Earlier this year, iRobot, the company that made the Roomba, filed for bankruptcy and was sold off to a Chinese supplier. The cause was a decision made in Brussels, three years ago, to block Amazon’s rescue offer. Thusly, an American company was regulated out of existence by a foreign bureaucracy. A Chinese competitor inherited the spoils, which is a fair summary of how the European Union’s (EU) so-called consumer protections work in the real world.

iRobot is no isolated case. The EU has built an entire regulatory architecture for precisely this purpose, with two pieces of legislation: the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA), marketed as consumer protection but functioning as industrial policy directed at firms headquartered in the United States.

In fact, five of the seven companies Brussels has designated as “gatekeepers” under the DMA are American. European competitors, on the other hand, are usually spared, and Chinese firms face notably lighter compliance pressure. It’s hardly an accident.

President Trump has so far been one of the very few Western leaders willing to spend political capital pushing back on this, and his administration’s opening move was instructive. Last July, at the President’s direction, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) launched a Section 301 investigation into Brazil over what Ambassador Jamieson Greer called Brasília’s “attacks on American social media companies,” alongside a longer catalogue of unfair tariff, anti-corruption, and market-access practices.

Brazil’s framework closely mirroring Brussels is a giveaway, since the European original is where the larger problem really originates.

PRECEDENT SET.

The administration deserves credit for using the Brazil case to put down a marker that digital protectionism dressed in regulatory clothing is still protectionism, and that Section 301 is the right tool for confronting it. The House Judiciary Committee even underscored that point in a letter to Brazil’s finance ministry, warning that the proposed competition bill would “mainly capture American platforms” and amount to a non-tariff trade barrier, with the same logic applying with even greater force across the Atlantic.

The U.S.-EU framework agreement signed last August included a polite commitment from both sides to address “unjustified digital trade barriers,” though that commitment has proven entirely one-sided. Brussels, so far, has offered no meaningful concessions, and EU competition chief Teresa Ribera has publicly declared the digital rulebook “not up for negotiation,” ludicrously characterizing American pressure as “blackmail.” European Commission officials have even signaled that 2026 will see enforcement escalate further, with landmark cases queued up against Google, Meta, Apple, and X, with a €120 million fine on X marking the start of greater enforcement.

THE ASYMMETRY.

The two-tier digital economy Brussels has constructed was always its intended outcome. Europe can’t build a competitive technology sector, so it built a regulatory one, and is now using that apparatus to distort markets.

The censorship dimension is, if anything, worse, since the DSA empowers Brussels to dictate how American platforms moderate content, including speech that is plainly lawful in the United States. The administration grasped the seriousness late last year when it imposed visa restrictions on former Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton and others, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio describing the targets as “leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex,” and that signal now requires substantive follow-through.

WHAT MUST FOLLOW.

Section 301 is the obvious next step, since the statute permits USTR, on Presidential direction, to investigate foreign acts that are “unjustifiable,” “unreasonable,” or “discriminatory” and burden U.S. commerce, all three of which the DMA and DSA meet comfortably.

A formal investigation would produce a record of how Brussels’ regulatory architecture functions as a trade barrier, test it against the framework commitments the EU is now openly ignoring, and generate genuine leverage, the one commodity polite diplomatic correspondence doesn’t produce on its own. As the Brazil case has already shown, the prospect of retaliatory tariffs concentrates minds in foreign capitals far more reliably than remonstration.

While that is the likely case, the U.S. could be forced to act even further if the EU does not roll back its DMA and digital services tax regulations, potentially even imposing similar restrictions on EU companies operating in the U.S., like Nokia, SAP, and DHL.

The Trump admin should keep pressing Brazil until its digital regime is meaningfully recalibrated, and it should open a parallel Section 301 case against the European Union without further delay, since the Brazilian bill was modeled on the European one. Closing down the imitation while leaving the source untouched would amount to a strategic half-measure of the sort Brussels, judging by its current posture, would happily exploit.

If the EU insists on writing American rules from a desk in Berlaymont, Washington has the tools to make them cost prohibitive. President Trump should use them without apology.

WESTMINSTER, LONDON — Last week, Reform UK leader and perpetual thorn-in-the-establishment’s-side, Nigel Farage, told the press he intended to be on the streets of Havering in East London on the morning of Friday, May 8th, celebrating Reform UK’s first capital city breakthrough. Sure enough, the borough is now his, with the once-dominant Conservative Party relegated to ZERO seats in the white-van-and-mortgage belt of London.

