ON THE first night of Passover, a would-be assassin allegedly attempted to kill Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, one of the nation's most prominent Jewish politicians, by burning him and his family in their home. A mentally disturbed 38-year-old arrested in the attack, Cody Balmer, was recorded on security cameras climbing the fence of the governor's residence, using a sledgehammer to smash several windows, then igniting fires with homemade Molotov cocktails. In the large dining room where the Shapiros had gathered earlier for their Passover Seder, the destruction caused by the fire was massive.

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WHEN PRESIDENT Trump announced in February that he was imposing stiff new tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China, he said his power to do so came from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, a law passed by Congress in 1977. Two months later he again invoked that statute as he unveiled his sweeping "Liberation Day" tariffs, which mandated levies of between 10 percent and 50 percent on imports from nearly every country on earth.

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EARLY IN 1990, about three months after the Berlin Wall fell and Eastern Europe's communist regimes imploded, I had the opportunity to travel through Hungary, Romania, and what was then still a unified Czechoslovakia. Many of the people I met during that trip told me what it had been like to live in a dictatorship where expressing criticism of the government could lead to persecution, imprisonment, or worse.

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When President Trump announced last month that he had directed the US Mint to stop coining pennies, he gave only one reason for doing so.

"For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful!" he posted on social media. "I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies."

If you've heard that argument once, you've heard it a dozen times. The same point has been made over the years by everyone from HBO's progressive commentator/comedian John Oliver to the centrist Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman to Iowa's staunchly conservative US Senator Joni Ernst.

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FORCING UKRAINE to agree to a 30-day cease-fire with Russia was easy. President Trump merely had to halt the flow of military equipment and suspend most intelligence sharing with Kyiv. As a result, Russian troops were able to recapture the largest town in the Kursk region occupied by Ukraine last August, in the process killing hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers. Faced with such a ruthless demonstration of Washington's power to get its way, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was left with little choice but to knuckle under to the American demand.

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