MAGA Asceticism

Plus: Social media surveillance from the CBP, SpaceX IPO, assisted dying in the Netherlands, and more...

Trump's affordability tour: "You know, you can give up certain products. You can give up pencils," said President Donald Trump at a speech in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, that was supposed to help alleviate people's worries about affordability and help Republicans figure out salient messaging ahead of the midterms.

What a fascinating tack to take.

"You always need steel. You don't need 37 dolls for your daughter," he continued. "Two or three is nice, but you don't need 37 dolls. So, we're doing things right. We're running this country right well."

"I can't say affordability is a hoax because I agree the prices were too high. So I can't go to call it a hoax because they'll misconstrue that," said Trump. "But they use the word affordability. And that's the only word they say. Affordability. And that's their only word. They say, 'Affordability.' And everyone says, 'Oh, that must mean Trump has high prices.' No. Our prices are coming down tremendously from the highest prices in the history of our country."

In a sense, this is true: Inflation reached its year-over-year high in June 2022, during Joe Biden's presidency, when it broke 9 percent. It has since been tamed. But the Trump economy is rather, uh, bad. And it's unforced errors all the way down: Tariffs aren't necessary or wise or especially conservative (though he's worked on rebranding them as such). The economic hardship imposed wipes out any revenue gains, and then some. "The Trump tariffs amount to an average tax increase per US household of $1,100 in 2025 and $1,400 in 2026," report Tax Foundation's Erica York and Alex Durante. They continue, "The Trump tariffs are the largest US tax increase as a percent of GDP (0.47 percent for 2025) since 1993." Many companies will choose not to do business in the U.S., and many U.S. businesses that relied on foreign imports will have to change their methods or simply shoulder higher costs that will inevitably be passed on to consumers. Some will just close up shop.

Trump, in his Pennsylvania speech, displays approximately zero self-awareness and shares no admissions of guilt: "I mean, the only thing that is really going up big, it's called the stock market and your 401(k)." But people aren't fools. They see the rise in grocery prices reflected in their household budgets; the fact that it's harder to get goods to arrive on time; the fact that large manufacturers are now running into real supply chain issues (after a summer and fall of stockpiling that made it so most consumers didn't feel the tariff effects until somewhat recently). Is the rhetorical approach of "you can just give up things you want" actually a winner? Trump seems to think so. Color me skeptical.

Social media surveillance for visa-free visitors: U.S. Customs and Border Protection is going to start "adding social media as a mandatory data element" that they consider when screening people entering the country under the Visa Waiver Program, which allows citizens of places like Australia, Germany, Japan, and the U.K. to enter visa-free.

This raises questions. Can you just pretend you don't have social media accounts? What exactly would they find disqualifying? Also, is this really the highest and best use of these agents' time? Attempting to very tightly control who enters this country would make sense if we had some sort of massive wave of radicalism and extremist violence fomented by people from these places who are entering via the Visa Waiver Program—but we don't. We don't even have much of an issue with these passport holders overstaying their visas. Like so many things the Trump administration does, it's a solution in search of a problem.

The new screening "would apply to travelers from about 40 countries who can stay in the US for up to 90 days without a visa and are screened before travel under an electronic system known as ESTA," reports Bloomberg. It's "the latest in a series of measures from the Trump administration aimed at restricting entry," including "a planned travel ban for around 30 countries announced this month following the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington." But the suspect in that shooting, keen observers might note, was not visiting from Germany or Australia; he was "an Afghan national who worked with US forces and the CIA in Afghanistan before arriving in the US in 2021."

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Scenes from New York: 

the rapid rise of "private members clubs" in new york is a useful phenomena to watch. these clubs aren't "private" in any real sense, they simply exist to enforce norms (don't overhear people, don't photograph people, no fighting) that were enforced societally but are no longer https://t.co/rga8oHKfrb

— Will Manidis (@WillManidis) December 2, 2025

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QUICK HITS

• At long last, the Reason Webathon has concluded. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your generosity. Excited for another year of churning out this little newsletter here (after I take a brief hiatus for the month of January to welcome/wrangle my second baby).
• "SpaceX is moving ahead with plans for an initial public offering that would seek to raise significantly more than $30 billion, people familiar with the matter said, in a transaction that would make it the biggest listing of all time," reports Bloomberg.
• "A social panic has set in over how smartphones and social media are destroying us and ruining our children," writes Tyler Cowen in The Free Press. "The thing is, after much rigorous investigation, the harms are relatively small. Yet in headlines they are reported as major negative effects.…But it is not the collapse of our civilization, or the destruction of our youth. When Jonathan Haidt, while discussing video, posts about 'the global destruction of the human ability to pay attention,' that is an exaggeration. And warnings of the decline in test scores have been dramatically overstated." I have to lodge my disagreement with Cowen here: Maybe the concerns are more minor for children whose parents set controls and limits, but I'm very worried about attention-span bifurcation, in which some number of children have their attention spans safeguarded from a very young age in some form and other children have iPad Cocomelon-ed(or worse) Clockwork Orange-d into their eyeballs from the age of 12 months onward, thus hindering them from developing any semblance of focus.
• "Over the past decade, a growing number of adolescents [in the Netherlands] have applied for assisted death for relief from irremediable psychiatric suffering from conditions such as eating disorders and anxiety," reports The New York Times. The Dutch government's decision to allow assisted suicide for minors is rather controversial, and "public concern over a few high-profile cases of teens who received assisted deaths prompted the country's regulator to consider a moratorium on approvals for children applying on the basis of psychiatric suffering."
• "Last month, Pew Research Center compared data from 1993 and 2023, finding 12th-grade boys are more likely than 12th-grade girls to say they want to get married someday, a flip from three decades ago," writes Emily Jashinsky for The Washington Post. "Boys' plans for marriage have barely budged since 1993, dropping to 74 percent from 76 percent. Girls, however, swung away from marriage by double digits. In the early 1990s, 83 percent of girls wanted to get married. In 2023, 61 percent said the same.…What seems to be changing is women's expectations, and the likely culprit is men's prospects. If 6 in 10 girls still say they want to get married, what's going on with the two who changed their minds since 1993? A January paper summarized by the American Institute for Boys and Men found: 'Historical data show that when men's educational and economic outcomes decline, it is women without a college degree who experience the sharpest declines in marriage rates.' Women's perceived appeal as marriage partners is not declining, but men's is."
• True:

"She wants to be heard but it is not clear what she wants to say" is such a brutal encapsulation of Kamala's career https://t.co/5oOjgYLSsB

— Daniel (@growing_daniel) December 10, 2025

• lol:

one of the main things about being an american guy is, no matter your profession or even your age as far as I can tell, you think there's a small chance that you'll become president one day https://t.co/TzQVd9dI7f

— Mike Solana (@micsolana) December 8, 2025