t purely principle, as it was clearly prompted by fears that California Gov. Gavin Newsom would carry out his threat to counter Texas’ redistricting shenanigans in kind, potentially unseating California Republicans such as Kiley himself. Still, the legislation (which faces low odds of passage) would at least put the brakes on this runaway redistricting train.

Is what Texas is doing and Missouri is contemplating even legal? Clearly it shouldn’t be. One person, one vote is a bedrock principle of our democracy. Gerrymandering generally erodes that principle — and gerrymandering that’s this blatant in its timing and stated motivation erodes it blatantly. But the U.S. Supreme Court in a 2019 case (Rucho v. Common Cause) effectively punted on the issue, allowing that gerrymandering might be illegal but ruling that federal courts had no jurisdiction to decide the matter.

But that doesn’t prevent Congress from imposing controls over the process like the one Rep. Kiley envisions, keeping redistricting as the once-per-decade process it’s always been. Better still would be reforms of the kind Common Cause and others have long envisioned (and that California, for one, has already enacted) taking redistricting out of the hands of politicians entirely and leaving it to independent entities using hard cold demographic data instead of partisan gamesmanship.

The game Trump and his loyalists currently play is the polar opposite of that kind of reform — and they may well come to regret it.

We’re not ready to encourage blue states to get down in the gutter with red states and scrap the norms of redistricting for the sake of raw power. But imploring Democrats to endlessly play by the rules while Republicans incinerate them isn’t a viable long-term strategy. At some point, Democrats can’t be blamed if they decide to fight fire with fire.

Think about the process that would threaten to usher in: Instead of states redrawing their congressional districts every 10 years based on census data, they would draw them every two years, before every congressional election, based on nothing but partisan power politics. Does any rational Republican think the normalization of such a chaotic and ever-shifting process won’t at some point come back to bite them?

ONLINE: https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/article_7eca062f-c694-4a1e-a46a-d7610eef8873.html

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Aug. 11

The Guardian says RFK Jr. is unfit for role of Health Secretary

Science is not black and white. It’s more complicated and more exciting. It’s a constant process of exploration. An adventure into the unknown. Scientists come up with theories about what might be going on, and then test them. They don’t always get it right. Far from it. But inch by inch, testing, failing and trying again, they make progress.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, during Senate confirmation hearings for the role of secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), seemed to get that. Those who feared what a vaccine sceptic might do in that role breathed again. “I’m going to empower the scientists at HHS to do their job and make sure that we have good science that is evidence based … I’m not going to substitute my judgment for science,” he said.

Yet now, without good explanation or sound science, he is cutting $500m of research funding for mRNA vaccines, claiming that they “fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like Covid and flu”. In fact, no Covid vaccine fully protects against infection, but they have been shown to prevent deaths in billions of people. The 22 contracts that will be cancelled include one with Moderna for a vaccine against bird flu, which many fear could trigger the next human pandemic (and there will be one). Instead, federal funds will go to vaccines developed in more traditional ways.

Either Mr Kennedy lied to Congress or he has a different understanding of science and evidence from most scientists, unpicking what they thought was uncontestable. The childhood vaccine schedule is being reconsidered, and mandating the measles vaccine is being questioned in spite of fatal outbreaks in the US. He has sacked the Centers for Disease Control vaccine advisory panel and replaced it with many people known to have sceptical views.

Mr Kennedy is particularly hostile to the mRNA vaccines against Covid-19, panning them in 2021 as the “deadliest vaccines in history”, wrongly claiming that half those suffering the rare side-effect of myocarditis would die or need heart transplants within five years. The vast majority have quickly recovered. Until 2023, he chaired an anti-vaccine organisation called Children’s Health Defense, where he petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to rescind the licence of all Covid-19 vaccines and compared mandating vaccines to Nazi oppression in the second world war.

This is the stuff of internet scares; labyrinthine tangles of misinformation dotted with odd inaccurate nuggets of quasi-science. It doesn’t compare with the evidence base for mRNA vaccines, which went through clinical trials on hundreds of thousands of people and have since been used to vaccinate billions.

Experts agree that the mRNA vaccines were a stunning breakthrough that allowed people to be protected in record time from Covid-19. They contain messenger RNA, a tiny bit of genetic code that teaches the immune system to fight the virus. No need to grow the virus in hen’s eggs, which takes months. The “plug and play” technology can be adapted against other viruses, such as flu, including some that devastate populations in poor countries. The inventors won the Nobel prize in 2023.

