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.
Source also confirmed to me Stephen Miller is close to the groups behind Canary Mission and Betar.
This is from 2018, about the board of the nonprofit believed to operate Canary Mission in Israel.
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.
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.
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?
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 to Bukele: "Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough."
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:
The next step for Trump is to send a US citizen convicted of something like child murder and rape to CECOT in El Salvador. It'll set the precedent to send citizens there while neutralizing outrage over it because of the heinous nature of their crimes. Then it'll any felony and then protestors.
I think Trump will send a US citizen to the El Salvador concentration camp before the end of the month. Once protests pick up in the summer, that'll be the next escalation to send organizers there.
We're heading down a truly dark path.
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.
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 Journalpoll, 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.
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:
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 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.
Some personal news: the Department of Homeland Security has given me, an immigration lawyer born in Newton, Massachusetts, seven days to leave the U.S. Does anyone know if you can get Italian citizenship through great-grandparents?
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.
Hours ago, @politico.com revealed that DOGE is working with DHS on automating mass deportation efforts — likely explaining why many US citizens, green card holders, and even a Canadian (in Canada) got threatening emails last night terminating “your parole” and telling them to leave the US in 7 days.
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:
There is no reason to believe this is a scam. Thousands of people got it in the last 24 hours. It is reportedly part of their ongoing effort to strip hundreds of thousands of humanitarian parole.
They aren’t even sending letters by mail. It’s just an email, and it’s being sent to wrong people too.
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.
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:
It's overwhelmingly likely that the Trump administration CAN order El Salvador to send back Abrego Garcia with one phone call. There's no plausible evidence that it can't! Things will get dicey if the administration claims that's possible. But I think the odds are that Abrego Garcia comes home soon.
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.
“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.
This is important bc it means there will be a fight about what the govt can or can’t do to bring about the return. That is, the exec branch might say they can’t actually bring about return, or can’t do X, Y, or Z to effectuate return.
The R Justices gave the admin latitude to try and do that.
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.
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.
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 Journalnoted:
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 Postreports:
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.
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.
This might be the most disheartening sentence I've read this morning:
House Republicans raised $35.2 million last night from a glitzy black tie dinner with President Donald Trump, money that will be used for the reelection campaigns of dozens of lawmakers.
It's disheartening because I know how much power rich donors have in our political system. It's clear that the rich don't like President Trump's tariffs, and it's clear (to me at least) that donor pressure on congressional Republicans could help get a bill passed that would require congressional approval for new tariffs, with a backup plan of an impeachment threat if Trump won't comply, but it's also clear that rich Republican donors don't want to use the power they have, either out of fear, or because they're in the denial stage of grief and don't believe Trump is serious about a prolonged trade war, or because they know they're stinking rich and will be the last people in this society to suffer if -- when -- things go haywire.
A NOTUS story (free to read here) makes clear that rich donors aren't ready to use the power they have:
Some notable donors have openlyquestioned the president’s strategy, and a Republican strategist familiar with the party’s big donors said they were aware of one major contributor who temporarily suspended all political giving because of the economic uncertainty related to the tariffs.
Just one major contributor has suspended donations -- temporarily!
Other longtime donors could do the same if economic conditions don’t improve, warned the source, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive fundraising issues.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of them are reevaluating where things are at the moment,” the strategist said. “And it’s early off in the cycle that they can do that without any real repercussions.”
And by "repercussions" they mean handing control of one or both houses of Congress to Democrats, which they feel would be a fate worse than death, and even a fate worse than control of Congress by a party that is complicit in the total destruction of the global economy. So even if additional big donors stop giving, they're likely to make up for it as elections get closer. So it will almost be as if they never suspended donations at all!
Clearly there's an element of fear at work here, as The Atlantic Jonathan Chait notes (free to read here):
A few days after “Liberation Day,” the MAGA financier Bill Ackman briefly succumbed to despair. “I don’t think this was foreseeable,” he posted on X. “I assumed economic rationality would be paramount. My bad.”
