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At least one hyperscaler’s big bets seem to be paying off.
Protesters interrupted President Trump’s speech on Monday. Polling suggests the public is behind them — and Republicans are divided.
Wildfires in France and Spain — and a dire El Niño forecast — point to another era of public attention on disaster.
The data center boom is everywhere you look in U.S. economic and emissions data.
Trump’s new tariffs seem to make few exemptions for clean energy.
France’s deadliest heat wave since 2003 killed more than 2,700 people — and possibly as many as 5,700.
Average U.S. gasoline prices have slipped back above $4 a gallon.
A decade ago, the Princeton economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson published a paper about a fact that they called “not nearly as widely known as it should be”: The U.S. economy has done better under Democratic presidents than Republican presidents.
Blinder was not a completely impartial observer — he served on President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Clinton later appointed him vice chair of the Federal Reserve — but he and Watson compiled a lengthy list of statistics to back up their claim. The U.S. economy has grown faster, produced more jobs, had a lower unemployment rate, seen higher corporate profits and investment, and experienced better stock market performance under Democrats than Republicans. While the original paper described this divergence from 1947 to 2013, recent research has shown that it held through the subsequent Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations.
The only metric where the two parties come close is inflation, but Democrats still seem to have a tiny edge there, even after the Biden-era inflation.
Why? Blinder and Watson found that it didn’t entirely come down to timing. (Other observers have disputed this, arguing that Republicans tend to get elected at the peak of economic booms, while Democrats win during or just after recessions.) Instead, Blinder and Watson found that a few factors — oil shocks, productivity growth, a more favorable international growth environment, and perhaps better consumer confidence — could explain much of the divergence.
Of course, these factors can’t be entirely separated from a president’s record in office. Oil shocks, for example, tend to drag down global growth, which in turn slows the U.S. economy. And as Watson and Blinder write, some of those oil shocks “may have been induced by [American] foreign policy.” By that mechanism, presidential bellicosity in the Middle East can translate into poorer economic outcomes. This belligerence may even be, as the writer Matt Yglesias contended earlier this year, Republican presidents’ “worst economic policy.”
Why am I recounting all this? Because average U.S. gasoline prices have slipped back above $4 a gallon, according to AAA. (As I write, they stand at $4.01.) The collapse of the ceasefire with Iran — and President Trump’s inability to figure out how to end a war he started — are once again driving up fossil fuel prices.
The numbers add up. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress today that the Iran War has cost $37.5 billion so far, but according to a tracker from Brown University researchers, Americans have already paid nearly double that — $71 billion! — on more expensive gasoline and diesel fuel. A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real economic underperformance. That estimate suggests the burden of higher energy prices from the Iran War has wiped out the expected $65 billion consumer boost from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s expanded tax refunds.
Of course, from a decarbonization perspective, higher gas prices are good, in theory. They encourage people to drive less and to switch to more fuel-efficient — or even fully electrified — vehicles, reducing carbon emissions. (This is part of why I joke about Degrowth Donald, raising fuel prices as he goes.) But short-term oil shocks are the second worst kind of emissions reductions after recessions: They are unlikely to last; they will probably not lead to real decarbonization; and they produce a lot of human misery along the way.
Perhaps this oil spike won’t persist. Perhaps Trump will find a way out of the quagmiring conflict in the Persian Gulf. Perhaps Republican presidential underperformance really does all come down to luck, too. (Or maybe, as a 2020 paper argued, Democratic presidents benefit from a “pre-election growth surge” just before a Republican wins.) But I think it’s worth noting that the recent trickle of news — and the recent and less noticed surge in gas prices — is how an oil interruption results in slower growth overall. If oil shocks really are responsible for GOP presidential underperformance, this is what it would look like.
The irony is that technology finally exists to make the American transportation sector — and the overall economy — less dependent on oil. This technology was developed at the American public’s expense to help manage a scenario much like this one. And the administration has undermined it at almost every opportunity.
Cement, plywood, and some electronic equipment will face 50% levies. But the real cost is much higher.
Here we go again. The United States will impose new 50% tariffs on a slew of imports from Canada, the White House announced on Monday afternoon. The trade levies — which will hit more than 500 categories of goods, from anoraks, beer, and curtains, to yarn, wool, and whey protein — will take effect in 30 days.
The new tariffs don’t seem to be wildfire-related. President Trump threatened to impose new tariffs last week after smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted south over the northern U.S. border, but administration officials have claimed to CNN that these new levies were already in motion by then.
Even so, a few aspects of the announcement stand out. Most important, at least from a generalist perspective, is the legal mechanism that President Trump is using to apply them: Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. This passage, which has never been used by a previous president to levy tariffs, allows the United States to tax trade from countries that the president says have “discriminated against” U.S. commerce.
Significant, too, is the fact the White House asserts this new kind of tariff could apply to any kind of product — even those that would normally be covered by the North American free trade pact, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. So far, the “Big Three” automakers — whose supply chains cross the Mexican or Canadian borders half a dozen times before a car is finally assembled — have avoided major tariff danger because auto parts and other inputs fall under the USMCA’s auspices. If the White House now thinks it can levy taxes despite that pact, then the risks for Ford, General Motors, and their suppliers have increased.
Energy and critical minerals are exempt from the new tariffs, so Canadian crude oil, gasoline, diesel, natural gas, and electricity will presumably keep flowing into the United States. (That explicit carve-out might be ominous in its own right, because energy had been protected by USMCA so far, too.) By omitting energy, Trump and his officials may be calculating they can avoid major inflationary hazards from this round of tariffs.
Who knows. In any case, to my eye, these tariffs do seem like they could aggravate construction costs and possibly contribute to wider U.S. inflation. There’s already some evidence that data centers are driving a new wave of inflation, for instance, by hiking construction input and labor costs. Yet data centers use a lot of cement — and cement will now face a 50% tariff under the new regime. So too will plywood, plaster, and paperboard, as well as industrial cooling equipment, chemicals, and some circuit boards.
I could keep listing the potential economic costs here — I could point out that overall inflation risk is rising or that average U.S. gas prices rose to $4 a gallon today on the Iran war news — but I think it’s important to look at least one step beyond the hits to commerce alone.
I mentioned earlier that these tariffs are meant to punish “discrimination.” In this case, some of the “discrimination” appears to be what some Canadian provinces did to retaliate against the president’s earlier tariffs. The state-owned liquor stores in Quebec and Ontario, for instance, stopped buying U.S.-made booze after Trump slapped 25% tariffs on Canada in March 2025; those boycotts are mentioned by name in today’s proclamation. Canada, you see, is not supposed to respond to Trump’s tariffs. It is just supposed to take it — just like it’s supposed to take the constant stream of falsehoods, abuse, belittling, and invasion threat.
Over the past few years, politicians and pundits have learned to respond to Trump’s policies by appealing to U.S. self-interest — by explaining how the president’s policies are making Americans poorer. It is a sensible strategy for a morally denuded era. A recent statement from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer about Canada, for example, criticized the president for hurting “our closest ally and partner … right when summer tourism season is arriving.” I get the move here — and I think, in some sense, Schumer is trying to avoid polarizing Trump’s treatment of Canada along partisan lines — but Canadians are more than their tourism dollars.
For the past several years, Trump has threatened to strip Canada of its sovereignty and its dignity. He has treated what was once a deep and secure relationship as something to be bartered and mined and dissipated. It is a mucilaginous approach to statecraft, and as recent reporting has made clear, its long-term costs will exceed any simple accounting. We Americans have been robbed of an honorable friendship. Some losses cannot be counted in dollars.
