Politics

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28079748

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250411113426/https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/the-most-extraordinary-attack-on-voting-rights-in-american-history-how-the-save-act-upends-over-a-century-and-a-half-of-protecting-voting/

Some political observers hope that Trump single-handedly inflicting deep financial pain on the world might break the spell among his most ardent supporters. In this way, the tariffs are a reality test. But if the recent past is any guide, what many dismiss as bad-faith rhetoric can quickly harden into a core ideology for a set of true believers; the anti-vax movement and the subsequent measles outbreaks are a sobering analog. This is how breaks with reality occur now, aided, in part, by the internet’s justification machine, which is an efficient mechanism for dispelling any trace of cognitive dissonance. In some cases, falling down the conspiratorial rabbit hole is motivated by grievance—my enemies hate this, therefore it must be good. And any market bounce-back after Trump’s announcement of a 90-day pause will be taken by true believers as evidence of the president’s genius (see: Bill Ackman).

Some Trump supporters are also worried about their reputations. For many outspoken VCs, backing Trump was a bet, much like investing in a portfolio company—one that came with substantial risk. Should Trump’s tariff scheme backfire completely by causing a recession or worse, their reputations as risk managers and complex-systems thinkers would naturally be tarnished (see: Bill Ackman). Unless, of course, they chose to double down and create a fictional narrative in which they cannot be wrong. The truthers are, in essence, talking up their reputational investment —as if the Trump administration was a stock they were holding. As Trump himself has proved throughout his political career, it is often easier to double down and build a fantasy world around your mistake than to admit you were wrong.

For now, it seems as if the president’s economy-nuking bad math was somehow too stupid to implement, even for this uniquely depraved administration.

“I can breathe now… But everything could change tomorrow,” one big Trump and GOP donor says, days after telling Rolling Stone: “I don’t know if I would be this worried about what will happen to the economy if Bernie fucking Sanders were president. That’s how bad this is.”

In fact, mere hours before the president cried “PAUSE,” an array of Trump advisers and close associates were watching through splayed fingers, unsure if catastrophe and collapse were waiting around the next news cycle.

“I am cautiously optimistic about the future. But I’m scared to death right now,” Art Laffer, a well-known Reaganite economist who remains an informal adviser to Trump, said in a phone interview Wednesday morning. “I am a wuss. I really don’t like taking things to the brink,” he said, explaining that Trump was “doing something I never would do, because I’m a chicken, and he’s not. It frightens me, but can I say he’s wrong? I don’t know.”

When Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, went looking for someone to head the National Counterterrorism Center, she landed on Joe Kent, a former Green Beret, past CIA officer, and twice-failed MAGA congressional candidate in Washington state, who, as the Associated Press reported, “stands out for the breadth of his ties to a deep-seated extremist fringe.” During his first campaign in 2022, Kent consulted with white nationalist Nick Fuentes on social-media strategy. He also had a member of the Proud Boys on his campaign staff, and he embraced as a supporter and ally Joey Gibson, the leader of Patriot Prayer, a Christian nationalist group.

But his associations with far-right extremists began prior to his attempt to win a congressional seat. In 2020, Kent helped boost the organizing message of a new right-wing paramilitary outfit that called itself the 1st Amendment Praetorian.

On September 20, 2020, Robert Patrick Lewis, a former Green Beret and QAnon supporter, posted a long thread on Twitter (now X) that announced the formation of the group. Lewis declared that a band of “military, law enforcement & intel community veterans” had come together to protect the First Amendment rights of conservatives. He presented a harsh, conspiratorial, and paranoid view, claiming, “There are Marxist & leftist politicians aiming to lock down total control over our populace.” He asserted, “Their tyrannical, Marxist subversive groups such as ANTIFA & BLM demand total subservience to and adulation of their specific view of the world.” And he maintained the “corrupted Main Stream Media does their best to tarnish the reputation and destroy the lives of any public or private citizen who dares step up to them or fight back against their narrative.”

Lewis called on “military, law enforcement or intelligence community” veterans to join 1AP and fight back. In an apparent sign of support, Kent reposted this thread.

Lewis noted that 1AP would be providing security services for right-wing rallies and marches, including those “with a large number of high-profile, conservative VIPs speaking & attending.” For one event, he said he needed veterans to provide “physical security, intelligence/surveillance and to serve as team leaders for small security & intelligence and intelligence cells.” He promised, “we will keep your names confidential and our personnel records & communications will be encrypted.” He added, “This group was formed to protect attendees at President Trump’s campaign rallies.”

Soon after forming 1Ap, Lewis presented it not only as a security service for the right but as an intelligence operation. He told Fox News, “Our intelligence shows that no matter who wins the election, they [Antifa] are planning a massive ‘Antifa Tet Offensive,’ bent on destroying the global order they are not beholden to any one party. Their sole purpose is to create havoc, fear, and intimidation.” (No such uprising occurred.) After the election, 1AP claimed it was collecting evidence of fraud. On January 6, as the riot began at the Capitol, Lewis tweeted, “Today is the day the true battles begin.” (He later said he was at the Willard Hotel, not Capitol Hill, that day.)