Among the MAGA faithful, this statement amounts to a shocking apostasy. And yet, even so, it was tightly circumscribed. Ackman wrote the entire passage in the passive voice—“this was foreseeable”; “rationality would be paramount”—omitting the need to identify any protagonist behind these disasters. Like so many Trump supporters, especially among the financial elite, he refused to believe that Trump would do the things he’d promised to do, precisely because they were so irrational, without pausing to ask if the very fact that Trump was promising to do crazy things was itself a reason to keep him out of power. Ackman’s little soliloquy ended, fittingly, on a note of personal contrition. The only person he could blame was himself.
Some of the most powerful men in the world are clearly terrified of Trump, Chait writes:
Ackman, firmly grasping the euphemistic protocols necessary to jockey for influence in MAGA world, tried a number of gambits. He blamed corrupt advisers for manipulating the great leader: “Just figured out why @howardlutnick is indifferent to the stock market and the economy crashing. He and Cantor are long bonds. He profits when our economy implodes” (a charge he subsequently withdrew).
Ackman wrote that surely the great and powerful Trump wouldn't engage in such an obvious act of destruction as this tariff war on his own -- it must be the fault of Howard Lutnick and his former firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, because they have big investments in bonds. (If that were true, it would have been a terrible gamble -- right now bonds are plunging along with stocks.)
Chait continues:
[Ackman] tried flattery: “An important characteristic of a great leader is a willingness to change course when the facts change or when the initial strategy is not working. We have seen Trump do this before. Two days in, however, it is much too early to form a view about his tariff strategy.”
When even these indirect complaints drew pushback, Ackman reaffirmed his unwavering loyalty: “Some have misinterpreted my thoughts on tariffs. I am totally supportive of President @realDonaldTrump using tariffs to eliminate tariffs and unfair trading practices of our trading partners, and to induce more investment and manufacturing in our country.”
Weak. Weak. Come on, Bill. Try harder. Rally some of your rich friends.
But this is a collective action problem, and rich donors aren't much for collective action, unless they're colluding to fix prices or engage in some other practice more directly related to business.
Also, they'll barely suffer, while the rest of us are on the street selling pencils like it's 1932.
And it's hard for the rich to shake the belief that Republicans are always better for them. In normal times, they ignore the strong economic growth that usually comes when a Democrat is in the White House, because the improved cashflow to their businesses seems less important than the fact that Democrats want them to pay slightly higher tax rates and scrutinize their businesses and deals somewhat more closely. They see what Trump is actually doing and they still seem to believe it's not something he would do. And while they remain in this state of denial, we'll be badly hurt. But the leopard is coming for their faces, too.
By now it’s obvious to anyone willing to see — which many people still aren’t — that Donald Trump is, in practice, waging war against American greatness.
Krugman is right. From his early fight against USAID, which diminished America's soft power worldwide, to his tariff mania, which gives America a trade policy suitable to an emerging country rather than a global superpower, Trump is clearly making America less great, whether he consciously realizes it or not. Beyond tariffs, Krugman cites Trump and Elon Musk's attacks on the functionality of the Social Security website, with further assaults on the system clearly to come. Krugman also cites Robert Kennedy's vaccine skepticism and the administration's "savage funding cuts and layoffs at the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes for Health," which "are already having a catastrophic effect on medical research." Krugman writes:
Even if research funding is restored, even if NIH and other agencies try to rebuild, U.S. science will have suffered huge long-term damage. So will the world trading system, which will never be the same even if the Trump tariffs are reversed, and the effectiveness of the federal bureaucracy, which will be impaired for many years even if DOGE’s depredations stop.
I think Trump wants this because he doesn't want any entity in the world -- not just anyone, but anything -- to be more powerful than he is.
He knows on a gut level that the America of NATO and other global alliances, and of soft-power agencies such as USAID, was big and powerful before he entered politics and would have remained big and powerful long after he dies if he'd merely made minimal changes to them, as he did in his first term. So they had to be brought down to size.
The same is true of America as an economic force. The country was big and powerful when he was a child and had no influence on it, it was big and powerful when he wasn't president, and it was on course to remain big and powerful long after his death. So it needs to be diminished, and its economy had to be completely remade as his economy.