These results are being replicated up and down the nation, with over 5,000 council seats up for grabs in Thursday’s elections, and Reform UK already picking up around 1 in 3 of them. It’s a nightmare scenario for the governing Labour Party, which is still being led by one of the most unpopular political figures in modern political canon.

“I can honestly say you are witnessing an historic shift in British politics,” Farage told the assembled press, insisting that “this is now the most national of all parties.”

GETTING STARMER OUT.

Asked whether the result was a protest vote against Labour, he was blunt: “It cannot continue to be a fluke or a protest vote.” He compared his party’s gains to clearing Becher’s Brook in the Grand National, telling assembled reporters at the Reform UK headquarters in the early hours of Friday morning: “if we cleared Becher’s Brook and land well, we go on to win the Grand National.”

While there isn’t a General Election scheduled in the United Kingdom until 2029, the British parliament does technically have the ability to dissolve itself and “go to the country” earlier. If the Labour Party manages to oust Starmer – an increasingly likely prospect – a new leader may want a snap election to try and gain some public credibility. That situation would, at least currently, likely end in further disaster for Labour.

In any case, Starmer refuses to go. He told the media on Friday morning: “The results are tough, they are very tough, and there’s no sugarcoating it. We have lost brilliant Labour representatives across the country. And that hurts, and it should hurt, and I take responsibility. The voters have sent a message about the pace of change, how they want their lives improved. I was elected to meet those challenges but I’m not going to walk away from those challenges.”

Labour’s MP for Hartlepool, Jonathan Brash, told reporters overnight: “I don’t think Keir Starmer should survive these results,” adding that “we have to be bolder, and we have to go further.”

By noon on Friday, when still only a fraction of the 136 English councils had reported, Reform’s net seat gain was already past 420, with Labour shedding more than 250, and the Conservatives (Tories), dropping near 200.

POLL POSITION.

Sir John Curtice, Britain’s elections guru, told the BBC that “however you look at it Reform are in poll position.”

Across East Anglia, the very part of England the Tories have spent decades treating as ancestral land, Reform was the party that prospered.

Basildon delivered eleven new Reform councillors on a night when both Labour and the Conservatives lost ground. Brentwood and Southend each handed Reform another seven. Peterborough returned four more, making Reform the second-largest party there. By the time Friday afternoon’s county counts begin in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, the only real question will be the size of the Conservative defeat, with Essex County Council widely expected to fall to Reform outright.

The mood at Reform UK HQ on Thursday night and well into Friday morning was ebullient. No party worked harder, traveled further, recruited better, or staved off more attacks than Farage’s Reform. Indeed by every metric, Farage outpaced his competition, criss-crossing the country for nine weeks straight, proving that actually putting the hard work in and meeting voters where they are – the old fashioned way of doing politics – works.

But Reform UK also outpaced across digital platforms too, with a quicker, savvier, and more engaging online operation than the other major British political parties. Their Thursday night “spin room” – in a swanky skyscraper in Westminster – was adorned with floor-to-ceiling television screens blaring every latest detail of every count across the nation. All this while the other parties sat huddled around old laptops in stuffy old digs.

THE OLD GUARD.

For the better part of 40 years, the Conservative Party has insisted that it alone speaks for shire England. Voters in the shires, on the evidence of the past 24 hours, no longer agree. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s defenders will note that they defied some expectations in pockets of London, holding Bexley and Kensington & Chelsea and even adding seats in Wandsworth as Labour collapsed there. But these are skirmishes won on the edges of a war that is being lost in the middle. A Conservative Party that cannot hold East Anglia is not, in any meaningful sense, a national party of opposition.

The Green Party, advertised by sympathetic leftist media as the great progressive alternative, has not arrived either. Curtice noted that the Greens had picked up roughly an eight-point swing in vote share but were converting almost none of it into actual council seats. By the early hours, their net gain stood somewhere in the low 20s, a figure that is a footnote, rather than a foothold.

Green Party leader Zack Polanski – who has faced weeks of scrutiny over his party’s rampant, internal anti-Semitism – went into Thursday promising historic gains in London, Sussex, and Hastings, and a breakthrough in Wales. It hasn’t happened.

WHAT NEXT?

Keir Starmer’s problem is that the public quite plainly treated yesterday’s vote as a referendum on his premiership, and answered no. It was a national vote of no confidence in a man who has promptly presided over one of the worst political and cultural eras in modern Britain.

Just two years into a five-year mandate, he now faces the question of whether the parliamentary Labour Party, which has never previously removed a sitting Prime Minister, will continue to defer to a leader whose approval ratings have spent eighteen months at historic lows.

