Trump Appears to Have Lost His Trade Wars Even Before They Started

Yesterday, we were going to run an item headlined "Trump's Tariffs Hit a Few Snags." We are fortunate we ran out of time while writing that post, because after we went live, there was yet another snag, probably the biggest of them all. Sometimes, the early bird does NOT get the worm.

Before we get into specifics, let's talk a little bit about tariffs in general. And to start that part of the discussion, let's start with... a sports analogy. There is an old saying in football, which we have mentioned before, that a team that has two quarterbacks doesn't have any quarterbacks. That is to say, if a team does not have a clear-cut best option for that position, the most important on the field, team management has not done its job. If you would like to observe a real-life example in action, the Pittsburgh Steelers' 2025 schedule is right here. We thought about giving you the Cleveland Browns schedule, but they actually have FIVE quarterbacks (with all that implies).

What does this have to do with tariffs? Well, tariffs can broadly be used to pursue two basic sets of goals. The first set of goals involves tariffs that the government actually intends to collect. Such tariffs can be used to raise revenues, and to gain leverage in trade-deal negotiations, and potentially to correct certain kinds of trade imbalances. The second set of goals involves tariffs the government does NOT intend to collect. In general, the purpose here is to either punish some foreign nation for its misdeeds (environmental abuses, use of sweatshop labor, manufacture of exported goods that are designed to spy on the end consumer, etc.) or to provide protection, or near-total protection, for some domestic industry (i.e., production of computer chips).

A football team can't start two quarterbacks at the same time. And a nation cannot go all-in on both types of tariff policy at the same time, as they are in conflict. Either you want to regulate trade, or you want to shut it down. To the extent that Donald Trump has explained his trade wars, he has promised all the benefits of the first category of tariffs AND all the benefits of the second category of tariffs. He can't have both. Or, to put it another way, a president who has two different tariff policies has no tariff policy.

Regardless of what Trump's goals are—and it's entirely possible even he doesn't really know, or that he doesn't really understand that he's pulling in two opposite directions—his plans are in deep trouble. We'll run through four significant issues that have arisen, and then give some comments as to why each of them is a problem for him:

• Issue 1: The Court Decision: This is the news that broke yesterday, and that we are able to include because we spent so much time writing about how stupid Tommy Tuberville is, and how sleazy CNN entertainer Jake Tapper is. Much like the Parliamentarian of the Senate, who spends 99.8% of her time flying completely under the radar and 0.2% of her time right in the thick of the action, nobody pays attention to the U.S. Court of International Trade... until they do.
  
  That court, which sits in New York City, has just nine judges. And its responsibility is—you guessed it—dealing with civil actions related to customs and international trade, including tariffs. The Court was asked to consider two different cases, each filed by a consortium of small businesses, arguing that Trump's tariffs are not legal. Yesterday, Judges Timothy Reif (Trump appointee), Jane Restani (Ronald Reagan appointee) and Gary Katzmann (Barack Obama appointee) ruled unanimously for the plaintiffs.
  
  The ruling gutted the basis for nearly all of the tariffs Trump has announced. He claimed authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, and the administration's lawyers argued that not only was that correct, but that this is a political question, and not something for the courts to consider. The judges rejected both elements of that, asserting that this is most certainly a justiciable question dealing with the powers and responsibilities of the branches of government. They also found that there is no emergency, and that even if there was, Congress did not delegate unlimited authority to the president to set tariff rates in the event of an emergency, and that even if they did, that is an impermissible delegation of legislative branch prerogatives.
  
  
• Why This Is a Problem for Trump: By virtue of the ruling, the tariffs are currently in abeyance. At this point, he has two possible courses of action. The first is to appeal the ruling, and to try to get the Court of International Trade overturned. The White House has filed that appeal; it goes to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. However, the administration's argument is pretty weak, and the case is likely to draw unfriendly judges—the Democratic appointees on the court don't like unchecked presidential power, the Republican appointees are free traders, and none of the judges are Trump appointees. On top of that, because the Federal Circuit hears appeals from courts defined by their area of the law and NOT their region, its decisions are nationally binding. So, the Supreme Court is particularly likely to decline appeals, since there's no need to resolve, say, conflicting rulings from the Fifth Circuit and the Ninth Circuit. And even if SCOTUS does hear the appeal, Trump will run into the same unchecked power/free trade dynamic with the Supremes.
  
