Donald Trump is right—the United States is not in a trade war with China.At least, not yet. As the rhetoric has flown back and forth between Washington and Beijing, breathless news coverage has made it seem as though the war of tariffs has already begun. It has not—hardly any new duties have been levied.

So it happened. After months of speculation about whether and when Gary Cohn might resign, he finally did. The former prince of Goldman Sachs—and the unofficial leader of the free-traders, internationalists and Wall Streeters at the White House

Judging from their flurry of op-eds and tweets denouncing, dismissing or analyzing President Trump’s new National Security Strategy, America’s foreign policy mandarins would have you believe that the document is either dangerous, irrelevant or both. It is neither.

It’s fashionable these days to compare our present to the Gilded Age: rising inequality, labor struggling while capital thrives, an astonishingly wealthy and concentrated elite appearing to amass an inordinate amount of power. But a stark difference between our era and the last decades of the 19th century is the nature of the American presidency. 

In 1973, the late, great historian Arthur Schlesinger published The Imperial Presidency, charting the post-World War II expansion of presidential power and warning that the office had dangerously diverged from the parameters established by the Constitution and subsequent precedent. 

Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Accords is widely attributed to the now-waxing influence of the America First nationalists in the White House, but several days before that announcement, national security adviser H.R. McMaster and director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn

Every few years, Washington rouses itself from its partisan noise and rounds its attention on the Congressional Budget Office, a sleepy, nonpartisan place that quietly wields immense influence over most legislation of any consequence. 

Just weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, you would think that everything had changed. The uproar over the president’s tweets grows louder by the day, as does concern over the erratic, haphazard and aggressive stance of the White House toward critics and those with different policy views. It is the illusion of a presidency, not the real thing.

Of the many polarizations of the United States today, the battle over regulation is particularly fierce and many years in the making. Over the past decades, since at least the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the right and the Republican Party have come to view regulation as the premier sign of government overreach, stifling freedoms and hobbling economic growth. The left and the Democrats for the most part see regulation as the vital bulwark protecting the mass of Americans from corporate and government abuse.

Donald Trump ran his company and campaign, as many have observed, like an episode of “Game of Thrones”: Pit various factions against one another and see who comes out on top. It may be an inelegant and crude way to manage, but it has a certain logic if you are interested in power and who can wield it effectively. 

He sees it as zero-sum. She believes all boats rise together. Hillary is right, but a lot of people are buying into Trump’s vision.

 It is a relief that Donald Trump has finally turned to policy. Because now we can see, finally, that his policy ideas are as frothy, bombastic and detached from the world as the rest of his rhetoric. What the GOP candidate outlined in his big economic speech in Detroit on Monday relies entirely on an outdated theory (trickle-down economics)

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Those cutting words, delivered on national television, effectively ended the career of Senator Joe McCarthy. For four years, McCarthy had enjoyed a kind of immunity as he smeared anyone he pleased while on a national witch hunt for Communist sympathizers. 

Not only hasn’t he retracted his pledge to ban Muslims from America’s shores, Donald Trump has doubled down on it over the past week. In the wake of the Orlando shootings, Trump announced that as president he would “suspend immigration from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism against the U.S.”