Politics

During Donald Trump’s first term, advisers who wanted to check his most dramatic impulses reliably turned to two places to act as guardrails: the stock market and cable news. If the markets reacted badly to something Trump did, they found, he would likely change course to match Wall Street’s moves. And television’s hold over Trump was so great that, at times, his aides would look to get booked on a cable-news show, believing that the president would be more receptive to an idea he heard there than one floated during an Oval Office meeting.

But Trump’s second term looks different. Taking further steps today to escalate his global trade war, the president has ignored the deep plunges on Wall Street that have cost the economy trillions of dollars and accelerated risks of a bear market. He has tuned out the wall-to-wall coverage, at least on some cable networks, about the self-inflicted wounds he has dealt the United States economy. And unlike eight years ago, few members of Trump’s team are looking to rein him in, and those who think differently have almost all opted against publicly voicing disagreement.

Trump is showing no signs—at least not yet—of being encumbered by political considerations as he makes the biggest bet of his presidency, according to three White House officials and two outside allies granted anonymity to discuss the president’s decision making. Emboldened by his historic comeback, he believes that launching a trade battle is his best chance of fundamentally remaking the American economy, elites and experts be damned.

“This man was politically dead and survived both four criminal cases and an assassination attempt to be president again. He really believes in this and is going to go big,” one of the outside allies told me. “His pain threshold is high to get this done.”

What’s not clear, even to some of those closest to him, is what will count as a victory.

The president has likened his tariffs to “medicine” for a sick patient, but they have caused widespread confusion—particularly over whether Trump is committed to keeping the plan in place for years to boost U.S. manufacturing or whether he is using the new tariffs as a negotiating ploy to force other countries to change their policies.

[Read: Trade will move on without the United States]

“We have many, many countries coming to negotiate deals with us, and they’re going to be fair deals,” Trump told reporters today in the Oval Office, adding that he will not pause the tariffs despite another day of Wall Street turbulence. “No other president’s going to do this, what I’m doing.”

Markets plunged around the globe today for the third-straight trading day after Trump announced the sweeping “Liberation Day” set of tariffs—imposed on nearly all of the world’s economies—that almost instantly remade the United States’ trading relationship with the rest of the world. He has said that Americans should expect short-term pain (“HANG TOUGH,” he declared on social media) as he attempts to make the U.S. economy less dependent on foreign-made goods.

The blowback has been extensive and relentless. Other nations have responded with retaliatory levies. Fears of a recession have spiked. CEOs, after panicking privately for days, are beginning to speak out. Most cable channels have been bathed in the red of graphs depicting plunging markets, the stock ticker in the corner falling ever downward. Even Fox News, which has downplayed the crisis, has begun carrying stories about the impact on Trump voters who are worried about shrinking retirement accounts and rising prices. GOP lawmakers, usually loath to cross the White House, are mulling trying to limit the president’s economic authority. Senator Ted Cruz worried that the tariffs will cause a 2026 midterms “bloodbath,” while seven other GOP senators, including Trump allies such as Chuck Grassley, signed on to a bipartisan bill that would require Congress to approve Trump’s steep tariffs on trading partners.

Trump has stayed committed to the tariffs, and he lashed out today on social media at wavering Republicans, declaring them “Weak and Stupid” and warning, “Don’t be a PANICAN,” while his staff promised a veto of the bipartisan bill.

Yet even within Trump’s administration, the president’s moves have caused widespread confusion about what he is trying to get out of the tariffs. Peter Navarro, one of the administration’s most influential voices on trade, wrote in the Financial Times , “This is not a negotiation. For the US, it is a national emergency triggered by trade deficits caused by a rigged system.” Just a short time later, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote on social media that he had been tasked by Trump to begin negotiations with Japan and that he looks “forward to our upcoming productive engagement regarding tariffs, non-tariff trade barriers, currency issues, and government subsidies.”