  The other possibility, which the administration's lawyers are undoubtedly working on, is to find some other statutory basis for Trump to impose tariffs by fiat. However, they surely already did this work, and decided that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act was the best option. So, any backup option is likely to be even weaker, and even less likely to stand up in court.
  
  Meanwhile, all of this means additional months or years of legal wrangling. If Trump was hoping to collect lots and lots of import duties—say, to offset the tax cuts for rich people in the "big, beautiful bill"—then that is not happening right now, and will not likely happen for the foreseeable future. If, on the other hand, the goal was leverage in negotiations with other countries, well, the people who run China or the EU or Canada or Mexico can read the newspapers, and so they know as well as we do that Trump's position is shaky, at best. "Shaky, at best" does not generally equate to "negotiating from a position of strength."
  
  
• Issue 2: The Loophole: This is a little weedy, but in 1988 Congress adopted legislation that established what is known as the "first sale rule." Basically, if a factory in China manufactures a pair of Nikes for $10, and then sells them to Acme Traders for $20, and then to Acme Traders sells them to Nike USA for $50, and then Nike USA sells them to American consumers for $200, Nike only has to pay the tariff on the original $10 price.
  
  Again, it's weedy, particularly when you get into the rules that were established to keep companies from grossly abusing the system. For example, each participant in the chain has to be independent of the other participants—Nike can't manufacture shoes in China as Nike Shanghai and then turn around and sell those shoes to Nike USA for ten cents. And when the various links in the chain ARE independent, it can be hard for the later links in the chain to get accurate information about prices from earlier links in the chain. For example, Acme Traders may not be eager to reveal to Nike USA that its markup is 250%.
  
  
• Why This Is a Problem for Trump: If the goal is to collect revenue for the government, then every time that a loophole is exploited, it's less revenue for the government. If the goal is to protect domestic industries, then there are some (probably many) industries where big import tariffs are not going to be nearly as big as Trump thinks they are. And note that this is an American law, so the loophole exists for goods coming INTO the United States. If American Shoe Exporters, Inc. is trying to sell shoes in China or France or Angola, that company may not have the same loophole available in the event that reciprocal tariffs are imposed.
  
  Also, it may not be LEGAL to get around the rules by creating shell companies, but corporate interests are pretty good at chicanery if they want to be, particularly when the stakes are high enough. Trump knows little of history, but we bet the readers of this site are familiar with the corporate trusts of the Gilded Age, which were created to subvert laws against monopolies. It took decades to bust the trusts, and even then it was only achieved with a fully staffed Department of Justice and a series of presidential administrations (Theodore Roosevelt, then William Howard Taft, then Woodrow Wilson) that were willing to go to war. Do you really think the DOGE-ified Trump administration, which also appears to be in the thrall of business interests, would be able to do in 1-2 years what it took Roosevelt/Taft/Wilson something like 20 years to do?
  
  It is true that Trump could demand that Congress change or repeal the 1988 law. However, while the Republican members appear unwilling to challenge him directly, there may be at least a few of them who are not willing to actively rewrite the laws to enable his trade wars. Also, unless such a provision was added to the "big, beautiful bill" (and survived the Byrd bath), then a new trade law would be filibusterable in the Senate.
  
  
• Issue 3: TACO Tuesdays (and Wednesdays, and Thursdays...): This was inside baseball for a week or so, but now it's all over the Internet. The people who run Wall Street just so happen to have noticed that every time Trump declares some harsh new tariff, maybe against China, maybe against Canada, maybe against some unfriendly penguins, the markets take a dive. That means not only the stock markets (and their various indices), but also the bond market, where downturns are really bad for Uncle Sam's bottom line. And every time the bleeding begins, even just a little, Trump backs down and delays [TARIFF X], or announces a "deal" has been struck, or finds some other way to change course, and the markets come roaring back to life.
  
  The dynamic of "the markets drop when tariffs are announced, and rebound when they those tarifs delayed/rolled back" presents certain opportunities for investors, particularly day traders. And the phenomenon is clear enough, and has repeated enough times, that it now has a name: The TACO Trade. TACO stands for "Trump Always Chickens Out." The acronym was reportedly coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong.
  