The devolved picture is in some ways more striking still. In Wales, Labour, the natural party of government in Cardiff Bay since devolution began in 1999, was on course for its worst Welsh result in over a century. Plaid Cymru and Reform were expected to emerge as the two largest forces in the new 96-seat Senedd.

In Scotland, where counts get under way on Friday afternoon, the far-left Scottish National Party (SNP) is expected to remain the largest party but well short of a majority, while Reform UK, which had no Members of the Scottish Parliament whatsoever after 2021, was forecast to enter Holyrood as either the second or third-largest force, displacing the Conservatives and rivaling Scottish Labour.

The immediate consequences for council control are substantial. Reform now governs more of England than at any point in its history, with Havering joining the 10 authorities already captured last year, and the Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk counts still to deliver verdicts that look likely to extend that map further. The party will be administering services, setting council tax, and running a DOGE-style efficiency programme in places where, two years ago, it held no seats at all. Every council it controls becomes both an opportunity and a test. If Reform delivers, the case for a Reform government writes itself; if it falters, the legacy parties will ensure nobody forgets.

For 30 years, the British political class has insisted that the Faragist tendency in British politics could be ignored, contained, or laughed off. On the morning of 8 May 2026, on a pavement in Romford, that consensus died.

On Thursday, voters across England, Scotland, and Wales head to the polls in the most fragmented set of British elections in living memory — with projections pointing to the simultaneous collapse of two-party politics across all three nations.

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If you were to walk into a New Jersey pharmacy and ask for a year’s supply of Eliquis, a blood thinner that millions of Americans take to prevent strokes, the list price will be in the region of $7,100. The same drug, manufactured by the same two American companies, Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer, at the same plant, could cost you just $770… if you lived in Berlin, Germany.

Now do the same calculation with the increasingly popular Ozempic. The list price in Cleveland is $969 a month, but in Copenhagen it costs just $122. In Berlin it’s as low as $59.

None of this is a quirk, nor is it down to cunning European negotiation. It is, in fact, one of the oldest rackets in international trade.

Americans foot the bill at both ends of all this, by the way: once as taxpayers, by publicly funding organizations like the increasingly scrutinized National Institutes of Health (NIH), which underwrites scientific developments, and a second time at the pharmacy counter, by paying the prices that allow drugmakers to absorb the discounts Berlin and Paris demand as their cost of market access.

European governments operate single-payer health systems, which they use as bottlenecks: they tell pharmaceutical companies what price they’ll pay for a given drug, and the companies, unable to walk away from entire national markets, take what they can get. And in some countries the squeeze doesn’t even stop at the register: governments use “clawbacks” to reach back into the pockets of American drugmakers after the sale and demand a refund on medicines already delivered. Whatever margin is squeezed out of Germany or France inevitably gets recouped from the one large market that does not impose statutory price controls: America’s.

Brussels calls the whole process “price negotiation,” which is one of those European terms that means the opposite of what it is.

Take Germany — Europe’s largest economy and the country that lectures the loudest about “solidarity.” For years, Berlin has forced mandatory price cuts on American medicines the moment they cross its border, suppressing what American companies can charge and sending the bill for the shortfall back across the Atlantic to American patients.

LONG-TERM MALIGNANCE.

For 70 years European governments have spent below NATO defensive spending targets, redirecting the savings into their welfare states, which the United States effectively subsidizes. The same mentality drives the medicine racket: why fund your own research when the Americans will do it for you?

Europeans often lecture Americans about the supposed cruelty of America’s “for-profit healthcare,” while running an entire continent’s pharmacopoeia on profits extracted from American patients. European Union Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen condemns capitalism during Davos, but then dispatches her negotiators to enforce the price controls that depend on it. When President Trump suggested at the same conference in January that Emmanuel Macron might consider letting French citizens pay something closer to what Americans pay for the same medicines, the French presidency dismissed the comment as “fake news.” The more accurate translation is that they consider the question itself an impertinence.

Over the past year, President Trump has expended significant effort on this.

His May 2025 ‘Most Favored Nation’ executive order put the principle on paper. By December 2025, 17 of the world’s largest medicine manufacturers (accounting for about 86% of the branded drug market) had signed deals committing to align American prices with the lowest paid in comparable developed countries.

BRINGING PRICES DOWN FOR AMERICANS.

This February, TrumpRx.gov went live, with the cash price of Ozempic falling from $1,028 to around $350 and Wegovy to as low as $149. The British, to their credit, read the room: on 1 December 2025 London signed an agreement to raise the net UK price on new drugs in exchange for tariff relief. The model, in short, works, and now needs to be turned on the governments that still refuse to apply it.

