YOUR RIGHT-WING NEIGHBORS HATED POPE FRANCIS AND ARE GLAD HE'S DEAD (updated)

Pope Francis died this morning at the age of 88. If what I'm reading in right-wing comments section is any indication, your right-wing neighbors an relatives are already celebrating the pope's death.

Here are some of the top comments to Gateway Pundit's obituary, which says that Francis was "long criticized by conservatives for steering the Church into left-wing political activism rather than defending tradition and morality":

He died not in peace, but in fear, because he served Satan.
Good riddance. The world is a slightly better place without him.

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Truer words have not been spoken.He served the Devil completely.

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The communist Pope has left the stage!

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To rot in Hell.

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He was very generous... with other people's stuff.

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Bergoglio took steps to stack the College of Cardinals with Globalists. We'll just get another Francis.

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Yes, Francis packed the Conference of Cardinals with Commie filthbags like himself.

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He packed The Conference in the same way the Democrats packed the court under Biden.

They are each DEMONIC

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He was globalist, and communist, he believed in the same world as King Charles, one of the ruling class, one of exploitation of poor and infirm, and everyone else in servitude to the elite...

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Sad part is,there are plenty more just like him ready to take over and continue what he started.

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Just like every US institution and university has been destroyed by Marxism…I fear the Catholic Church has been subverted by the “Holy” Communist Father Mario Bergoglio. We can only pray the Holy Spirit can once again pierce the clouds of sulphur that blanket the earth....

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The True Pope, Benedict, never left his seat. He was forced out by a deep state globalist usurper. Now the usurper is dead.

The comments in response to this Breitbart obituary are similar:

What a shame.
They'll be hard-pressed to find a replacement as leftist as he was.

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You have to remember, the leftist Cardinals who appointed him are still there. I can almost see the headlines, Trans Pope Appointed.

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I was thinking the same thing. Next Pope will be a trans or an illegal gang member trans. LOL

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Pope Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. She checks off lots of boxes.

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Put a chick in it...and make her lame and gay!

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Hmmm... Does China tells them who to be the next Poop

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He said and did evil things that influenced hundreds of millions of people. I'm happy he is dead and not ashamed about it at all.

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I grew up in the 60s and 70s hearing "The only good Commie is a dead Commie." I look at Frankie's demise no differently than I did Mao's, Brezhnev's, Ho Chi Minh's or Pol Pot's. The only difference between them and Frankie is that he didn't leave as many corpses in his wake. But he was just as godless.

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Pro-Homosexual turd burglar

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Pope Francis has died. Well I'm not Catholic, nor was I a fan of him. I felt that he was a Globalist and spent more time preaching the gospel of George Soros than that Of Jesus Christ. I hope they find a Pope more interested in Christ than Soros.

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His successor should call for a crusade to extirpate Islamism from Europe.

The response to the Fox News obituary is only a bit milder:

He was also an extreme hypocrite. When asked about Gays, who are specifically admonished in The Bible, he replied who am I to judge. A wonderful response until he went on to viciously judge Capitalism, and by extension, Capitalists, which are never mentioned in The Bible. He criticized borders while Vatican City is surrounded by a wall and has the most restrictive immigration laws on the planet.

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Hitler loved his mom, girlfriend and dog. That did not make him a good person.

Francis helped the poor but he led the Lord's sheep astray (with his socialist woke ideology) and on a road to hell. That made him a terrible Pope.

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I quit going to Mass because of his progressive stance on immigration and pushing the CLIMATE hoax. He told Trump in 2017 that we needed to open our borders.... After meeting with the Kenyan

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He was part of the international liberal/socialist cabal, and living very comfortably behind a facade of religion.

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Good grief, how many stories does Fox need about this freakin' Pope dying? No one here even likes him and the guy was only pope for 12 years. That's hardly a blip in time when you consider the Earth is almost 4,000 years old.

(That last one is from a commenter named GretasStrapon.MakesAndyTateCry855.)

Maybe now they will get a real Catholic that isn’t woke and prone to globalism and abortions.

They want a wingnut successor. From the Gateway Pundit comments:

Cardinal Maria Vigano should be the next Pope. But the communist pope who just mercifully left this life, excommunicated him. Too Catholic for his tastes. But the globalists would never allow it. He has written extensively about their evil and the rot within the Church, covered up by the "deep" Curch. This pope was a globalist tool.

When I regularly lurked at Free Republic, I'd see Carlo Maria Viganò's name a lot. He was excommunicated last year. But fear not: The right-wingers will rally around other candidates:

One, Hungarian churchman Peter Erdo, is close to his country's hardline president Victor Orban and has expressed opposition to divorced or remarried Catholics being allowed to receive Holy Communion.

Another, the Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah branded gender ideology 'Luciferian' and has also spoken out against Islamic fundamentalism.

On paper, Sarah would seem to have a slight edge. But he's black, so I think they'll be rooting for Erdo. If a liberal or moderate wins, they'll probably blame George Soros or the World Economic Forum.

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UPDATE: As I was saying...

Today there were major shifts in global leaderships.

Evil is being defeated by the hand of God.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) April 21, 2025

TRUMP'S BAD ECONOMIC POLL NUMBERS ARE ACTUALLY A REASON FOR DEMOCRATS TO TALK ABOUT OTHER SUBJECTS (updated)

I'm just a schmuck amateur blogger and Matthew Yglesias is one of the Big Brains, but I think he's taking away exactly the wrong lesson from the data he's citing:

Everyone should think about which topics they want to raise the salience of and why. pic.twitter.com/O9wutKoSVR

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 18, 2025

Self-criticism corner: By suggesting it is bad to increase the salience of immigration, I have generated meta-discourse that has only further increased the salience.

No more posts about this from me ever!

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 18, 2025

Yglesias's argument is as follows: Trump's poll numbers on the economy and trade are really bad, much worse than his overall approval rating, so people who want to make him less popular should keep talking about the economy and trade, and stop talking about immigration, because the numbers show that voters like Trump's abductions and deportations.

But the numbers that lead Yglesias to this conclusion can be read in exactly the opposite way: that we're winning the argument on the economy and trade, yet it's not enough to drive Trump's overall poll numbers lower, so we need to go after Trump's strength on immigration and try to lower that number as well.

I'm not sure we can drag Trump's economic numbers any further down, at least in the near future. Yesterday I noted that many of the Trump-voting independents in a recent New York Times focus group have economic anxiety right now but "trust the plan" -- they assume that President Trump is really, really smart and knows exactly what he's doing, and that all of this will work out in the long run. We can try to tell them that it won't work out, but they'll just assume that we're defending the establishment elitists and Trump knows better because he's the world's greatest dealmaker. And then what can we say? We have a pretty good idea what Trumponomics will do in the long run, but until more time passes, we can't prove we're right.