  "TACO Trade" not only communicates potentially useful financial wisdom, it's also a double-poke in Trump's eyes, as it paints him as both a coward and an incompetent flip-flopper. And in case anyone missed that latter insinuation, University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers talked to Barron's yesterday and helpfully pointed out that "here was no BACO trade" and "no CACO trade" (these refer to Joe Biden and Bill Clinton; presumably OACO was too hard to pronounce).
  
  
• Why This Is a Problem for Trump: We see two issues, the one that's more substantive, and the one that Trump probably cares more about. The substantive issue is this: Nearly any goal that Trump might have relies on people, both domestically and abroad, believing the tariffs are for real, and that they will remain in place unless there are BIG concessions, and maybe they'll stay in place even then.
  
  For example, consider the goal that Trump has most often enunciated (even though it's the toughest, and thus least realistic one, to achieve): bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. That is a decades-long process. Even today, a majority of manufacturing jobs are performed by robots, and a sizable chunk of the rest of the jobs are for engineers and programmers who build and maintain the robots. The days of 30,000 people all earning a middle-class wage from their jobs building cars for Ford in Flint, MI, are already mostly gone, and will be even more gone in 10 or 20 years.
  
  That said, there are certainly potential benefits to bringing certain kinds of manufacturing concerns back to the U.S. (like computer chip manufacturing, or maybe even iPhone production, which Trump seems to be particularly obsessed over). However, this would require corporations (and, very possibly, the government) to commit to long-term investments, involving tens or hundreds of billions of dollars over a period of time that will extend beyond Trump's presidency and, in all likelihood, beyond his time on Earth. They need to know that, if they are going to take that leap of faith, the U.S. government is going to back that play, long-term.
  
  The very best option would be for Trump to develop a plan, get buy-in from both sides of the political aisle, and then to go to the business leaders. That ship has sailed; the Democrats are never, ever going to work with him on a protectionist trade policy. Next best would be to lean on the Republicans in Congress to pass a bill establishing a protectionist policy the next 10 years (and then to hope that the next Democratic trifecta does not kill the bill). However, it is doubtful that the necessary number of Republicans in Congress would support protectionism (you can already count on Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie, both R-KY, as "no" votes). Unlike Trump, most of them have to worry about getting reelected, and again, they likely don't want to take ownership of a trade war and a possible recession/depression.
  
  So, Trump is left with executive orders and announcements on Truth Social and making a fist and shaking it at the clouds. It is extremely improbable that this would be enough to convince corporate interests to commit billions of dollars to relocating manufacturing back to the U.S. And if they think that any and all tariff announcements are just a mirage, to soon be wiped out by either a court decision or by Trump's "chickening out"? Then it's impossible.
  
  There is also the second problem here, the one we think Trump actually cares about. He hates, hates, hates to be made the butt of jokes, and that is exactly what is happening here. Just in case there was any doubt, a reported asked him about "The TACO Trade" yesterday, and Trump blew his stack: "Don't ever say what you say, that's a nasty question. To me that's the nastiest question." He also added that the real problem is that... he's just too tough when it comes to trade. And if you were able to keep a straight face while reading that claim, you are a stronger person than we are.
  
  
• Issue 4: Passing the Buck: We wrote about this before, specifically the case of Walmart. But now, a whole bunch of additional companies have announced their intent to raise prices to cover the costs of tariffs, and to make sure customers know why. Those companies include, in addition to Walmart, Mattel, Best Buy, Ford, Subaru, Procter & Gamble and Adidas.
  
  
• Why This Is a Problem for Trump: Trump, who is prone to magical thinking, seems to have believed that he could bully companies into eating the costs of tariffs, or at least not telling customers where the price increases came from. This was madness. Most of these companies, if not all of them, operate on margins small enough that they cannot eat a 10% increase (much less a 30% or 40% increase) in costs without going into the red. Further, the leaders of these companies, assuming they are publicly traded (and all of these companies are), literally have a legal duty to act in the best interests of the business. If the CEO takes a giant economic hit, or a giant PR hit, to help Trump out, then that CEO not only not doing their job, they are potentially opening themselves up to legal action.
  
  We will also point out—and this may come as a shock—that corporate interests have been known to use an external excuse, like tariffs, or maybe a pandemic, to raise their prices beyond what is actually needed to make up for the external issue. So, if the tariffs do come back to life, Trump could end up getting the blame for price increases that ARE his fault, and maybe some price increases that ARE NOT actually his fault.