Science was big. It had the power to give life. Therefore, it was far too powerful for Trump to bear. So it also had to be brought down to size.
And, obviously, the Constitution and the rule of law predated Trump and have been, up till now, bigger and more powerful than he is. That was intolerable to him.
Trump was never the most powerful real estate developer in New York, much less the most powerful businessman in the world. He never built the world's tallest building, though he tried. The wives and girlfriends he treated as arm candy were never the most super of supermodels. He was a TV star, but he was never the star of a show spoken of with reverence, like Seinfeld or The Sopranos. He became president, but he lost the popular vote when he won and he couldn't get reelected as an incumbent.
Now he sees the opportunity to be more powerful than anyone or anything on the planet. He's not the richest man in the world, but the richest man in the world works for him. Elon Musk is dismantling government agencies that predate Trump, would have outlived him, and have in some cases threatened him. Trump loves having power over them.
I suspect that Trump is enjoying the global market crash. Who has ever wielded such power? Who has ever taken a global economic order that was fundamentally sound and destroyed it by sheer will? It took bad decisions by many firms to cause the Great Recession in 2008. Trump has that much power all by himself!
For all its flaws, America was strong and resilient in 2024. Even if Trump had somehow been a great president in his second term, he would have been perceived as someone who merely made a good thing better. Making a good thing abysmal clearly shows that he's much more powerful than someone who's just a great president.
I know that Trump believes that everything he's doing is brilliant, and that he's making the country unimaginably great. But I think he's really happy with where America is now. He's changed everything -- sure, it's a shambles now, but the ability to destroy this much this fast is power, isn't it?
America's Mad King isn't backing down on tariffs, although Kevin Hassett of the National Economic Council didn't express outright disapproval when a Fox interviewer floated hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman's idea of a 90-day pause. (UPDATE: The White House has dismissed rumors that there might be a pause as "fake news.") The New York Times reports that the financial world's Masters of the Universe feel helpless:
There was little rest on Wall Street this weekend. There was plenty of anger, anxiety, frustration, and fear.
Anger at President Trump for a brash and chaotic rollout of tariffs that erased trillions of dollars in value from the stock market in two days. Anxiety about the state of the private equity industry and other colossal funds with global investments. Frustration among Wall Street’s elite at their sudden inability to influence the president and his advisers.
It's true that Trump seems unreachable. The Washington Post reported this on Friday:
Inside and outside the White House, advisers say Trump is unbowed even as the world reels from the biggest increase in trade hostilities in a century. They say Trump is unperturbed by negative headlines or criticism from foreign leaders. He is determined to listen to a single voice — his own — to secure what he views as his political legacy....
“He’s at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore,” said a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f---. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”
Wall Streeters are accustomed to having access to presidents and wielding a great deal of influence, as the Timesnotes:
For generations, Wall Street enjoyed a role advising the leaders of both major political parties, and there was hope that the appointment of Scott Bessent, a hedge fund manager and onetime Democrat, as Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary, meant the industry had a friend near the Oval Office.
Mr. Bessent, however, has shrugged off the tumult. “The market consistently underestimates Donald Trump,” he said on the NBC program “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
That has left even some of Mr. Trump’s bigger Wall Street defenders with little to do but gripe publicly.
But they can do more than "gripe publicly." They can still wield influence, because there are people in the government other than the president and his subordinates, although you'd never know it from the way America has been run since Inauguration Day.
Why aren't Wall Streeters putting pressure on Congress? Republicans have tiny margins in both the House and the Senate. Congress could seriously challenge Trump on tariffs if it wanted to. All it would take would be a handful of Republicans plus every Democrat, or nearly every Democrat. (By the way, even John Fetterman is critical of the tariffs.)
I don't know if we'll have real elections in 2026 or 2028, but most people in Washington think we will. Elections cost money. Political parties and individual members of Congress spend massive amounts of time raising money for future election cycles, much of it from people like ... Wall Street billionaires.