We can see voters splitting on the short-term and long-term impacts of Trump's economic and trade policies in polls. Here are some numbers from a recent CBS poll (apologies for the muddy images; click to enlarge):

In the short term, 75% of poll respondents think Trump's tariffs will increase prices; only 5% think they'll decrease prices. But in the long term, 30% think they'll decrease prices, while 48% think they'll increase prices. In terms of overall economic impact, 65% of respondents think the tariffs will make the economy worse in the long run, but only 42% think they'll make the economy worse in the long run. Only 8% of respondents expect the economy to be better in the short term, but 34% expect it to be better in the long term.

Even the long-term numbers are kind of lousy for Trump, but they're better than his short-term numbers. We simply can't win over the people who expect the plan to work in the long run, because they think Trump is smarter than we are. Also see this result from a March Wall Street Journal poll:

In this poll, 48% of respondents think Trump's policies will "create economic difficulties with very little benefit," and 35% believe they'll "create some economic difficulties in the short run but economic benefits in the long run" (while 13% think they'll just create benefits). The 13% probably can't be won over under any circumstances, and it's unlikely that we can win over the 35% until the economic leopards are actually eating their faces.

Meanwhile, the data analyst who produced the chart Yglesias reproduces above -- G. Elliott Morris, who succeeded Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight -- disagrees with Yglesias and believes it's worth going after Trump on immigration.

... the individual components of Trump's immigration agenda are much less popular than the general ideas of securing the border or deporting undocumented immigrants.

In polls of Trump's immigration policy, voters generally oppose deporting residents who have been in America for more than ~5 years, deporting people where it would separate children from parents, and deporting people who have not been convicted of crimes other than illegal entry.

In a piece titled "Trump's Immigration Agenda Is Not Popular," Morris gives us some specifics:

There are some ambiguities in the polling. In the Wall Street Journal poll I cite above, 55% of respondents approve of "deporting illegal immigrants who are suspected foreign gang members to El Salvador without a court hearing to determine whether they belong to a gang"; 43% disapprove. On the other hand, 58% believe that "Donald Trump must comply with federal court rulings that limit his actions or which he disagrees with," while only 37% believe that Trump should refuse to abide by federal court decisions. So if courts block Trump's renditions and express skepticism about whether he's correctly identified gang members, it seems as if there's room for public opinion to change. Contesting Trump's immigration moves involves contesting his characterizations of the abducted. He's obviously lying about many of them, if not all or nearly all of them. Americans want him to deport immigrants who are bad people, but their support for him could change if they don't believe that's what he's doing, and if they see him not merely taking aggressive action but taking aggressive action in defiance of the courts.

I'll add this: mainstream Democrats like Yglesias want the party to be hyper-cautious and limit its rhetoric to as few issues as possible. They seem to believe that voters can't think about more than one issue at a time. Meanwhile, Trumpworld talks about tariffs and Greenland and DEI and the "Gulf of America" and universities and pro-Palestine foreign nationals at universities and alleged immigrant gang members from Latin America and many other subjects, and voters seem able to process it all. Democrats are hemming themselves in -- something they seem to love doing -- if they continually say they mustn't or can't or shouldn't. They should exercise a certain amount of caution, but much less than Matthew Yglesias recommends.

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UPDATE: Look who's not afraid to defend due process for immigrants.

TRUMP'S TARIFF RHETORIC ISN'T JUST A CON, IT'S A LONG CON

I've had to adjust my thinking about how much damage Donald Trump has to do to America before his less-committed supporters decide he's a bad president. I don't think they're sticking with him simply because they voted for him and can't bear the thought that their vote was wrong -- how many swing-voting Americans really have that much of an emotional investment in their vote? I think it's more likely that their belief that he'd quickly make the country better has been replaced by a belief that he'll make the country better someday, even though things look bad now, and everyone just needs to be patient.

In other words, he's replaced the con of his campaign (I'll make everything better on Day One) with a long con (Just stay invested -- the payoff is coming, I swear, and it'll be a big one).

I'm saying this after reading the latest New York Times focus group involving thirteen independent voters who chose Trump in 2024. When they're prompted, "Fill in the blank for me: I feel 'blank' about the way the country is going these days," seven express discomfort ("Bad," "Pessimistic," "Hopeless," "Frustrated," "Worried," "Confused," "Lied to"). Two others are neutral ("Curious," "Faithful"). Three are "Hopeful." One is "Cautiously optimistic." Yet not one of them regrets voting for Trump.

They were interview on April 8, just before the mega-tariffs were scheduled to take effect, then partly rolled back. They weren't loving the tariffs. Diana, who was "Hopeful," said,

I work in finance. I think in the short term, it’s a shot in the foot.

But then she added:

But I think in the long term, it may be a great thing for the country. So I’m hopeful that this will improve our economy and manufacturing.

Angela, who was "Faithful," said:

I feel like there’s a plan that’s been implemented. I’m just trusting the process.

Only four of the thirteen believed things in the country would be better in the next six months. Three thought they'd be worse. Five thought they'd be "basically the same." But, some of them said, that's okay! I guess they took all of Trump's promises of an instant economic Golden Age seriously but not literally, and now they'd accepted the con man's assurance that the apparent short-term failure of The Plan isn't a sign that's it's failing, it's a sign that it's succeeding, and they just need to stick with Trump.

Steven ("Curious"):

There’s a lot of policy movement right now. It’s a lot — break things now, fix it later. And sometimes that’s the best kind of leader. Sometimes it’s not. I don’t think six months is long enough to reconcile what needs to happen. So I think it’s probably going to be 12 months and beyond before we see any meaningful change that might come from what’s going on today.

Walter ("Cautiously optimistic") repeated his assessment:

I’m trying to be cautiously optimistic. But it is going to take a while for all these policies to shake out and take effect. So maybe a six-month horizon isn’t quite long enough.

Neil ("Hopeful") said:

The whole point of having tariffs is to even out the playing field. I want the Ford plants in Mexico shut down and all those jobs brought over here. How long is it going to take Ford to build an entire building to bring those plants up? It’s not going to be overnight or even a couple of months. It’s going to take a while, probably a couple of years.

He was asked, "Would that still feel short term for you?" His reply:

We’ve been taken advantage of by the entire planet since after World War II. So it takes as long as it takes. It’s for the good of the country. If whatever happens happens, that’s what it is.

