Be Outraged with Me: Tariffs, Free Speech and Security

By Mort Kondracke

President Trump keeps perpetrating outrages at a furious rate: this week, it was extreme volatility—and uncertainty— on tariffs that might raise prices, crush markets and savings, cost jobs and alienate allies and perhaps bring on a recession; new threats to free speech, and firing of top national security officials on the say-so of a wild conspiracist.

We’ll get into all of that in this installment of Post Alley’s Trump Outrage Watch but first let’s consider what some wise observers have to say about what Trumpism represents historically, philosophically and culturally. Bottom line, it’s the destruction of America as a free society.

One of the best historians we have is Robert Kagan, a former Republican—a State Department official under Ronald Reagan and foreign policy adviser to John McCain—who left the party when it was taken over by Trump.

He’s a Brookings Institution scholar, a staff writer for the Atlantic and author of nine books, the latest of which is “Rebellion: How Anti-liberalism is Tearing America Apart—Again.”

https://www.postalley.org/2025/04/12/be-outraged-with-me-tariffs-free-speech-and-security/