These billionaires should be telling the GOP: We're cutting you off without a cent unless you impeach the motherfucker and remove him from office, or at least start the process and get him to back down on these tariffs. No money for individual candidates. No money for party campaign committees. No money for Republican-aligned PACs.
They could start by focusing pressure on candidates in swing districts, for whom breaking with Trump might actually be electorally advantageous. Oh, and they should also tell congressional Democrats to grow a spine and unify around the idea of impeachment if the tariffs persist.
The pressure shouldn't just come from Wall Street. The muckamucks in every affected industry should cut off the congressional GOP, or threaten to. They need to scare the bejeezus out of Mike Johnson and John Thune.
Last week, Congressman Al Green promised to present articles of impeachment against Trump within thirty days. I'm sure his impeachment articles will resonate with liberals and progressives. I'm sure I'll agree with every word. But I know that he's perceived as the crazy old coot who brandished a walking stick during a presidential address. He might not be the best face for this effort.
I think Green should proceed, but there should also be an impeachment bill that's moderate-friendly. Maybe it should just be about Trump's illegal usurpation of Congress's tariff power.
In any case, I think Democrats should go all in on impeachment. As 401(k)s crater and economic uncertainty worsens, this will start to seem like a good idea even to Middle American moderates.
If enough people talk about impeachment, it will become thinkable. It's the right moment to start this conversation.
I regularly criticize The New York Times, but there are writers at the paper who understand the dangerous nature of Donald Trump's presidency. On Friday, the Times opinion section published a roundtable discussion in which M. Gessen, Lydia Polgreen, Zeynep Tufekci, and (yes) David French described Trump as an authoritarian comparable to the worst tyrants around the globe. Gessen set the tone:
[Trump] has successfully destroyed more in two and a half months than even I, ever the catastrophizer, thought possible. He has enabled a secret police force, inflicting terror on millions of people in this country. He is rapidly normalizing disregard for the judiciary. He has brought a leading university and several giant law firms to their knees, and some large media companies have arguably assumed a supplicant position as well. That is a spectacular amount of institutional and societal damage....
Today the Times editorial board chastises law firms and universities that have bent the knee to Trump:
... the most likely path to American autocracy depends on not only a power-hungry president but also the voluntary capitulation of a cowed civil society.
... This is a moment for courage.
The playbook begins with a recognition that capitulation is doomed. Some law firms and corporations, as well as Columbia University, have made a different bet, obviously. But the example of law firms demonstrates the problems with capitulation.
... Mr. Trump can threaten the firms again whenever he chooses and demand further concessions. These firms are in virtual receivership to Mr. Trump. So is Columbia, which yielded to Mr. Trump after he threatened its federal funding. The university did not even win the restoration of that funding when it agreed to his demands; it won merely permission to begin negotiating with the administration.
Standing up to the abuse of power is inherently difficult.... But crises usually do not end on their own. Resolving them requires courage and action.
But elsewhere in the paper, the people who have opposed Trump since before his second inauguration are othered. Yesterday, the Times published a story headlined "7 Americans Weigh In on Trump’s Sweeping Tariffs." Of the seven, five voted for Trump in 2024 and one -- a Trump admirer named Dave Abdallah from Dearborn, Michigan -- voted for Jill Stein. Only one voted for Kamala Harris. The Times has interviewed these voters before, in one instance under the headline "What Some Reluctant Trump Voters Thought of His Speech." But here and in other Times stories they're presented as just "Americans" or "voters," as if they're a representative cross-section of the country -- as if, in other words, Harris voters aren't really American.
But Democrats exist. Democrats are Americans. We've been reminding the media of that this week, even if the conventional wisdom is still that we're weird outliers and also insufferable elitists. Here's Nate Cohn in a Times newsletter today trying to reconcile reality with his priors:
This week, the next two years of American politics began to come into focus, and it does not look like a MAGA or Republican “golden age.” The special House elections in Florida and the Supreme Court election in Wisconsin confirmed that Democratic voters were not, in fact, stunned into submission by last November’s election....