When I was young, Republicans' imagined American Golden Era was the 1950s. For many people that wasn't true, but for millions it actually was, though for many reasons Republicans would never acknowledge (strong unions, very progessive taxation, significant government investment in education, housing, and infrastructure). But now Trump says that the period when America had its broadest and most prosperous middle class was hell on earth. And these folks believe it. They believe we've been miserable for eighty years, and that was after the Great Depression and World War II. So of course Trump can't fix everything overnight if it's been awful for at least a century!

Thus the con becomes a long con.

A couple of years from now, in all likelihood, things will still be bad, and these people may well perceive them as bad -- but if Trump keeps pumping out the rhetoric of his long economic con, while continuing to tighten the screws on anyone who opposes him, he (or at least the regime he's building) could have the staying power of Viktor Orban's regime in Hungary. As The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum notes, Orban remains in power despite a terrible economy:

Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row.

Trump needs to keep the long con going until his opponents can't topple him. To prevent this, we need to fight him on every possible front until we peel off as many soft supporters as possible. But that's going to be difficult, because the con will keep many of them waiting for the big payoff for a long time.

SMART-ASS NAYIB BUKELE IS PLAYING EXCLUSIVELY TO TRUMP'S BASE

I don't know what happens next in the case of immigrants abducted from U.S. soil and sent to a torture prison overseen by President Trump's smug, sociopathic errand boy, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. Bukele at first refused to allow Senator Chris Van Hollen to meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal resident of Maryland until his abduction by Trump's thugs, but yesterday Bukele relented. The Bulwark's Andrew Egger thinks Van Hollen threw Bukele off stride:

Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s trip yesterday to El Salvador to meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia plainly wrongfooted Bukele, who first denied Van Hollen an opportunity to meet with the wrongfully deported man, then reversed himself and tried to sully their meeting with some hamfisted propaganda, directing an aide to place “glasses with cherries and salted rims” on the table “in an attempt to stage the photo.”

Yes, that's real. The New York Times reports:

Mr. Bukele, in a social media post, even crowed that “Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture,’” was “now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” But according to a person familiar with the situation, a Bukele aide placed the two glasses with cherries and salted rims on the table in front of Mr. Van Hollen and Mr. Abrego Garcia in the middle of their meeting in an attempt to stage the photo.

Here's Bukele's tweet with the staged photos:

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the “death camps” & “torture”, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!🍹 pic.twitter.com/r6VWc6Fjtn

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) April 18, 2025

Those aren't very convincing margaritas.

Why would Bukele relent and allow Van Hollen to see Abrego Garcia? When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did a photo op in front of shirtless, tattooed prisoners last month at CECOT, the prison where Abrego Garcia is being held, The Bulwark's Jonathan Last wrote:

The use of prisoners for propaganda purposes is as old as war itself. But there are a few recent examples you may recall. ISIS made extensive use of videos and pictures of imprisonment and execution. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese alternated their approach. Sometimes they used American POWs as props to suggest that all was well in their camps and that prisoners were being treated properly. (They were not.) Other times, they used images of American prisoners as tools to spread fear. They would parade captured American soldiers before mobs and display them at press conferences.

The goal is always the same, though: To use prisoners’ bodies as weapons of political war and to do so against their will.

This is what evil, illiberal regimes do.

Bukele is sending conflicting messages, like the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. But he's always controlling the message.

However, it's my sense that the current messaging is aimed at Americans who get 100% of their news from right-wing sources. That's a healthy portion of the country, but it's not all of us. To those people, Abrego Garcia is not only an unquestionably bad person and not only a gang member, he's one of the key members of the gang he's accused of joining.

Before his abduction, Abrego Garcia worked full time as a sheet metal apprentice. How many "top" gang members are you aware of who need to work a forty-hour day job?

The Times reports that on Wednesday afternoon White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt

was joined in the briefing room by Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, a Maryland resident who was brutally murdered in 2023 by an immigrant from El Salvador. The administration has pointed to Ms. Morin’s death as an example to justify its stance on immigration, though statistics show immigrants are less likely than U.S.-born citizens to commit crimes.

The White House used your tax dollars to post a tweet with two photos, one showing Trump meeting Patty Morin and the other showing Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia.

We are not the same. pic.twitter.com/yTUoSXmCBa

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 18, 2025

You may object that while Rachel Morin was murdered by a Salvadoran, it was a Salvadoran other than Abrego Garcia. But in the MAGA/Fox News Extended Universe, all Salvadoran men are alike, all are murderers and MS-13 members and terrorists.

But when the Trumpers put this propaganda out, I think they forget that the immigrant horror stories that make up a disproportionate percentage of Fox News programming simply aren't front of mind for most Americans the way they are for Fox viewers.

And as for that word "terrorist": The Trumpers love to use it because it adds an extra layer of fear. They also use it because the fiction on which they're basing their detention drive includes the notion that Latin American governments are deliberately sending border crossers to America as an act of war. I hope you're sitting down for this: They're lying about that. The Washington Post reports:

The National Intelligence Council, drawing on the acumen of the United States’ 18 intelligence agencies, determined in a secret assessment early this month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the United States by the prison gang Tren de Aragua, a judgment that contradicts President Donald Trump’s public statements, according to people familiar with the matter.

The determination is the U.S. government’s most comprehensive assessment to date undercutting Trump’s rationale for deporting suspected gang members without due process under the Alien Enemies Act, [a] 1798 law....

The intelligence product found that although there are some low-level contacts between the Maduro government and Tren de Aragua, or TdA, the gang does not operate at the direction of Venezuela’s leader.

And, of course, Kilmar Abrego Garcia isn't from Venezuela, or accused of being a member of Tren de Aragua -- he's from El Salvador and is accused of being a member of MS-13. But they know all those Latin Americans and Latin American gangs look alike to Fox viewers, the same way they know that their base can't distinguish Abrego Garcia and Rachel Morin's murderer.

So Fox viewers look at Abrego Garcia at that table with Senator Van Hollen and see a scary terrorist gang memnber. They have no idea that what the rest of us know about him includes the fact that the administration itself said he was abducted and deported due to an "administrative error." Members of the Trump regime would love to wipe out everyone's memory of that inconvenient truth the way they've banished knowldge of it in the minds of their own fans. So they pretend it's fake news:

Abrego Garcia isn't a perfect person. His wife did get an order of protection against him in 2021, though she now says the two have worked through their problems. But the larger point is that he should stay in the country or be expelled based on evidence and a formal process for assessing that evidence.