Germany didn’t learn from the UK. It is racing in the opposite direction and will likely be the first EU domino to fly in the face of Trump’s policy. Earlier this month, Berlin published a new cost-containment bill that piles fresh rebates and price cuts on top of an already rigged system.

The administration’s existing Section 301 investigation into the European Union, opened on 11 March 2026, currently focuses on things like excess industrial capacity. But it should be extended (or a parallel one opened) to cover European pharmaceutical price-setting regimes directly.

The language was written for exactly this kind of behavior: foreign government practices that are “unreasonable or discriminatory” and burden the American taxpayer and the nation’s commerce.

For half a century the deal has been that Americans pay for the discoveries and Europeans enjoy them at cut rates. Under Trump, that arrangement is coming to its end. Britain has accepted the new terms. Germany is testing whether the Administration means it. France is watching. They will all likely accept these terms in time, or they will discover at last what it feels like to pay for their own science, their own medicine, and their own defense, all of which the United States has been quietly funding on their behalf for the better part of a lifetime.

President Trump will fly to Beijing on May 14, and when he sits down across the table from Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist leader will almost certainly reach for the same card he has played against every American administration for a decade.

Whenever a trade negotiation turns tough, with tariffs climbing and tempers fraying, Beijing picks up the phone and orders its state buyers to stop purchasing American farm goods. Soybeans, mostly. Beef and pork have had their turns, too. The effect is immediate and brutal. Within days, commodity prices collapse, and somewhere in the American South, a man who planted forty acres for a harvest that was supposed to ship to China in October watches his year’s income evaporate.

No U.S. president can let that stand, of course, so the checks go out. In 2018 and 2019, after Xi halted Chinese purchases of American soybeans during President Trump’s first trade fight, the Treasury cut roughly $23 billion in emergency payments to farmers — a figure larger than the annual budget of several federal departments, wired out in lump sums to compensate American families for damage inflicted by a single foreign leader. In 2025, when the trade fight resumed, Beijing ran the play again. Blocked American beef. Canceled soybean orders. Another $12 billion in aid was duly announced. Another round, another patch on a wound inflicted by a foreign adversary.

It is, if you stop and think about it for more than a moment, an astonishing state of affairs. And hardly sustainable.

The big agricultural companies shrug all of this off because multinationals with grain operations across three continents can ride out a trade war. They have the lawyers, the diversification, the patience of people who aren’t missing a mortgage payment over it. What they do not have is four hundred acres outside Decatur and a son who wants to take over the farm. The family farmer does. When Beijing freezes a purchase order, it is not anybody’s boardroom that absorbs the blow. It is a kitchen table in rural Illinois.

There is, mercifully, a bill sitting in Congress that takes the trick off the table.

It is called the Grown in America Act, and the idea is about as uncomplicated as legislation ever gets. When an American food or beverage company sources its ingredients from American farmers rather than importing them, the company gets a tax break. Buy more from American farmers, get more. Buy foreign, get nothing. That is more or less the whole thing.

What this builds, year by year and quietly, is a steady and compounding domestic market for American farm goods. A buyer that doesn’t hang up the phone when a summit in Beijing goes sideways. The soybean farmer in Iowa stops being a chess piece in a game he didn’t sign up for and becomes what he always should have been: a supplier to the American food economy, in a country that grows more than enough of its own food to feed itself. Xi’s favorite card loses its power for the simple reason that the American farmer no longer depends on him.

Will it cost the Treasury money? It will. Will it cost less than the $23 billion the Treasury was forced to write out the last time Beijing pulled this stunt? Considerably. And unlike the emergency checks, it actually buys something: a structural change that doesn’t evaporate the moment the next negotiation ends.

Which brings us to May 14.

When the President walks into that room roughly three weeks from now, he will do so in one of two conditions. Either he will walk in the way every American president before him has walked in — with American farmers dangling behind him like hostages, a fact Xi will have calculated to three decimal places before Air Force One has even landed — or he will walk in having had that weapon taken off the board by a Congress that finally understood what was at stake.

Every day this bill sits unsigned is another day Xi holds a card he is eager to play. It would be a good idea to pass it, and have Trump sign it, before the he boards the plane.

The “doves” on the right have spent weeks being derided as “panicans.” But their warnings: that another Middle East war would spook voters, push up prices, and hand Democrats a line of attack before the midterms have all come to pass. The polling underscores how they weren’t imagining it. But the real panicans are not the anti-war voices. The real panicans are the corporate suits who see a crisis, grab a mic, and start leveraging the war for their own greed.