In short, in so many ways, the Trump trade wars have turned into a Trump train wreck. Luckily, given that acronyms are all the rage these days, those have the exact same one. Undoubtedly, if you tell people the TTW have become the TTW, they will know exactly what you mean. And although he sometimes claims not to notice/care, Trump is certainly aware that every time he imposes tariffs, the markets do badly (and, it appears, his approval rating goes down). And every time he backs down, or he is forced to back down, the markets boom (they did yesterday, presumably in response to the decision from the U.S. Court of International Trade). We've never fully understood why he's so obsessed with tariffs, or what he's actually trying to achieve (we've had plenty of theories, mind you, but no actual answers). We wonder if we've finally reached the point that he'll announce a few "beautiful trade deals" and then he'll quietly dispense with all the tariff talk. (Z)

Musk Out...

Yesterday, Elon Musk took to HIS social media site (which is also truth-free, by the way) and announced that he has reached the statutory limit for service as a Special Government Employee, and that he would be departing the Trump administration immediately.

Elon Musk is a very dishonest man. Donald Trump is a very dishonest man. So, it's certainly possible this is something they've cooked up so that Musk can ignore the rules without people asking too many questions. However, our gut feel is: We doubt it.

To start, it is clear that Trump is getting a little weary of sharing the spotlight with Musk. The President very much enjoyed having Musk's money. He somewhat enjoyed having someone who could act as a hatchet man. However, Trump does not particularly love the juxtaposition of "actual successful businessman" and "just claims to be a successful businessman." He also doesn't love getting blowback for the high-profile missteps of DOGE. And he really dislikes sharing the spotlight.

More importantly, if Musk WANTED to stay, Trump might have a hard time pushing him out. But we think Musk wants to go. Part of it is that he wants to return to his business empire to see if he can fix what ails it. Part of it is that he's clearly disenchanted with government work. And part of it is that he feels unappreciated, which has created cracks in his relationship with Trump. This weekend, Musk sat for an interview that will air, in full, in a couple of days. And he took some shots at Trump's budget bill, saying that the massive outlay runs entirely contrary to what DOGE was/is doing.

And finally, while this is trivial, it's also an important part of the dynamic. If Musk really wanted to skirt the rules, and to keep working quietly behind the scenes, he could probably pull that off for a while. But that is not what Musk wants to do. He wants attention, and lots of it, all the time. He can't have it, unless he does things that make it clear he's violating the laws governing Special Government Employees. The South African will undoubtedly still have Trump's cell phone number, and will probably pop in on the administration in person from time to time, but we really think his leadership of DOGE is over. (Z)

...but Bove In?

Meanwhile, on the same day that Elon Musk said that he was exiting, stage right, Donald Trump got onto "No Truths" Social to make this announcement:

It is my great honor to nominate Emil Bove to serve as a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Emil is a distinguished graduate of Georgetown Law, and served as Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York for nearly a decade, where he was the Co-Chief of the Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit. Emil is SMART, TOUGH, and respected by everyone. He will end the Weaponization of Justice, restore the Rule of Law, and do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Emil Bove will never let you down!

Perhaps that name sounds familiar to some/many readers. That is because Bove, before taking on a job in this administration, served as Trump's personal defense attorney for several years. Curiously, Trump somehow forgot to mention that in his announcement.

You really don't need us to tell you what Trump is thinking here. The Third Circuit covers Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, and is where a lot of immigration-related cases are being heard (most notably the Mahmoud Khalil case). The President would very much like an Aileen-Cannon-style lapdog sitting on that court, and Bove would seem to fit the bill. His highest-profile assignment, as part of the Trump administration, was taking the lead in dismantling the case against Eric Adams. So, corrupt behavior is not a problem. Even better is a lapdog who is also a hardliner on immigration, and Bove certainly is.

We suspect that some readers, when hearing that Trump is going to try to appoint one of his personal attorneys to the federal bench, thought of George W. Bush's attempt to put HIS lawyer, Harriet Miers, on the Supreme Court. In that case, the 55-Republican Senate reacted so badly that Bush had to pull the nomination. We shall see what the 53-Republican Senate does this time, but our guess is that the outcome will be a little different than it was in 2005. (Z)

Joe Biden Continues to be the FORMER President, Part II: On Knowledge

The "original" Joe Biden health news was related to his alleged cognitive decline. The "recent" Joe Biden health news is related to his cancer diagnosis.