I think we need more Chris Van Hollens. Van Hollen and other Democrats should continue demanding to see the prison itself -- if Bukele is so proud of it, why won't he show it off? Polls show that Americans have sympathy even for immigrants living illegally in America as long as they're working and playing by the rules otherwise. Democrats in Congress should demand due process for the gay makeup artist and the abductee with the autism tattoo honoring his brother, and others.

And to the Democrats who fear this is a bad issue, I'd say that Democrats can do this and demand border security. Just make the processes fair and aboveboard. And it's not a "distraction" from the economy, as Gavin Newsom and others believe -- in their reactions to Trump's throw-everything-at-the-wall approach, Americans have demonstrated that they can respond to more than one issue at the same time.

AMERICANS ARE CAPABLE OF THINKING ABOUT ISSUES OTHER THAN MONEY, APPARENTLY

Navigator Research is a public opinion research firm that's aligned with the Democratic Party, so perhaps we should take its latest survey with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, the survey makes clear that voters are not comfortable with President Trump's assaults on the rule of law. If that's true, it contradicts what Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, James Carville, and other old-fashioned Democrats fervently believe: that only the economy matters to voters.

The survey tells us:

Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of Americans say that Donald Trump believes he is above the law, including majorities of independents (65 percent) and non-MAGA Republicans (51 percent)....

Driving their concerns: that Trump let Elon Musk and DOGE access the personal health and financial data of tens of millions of Americans, that Trump has violated multiple court rulings, and that Trump is attempting to close federal departments and agencies. Two-thirds find each of these concerning, including majorities of both Democrats and independents.

* Trump let Elon Musk and DOGE access the personal health and financial data of tens of millions of Americans: 66 percent concerning, 53 percent “very” concerning,

* Trump has violated multiple court rulings: 65 percent concerning, 51 percent “very” concerning, and;

* Trump is attempting to close federal departments and agencies like the Department of Education, even though those departments and agencies can only be shut down by acts of Congress: 64 percent concerning, 51 percent “very” concerning....

Nearly 60 percent say each of these poses a threat to democracy, with almost half saying these actions pose a severe threat to democracy.

Respondents also believe Trump's threat to pursue a third term poses a threat to democracy -- 48% say it's a "severe" threat and 60% overall think it's a threat.

I don't want to overstate the importance of this. The respondents are expressing these opinions because they've been asked questions. That doesn't mean that they think about these subjects a lot. I'm sure economic issues are much more important to them.

But the results suggest that regular reminders of Trump's abuses would find a receptive audience in the public. I don't agree with the Carvillean conventional wisdom that Democrats need to focus their attention on one or two issues because the public can't process more than that and other issues are Trumpian "distractions." It appears that everything Trump is doing is dead serious, and if Trump and Republicans are able to focus the public's attention on multiple issues, why can't Democrats?

So it's good to have Senator Chris Van Hollen in El Salvador reminding voters about Trump's flouting of court orders in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, with other Democrats likely to follow. It's good to talk about the possibility that Trump will try to stay in power past January 2029. The public has opinions on these subjects even if many elected Democrats are hesitant to talk about them. If every Democrat highlighted these very unpopular aspects of Trumpism, it could further damage his overall popularity. And morally, speaking out against authoritarianism is obviously the right thing to do.

I'm sure there was never a time when the American public said that the #1 issue in America was the security of overseas diplomatic outposts or the email practices of government officials. But Republicans relentlessly attacked Hillary Clinton on Benghazi and her private email server, and succeeded in damaging her approval ratings. Democratic should treat Trump the same way. Attack him with whatever is at hand. It's good for the Democrats, and fighting the administration's lawlessness is good for America.

EVEN UNDER FASCISM, PERSONNEL IS POLICY

Many of us feel the way Garrett Graff feels.

I have to say that the unraveling of American democracy has proceeded far faster than I thought it would: I always assumed concentration camps for Donald Trump’s enemies was somewhere at the end of the road toward American authoritarianism....

But I never imagined that not even three months into the administration we’d already be negotiating and debating the precise legal fig leaf necessary for masked state agents to sweep everyday Americans off the streets and disappear them to specially designed torture gulags in Central America without due process for indefinite (and nearly surely permanent) detention.

And yet here we are.

Why is this policy being implemented so quickly and ruthlessly?

I keep thinking about an old politcal adage: Personnel is policy. It's used by people on the right and the left as a shorthand way of saying that if you have certain policy goals, you should appoint people to key positions who share those goals and are capable of successfully implementing them.

Our current fascist presidency has a number of policy goals, which it's implementing with varying degrees of success. I assume that the totalitarian crackdown on immigrants is happening quickly because it's the work of Stephen Miller, who's young (39) and tireless in addition to being smart and sociopathic. I think he knew from the start how much pain he wanted to inflict and the specific ways he could inflict it. We know he hates Latin American immigrants, but he also has ties to the groups that are outing pro-Palestinian protestors.

(The Forward article is here.)

Miller is a creature of right-wing media -- he's a frequent Fox guest who began calling into right-wing radio shows when he was a teenager, and soon became an on-air guest -- which might explain why the Trump regime's immigration approach has featured so many conscience-shocking stunts. (ICE is actually deporting fewer people this year than the Biden administration had deported by this time last year.) Miller is good at getting on television and good at extreme cruelty -- and that's how the Trump regime's immigration policy has evolved. Miller also came from a liberal family and grew up right-wing in a liberal community, so I imagine he'll be deeply involved in the renditioning of U.S. citizens, which he'll regard as revenge against a class of enemies he's hated since his schooldays.

The dismantling of the government is being executed by Elon Musk, cruelly and with mixed success. Musk is good at moving fast and breaking things. He's also good at assembling teams that force their way into systems and take control of them. Musk likes mass layoffs conducted without much forethought, so that's what we're getting. One way he's less competent than Miller is that he's happy to be the story. Miller, for all his TV time, never acts as if he's anything but a loyal Trump subordinate. Musk likes to be the star. He's much more visible, so he's easy to blame when the regime is, for instance, laying off nuclear inspectors.

And then there's tariff policy. This is the most poorly implemented of the regime's policies because the president has assigned the job of constructing the policy to one man: himself. Trump is lazy, stupid, and arrogant. He's utterly incapable of executing a successful trade policy. We're lucky that the markets scared the bejeezus out of him and compelled him to pull back on the tariffs somewhat, although the ones that remain are still bad.