Lewis’ 1AP did provide security at various events featuring far-right extremists. According to the final report of the House January 6 committee, during a December 12, 2020, rally of pro-Trump election deniers in Washington, DC, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, a right-wing, anti-government militia, “coordinated” with 1AP “to guard VIPs, including retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne.” (Both Flynn and Byrne were prominent promoters of the crackpot conspiracy theory holding that the 2020 election was stolen form Trump.) Months later, Lewis and 1AP provided security at a QAnon conference in Dallas, where Flynn essentially called for a military coup in the United States.

On social media, Kent has often boosted posts from Lewis. At one point each complimented the other for a podcast appearance. When Kent ran for Congress, Lewis expressed his support for him on social media. In a 2022 Telegram post, Lewis said that he knew Kent “personally” and “wish I could personally vote for him.” In January, 1AP posted on Telegram that there were “mumblings” that Kent could be appointed to lead the National Counterterrorism Center and that this “would be a very good thing. I could not support this more strongly.”

Mother Jones sent Kent, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Counterterrorism Center a list of questions about Kent’s support for 1AP and his relationship with Lewis. Neither Kent nor the agencies responded.

Kent has an established record as an extremist and promoter of conspiracy theories. During his 2022 run, he called for charging Dr. Anthony Fauci with murder to hold him “accountable” for the “scam that is Covid.” He promoted Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was rigged against him. He backed the idea the January 6 riot was orchestrated by the Deep State to discredit Trump and his supporters. He referred to the J6 rioters as “political prisoners.” He pushed the notion that billionaire Bill Gates was seeking to “control the food supply” and “control housing” to force people to “live in the pod eat the bugs.”

Like Gabbard, Kent has no experience in leading a large intelligence organization. (After serving in the Army, he was a field operative for the CIA for a short time.) Both Kent and Gabbard were on the infamous Signalgate chat. As head of the NCTC, Kent will have the responsibility for monitoring and preventing both foreign and domestic terrorism. But his past as a conspiracy theorist and his association with far-right extremists raise questions about his analytical abilities and his capacity to assess threats of domestic terrorism that arise from the right. His association with 1AP and Lewis is just one more reason to wonder about his judgment.

Perhaps

Just two months into Donald Trump’s second term, Wall Street is unnerved. Julia Coronado, the president and co-founder of the economic consulting firm MacroPolicy Perspectives, said that’s because investors and executives had convinced themselves that Trump wouldn’t do anything significant to disrupt the market’s upward trajectory.

“We had a pretty great setup for Trump,” Coronado said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine, paraphrasing the thinking on the Street. “Why would he mess with that?”

Coronado, a former Federal Reserve economist who’s held top roles at BNP Paribas and the hedge fund Graham Capital Management, is a widely sought after economic consultant whose clients include asset managers, hedge funds and banks. I spoke with Coronado as she drove to the University of Texas at Austin, where she’s a clinical associate professor of finance at the McCombs School of Business.

Wall Street craves predictability, but Trump’s early priorities — including off-and-on tariffs, government cutbacks and immigration crackdowns — signal that this time around, the president has a much stronger appetite for disruption. He has refused to rule out a possible recession even after markets convulsed following a series of major tariff announcements.

Inscribed above the front entrance of the U.S. Supreme Court is a simple, four-word inscription: Equal justice under law. The phrase doesn’t require a great deal of explanation, but it does require fortification. At the moment, the nation has a president who cares deeply about due process for himself but wants to strip it from others.

Last night, the Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to continue deporting people under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. The ruling is narrow—the unsigned majority concluded that challenges to removal should be brought in Texas, where detainees are held, and not in Washington, D.C., where a judge had temporarily blocked deportations. Importantly, the majority rejected the administration’s argument about how court approval applies. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion that “all nine Members of the Court agree that judicial review is available. The only question is where that judicial review should occur.”

But as my colleague Adam Serwer writes, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in a dissent that this distinction was only somewhat meaningful: “Individuals who are unable to secure counsel, or who cannot timely appeal an adverse judgment … face the prospect of removal directly into the perilous conditions” at a notorious Salvadoran prison. In a sense, the majority is hiding behind a small point of process—a jurisdictional one—at the risk of undermining a much more important process question, which is whether people dubiously accused of being gang members have any recourse before being sent into hellish conditions abroad.