Take United Airlines CEO, Scott Kirby.

While President Donald J. Trump and his administration have been telling Americans that any oil spike tied to Iran will be temporary, Kirby has been out there acting like the apocalypse is hard-coded into the calendar year. He has floated a scenario in which oil hits $175 a barrel and stays there through 2027.

When the boss of a major airline goes on TV and starts pushing such long-term, worst-case scenarios, he’s trying to set expectations, telling consumers like you to get ready to pay more for the foreseeable future.

Trump has said the opposite.

“When this is over,” he told reporters this month, “oil prices are going to go down very, very rapidly.” A White House spokesman said the same last week, insisting prices would fall “rapidly” once the war in Iran ended. Indeed, on the word of a ceasefire, prices immediately plummeted to $75.

But Kirby keeps going the other way.

On March 20, he said United assumes “oil goes to $175/barrel and doesn’t get back down to $100/barrel until the end of 2027.”

That’s a deeply irresponsible, doomsday scenario that feels as tailored to garnering Democrat voters at the midterms as it does prepping consumers for supply shocks.

On March 25, he doubled down on CNBC, calling that “a reasonable assumption for us to make…” and saying prices could “stay at a high level all the way through next year.”

Then came the part aimed squarely at passengers.

“I think fares will continue to go up in line with oil prices… you’ve got to pass through the costs of inputs…” Kirby said.

There it is. Another corporate executive using a geopolitical crisis to lock in higher prices.

The Trump administration has already pushed back. On CNBC, Energy Secretary Chris Wright dismissed Kirby’s scenario as “highly unlikely” and said the country was dealing with a short-term disruption, not some new permanent reality.

That is the split. Trump is trying to calm people (and markets) down. Kirby is out there hardening the idea that elevated costs are here to stay. One side is saying the shock will pass. The other is normalizing the pain before it has even arrived in full.

That is what a real panican looks like.

Trump coined the word in 2025 for the people who panic on cue and immediately amplify the bleakest possible outcome. Kirby fits the type. So do plenty of executives in corporate America who treat every disruption as an opportunity to condition the public to accept less prosperity and more expense. And Kirby has form here.

While Trump has moved to uproot DEI preferences from government and corporate life, Kirby has embraced them. Under his leadership, United boasted that it was “the first airline to offer nonbinary gender booking options.” He also backed a policy aimed at making 50 percent of United’s graduating pilot classes women or people of color.

Then there is the personal theater. Kirby bizarrely has a history of dressing in drag as both Kesha and Taylor Swift. He’s a leftist, a weirdo, and he’s priming the pump to charge you more to fly on his increasingly awful airline.

The anti-war right did not create anxieties over war. They just spotted them early.

The people feeding the panic are the executives, analysts, and media hands who seize on every crisis and start propagandizing to Americans to expect scarcity, inflation, and decline.

Scott Kirby is doing precisely that. Giving himself PR cover to raise fares. Undercutting a White House trying to reassure the country. Telling Americans to get used to paying more.

The doves were not the panicans; the United Airlines boardroom was.

Our previous arguments against Netflix as the right fit for a Warner Bros. acquisition now look even stronger. Netflix never needed Warner’s library to compete. It needed the market to be kept exactly as it is: fragmented, weaker, and miles behind.

That helps explain the latest round of Netflix price hikes, which, by our calculation, would leave the company with an eye-watering $40-a-month premium price tag by the middle of the next decade. Why anyone would pay that for Emily in Paris, and its ilk, evades us.

Indeed, in under two months since insisting a Warner deal would give consumers “more content for less,” Netflix is doing the precise opposite—because it can.

With roughly 325 million subscribers and no true rival within striking distance, Netflix flexes the kind of market dominance that turns “consumer choice” into a poor joke. Prices will continue to go up, and subscribers will lazily stay put.

The old Hollywood bargain has been torched in the process, too.

Consumers will surely continue to pay more, but writers, actors, and directors are paid less through the erosion of residuals and the casualization of creative labor. Netflix has built a commanding position not just on scale, but on the weakening of everyone around it: competitors, customers, and talent alike.

That is why the Warner Bros. deal was never the right prize for Netflix. It would not have produced a better market. It would have deepened the imbalance. And now, with the merger dead, Netflix is showing exactly what streaming supremacy looks like: higher prices, lower obligations, and no reason to pretend otherwise.