I encounter many people on social media who say that they wake up every day hoping to learn that Trump has died overnight. I don't share that sentiment. I think the death of Trump would lead to a J.D. Vance presidency that's exactly as cruel and vicious as Trump's, but without Trump's trade incompetence. I think that trade incompetence is the aspect of the Trump presidency that's most likely to lead to widespread public disapproval. I think a Vance presidency would be exactly as fascist as Trump's, but would lack this Achilles' heel. A Vance who gives us Trumpism minus tariffmania could rule for decades in a post-democratic America. So I guess I'm grateful that Trump hasn't done any delegating on tariffs.

FASCISM GOES MASK OFF, AND EVEN JAMES CARVILLE KNOWS THAT JAMES CARVILLE IS WRONG

The rule of law in America has been on life support for weeks, but it's dead now.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said Monday that he does not plan to return a Maryland man whom the Trump administration mistakenly deported to his country....

“How can I return him to the United States?” Bukele said in an Oval Office meeting with President Donald Trump, responding to a reporter’s question. “I smuggle him into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?”

Please note that the Trump regime and Bukele are getting away with this in part because they continually assert that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a gangster, a "terrorist," or, as the Department of Homeland Security puts it, a "terrorist gang member." (One of the corrosive things the regime has done to language is to conflate gang membership and terrorism, as if they're the same thing. The Trumpers do this only because they believe it doubles the fear factor in the reptile portion of their listeners' brains, not because they believe gang members are terrorists.)

Abrego Garcia has never been charged with a crime in America. An informant has claimed that he was attached to a branch of the MS-13 gang in New York, where he's never lived, but the claim has never had a full hearing in court, and it depends largely on the fact that Abrego Garcia wore Chicago Bulls clothing. Members of the Trump regime now say he's a terrifyingly evil person, but they previously asserted that his deportation was an "administrative error."

The Supreme Court and a lower court have ordered the Trump regime to take steps to get Abrego Garcia back, but after the administration insisted that the president had no leverage over the client state of El Salvador, Trump humiliated the courts by showing the world what BFFs he and El Salvador's president are.

Friends 🇺🇸🤝🏼🇸🇻 pic.twitter.com/tMJHMf7pT4

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) April 14, 2025

Message: You know how I said I couldn't demand that Bukele return this prisoner? Fuck you -- I could! We're best buds! But I won't! What are you going to do about it?

And:

President Donald Trump on Monday suggested his administration could send U.S. citizens who commit violent crimes to El Salvador, telling Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele that the "homegrowns are next" and urging him to build more prisons to house them.

Trump brought up the idea ‒ which he's discussed previously ‒ to Bukele in the Oval Office before reporters entered the room for a bilateral meeting. The exchange was captured in a livestream video published on the X account of Bukele's office.

"Homegrown criminals are next," Trump said to Bukele. "I said homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You've got to build about five more places."

Trump is no longer threatening to torch the Constitution. He's done it. The whole thing is ashes now.

We're left to speculate on what horror comes next:

Maybe the first citizen to be renditioned will be this guy:

An Albuquerque man was arrested on Monday in connection with the fire bombings of the Republican Party of New Mexico’s headquarters in March and a Tesla dealership in February, attacks that the federal authorities have designated as “domestic terrorism.”

The suspect, Jamison Wagner, 40, had parked his white Hyundai sedan at both locations before the arson attacks and then drove away, according to security and traffic camera images released by the Justice Department.

That would be the first step in criminalizing dissent. Or maybe they'll pick a peaceful protester -- perhaps someone who marched and chanted at a Tesla dealership but did nothing unlawful. That would be a quick way of saying that no regime opponent is safe.

I know -- I'm doom-spiraling, and that's bad. Some people are fighting back -- Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen plans to travel to El Salvador this week to seek Abrego Garcia's release. Stuart Stevens, the former Republican strategist, is proposing a way for Democrats in the states to push back:

"What do you do with criminals? You arrest them," Stevens said. "So this is criminal activity."

He then added, "And I think the state attorney generals in these states where this is occurring should treat it like what it is. It's kidnaping. It's human trafficking. They should file charges and arrest the people that are involved with this."

I hope this happens. Abrego Garcia was arrested in Maryland. Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested in Massachusetts. Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in New York. Mohsen Mahdawi was just arrested in Vermont. Will there be a time when blue states will criminalize arrests that lead to lawless detentions? Might states eventually try to block flights that take detainees out of their jurisdiction and into lawless red America, Guantanamo, or El Salvador?

I'm glad Van Hollen is taking a stand. I'm glad Stevens is speaking out. But there should be more than a few small acts of resistance. There should have been massive spontaneous demonstrations yesterday. There should be huge banner headlines in the press -- as I type this, yesterday's developments aren't even the lead story at the websites of The New York Times or The Washington Post.

*****

While Trump and Bukele were meeting, the Times was promoting a James Carville op-ed that was obsolete almost immediately after publication. Carville no longer believes that Democrats should do nothing to oppose Trump and the Republicans, but he argues in the op-ed that they should talk exclusively about the economy -- and it's all Democrats' fault that his earlier genius plan didn't work:

In February I wrote a piece calling on my party’s leaders to play dead, allowing the Republicans to punch themselves out and crumble beneath their own weight. But many Democrats indulged Mr. Trump’s lunacy or allowed themselves to become the story over the government funding and shutdown debate, while the president continued his campaign of chaos and distraction. Now, Democrats have an opportunity to allow the Republicans to edge closer to collapse as the party in full control of Washington — let’s please not become the story again and get in their way.

Carville goes on to recommend some reasonable steps for Democrats: Talk about persistently high prices and cratering 401(k)s, talk about the local economic impact of Trumponomics. The problem is, otherwise timid Democrats like Chuck Schumer have been talking about these things, and disapproval of Trump on the economy and inflation now exceeds approval by double digits. But Trump's overall approval rating is still only a couple of points lower than his disapproval rating. The economy clearly isn't the only issue on voters' minds.

But Carville's op-ed says that Democrats should pay no attention to other issues:

This can only be done if we avoid the distractions — whether it’s Mr. Trump’s third-term talk or Democratic infighting on social issues — and instead focus on the economic foundations that matter to Americans most.

However, within hours of the op-ed's publication, Carville was conceding that other issues matter.

Last night, he was interviewed by CNN's John Berman.



For the first several minutes of the interview, Carville rehashed the op-ed's arguments. Then Berman asked about the Bukele meeting -- and Carville admitted that it's not always the economy, stupid:

CARVILLE: So let me get this straight. This guy was here legally. There are a lot of people here that -- illegal that really contribute to our workforce, our productivity. He was doing nothing wrong. He was in a parking lot.

He had a child -- child's in the backseat. He was sent to El Salvador. The district court said he has to come back. The appeals court said he had to come back. The Supreme Court said he had to come back....