That public disconnect has brought private disagreements into the light, two of the White House officials and the other outside ally told me. Navarro and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller—who is perceived by many in Trump’s orbit as the most powerful aide on most issues—have embraced the idea that the tariffs should be permanent to erase trade deficits with other countries and even punish some nations, including China, for what the White House says are decades of unfair trade practices. Steve Bannon, the influential outside Trump adviser, has said on his podcast that bringing nations to the negotiating table is not enough and that the White House needs to insist that companies make commitments to bolster domestic manufacturing.

Bessent, a former hedge-fund manager who once worked for George Soros, has expressed some hesitancy behind closed doors about the tariffs, according to two of the White House officials. (The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) While stopping short of disagreeing with Trump, Bessent has tried in public interviews to soften the impact of the duties. Yesterday, he said on Meet the Press that “I see no reason that we have to price in a recession” and hinted that the tariffs could be temporary because a number of nations have already sought negotiations. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who to this point has been Trump’s most visible adviser, today posted a well-known video of the economist Milton Friedman touting free trade. That followed a weekend during which Musk took aim at Navarro, suggesting that his push for steep trade barriers is too extreme.

Trump himself hardly cleared up the inconsistent messaging when asked in the Oval Office this afternoon if the tariffs are a negotiating tool or are going to be permanent. “Well, they can both be true,” Trump said. “There can be permanent tariffs, and there can also be negotiations, because there are things that we need beyond tariffs.”

Earlier in the day, the confused messaging had a material impact on the markets: A social-media post misconstruing a comment by National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett to suggest that Trump might pause the tariffs for 90 days briefly sent markets upward. The White House clarified that no change in policy was planned, prompting markets to go back down.

That brief rally also seemed to reveal Wall Street’s wishful thinking that the president will soon back off the tariffs—the same sense of optimism that mistakenly led investors to hope before last week that Trump’s campaign rhetoric about tariffs was just a bluff or a negotiating tactic. In a lengthy social-media post yesterday, the hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, a staunch Trump supporter, wrote that the president needs to pause the tariffs or risk “a self-induced economic nuclear winter.”

[Annie Lowrey: Here are the places where the recession has already begun]

Many Republicans had hoped that Trump’s economic policy would focus on extending his 2017 tax cuts (which disproportionately helped businesses and the wealthy) while also tackling inflation. But although Trump has long possessed a flexible ideology, one of his few consistent principles, dating to at least the 1980s, is a belief in tariffs, even though many economists believe that tariffs are outdated and ineffective in an era of globalization.

Trump has done little to enact his campaign promise to bring down prices and has surprised some observers with his willingness to endanger his poll numbers by taking on such a risky tariff scheme. Although Trump is notorious for changing his mind on a whim, he is for now ignoring the complaints from business leaders and the warnings about the tariffs’ effect on his own voters.

There was another small marker recently of how Trump has changed from eight years ago. During his first administration, he regularly grew angry about any media coverage—particularly photographs—that portrayed him unflatteringly. Over the weekend, the front page of The Wall Street Journal carried a photo taken of Trump on Saturday, as he rode in the back of a vehicle wearing golf attire, waving, and talking on the phone, mouth open. The headline read: “Trump Heads to Golf Club Amid Tariff Turmoil.”

Yet Trump has not complained about the coverage, one of the White House officials told me. And he golfed again yesterday.

The Supreme Court is about to decide whether the Trump administration can exile Americans to a gulag overseas and then leave them there.

The Trump administration wants everyone to believe that the case challenging its deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s infamous Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, is about the government’s right to deport undocumented immigrants, or gang members, or terrorists. But it’s actually about whether the United States government can kidnap someone off the street and then maroon them, incommunicado, in a prison abroad with little hope of release. Human-rights groups have said that they have yet to find anyone freed from CECOT, and the Salvadoran government has previously said anyone imprisoned there will “never leave.”