In one key respect, the elections on Tuesday were not significant: They do not suggest that Democrats solved any of the problems that cost them the last election. Instead, they mostly reflect the party’s advantage among the most highly informed, educated and civically engaged voters. This advantage has allowed Democrats to excel in low-turnout elections throughout the Trump era, even as he made enormous gains among the disaffected and disengaged young, working-class and nonwhite voters who show up only in presidential elections.
Still, Democrats won’t have to face many of those disaffected and disengaged voters until 2028. The results last Tuesday thus offer a plausible preview of the next few years of elections: major Democratic victories, including in next year’s midterm election.
Translation: The Democrats did okay on Tuesday, though they're still a bunch of cringe elitists. That cringe elitism is why they did well, and will probably keep doing well enough to have a decent midterm cycle.
In fact, the Wisconsin contest was a high-turnout election by special-election standards -- 2.3 million people voted, compared to the roughly 2.7 miilion who voted in gubernatorial contests in November 2018 and November 2022, and the 1.8 million who voted in the last state Supreme Court contest in 2023. This is lower than the 3.4 million who turned out in Wisconsin to vote for president last year, but it's high turnout for a special election in April.
And as for that new Republican coalition that includes "disaffected and disengaged young, working-class and nonwhite voters," don't assume that it's durable:
Wow this chart.
Outside of his MAGA base, Trump's approval ratings among others who voted for him in 2024 have fallen ~15% overall over the past few months.
On jobs/economy/inflation/prices it's more like a 20-25% decline.
Link: www.ft.com/content/26d1...
And this polling was done before Trump announced his tariffs.
Also, despite the emerging conventional wisdom that Democrats are all rich coastal elitists, I'll note that the one Harris voter in that "7 Americans Weigh In" story is a black South Carolina retiree on a fixed income who needs to replace a beat-up car soon.
Which brings us to yesterday's demonstrations.
On Friday I said I was I worried that turnout would be diminished in the big cities as a result of smaller demonstrations elsewhere. That wasn't a problem. Turnout in Washington, Boston, Chicago, and especially New York was huge -- and there were impressive crowds in smaller cities and towns all over America. From the Times:
Mass Protests Across the Country Show Resistance to Trump
Demonstrators packed the streets in cities and towns to rail against government cutbacks, financial turmoil and what they viewed as attacks on democracy.
They came out in defense of national parks and small businesses, public education and health care for veterans, abortion rights and fair elections. They marched against tariffs and oligarchs, dark money and fascism, the deportation of legal immigrants and the Department of Government Efficiency.
Demonstrators had no shortage of causes as they gathered in towns and cities across the country on Saturday to protest President Trump’s agenda. Rallies were planned in all 50 states, and images posted on social media showed dense crowds in places as diverse as St. Augustine, Fla.; Salt Lake City and rainy Frankfort, Ky....
On Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the protest stretched for nearly 20 blocks. In Chicago, thousands flooded Daley Plaza and adjacent streets, while, in the nation’s capital, tens of thousands surrounded the Washington Monument. In Atlanta, the police estimated the crowd marching to the gold-domed statehouse at over 20,000.
Interviewees include "Marilyn Finner, 65, who works in customer service" in Chicago; "Don Westhoff, a 59-year-old accountant"; and "Fiona Smythe, 56," who mentions concern about cuts to the Forest Service at a rally in Ketchum, Idaho.
So now can the press please stop saying that (a) the resistance is dead and (b) all Democrats are un-American weirdo elitists from the Acela Corridor? Probably not, but let's hope. We've provided enough evidence for a significant change in the conventional wisdom.
I won't be posting tomorrow because I've made plans to go to D.C. for a rally at the Washington Monument. When I made these plans -- which, for various reasons, I can't change -- I hoped that this would be the biggest anti-Trump demonstration in Washington so far. Sadly, the demonstration is unlikely to be "the big one," simply because there'll be hundreds of other demonstrations taking place simultaneously all over the country, including many right here in the New York metro area. Around here, there's going to be a rally in midtown Manhattan, another rally uptown at Columbia University, and yet another rally on Staten Island. A bit upstate and on Long Island, there'll be rallies in Mamaroneck, Hastings-on-Hudson, Mineola, Nanuet, Mount Kisco, and Stony Point. In New Jersey, there'll be rallies in Weehauken, Jersey City, Teaneck, Upper Montclair, Bloomfield, Glen Ridge, Maplewood, West Caldwell, Metuchen, Morristown, Red Bank, and Piscataway. There'll be a rally in Greenwich, Connecticut, and also in Stamford. And that's an incomplete list.