We want to focus specifically on the cancer diagnosis right now, a diagnosis about which many people who are not Joe Biden or his doctors made many confident pronouncements. This includes a number of people who are not inherently hostile to Biden, like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who is brother to Rahm Emanuel, and who was appointed to several blue-ribbon panels by Biden during his presidency. The general thrust of the comments, including those from Ezekiel Emmanuel, was that it's very hard to believe that Biden, with access to the best preventative care in the world, only learned about the cancer after he left office. This, in turn, has caused many people (particularly on the right, but also some on the left) to incorporate the cancer into the broader "Biden cover-up" narrative.

We took great exception to people who have not examined Biden, and who were not part of his care team, and who have not seen his test results, presuming to make an armchair diagnosis, whether they are trained oncologists (like Dr. Emanuel) or not. We had several responses that we wanted to share. The first three are from physicians; the fourth is from a prostate cancer survivor (and then, at the end, we'll have some more comments):

J.E. in Akron, OH: Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel's "surprise" that President Biden's prostate cancer wasn't picked up by "routine" screenings is disingenuous. The United States Preventive Services Task Force recommends AGAINST continuing to screen for prostate cancer beyond age 70.

While this recommendation is controversial, it reflects the considered, evidence-based judgment of the entity tasked by the Affordable Care Act with weighing the risks and benefits of various preventative strategies. To my knowledge, Dr. Emanuel has never criticized this recommendation; if anything, he has been a critic of excessive testing and healthcare spending in the later stages of life. While it is certainly possible that the publicity surrounding Biden's diagnosis will prompt a re-evaluation of current recommendations, nothing publicly known about Biden's diagnosis suggests any deficiency in his preventative care.

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H.R. in Pittsburgh, PA: As a physician, I want to commend you on your very insightful and non-hyperventilatory description of the significance of Biden's prostate cancer. I agree 100% with your assessment of the ridiculous and unfounded assertion by Ezekiel Emmanuel that Biden had prostate cancer "for years," ergo there must have been a cover-up.

Eminent professor he might be, but Emmanuel seems to have forgotten his roots as an oncologist entirely. Even I, who am neither an oncologist nor a urologist, know that cancers are graded as "aggressive" vs. "intermediate risk" vs. "non-aggressive" based on at least two factors. One is "invasive vs indolent"—phrases that mean exactly what they imply. The other is poorly differentiated (i.e. uncontrolled cell replication) vs well-differentiated (i.e. partially responsive to growth inhibitory factors).

What distinguishes the two extremes in ALL cancers is called "doubling time." In solid tumors, that means volume, not two-dimensional diameter. In prostate cancer specifically, however, there are two other measures of aggressiveness. One is Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) doubling time, which is traditionally determined as <6 months for the most aggressive, 6-12 months for intermediate, and >12 months for slower-growing prostate cancers. However, there is considerable doubt as to the reliability of doubling time as a measure in the individual patient. That is the unending and unresolvable problem of "intra"-polating (if I may create a word) from population studies to the singular level, as the statistician in [V] will attest. (For those interested in frying their brains with a more detailed explanation of how many ways to Sunday have population studies tried to manipulate doubling time to achieve the Holy Grail of reliability in the clinical context, you can read a summary of those efforts here).

That said, the PSA-doubling time can potentially be helpful if one has a baseline value within the prior 12 months (as Joe Biden must have as an 80+ year old). If, as I suspect, his PSA had not risen by more than 0.6ng/ml/yr—the generally accepted clinical range for biopsy—then a diagnosis of "highly aggressive" (i.e. PSA doubling time of <6 months) definitively rules out a "cover-up" for three reasons. First, if the PSA had doubled, a biopsy would have been performed earlier. Second, the presence of metastases to bone—something, by the way, any cancer patient will tell you is not asymptomatic for any length of time—indicates a really aggressive form of prostate cancer. Third, many such cancers are so undifferentiated that they cannot even synthesize PSA (so forget PSA doubling time)!