The Court’s affirmation of the right to judicial review is somewhat reassuring, but on the same day, Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily lifted an order in a separate case for the executive branch to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States. Abrego Garcia, as my colleague Nick Miroff reported, is a Maryland man who was living in the United States legally, has not been charged with any crime, and yet was arrested and sent to El Salvador. His lawyers called the situation “Kafka-esque,” and though that term is overused, here it is appropriate. The administration acknowledges that Abrego Garcia’s removal was a mistake, but it says it can’t do anything to remedy that mistake, because he’s now in Salvadoran custody. Put differently, the argument is that the government’s error means Abrego Garcia has no right to due process—which is a right that belongs to citizens and noncitizens alike. Although he is not a citizen, U.S. citizens have allegedly been mistakenly deported in previous administrations. By this administration's logic, a citizen wrongly deported now could find themselves without legal recourse.

The Trump administration’s attempt to deny due process is especially galling because the man who leads it has benefited from—some might say exploited—his own right to due process so extensively and so recently. Starting in 2023, Donald Trump faced a slew of felony charges related to his attempts to subvert the 2020 election and his hoarding of highly sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago. These were widely recognized as the most politically hazardous charges against him, as opposed to the more complicated New York State case that produced convictions on 34 felony counts.

But Trump never faced a trial for the election-subversion or document-mishandling charges, because he and his lawyers cleverly used due-process protections to drag the cases out. In the federal election-subversion case, Trump’s team tried to get the judge in the case disqualified, and though they were unsuccessful, this delayed proceedings. The attorneys then took a long-shot argument about presidential immunity all the way to the Supreme Court, where they won a partial victory and used up even more time. Special Counsel Jack Smith simply re-charged Trump, but ran out of time for a trial before the election. The indictment was dropped after Trump won, in deference to Justice Department guidelines that prevent the prosecution of a sitting president; he would have killed the charges once he took office anyway.

In the documents case, Trump filed multiple requests and repeatedly won favorable and erratic rulings from Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he’d appointed to the bench, culminating in her ruling Smith’s appointment unconstitutional. That case was under appeal when Trump won election, and Trump was thus dropped from it. In Fulton County, Georgia, challenges to District Attorney Fani Willis’s leadership of Trump’s prosecution extended the case past the election; it remains in limbo today.

Although Trump moaned endlessly about being unfairly persecuted, his success in these arguments was evidence to the contrary: Trump exercised his right to challenge the process. (He also had the advantage of deep pockets and time to pursue these appeals.) Some people may view the decisions delaying Trump’s trials as perversions of the law, or as rulings that honor the letter of the law at the expense of its spirit. But the American justice system is built to err on the side of fairness rather than of depriving people of rights.

Trump does not care about that balance where people other than himself are concerned. Whether this is in spite of his own experience or because of it is a question for a psychologist. Whether everyone will continue to enjoy the constitutional protections Trump did, however, is a question for the Supreme Court justices. They should be able to find the answer by looking up on their way into work.

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.

The U.S. Supreme Court blocked on Tuesday a judge's order for President Donald Trump's administration to rehire thousands of fired employees, acting in a dispute over his effort to slash the federal workforce and dismantle parts of the government.

The court put on hold San Francisco-based U.S. Judge William Alsup's March 13 injunction requiring six federal agencies to reinstate thousands of recently hired probationary employees while litigation challenging the legality of the dismissals continues.

As countries debate how to respond, the pain threshold that might matter most is not Trump’s but that of his fellow Republicans, especially those in Congress who have the ability to stop and reverse these tariffs. At what point will they feel enough pressure from their voters, with their dwindling savings, to move against the president?

Even if that day comes sooner than expected, one thing is for certain: One of the biggest costs of Trump’s trade war is the trust of other countries in America as a stable, reliable pillar of global trade.

For a few short years during and after the Civil War, the United States imposed its first tax on income to help fund the massive costs of the war. Placed on relatively high incomes but only collecting a modest percentage, it was cast as both a way to generate needed revenue and a way to maintain fairness.

Yes, that’s right, one of the chief selling points of taxing income was that it was a way of achieving “equity” in the burdens of the war. Responding to allegations that only poor men were fighting and dying, President Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party made sure the law required that the taxes people paid would be publicly disclosed. Unsurprisingly, the wealthy men of the dawning Gilded Age did not like seeing their tax information in the pages of The New York Times. Wealthy interests forced a repeal of the income tax in 1871, and the federal government returned to funding itself with proceeds from user fees and tariffs.

Efforts to rein in the rich persisted, however. Congress moved in 1894 to reintroduce an income tax. The populist Kansan politician William Jennings Bryan gave a famous speech on the floor of Congress. Responding to the argument that the wealthy would leave America if they had to pay such a tax, then proposed as 2% on the top incomes, he said:

“Of all the mean men I have ever known, I have never known one so mean that I would be willing to say of him that his patriotism was less than 2 per cent deep. … If ‘some of our best people’ prefer to leave the country rather than pay a tax of 2 per cent, God pity the worst.”

It's hilarious that the rich were screaming about a 2% income tax.

As always, Steve Reich is informative and interesting to listen to.

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.

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.