And so the administration said, we're just not going to bring him back.

Well, that is the very essence of a constitutional crisis.

No shit, James.

... this is -- this is not something that's a minor thing, where you just ignore a court order.

And this tinhorn coming in here in the White House and them refusing to pay attention to a legitimate order issued by American courts, this is not going to end well, unless somebody gets this guy back in this country where he belongs. And he's done nothing to be in a -- in a prison anywhere. And it's a -- it's a real shame.

But is it a "distraction," James? Should Democrats ignore it? Berman asks Carville about this as if it's just a matter of political posturing, and Carville, to his credit, says it's serious:

BERMAN: ... do you think the administration would rather have that fight than more focus on tariffs and wild swings in the markets?

CARVILLE: Well, you know, sometimes you got to -- you got to fight on two fronts. And you can fight on an economic front, but also this is such an egregious trespass of justice that you just can't say, well, we'll just repair to the higher ground and talk about egg prices and forget about this guy, well, I'm not for that.

I don't -- I think what's happened here is a -- is really offense against the nation. It's offense against the Constitution. It's offense against order. You just can't let this go.

I'm sorry, it might not be the most politically productive thing in the world, but sometimes you got to just get a backbone and take a stand.

Thank you, James. Thank you for admitting that it's wrong to ignore every non-economic aspect of this regime. Now I wish you'd go all the way and admit that your entire approach to this question is wrong and that Democrats need to treat this as a five-alarm fire for America as a free country.

WE NEED DEMOCRATS WHO AREN'T AFRAID OF TRUMP'S GOOD POLL NUMBERS ON IMMIGRATION

Remember this chilling moment of American fascism?



The Washington Post reports that the stated reason for this arrest was a lie:

Days before masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk to deport her, the State Department determined that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that she engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization, as the government has alleged.

The finding, contained in a March memo that was described to The Washington Post, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not have sufficient grounds for revoking Ozturk’s visa under an authority empowering the top U.S. diplomat to safeguard the foreign policy interests of the United States.

... the State Department found that while Ozturk had protested Tufts’ relationship with Israel, neither DHS nor ICE nor Homeland Security investigations produced any evidence showing that Ozturk has engaged in antisemitic activity or made public statements indicating support for a terrorist organization, according to U.S. government employees briefed on the State Department’s memo.

But top Democrats don't want to make noise about Ozturk's case, or the case of Mahmoud Khalil and other legal residents who expressed opposition to the Israeli war in Gaza in a peaceful manner.

I get this. It's an article of faith in American politics that the public is pro-Israel. But that's no longer true. Last week, Pew reported this survey result:

... the public’s views of Israel have turned more negative over the past three years. More than half of U.S. adults (53%) now express an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 42% in March 2022 – before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip....

Americans’ confidence in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also remains relatively low (32%), according to the new survey.

And Gallup polling reveals a significant decline in support for Israel:

According to Gallup, 76% of Democrats, 53% of independents, and even 41% of Republicans support the creation of an independent Palestinian state. So there's no good reason for Democrats to be fearful on this issue.

Leading Democrats also seem afraid to speak out on behalf of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who has been falsely accused of gang activities and renditioned to a torture prison in El Salvador. I understand why: While President Trump's poll numbers on the economy and inflation are terrible, he gets positive ratings on immigration.

There's no question that Americans have moved rightward on immigration, but most of America still doesn't share MAGA views on the subject. In a recent Wall Street Journal poll, 53% of respondents responded favorably to a "Detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants" policy; 45% disapproved. However, the numbers dropped to 33% approval and 63% disapproval for a policy described as "Detain and deport undocumented immigrants even if they have lived in the U.S. for 10 or more years, pay taxes on earnings, and have no criminal record."

We see something very similar in a recent Pew poll:

Many Americans who appear to share MAGA's immigration absolutism are clearly open to the idea that some targeted immigrants are decent people who don't deserve punishment.

In the two cases I've mentioned, Democrats should champion the rule of law, but "rule of law" is an abstraction. Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Rumeysa Ozturk are real people who have been brutalized by an administration that's not broadly popular and is widely perceived as reckless and uninterested in minimizing harm to innocent people. Democrats should take advantage of that skepticism.

Trump's poll numbers are bad, but they could be a lot worse. I think they'd be worse if prominent Democrats had the courage to take a page from the playbook of George W. Bush's chief strategist Karl Rove, who believed in attacking an opponent's strengths. In 2004, Republicans went after John Kerry's military record. Now, Democrats should try to chip away at Trump's good numbers on immigration. In the process, they'd be fighting for the rule of law, and for human decency.

THE MEDIA CARES ABOUT TRUMP'S EFFECT ON BUSINESS MORE THAN IT CARES ABOUT HIS EFFECT ON DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Back in February, when I went to my first protests at the Tesla dealership in downtown Manhattan, I was disappointed in the turnout. At one of the demonstrations, only about fifty people showed up. We stood and chanted for an hour in the cold anyway.

And then we got a surprising amount of media coverage.

At first, it wasn't in most major news outlets. It was in publications that focused on business, tech, and cars -- Fast Company, The Verge, Electrek. But eventually the coverage went national, in a way that protests for Mahmoud Khalil, for instance, haven't.

The Tesla protest movement got attention because it was a business story. Our scruffy little band (which became much bigger in the ensuing weeks) threatened the financial well-being of rich people, especially the richest man in the world, so our protests mattered.

Flash forward to today. Here's the front page of the New York Times website as I type this:

Here's The Washington Post:

Tariffs are a huge story right now, but they're not the only story. Right now the Trump regime is dishonestly insisting that it can't do anything to extricate a wrongly renditioned man from a Salvadoran torture prison, in defiance of the Supreme Court and lower federal courts. The Department of Homeland Security has just told a number of people, including at least one U.S. citizen, that they should self-deport. Harvard professors are suing the Trump regime over threats to cut billions in federal aid. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just denounced oligarchy in front of a crowd estimated at 36,000 people in Los Angeles.

And that's just a partial list of current news stories. But at the Times and the Post, the important news is tariffs, tariffs, tariffs.

The media cares what happens to rich people. News about business reaches a large audience of well-to-do readers and readers who want to be well-to-do someday. That's why there's a lot of business coverage in the most prestigious news outlets, and there are many publications devoted to business.

The media cares somewhat less about what happens to ordinary citizens. Every major newspaper has a section devoted to business, and a permanent "Business" tab on the website, but none have sections devoted to issues affecting working people. Labor issues don't get daily coverage, the way they did fifty years ago.

