Trade Wars, Meet Actual Wars

No Spain, no gain? It was probably inevitable that President Donald Trump’s trade war would eventually get mixed up in his actual war. 

Earlier this week, Spanish officials said they would prohibit American forces from using joint bases for war operations, unless those activities were covered by the United Nations Charter. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said his country would not “be complicit in something that is bad for the world,” the Associated Press reports. 

On Tuesday, Trump declared that he intended to “cut off all trade with Spain.” 

You might wonder: What legal authority does Trump have to unilaterally impose these sorts of revenge tariffs? After all, the Supreme Court ruled not that long ago that the authority Trump had been using to unilaterally impose tariffs based on his whims was unconstitutional. You might as well ask: On what legal authority did Trump launch a war against Iran? In theory, under the Constitution, Congress is supposed to authorize both tariffs and wars. In practice, they, uh, don’t. 

Trump just does things, and the annoying constitutional worrywarts can figure it out later. (I say this as an annoying constitutional worrywart.) 

In any case, yesterday, the Trump administration announced that Spain had changed its tune. “The U.S. military is coordinating with their counterparts in Spain,” White House Press press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. The implication was that the tariff threats had worked. 

Spain, however, said otherwise. “I can refute (the White House spokesperson),” Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares said. “The position of the Spanish government regarding the war in the Middle East, the bombing of Iran and the use of our bases has not changed one iota.” Maybe those tariff threats aren’t as effective as Trump thinks? 

In a speech, Sánchez warned that the war could spin out of control. “Nobody knows for sure what will happen now,” he said. “Even the objectives of those who launched the first attack are unclear. But we must be prepared, as the proponents say, for the possibility that this will be a long war, with numerous casualties and, therefore, with serious economic consequences on a global scale.” 

Sánchez also implicitly admonished Trump for escalating the war: “You can’t respond to one illegality with another because that’s how humanity’s great disasters begin.” 

I will just note that in the Star Wars prequels, the fall of the Republic, and the descent into darkness and imperial rule, began with a planetary blockade and a trade war. At the time, people said it was wonky and boring. But here we are. 

Where is Congress? The Constitution was built around the idea that each branch would fight to preserve its own powers, and this would create a system of checks and balances. But in Trump’s second term, Republicans in the legislature have been actively fighting to not preserve their power.  

Yesterday, in a 47–53 vote, Senate Republicans voted against a resolution that would have required Trump to ask Congress to sign off on any further military aggression in Iran. Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) voted with Democrats in favor of the measure; Sen. John Fetterman (D–Pa.) joined Republicans to vote against it. 

The measure was mostly symbolic. Even a successful vote would have been subject to a House vote and a presidential veto. And the position of both the White House and the GOP Speaker of the House is that this whole situation in which America is spending billions of dollars dropping thousands and thousands of bombs on military and political targets in a foreign country is not, in fact, a war. Nothing to see here. Everyone in Congress can go home and crack open a beer. 

Before we go: An update from this newsletter’s usual author, Liz Wolfe, who we all miss. 

To my readers—I had planned on doing a much shorter maternity leave and returning to you all quickly, but my sweet baby Solomon spent 61 (mostly terrifying!) days in the NICU—breathing troubles, seizures, and a surgery to fix an issue with his airways. He was finally released last week, and I’m going to spend a few more weeks getting to know him and adjusting to life at home. 

I miss writing this newsletter very much, and I can’t believe Trump keeps doing regime change while I’m all tied up! If you’re the praying type, please pray for my son: Though he’s out of the NICU, some of his health issues are ongoing. I hope to return to you all in April, once the home front has been handled. 

Scenes from Washington, D.C.: Congrats, Washingtonians: Your city is now officially the home to what is being described as “the first unionized cat cafe in the world. I like to imagine that it’s the cats who are unionized.

QUICK HITS

• The preliminary cost estimate for the war against Iran is $1 billion every day. 
• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the U.S. sank an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean with a torpedo. Iran says this is an “atrocity.”
• Despite pressure from Trump, the Department of Justice failed to build a case against Joe Biden for the former president’s use of the autopen. 
• Does Trump think he won the tariffs case? It’s always hard to say what, exactly, he believes. But it kind of seems like he does.  
• Federal Communications Commission chief Brendan Carr is seeking comment on foreign call centers. Won’t AI solve this sort of gripe? Most call centers are going to be “staffed” by robots soon. Real-time translation tools are going to mean that it won’t matter if the caller and the representative don’t speak the same language.  
• The Brady Bunch house is now a protected landmark. 
• Secretary Kristi Noem should not be running the Department of Homeland Security. 
• Massachusetts, where I have spent a good bit of time recently, lost 180,000 residents between April 2020 and July 2025. 
• I quite like playing sport-like video games where you blow people up. I do not like the White House using imagery from those same games as propaganda for an unpopular, unjustified war.