Mr Kennedy’s cancellation of funding not only stymies much research but also feeds worldwide doubt in mRNA vaccines. We are all the losers. Humanity needs these vaccines. Other countries need to step up with money and reassurance to try to heal this latest breach between science and nonsense. And Mr Kennedy is clearly unfit for the job he holds.

ONLINE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/11/the-guardian-view-on-rfk-jrs-vaccine-cuts-an-assault-on-science-from-a-politician-unfit-for-his-office

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Aug. 11

The Washington Post on Trump's deal with Nvidia and the potential costs of government intervention in business

The deal that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang hammered out with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office Wednesday might be good for his shareholders. But it’s bad for America.

After Huang promised to pay the U.S. government 15 percent of the revenue he makes from selling certain artificial intelligence chips to China, Trump called Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and directed him to issue the necessary export licenses to allow Nvidia to resume a valuable line of business that Trump halted in April.

With a market capitalization of nearly $4.5 trillion, Nvidia is the world’s most valuable public company and obviously stands to profit handsomely from doing more business in the world’s second biggest economy. (AMD has agreed to the same deal.) And this helps Trump’s trade negotiations with Beijing. The U.S. needs critical minerals that China sells, as much as China needs American-made chips. Both sides are working to reduce these dependencies, but these efforts could take years.

It’s not intrinsically bad that Trump wants to collect more revenue, at a time when the government is spending so much more than it takes in. But this doesn’t seem to be his main motive for making Nvidia and AMD pay for their export licenses.

The Constitution explicitly bans export taxes, which raises questions about whether the agreement is actually legal — though neither Nvidia nor AMD has reason to challenge it in court. In any case, if revenue was the goal, Trump could ask Congress to change the tax code.

The reason the U.S. government previously blocked chip exports to China was national security. Obviously, drawing a few extra billion dollars of tax revenue from chip makers does not mitigate the risks of transferring advanced technology. Trump only undermines international trust that the United States will hold firm when it imposes export controls. (Nvidia says it follows whatever rules the government sets, and Trump’s defenders say the H20 chips that will be sold are not the best available.)

Trump’s side deal is best viewed as inappropriate state intervention in the U.S. economy. Word has gone out that CEOs can kiss the president’s ring by offering to give him something he wants and in return be exempted from whatever policy threatens to damage their business. In this way, companies deepen their dependence on government and on Trump personally.

The chief executive of Intel demonstrated this same concept when he came to the White House on Monday after Trump had called on him to resign for allegedly being too cozy with China. Lip Bu-Tan flew across the country to persuade the president that he should keep his job. Intel received billions in federal subsidies as part of the industrial policy enacted during President Joe Biden’s term, and now the chip maker needs to get on good terms with the new occupant of the White House.

These are not the only examples. Recall how Trump finagled a “ golden share ” of U.S. Steel for the federal government as a condition for allowing Nippon Steel to take over the company. On the same day Trump met with Huang of Nvidia, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave the president a glass disk with a 24-karat gold base as he announced a $100 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing facilities. This freed the iPhone maker from new levies that Trump announced on semiconductors.

The president has also demanded large “signing bonuses” with other countries as a condition for agreeing to trade deals. The leaders pledge major investments in the United States and promise to give Trump a say over how the money gets spent.

Corporate chieftains have been far more muted in their criticism of the president than they were during Trump’s first term, because they fear retaliation if they fail to sing his praises. And when big companies get audiences with the president to negotiate special deals, these often come at the expense of smaller players who are unable to pay top lobbyists. Erecting such barriers to entry reduces competition.

It would be an exaggeration to equate this new economic order with China’s state capitalism, but there are echoes. The U.S. government has meddled in private enterprise in the past, especially during wartime, and it has bailed out companies during financial crises. Biden used government largesse to prod companies to give special treatment to unions and minorities. But Trump is the only president to make his dog and pony show an everyday reality of doing business in America. Now that this door is open, a future Democratic president might be even more aggressive in advancing his or her ideological aims. Any CEO who is pleased with how things are working right now should remember that they could find themselves out of favor under the next administration.

Government has never been good at allocating private capital or picking winners and losers in the marketplace. Even trying to do so makes companies overly dependent on the White House. And it makes the U.S. economy less vibrant.

ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/11/trump-nvidia-amd-chips-china/

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News from © The Associated Press, 2025