Our major media outlets don't think they need a front-page tab for democracy and human rights in America, even though that's a subject that needs to be covered every day now. There's good work being done on this subject in most major news outlets, but it's needs to be forced onto the front page, and often it doesn't linger for very long.

For those of us who oppose Trump, there's a lesson here: The media cares about money a lot more than it cares about human rights. So we need to keep protesting Tesla. We need to talk about the way Trump is damaging the economy. And we should accept the reality that while we also need to talk about Trump's horrific human rights abuses, they'll probably never get as much attention as a fluctuation in the bond market or a trade deal that changes the price of an iPhone. That sucks, but that's reality.

NOW THEY'RE SENDING DEPORTATION MESSAGES TO NATIVE-BORN AMERICANS

I saw this on Bluesky last night:

Here's the letter, sent to Micheroni's work email address:

As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council points out, this is not a hoax or an isolated event.

The Politico story says:

DOGE’s bread and butter has been slashing headcounts but it is now wielding its influence deep inside the nation’s immigration system....

Key DOGE engineers now embedded at DHS include Kyle Schutt, Edward Coristine, (aka “Big Balls”) and Mark Elez, according to their government email addresses. At least two others, Aram Moghaddassi and Payton Rehling also have access to DHS data, as DOGE fingerprints are spread throughout DHS, including Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure and Security Agency....

Their first mission: implement parole terminations for 6,300 undocumented immigrants who either have criminal records or are on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist. That effort required coordinating with the Social Security Administration to have their Social Security numbers effectively canceled by adding them to a database that tracks dead people, the New York Times and the Washington Post first reported.

So even if DOGE and DHS eventually get back to Micheroni (and other recipients of this email who aren't immigrant parolees) and say, "lol, jk, you don't have to self-deport," it seems possible that the recipients have had their Social Security numbers canceled.

But DOGE and DHS are presumably using using other databases if the recipients include a Canadian.

Reichlin-Melnick points out that quite a few recipients are discussing this email in a Reddit thread. The user who started the thread assumes the email is fake.

ATTENTION: SCAM email from “CBP” And “DHS”

PLEASE PLEASE be aware of potential scam email from donotreply@cbp.dhs.gov

Some of these email contain info about deportation, termination of parole, leaving the country, compliance check and etc. Those emails may be a scam and I would recommend to talk to attorney before you click ANYWHERE or do ANYTHING.

But Reichlin-Melnick says:

If you're a typical American, you're response to this and other outrageous acts by the Trump administration is: My life is fine. Keep kicking out immigrant gangsters and routing out waste, fraud, and abuse, guys! Trump's approval rating is still in the mid-40s because, in addition to the MAGA cultists, millions of other Americans believe that only vicious criminals are being deported and only unnecessary government expenditures are being curtailed. They believe all this is being done thoughtfully and with the best of intentions, not recklessly and vengefully.

But even if most Americans don't care about the fates of these email recipients, they should know that the government will undoubtedly apply this level of recklessness and mercilessness to something that matters to them very, very soon. They won't believe it until it happens, and even then they might believe Trump is still a swell guy. But he isn't, and nother are the people executing these mad plans. And they're coming for most of us.

THAT SUPREME COURT RULING WON'T GET KILMAR ABREGO GARCIA HOME

We're supposed to regard this as a big victory:

The Supreme Court on Thursday said the Trump administration must work to bring back a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to prison in El Salvador, rejecting the administration’s emergency appeal.

The court acted in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who had an immigration court order preventing his deportation to his native country over fears he would face persecution from local gangs.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis had ordered Abrego Garcia, now being held in a notorious Salvadoran prison, returned to the United States by midnight Monday.

“The order properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador,” the court said in an unsigned order with no noted dissents.

Slate's usually gloomy Mark Joseph Stern is optimistic:

I don't share Stern's optimism. This is the Trump regime, which is itching to defy the Supreme Court, and is eager to take full advantage of every loophole.

And here's a huge one. The ruling says:

“The [district judge's] order properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”

But it also says:

“The intended scope of the term ‘effectuate’ in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.“

So the High Court, while seeming to rule against the Trump administration, effectively endorsed the Trumpers' transparently phony argument that U.S. authorities can't possibly persuade or compel El Salvador's Trump-fanboy president, Nayib Bukele, to return Abrego Garcia. So now, if they choose, they can say they tried to "facilitate" his release but, darn it, they couldn't "effectuate" it. Thanks to the Supreme Court, they don't have to.

And the Supremes added a delay:

The Supreme Court’s unsigned order does not mean Abrego García will be returned immediately. The justices sent the case back to the lower-court judge to clarify aspects of her initial order and said the Trump administration should be prepared to “share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”

... In its order, the court also directed U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis to expand on her initial order to the extent she required the Trump administration to “effectuate” Abrego García’s return and said she may have exceeded her authority by infringing on the president’s powers. The courts typically defer to the executive branch in conducting policy overseas.

“The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs,” the order said.

Let's hope Abrego Garcia stays alive while all this is taking place.

I'm reminded of what Elie Mystal wrote after Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to chastise Trump for demanding the impeachment of a judge who'd ruled against him:

Roberts is trying to maintain the appearance of power in the face of a president who has shown no inclination to respect it. He is trying, desperately, to avoid a judicial confrontation with Trump, while still wanting to sound like he is in control....

Trump is not going to follow a Supreme Court order he doesn’t like, and everybody paying attention knows that, including Roberts. The only way for Roberts to avoid being exposed by Trump as unimportant is to defer to Trump on any matter of real import.

Roberts will undoubtedly ... rule that the laws Trump won’t follow anyway are unconstitutional. He knows Trump will violate his orders, so his entire plan will be to not issue an order that Trump can violate.

In this case, the Roberts Court is arguing that a judge can't order the president to "effectuate" a renditioned prisoner's release from a foreign torture prison. So Trump will pretend to "facilitate" that release, unsuccessfully, and both he and Roberts will be happy. Or Trump won't, and will falsely say that he tried, with the same outcome.

Or Roberts has misjudged Trump, assuming incorrectly that Trump wants to avoid openly defying the Supreme Court. I think Trump will be happy to take the win on "effectuate" and say, No, we won't even pretend to "facilitate" Abrego Garcia's release. But we'll see.

WHAT LOOKS LIKE INSIDER TRADING COULD ALSO BE TRUMP'S USUAL DERANGED IDIOCY

Donald Trump blinked on tariffs yesterday, more or less. Paul Krugman writes:

Yesterday Trump announced that he wasn’t going to impose all those tariffs he announced last week after all. Instead, he’s putting a 10 percent tariff on everyone, and 125 percent on China.

