◼ President Trump is criticizing Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell for waiting too long to cut interest rates, which suggests that he will replace Powell and possibly even try to do so before the latter’s term expires. But Powell is right on two points: inflation is not yet safely in the rearview mirror, and Trump’s tariffs will not only raise some prices but threaten to raise expected inflation in a way that could prove self-fulfilling. Trump’s sniping is making the problem more acute: if Powell were to cut interest rates now, markets and the public would have reason to conclude that they could not trust the Fed to stay vigilant against inflation. Trump should recall that the principal reason he sits in the White House is that the public dislikes inflation, not that it enjoys his caprice.

◼ Defying the clearly expressed mandates of a statute passed recently with widespread support in Congress, Trump is delaying a ban on TikTok for another 75 days. His first 75-day extension of the ban also violated the law, which allows for a single extension up to 90 days provided that the president certifies that a serious deal is on the table. His TikTok extensions belong in the same category of executive lawlessness as former President Biden’s actions to wipe out student loan debt and President Obama’s nonenforcement of immigration law. A deal looks less likely than ever, given the ongoing trade war. The duly enacted U.S. statute is supposed to be the law of the land, not a suggestion to be heeded or ignored depending on how the president of the United States feels about TikTok.

◼ William F. Buckley Jr. warned in God and Man at Yale against the taking of public money by private universities. The consequences he foresaw have come to pass. The Trump administration, in leveraging universities’ receipt of federal funding to impose terms on them, is not writing on a blank slate but instead, in Trumpian fashion, making loud and explicit what was previously done with subtlety. The Obama and Biden administrations were relentless in using federal law to influence or outright dictate how universities were managed. Trump’s counteroffensive started with Columbia and has advanced to Harvard. We share many of the administration’s concerns and cheer its lawful actions to correct them. But the overall impact of these demands would be pervasive federal monitoring of how the university is governed. The federal government simply should not have this power. Progressives eager to preserve the same powers when they return to the White House will doubtless seek to curb Trump’s authority in this area by attacking his motives, procedures, and factual predicates rather than by going to the root of the issue. But that root, as Buckley observed, is the money itself.

◼ They knew it was a disaster before it was a disaster. When Ron Klain, President Biden’s chief of staff from 2021 to 2023 and director of debate prep for his June 2024 face-off with Donald Trump, went to Camp David to coach him, the president was “exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.” Two mock debates had to be cut short because Biden “was fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged. . . . Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster.” These details are excerpted from a new book by Chris Whipple, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, and Klain has already tried to walk them back, saying that he did not mean to tell Whipple that Biden lacked mental acuity, only that he had been “sidelined” by White House staff — i.e., kept from understanding his own campaign or the state of domestic politics. That explanation is just another indictment. Only now do members of Biden’s inner circle admit what was evident to anyone with eyes and ears, that the old man was like a cracked piece of china, carried from day to day by anxious handlers. They wanted to keep Trump out of office, and themselves in. Their reward was defeat.

◼ The House passed, 220–208, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would require those registering to vote to produce proof of citizenship. It is already illegal under federal law to claim falsely to be a U.S. citizen. A commonsense legislative step to make the U.S. Code more enforceable should be uncontroversial. And it is, among the American public: About two-thirds of likely U.S. voters surveyed in April by Rasmussen Reports favor the SAVE Act. The controversy is concentrated in the media and among Democratic lawmakers. Only four House Democrats joined Republicans to pass the bill, one fewer than the five who had done so during the previous Congress. Opponents note that many Americans don’t have passports, and they panic on behalf of married women whose IDs list names different from those on their birth certificates. But U.S. citizens who care to vote can make easy fixes, as the 36 states that have passed voter-ID requirements have already proven.

◼ Trump signed memoranda ordering the attorney general, the director of national intelligence, and others to investigate two men: Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor. The former was the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security; the latter was chief of staff in the same department. Their offenses? In the relevant memo, Trump said that Krebs had “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.” Taylor, meanwhile, might be guilty of no less than treason (according to the president). In 2018, Taylor published an op-ed anonymously, warning that the chief executive — namely, Trump — was lawless. He followed that up with a book, also published anonymously, titled A Warning. Neither Krebs nor Taylor has been charged with any crime. President Trump ought to be careful, lest he prove Taylor’s point.