Is this a good idea?
On January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump's first inauguration, the Women's March in D.C. drew close to half a million people. There was also a very large rally in Manhattan. I know there were smaller rallies all over the country, but the protests weren't localized to this extent. I'm sure there weren't three rallies in New York City alone.
This bothers me because the media has spent much of its time since Election Day proclaiming that "the resistance" seems like a spent force, and one of its key metrics is the fact that there hasn't been a large national protest like the Women's March.
Discontent at congressional town halls and protests at Tesla dealerships -- which, obviously, are localized and relatively small -- has led journalists to conclude that there's some life in the resistance, as have the results of recent off-cycle elections, the crowds at rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Coertez, and even the response to Cory Booker's round-the-clock speech on the Senate floor. But the media still argues that the country is rallying around Trump now -- or at least was rallying around him until the "Liberation Day" tariffs -- in a way that it didn't during his first term. The Women's March impressed the media. Also, it helped plant the seeds for electoral victories in 2018 and 2020.
We need another big, undeniable, centralized protest. But we're in an atomized world now. When a major media outlet bends the knee to Trump, the response online is "Cancel your subscription to The Washington Post/Los Angeles Times/New York Times and subscribe to my one-person Substack instead." Many of these are great, but you need to subscribe to dozens of them to replace what you got from a legacy media outlet. It's as if we've all made a virtue of the isolation we experienced in 2020.
We need to break out of that. We need to band together -- and to be seen banding together -- to fight Trump.
President Trump's tariffs are a disaster -- ask Paul Krugman, ask The Economist, ask U.S. stock markets, which are experiencing a huge selloff -- but they're a disaster that the world of business appearently didn't foresee:
Tough language from JPMorgan tonight:
“.. we view the full implementation of these policies as a substantial macro economic shock not currently incorporated in our forecasts. .. these policies, if sustained, would likely push the US and global economy into recession this year.”
We know what JPMorgan's analysts believed: Trump is a fine fellow, and he's one of us -- he'd never do anything that would seriously hurt our interests. We were fine in his first term, so why worry now?
The signs were there, but they didn't think they needed to take them seriously.
I posted the video over 2 years ago. People thought he was bluffing I guess.
They thought the "guardrails" would hold the way they (more or less) did in his first term -- even though the "guardrails" were mostly Cabinet members and others in his administration who challenged or thwarted his worst instincts, and he was making it clear that he planned to stock his second administration with people who would never challenge him. Also, he was afilliating himself with Project 2025, which had a stated goal of firing apolitical career government bureaucrats and replacing them with loyalists.
All the signs were there. Millions of ordinary people didn't put them all together and see the risks inherent in a second Trump presidency -- although, as Mike says above, some of us did -- but we're talking about analysts whose job it is to understand all information relevant to their task of protecting and increasing their clients' money. Why didn't they realize this was a possibility?
In part I think it's because, in the post-Reagan era, we've made it too goddamn easy for the rich to stay rich. They don't need to be on alert for signs of peril because they do okay even under the worst circumstances, and they often do extremely well even if they're only half-trying. Look at the 2008 crash and the Great Recession that followed -- the government made certain that most of them barely got their hair mussed, and many big firms came out richer.
Ordinary people who saw the warning signs knew that Trump could do great damage in their own lives, or in the lives of people they cared about. Rich people who missed the warning signs assumed they'd be fine no matter what, because they always are. That helps explain how we got into this mess.
I'm watching CNBC. These anchors are so angry. They really didn't believe he'd do it. They're actually just now, 10 years into this shit, realizing he's a maniac hellbent on revenge and there's no grand plan for the markets. Better late than never but holy shit.