... this new announcement still sets tariffs at a much higher level than they were before Trump took office, indeed higher than he suggested during the campaign. For example, during the campaign researchers at the Peterson Institute for International Economics constructed a model assuming Trump implemented a 10 percent tariffs across the board and 60 percent on China. The researchers concluded that this regime would impose a nasty shock on the US economy. Now we are facing a tariffs of more than twice that level against China as well as 10 percent on all other countries.

... With a 125% tariff on Chinese imports and a 10% tariff on all other imports, I arrive at an effective tariff rate that is slightly below the Smoot-Hawley level of 1930. But this still represents a huge jump in tariffs in a US economy that now imports three times as much as it did in 1930. Trump’s post-pause tariff regime remains the biggest trade shock in U.S., and I think world history.

Nevertheless, we appear to have avoided an even worse outcome, at least temporarily. There was a big rally in the markets in response to Trump's 90-day pause (although U.S. stocks are down again as I type this).

One aspect of yesterday's rally seems suspect to a lot of people. The New Republic's Malcolm Ferguson writes:

Trump may have accidentally confessed to insider trading and market manipulation on Truth Social.

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT,” the president wrote on Wednesday, a mere four hours before announcing a 90-day pause on most retaliatory tariffs except for China....

Insider trading is a very illegal practice that involves using special or private information to give yourself an advantage in buying and selling stocks. Someone with knowledge of an economic policy change that would cause the markets to shoot back up would be posting about how great a time it is to buy right before the policy change happened.

But is it true that someone with knowledge of an economic policy change that would cause the markets to shoot back up would be posting about how great a time it is to buy right before the policy change happened -- announcing it to the world, rather than whispering it to a select few who are in on the scheme?

I really don't know. Maybe the answer to my question is: Yes, Trump posted this message for all the world to see, but only a select few understood it as code for "I'm pausing the tariffs."

I think this could be insider trading. But it also seems plausible to me that Trump is a deranged idiot and what happened fits the specific pattern of his idiocy and derangement.

Let's start with the idea that Trump engaged in insider trading to help his rich friends. How often does Trump try to help other people? Even his biggest donors don't get much love from him -- just a couple of days ago we were reading headlines such as "Big Tech Bet on Trump. It’s Still Waiting for the Payoff." Trump looks out for the interests of Trump. It's hard to imagine him looking out for the interests of anyone else.

The counterargument to that is contained in this Wall Street Journal report:

Trump Says He Will Consider Exempting Some U.S. Companies From Tariffs

President Trump said Wednesday that he’s considering granting some U.S. companies an exemption from his tariff program. “There are some that have been hard,” Trump told reporters when asked about companies requesting exemptions. “There are some that, by the nature of the company, get hit a little bit harder. We'll take a look at that.”

He certainly seems to be soliciting bribes -- but I question whether he'll actually give anything to the bribed.

The Wall Street Journal reported this about the tariff pause:

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT,” Trump posted at 9:37 a.m. Wednesday. An administration official said no decision had been made at that point.

I know that White House insiders lie to reporters. Maybe the pause decision had been made at that point. On the other hand, isn't this kind of ... plausible? Isn't it plausible that Trump imposed these cataclysmic tariffs, and was trying to root the market on to a rally that would show all the haters that they were an awesome idea -- and then he just changed his mind and flip-flopped within a couple of hours? Isn't that a likely product of his Diet Coke- and/or Adderall-fueled tiny brain?

I believe Trump imposed the tariffs because he really believes in tariffs. He wanted to prove that everyone else in the world is wrong about tariffs and he's right. He wanted to demonstrate that his gut instincts contain more wisdom than the recommendations of so-called smart people who read books and engage in serious study of the subjects they talk about. I think he wanted to stay the course, because he is an idiot.

But the markets freaked -- first the stock market, then the bond market. Meanwhile, administration insiders and rich influencers approached the crisis from several different angles, until they found one that worked. When they failed with the direct approach -- Bill Ackman's tweet warning of a possible "economic nuclear winter," for instance -- they began working on Trump indirectly, in part through Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as The Wall Street Journal noted:

Bessent was flooded with worried calls from Wall Street over the weekend and felt strongly he had to persuade Trump that a pause was needed.

The message that began the process of steering Trump away from national economic suicide? Tariffs aren't what makes your policy brilliant, sir -- deals are.

[A pause] wouldn’t be a capitulation, Bessent argued, because they were going to have so many deals.

Lindsey Graham and other GOP senators who appeared on an episode of Sean Hannity's show Tuesday night that Trump watched also tried to steer Trump's thinking to deals, The Washington Post reports:

Some of the senators expressed a desire for Trump to negotiate with other countries coming to the table on tariffs, and several of them spoke to the president after the show ended.

“I’ll leave it up to you what’s enough, what’s not enough,” Graham said he told Trump Tuesday night, “but I think you can see people are looking for some points on the board.”

If this were a planned pump-and-dump, I don't believe you would have seen so much desperate effort to urge a course correction from rich investors, key administration figures, and congressional Republicans.

And once Trump was convinced that he could look like the Great Dealmaker even if he paused the tariffs -- and once he also saw that the bond market was tanking -- he impulsively decided on a pause. Politico reports:

... a cadre of his economic advisers made a two-part pitch.... First, they told the president about their grave concerns over the bond market, which moved rapidly in the wrong direction overnight into Wednesday morning. Second, crucially, they praised Trump’s approach, telling him in effect: “This has already been successful. All these countries are coming to the table. Now we need time to negotiate.”

This seems like pure Trump -- he acknowledged the surprising news that the markets (which he cares a lot about) weren't responding well to his brilliance, but, ultimately, he was swayed by flattery. Bill Ackman eventually realized what Trump wants:

This was brilliantly executed by @realDonaldTrump. Textbook, Art of the Deal.

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) April 9, 2025

Maybe, in all this desperate work to prevent Trump from steering the car off the cliff, there was time to wink at rich cronies and say, "Buy now -- we're pivoting." But you should at least consider the possibility that it was all done in great haste, and that it was all these folks could do to ease Trump's lead foot off the gas pedal.

Prior to the pause, Republicans were selling the policy as if it would be in place for a long time. They said it would return manufacturing to America. They said it would solve the masculinity crisis. They said only weak people were worried about losing money.

Then came the pivot. I think it was Trump being impulsive. I don't think it was part of the plan. And I don't think he would encourage anyone else to get rich from the change of course, because he's too selfish. But I could be wrong.