There is, however, a second and even more troubling fact that shows how aggressive Biden's cancer is—even if one ignores the presence of mets to bone. ABC News was among the first to report that Biden was given a Gleason score of 9. It means the diagnosis was confirmed by a prostate biopsy (the old adage that you never sign a death warrant without conclusive proof holds in medicine as much as in justice). If true, then a score of 9 might be the scariest fact of all. On a scale of 1-10, a 9 means a highly anaplastic (undifferentiated) form of cancer. It explains not only how rapidly his cancer grew (i.e., there was, tragically, no "need" for a cover up), but also why it had already metastasized to bone by the time the diagnosis was made.

While great advances have been made in the treatment of advanced cancer, it is still the case that two-thirds of men with a Gleason score of 9-10 will not live five years—a prognosis that gets even worse when the cancer has already metastasized.

Needless to say, I am heartbroken by this news. I still believe, despite all the bad press and executive pullback by TCF, that Biden was the most consequential president of my time since I emigrated to the U.S. in the 80s. It has taken a great effort and considerable emotional distress for me to write this, but I did it so my fellow Electoral-Vote.com acolytes might understand the reason why (V) and (Z)'s resounding rebuttal of Emanuel is so on point. He seems to have gone over to the dark side (at least by my reckoning), so yesterday's post only closed the circle on my decision to write in.

I will close with my wish for President Biden's survival despite this dread disease. And to all my fellow 70-year-olds, please make sure you get an annual PSA and (ideally) a prostate exam, as well. Because the small nodule felt in Biden's prostate, and not his PSA, was, to my reckoning, the reason he got a biopsy.

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B.B. in Toronto, ON, Canada: I'm am a retired family physician and professor in the University of Toronto's Department of Family and Community Medicine.

As you know, Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer, and some (J.D. Vance perhaps) believe he has known for a long time and there is some sort of cover-up.

Here's my take. I suspect even though PSA screening is often stopped in elderly men, that the president was getting it done anyway. The problem with any screening is that it tends to detect less aggressive forms of disease. Screening is conducted at intervals, yearly... or longer. So how could his cancer have been "missed"?

The answer is that it wasn't. He has what is known as an "interval cancer." Aggressive forms of cancers come up quickly between the screening intervals, and it is entirely possible that he had a normal screening test a year ago, or even 6 months ago, and an aggressive form of cancer now.

This is true of all cancer screening—mammography and the various tests for colon cancer, for examples. By nature, screening tends to miss rapidly growing cancers, but does find slower cancers, and may detect cancers earlier in their natural course. Sometimes with routine screening you find an aggressive cancer early, but it's just luck.

So how CAN we screen for these rapid cancers? Shorten the interval? That's costly, and don't forget that screening detects all kinds of issues that aren't cancer, but have to be investigated to be certain... so called false positives. Eliminating the false positives is also costly and may do actual harm. For example a certain proportion of colonoscopies lead to bowel perforation, which is VERY serious. The interval for screening is chosen based on the best combination on sensitivity (the ability of the test to find cancers that are actually there, implying a low false negative rate) and specificity (the ability of the test to detect ONLY cancers and not other things, implying a low false positive rate). I know of no general screening test where the interval is shorter than a year. In some high-risk individuals, screening may be as short as every 6 months, but these are special cases, not good practice for screening everybody regardless of risk.

In short, Biden almost certainly didn't have this prostate cancer a year ago, and it would have taken some luck to have found it early.

Meantime, your sense that Gleason 9 with metastases to bone is not early detection is correct. His cancer is not curable, and it remains to be seen if it is controllable in any meaningful way. None of the treatments he faces are a walk in the park. They all have significant and life-altering side effects. He has my utmost sympathy.

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B.C. in Phoenix, AZ: I'm a prostate cancer survivor. It took the Mayo Clinic three biopsies to actually confirm I had cancer, and a HoLEP laser surgical procedure plus two dozen sessions of proton radiation therapy to defeat it.

The problem with many types of cancer is it is very difficult to diagnose, even with all the modern technology. I was at Mayo because my former urologist had diagnosed a spot on another part of my urological system as a potential cancerous lesion and had recommended a pretty serious, invasive surgical procedure to remove it. Mayo determined it was nothing more than a benign spot, but was concerned about a high PSA level. PSA is a protein which, if detected at elevated levels in the blood, suggests cancer. Some urologists have recently called its accuracy into question.