Today, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to lift a federal-court order telling the administration to retrieve Abrego Garcia. This afternoon, Chief Justice John Roberts blocked the order temporarily, pending further decision. As my colleague Nick Miroff reported, the Trump administration acknowledged in court that Abrego Garcia was deported because of an “administrative error.” Abrego Garcia has been in the U.S. since he was 16, having fled El Salvador and come to the U.S. illegally after gangs threatened his family. He is married to an American citizen, and has a 5-year-old child. In 2019, a judge gave him a protected status known as “withdrawal of removal,” ordering the government not to send him back to El Salvador. The Trump administration has alleged that Abrego Garcia is a member of the gang MS-13, based on the word of a single anonymous informant six years ago, and the fact that Abrego Garcia was wearing Chicago Bulls attire.

[Adam Serwer: Trump’s Salvadoran gulag]

In its majority opinion rejecting the government’s argument, though, judges from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the record “shows that Abrego Garcia has no criminal history, in this country or anywhere else, and that Abrego Garcia is a gainfully employed family man who lives a law abiding and productive life,” and that “if the Government wanted to prove to the district court that Abrego Garcia was a ‘prominent’ member of MS-13, it has had ample opportunity to do so but has not—nor has it even bothered to try.” Abrego Garcia is not an exception—an analysis by CBS News found that three-quarters of the more than 200 men deported to El Salvador lacked criminal records.

Even though the Trump administration conceded that Abrego Garcia was deported by mistake, it is insisting that federal courts cannot order his return. “A judicial order that forces the Executive to engage with a foreign power in a certain way, let alone compel a certain action by a foreign sovereign, is constitutionally intolerable,” it said in a court filing. The implications of this argument may not be immediately obvious, but if federal courts cannot order the return of someone exiled to a foreign gulag by mistake, then the administration is free to exile citizens and then claim they did so in error, while leaving them to rot.

As the legal scholar Steve Vladeck wrote, “A world in which federal courts lacked the power to order the government to take every possible step to bring back to the United States individuals like Abrego Garcia is a world in which the government could send any of us to a Salvadoran prison without due process, claim that the misstep was a result of ‘administrative error,’ and thereby wash its hands of any responsibility for what happens next.” If the Trump administration prevails here, it could disappear anyone, even an American citizen. Several have already been swept up and detained in recent ICE raids. Whether you can imagine yourself in Abrego Garcia’s position or not, all of our fates are ultimately tied to his.

Deporting people without due process is what’s actually “constitutionally intolerable,” given that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee due process of law. Disappearing people off the street and exiling them is “constitutionally intolerable” for the same reasons. Sending people who have never been convicted of any crime to CECOT, a prison where advocates allege that inmates are routinely abused, may also be “constitutionally intolerable,” given the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. But whatever their constitutional status, all of these things should be morally intolerable to any decent human being.

[Read: An ‘administrative error’ sends a Maryland father to a Salvadoran prison]

This should be one of those cases in which the justices are unanimous. If the Constitution’s commitments to due process mean anything, they should mean that the government cannot send people to be imprisoned by a foreign nation without a shred of evidence that they’ve committed any crime. American “history and tradition” produced a system designed to reject arbitrary powers such as these, with the conscious fear that “parchment barriers” would provide little protection against an “overbearing majority” willing to violate rights. Nevertheless, I have little doubt that someone will try to argue that the Framers who wrote two due-process clauses into the Constitution actually loved disappearing people to foreign prisons.

“The facts of this case thus present the potential for a disturbing loophole: namely that the government could whisk individuals to foreign prisons in violation of court orders and then contend, invoking its Article II powers, that it is no longer their custodian, and there is nothing that can be done,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who was appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, wrote in his concurrence. “It takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness, one that courts cannot condone.”

This is eloquent and correct, but this lawlessness is happening precisely because the nation’s highest court condoned it in advance. The right-wing justices on the Roberts Court have repeatedly rewritten the Constitution to Donald Trump’s benefit, first by nullifying the anti-insurrection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, and then by inventing an imperial presidential immunity that is nowhere in the text of the document. It is no surprise that Trump is now acting as though he is above the law. After all, the Roberts Court all but granted him permission.

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/25857740

This is INSANE! Trump is asking the Supreme Court to bless his administration screwing up TO THE POINT THEY CEEDED CUSTODY OF A PERSON THEY DIDN’T HAVE LEGAL CUSTODY OVER and not require them to fix it?