◼ The Texas House passed a bill that will bring school choice to the nation’s most populous red state. It’s a win for  Governor Greg Abbott, who championed the bill and supported primary challenges against Republican legislators who opposed school choice last year, and for President Trump, who worked the phones with legislators in the hours before the vote was called. The program, which will be capped at $1 billion in its first year of implementation, is designed to send money directly to families via education savings accounts. The money can be used for private-school tuition, homeschool tools and curriculum, and virtual learning programs.  Democrats and their allies in the teachers’ unions complain that the program’s cost could explode, a hilarious about-face from the top interest group for greater state and local government spending. If families and students choose to use the funds instead of attending public schools, that means they think they’ll be better off outside the public-education monopoly, and once they leave, legislators can cut public school spending to assuage the teachers’ unions’ spending concerns.

◼ Having been soundly defeated in the court of public opinion, the proponents of “gender-affirming” care for kids have taken their efforts underground. Health care providers are now concealing their mutilation of children when applying to have the procedures covered by insurers — so, rather than admit to performing a double mastectomy on a teen girl for purely cosmetic reasons, the responsible physician will file to have the procedure covered as a medically necessary “breast reduction.” We know about this latest, hidden front in the long-running fight against gender madness thanks to Eithan Haim, the surgeon who was prosecuted by the Biden Department of Justice for blowing the whistle on gender-transition procedures at Texas Children’s Hospital. Haim, who had all charges related to his whistleblower efforts dropped in January, recently testified before the House Judiciary Committee and explained how the Campaign for Southern Equality, an LGBTQ nonprofit, trains doctors to conceal their efforts. Dr. Haim may have to take up whistleblowing as a career.

◼ In Turkey, the principal opponent of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the country’s strongman, is Ekrem İmamoğlu. Was? İmamoğlu is the mayor of Istanbul. Was? Erdoğan has had him arrested and imprisoned. This is what dictators do, when their power is threatened. In Washington, President Trump said, “I have great relations with a man named Erdoğan. Have you heard of him? I happen to like him, and he likes me. I know the press will get very angry — ‘He likes Erdoğan.’ But I do, and he likes me.” An American president can do a little better than that.

◼ Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket shot six passengers, all women, including a pop star and Jeff Bezos’s fiancée, through the Kármán line into, arguably, space. If they expected to return a few minutes later to an admiring America, they will have been disappointed. Pointedly having only women aboard demonstrates that woke lives on, but historical knowledge does not. The first all-female spaceflight was when cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova orbited the earth alone in Vostok 6 for three days in 1963. Some objecting to the New Shepard flight point out that four of the passengers had no obvious connection to rocket science, which along with the presence of the future Mrs. Bezos was felt to undermine the jaunt’s skimpy feminist credentials. Killjoys worried about this “pointless” flight’s effect on the climate (none) or grumbled that the money could have been better spent elsewhere, a complaint as old as the Apollo program. More understandably, others bridled at the description of the passengers as “astronauts.” But there’s no shame in space tourism, an adventure begun (much more adventurously) by American engineer Dennis Tito in 2001. It’s another sign of the normalization and commercialization of space, critical steps if we are to move on from just this one rock. We’ll be ready for our tickets. One day.

◼ Men continue to invade women’s sports both mainstream and niche, prompting some courageous female competitors to stand up even if they stand alone. In March, female fencer Stephanie Turner refused to compete against her male opponent at the Cherry Blossom Open in Maryland. USA Fencing responded to her protest by disqualifying her. In England, a women’s pool tournament featured two male players in the championship. In Tennessee, Abigail Wilson walked off the disc golf course at the Music City Open rather than face a male player, who defeated the world’s top-ranked female competitor in 2022. That thing that never happens, in short, keeps happening.

◼ Everyone recognizes giants in the past, but there are such figures in the present as well. Early on, Mario Vargas Llosa made a splash, with The Time of the Hero, The Green House, and other novels. He also made splashes with political essays. After spending his youth on the left, he became a determined classical liberal. In his native Peru, he founded a political party, Movimiento Libertad. He ran for president in 1990, losing to Alberto Fujimori. In 2018, he published an intellectual memoir, The Call of the Tribe. He chronicled and hailed his influences, including Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and Raymond Aron. His Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 2010, was thoroughly fitting. His novels will be read and marveled at for generations. Mario Vargas Llosa is now a giant of the past, having died at 89. R.I.P.