My treatment has resulted in a PSA level which has remained at an undetectable level for the last two years. But the HoLEP procedure was necessary to address my symptoms of BPH (enlarged prostate) and an elevated PSA level also usually presents with BPH. The doctors cannot tell me how much my high PSA level was due to cancer and how much was caused by BPH.

A funny aside: as I was going through treatment, I was contacted by the company I had retired from just a year earlier. As the IT director and I were having lunch, he explained that his crew knew the Microsoft Windows environment very well, but were clueless about the various modern FreeBSD and Linux systems which were in place. He wondered if I could come in and, on a contract basis, school his people on those systems. Knowing about my cancer diagnosis, he asked "Do you feel up to it?"

"Sh**, yes," I laughed, "I've got cancer, not dementia!"

Thanks to all of you for sharing your expertise.

We imagine our purpose in passing these letters along is evident, but just in case: Quite a few people, including virtually the entire Trump administration, but also people like Emanuel, have behaved as if it is a certainty that Biden knew, before he left the White House, that he had been stricken. As the reports above make clear, the available evidence suggests the exact opposite. What it does not do is support the conclusion that there must have been a cover-up.

And that brings us back to Biden's alleged dementia. More specifically, it brings us back to Jake Tapper, Alex Thompson and their book. Original Sin is an important part of this story, because Tapper and Thompson are ostensibly "on the left," and so give credence to right-wing claims of a cover-up. We've mentioned this a couple of times before, but in historical analysis, and in particular in Biblical analysis, this is known as the "criterion of embarrassment." If someone says something they would presumably prefer not to say (for example, if one of the four gospel authors reports something embarrassing or negative about Jesus), it's likelier to be true, since there would be no good reason to tell that lie.

We're not so sure that Tapper and Thompson are actually "on the left," but that's the assumption that gives their book credence. And their book is built on certainty, because that is what sells, and that is what makes for a compelling argument, and compelling op-eds, and compelling TV interviews, etc. They are certain Biden was incapacitated to the point of dysfunction. They are certain that his underlings and family members knew it. They are certain that those underlings and family members, aided by others, took steps to cover the whole thing up.

But here is the thing. So many people, including trained oncologists, are certain (or nearly so) about Joe Biden's cancer. And, as we lay out above, that certainty is simply not warranted. Now consider that the Biden book (and all the other reports) are based on second- and third- and fourth-hand reports, from people who are not experts. Also consider that dementia and other mental conditions are considerably harder to isolate than something like, say, cancer. In part, that is because diseases of the brain often fade in and out, such that a person is fine sometimes, compromised at other times. That is somewhat less true with something like cancer, which tends to follow a relatively straight trajectory. And in part, it is because it can be hard to separate the symptoms of actual cognitive dysfunction from things like normal aging, normal tiredness after a long day and, in the case of Biden, a lifelong stuttering problem.

It is certainly possible that the story that Tapper, Thompson and others are telling is 100% on the mark, or nearly so. It's also possible that they have completely missed the boat, and none of it is correct. What is most likely, however, is that the truth is somewhere between those two extremes. We would guess that there was/is something amiss, and that the people around Biden slowly developed an awareness of that, but didn't quite know how serious it was, or quite what to do. Eventually, he blew the debate, some conversations were had behind the scenes, a few high-profile people went public, and he withdrew from the race. If we basically have the gist of it, then it's not nearly as conspiratorial or as nefarious as the "Biden cover-up" narrative suggests. But that version of the story also wouldn't sell as many books, and wouldn't do nearly as much to get the blood of Fox viewers boiling, as the Watergate-esque version.

Tomorrow, we will talk about whether or not the Biden dementia/cancer coverage has a purpose, and what that purpose might be. We have a few ideas on that subject, and readers have submitted some other thoughts.

Also, we did not forget about the next set of reports on gubernatorial candidates, nor the item on Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). But the above item on the trade war is over 3,000 words and took a long time to get to a point we deemed satisfactory (whether readers deem it satisfactory is a different matter, of course). We don't want to overtax people (this posting, in whole, is nearly 7,000 words), and we don't want to post TOO late. So, we'll try very hard to get to those pieces, plus one on Harvard, tomorrow. That's in addition to Part III of this series. Fingers crossed. (Z)

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