If SCOTUS backs Trump here, literally all is lost. Due process will have NO MEANING if this isn’t fixed ASAP.

Remember, if they did it to this guy the only thing stopping them from doing it to you or me is dumb luck.

It’s arguably a waste of time to read Donald Trump’s books. In the first place, he didn’t write them; they weren’t even written by the same ghostwriter. His first three books, 1987’s The Art of the Deal, 1990’s Surviving at the Top (republished a year later as The Art of Survival, when Trump’s position could no longer be described as “at the top”), and 1997’s The Art of the Comeback, have three different authors standing in for the Donald: Tony Schwartz, Charles Leerhsen, and Kate Bohner.

Trump is also an inveterate liar, so there’s not much point in parsing the details of some triumphant deal as he recounts them: They have inevitably been altered to reflect favorably on him, so to try to figure out where he’s fudging is to engage in a useless and tedious fact-checking exercise. His Art of… books are works of advertisement—or, as we should say now with the benefit of hindsight, works of propaganda, the production of which is perhaps his main gift. And although these books are all nominally memoirs, Trump is not one for introspection, so we can’t hope to learn much about his inner depths, mostly because he has none: He’s a self-admittedly shallow person.

White House staffers, it seems, had better hope that they stay in Laura Loomer’s good graces. This week, Loomer—a far-right provocateur who has described herself as “pro–white nationalism” and Islam as a “cancer on humanity”—met with Donald Trump in the Oval Office. After she reportedly railed against National Security Council officials she believed were disloyal to the president, the White House fired six NSC staff members the next day. More firings could be on their way: Yesterday, a person close to the administration told my colleague Michael Scherer that “Loomer has been asked to put together a list of people at State who are not MAGA loyalists.”

Loomer doesn’t have an official job in the Trump administration, and the president has denied that she had anything to do with the NSC firings. But she is one of the president’s confidantes, and she has come to exercise a significant amount of influence over the White House. Lots of people in Trump’s inner circle have unlikely backgrounds (defense secretaries are not usually hired straight from Fox News), but Loomer’s is probably the least likely of them all.

Reasonable conclusions may be drawn from these facts. First, Trump’s national security cabinet commonly discusses secret information on insecure personal devices. Second, sophisticated adversaries such as Russia and China intercept such communications, especially those sent or received in their countries. Third, as a result, hostile intelligence services now probably possess blackmail material regarding these officials’ indiscreet past conversations on similar topics. Fourth, as a first-term Trump administration official and ex-CIA officer, I believe the reason these officials risk interacting in this way is to prevent their communications from being preserved as required by the Presidential Records Act, and avoid them being discoverable in litigation, or subject to a subpoena or Freedom of Information Act request. And fifth, no one seems to have feared being investigated by the justice department for what appears to be a violation of the Espionage Act’s Section 793(f), which makes gross negligence in mishandling classified information a felony; the FBI director, Kash Patel, and attorney general, Pam Bondi, quickly confirmed that hunch. Remarkably, the CIA director John Ratcliffe wouldn’t even admit to Congress that he and his colleagues had made a mistake.

Two sources familiar with the issue, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, told the AP of the Justice Department’s decision, including that it was made while President Joe Biden was still in office. The DOJ did not immediately respond to questions about confirming the AP report.

The development extends a multiyear string of legal victories vindicating the once-embattled Republican. It underscores Paxton’s durability through all manner of political, personal and legal troubles and helps burnish his reputation among the right wing of his party as a fighter who, like President Donald Trump, has defied numerous efforts by his detractors to take him down.

Ah, yes ... the party of law and order. I'd not mind him moving along, though I'm sure we'll get someone just as bad to replace him as AG.

It was hosted in the White House Rose Garden by ancient gameshow MC Donald Trump, who was accidentally wearing his indoors makeup outdoors. Like many, I’ve tried to mentally detach from the fact that we live in a time when the US defence secretary has a neck tattoo or whatever, but it makes me feel at least partially alive that the presidential paint job still occasionally retains the power to horrify. Trump leered his way through his tariff presentation while appearing to have been made up by the technique that provided the climax to Joe Wilkinson’s RNLI speech on Last One Laughing (If you saw it, you know). It’s not so much foundation any more as cosmetic bukkake.

archive.is link

Maine Democrats have put forward a proposal to no longer award the state’s Electoral College votes by congressional district if Republican-led Nebraska also switches to a winner-take-all system for presidential elections.

The bill from Rep. Adam Lee, D-Auburn, is the first piece of legislation here directly responding to the debate out of Nebraska, where Republicans initially tried but failed last year to advance a plan at the urging of President Donald Trump to switch to a winner-take-all system and leave Democratic-led Maine as the only state to award presidential electors by congressional district.

Nebraska lawmakers have revived that effort this year alongside a backup plan to ask voters to decide on making such a change by referendum. Trump and his allies have pushed the change to benefit Republican presidential candidates in Nebraska, which has not voted statewide for a Democratic candidate since 1964 but has given one of its five electoral votes to Democrats in recent elections from the Omaha-area 2nd Congressional District.

Maine became the first state under a 1969 law to award one Electoral College vote to the winner of each of its two congressional districts. The statewide winner gets the other two. Nebraska followed in 1991 in a bid to gain more campaign attention from presidential candidates.

The Trump/Musk regime is traumatizing the economy. It is abducting innocent people and deporting some without due process to a foreign torture prison. It is dismantling essential government agencies and purging good people who’ve served them well. It is extorting universities and law firms. It has upended our status in the world. It has attacked the rule of law.

And this weekend, there’s something you can do about it.

On Saturday, April 5, thousands – maybe even millions – of people will join together in cities and towns across the country in nonviolent protest.

It’s essential that you take part, if you can. Sign up now. Tell your neighbors. Tell your friends.

The event, called “Hands Off!”, was launched by Indivisible, but now has over 200 organizational partners including MoveOn, the Working Families Party, 50501, Common Cause, Public Citizen, the ACLU, and the AFL-CIO.

Waving a big chart as a prop in the White House Rose Garden, Donald Trump suggested his new tariff plan was simple: “Reciprocal – that means they do it to us, and we do it to them. Very simple. Can’t get simpler than that.”

Perhaps a bit too simple. The method used to calculate the most important numbers in international trade, politics and economics has left some of the world’s leading experts shocked.

For each country, the White House looked up its trade in goods deficit for 2024, then divided that by the total value of imports. Trump, to be “kind”, said he would, however, offer a discount, so halved that figure. The calculation was even distilled into a formula.

Before you downvote this post, the title is in fact the title of the Youtube video verbatim.

The man has an interesting theory for why Trump is creating this much chaos and disruption. It even kind of makes sense.

TL;DR: Trump - or rather, his Heritage Foundation handlers, Trump is much too dumb to come up with this on his own - wants to blow up the neoliberal view of the world and come back to a sort of Bretton-Woods world without the gold standard.

If that's the long-term plan, I might almost understand it, were it not for one critical factor: all this assumes that the ultimate bargaining power for the US is access to the US market - which currently is the largest in the world. But this assumes the cretinous tariffs don't kill it completely by creating another great depression - and that's a big assumption.

Anyhow, worth a watch.

A cautionary tale as Trump decides to do this again. I see no way around this being an engineered collapse given historical data. Essentially, if you think 2008 was bad, think more 1930.

The Trump administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE have begun dismantling the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), beginning with stated plan is to cut half of the agency’s workforce.

Their biggest cuts appear to be in the Large Business and International division, which audits wealthy individuals and companies with more than $10 million in assets. These are essentially the workers that make sure billionaires and corporations pay their taxes.

Musk and Trump claim to be sage businessmen, but it would be hard to find a business owner in America that would dismantle their accounts receivable department when their wealthiest clients still owe them money.

So make no mistake: These cuts will cost taxpayers a lot more than they save.