Lazy Caturday Reads: America Has Gone Mad
Posted: April 5, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, U.S. Economy | Tags: destruction of scientific research, Hands Off rallies, insanity, polls, Stock Market, tariffs, Trump decision-making |
By Linda Benton
Good Afternoon!!
The news is mostly awful today. If you think too much about what is happening, you’ll sink into depression and despair. I heard a woman on TV (I can’t remember her name, unfortunately) argue that Trump wants to return to the world of his childhood–the 1950s. But there is simply no way to do that. We are no longer an industrial society and we aren’t going to return to being one. We are no longer a segregated society either. Trump can’t rid public life of Black people, women, and immigrants. It’s not going to happen. But he is going to keep trying, because he is certifiably insane. The Republicans could stop him but they won’t, because they are terrified and they are cowards.
I’m going to begin with one bit of good news. Today, Americans with gather to fight back against Trump and Musk and their efforts to destroy our government and turn most of us into serfs.
AP: ‘Hands Off!’ protests against Trump and Musk are planned across the US.
Opponents of President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk plan to rally across the U.S. on Saturday to protest the administration’s actions on government downsizing, the economy, human rights and other issues.
More than 1,200 “Hands Off!” demonstrations have been planned by more than 150 groups, including civil rights organizations, labor unions, LBGTQ+ advocates, veterans and elections activists. The protests are planned for the National Mall in Washington, D.C., state capitols and other locations in all 50 states.
Protesters are assailing the Trump administration’s moves to fire thousands of federal workers, close Social Security Administration field offices, effectively shutter entire agencies, deport immigrants, scale back protections for transgender people and cut federal funding for health programs.
Musk, a Trump adviser who owns Tesla, SpaceX and the social media platform X, has played a key role in government downsizing as the head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. He says he is saving taxpayers billions of dollars.
Asked about the protests, the White House said in a statement that “President Trump’s position is clear: he will always protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for eligible beneficiaries. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ stance is giving Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare benefits to illegal aliens, which will bankrupt these programs and crush American seniors.”
No, asshole. That’s not “Democrat’s stance.”
Before I get going with the rest of today’s news, I want to highlight this piece by JV Last at The Bulwark from a couple of days ago: The American Age Is Over. The United States commits imperial suicide.
Fittingly, it was the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who declared the official time of death.
“The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. The system of global trade anchored on the United States, that Canada has relied on since the end of the Second World War—a system that, while not perfect, has helped to deliver prosperity for our country for decades—is over.
Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over.
The eighty-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership—when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect, and championed the free and open exchange of good and services—is over.
While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.”
By Stephanie Lambourne
And just like that, the age of American empire, the great Pax Americana, ended.
We cannot overstate what has just happened. It took just 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the American economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order.
He did this with the enthusiastic support of the entire Republican party and conservative movement.
He did it with the support of a plurality of American voters.
He did not hide his intentions. He campaigned on them. He made them the central thrust of his election. He told Americans that he would betray our allies and give up our leadership position in the world.
There are only three possible explanations as to why Americans voted for this man:
- they wanted what he promised;
- they didn’t believe what he promised; or
- they didn’t understand what he promised.
Pick whichever rationale you want, because it doesn’t matter. Whatever the reason was, it exposed half of the electorate—the 77 million people who voted for Trump—as either fundamentally unserious, decadent, or weak.
And no empire can survive the degeneration of its people….
If, tomorrow, Donald Trump revoked his entire regime of tariffs, it would not matter. It might temporarily delay some economic pain, but the rest of the world now understands that it must move forward without America.
If, tomorrow, Donald Trump abandoned his quest to annex Greenland and committed himself to the defense of Ukraine and the perpetuation of NATO, it would not matter. The free world now understands that its long-term security plans must be made with the understanding that America is a potential adversary, not an ally.
This realization may be painful for Americans. But we should know that the rest of the world understands us more clearly than we understand ourselves.
Vladimir Putin bet his life that American voters would be weak and decadent enough to return Donald Trump to the presidency. He was right.
Please go read the rest at The Bulwark link.
This week, Trump took a wrecking ball to the U.S. economy.
Stephen Rattner at the New York Times: I Watch the Markets for a Living. This Week, Everything Changed.
In the past, the one constituency President Trump has sometimes listened to has been our stock market. Well, it has spoken, falling 10.5 percent in one of the largest two-day stock market swoons in decades.
In the 50 years I have been immersed in markets and economic policy, I have never before witnessed a signature economic policy initiative that was met with such unalloyed criticism. What’s worse, the damage was entirely self-inflicted.
By Stephanie Lambourne
Why such a reaction? One reason the S&P 500 fell was that the tariffs Mr. Trump rolled out were so much greater than investors anticipated. (Give the White House an F for failing to prepare the market for what to expect.) Then on Friday, China announced its own 34 percent tariff on our goods, making it clear that our trading partners were not going to simply give in to Mr. Trump’s demands, as he had suggested they would.
As Mr. Trump was doubling down, asserting that “my policies will never change,” the Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, was delivering his own bombshell: Given the higher-than-predicted tariffs, higher inflation and slower growth were likely to ensue, he said. That’s drastically different from just a couple of weeks ago, when Mr. Powell called the potential impact of new tariffs on prices “transitory.”
The business community, which by my count heavily supported Mr. Trump in the election five months ago, seems stunned. Few have spoken publicly, but the Business Roundtable, the premier corporate trade association, on Wednesday warned that universal tariffs run “the risk of causing major harm to American manufacturers, workers, families and exporters.”
Privately, several chief executives told me that they recognized that imposing the tariffs, as well as Mr. Trump’s intractable support of them, was a potentially cataclysmic mistake. “Few of us ever imagined he would go this far,” one told me. “He could well bring down the economy and himself.”
A bit more:
The Trump-supporting business leaders I’ve spoken to in the last two days don’t yet regret their votes, mostly because of their intense distaste (if not hatred) for the Biden-Harris administration. And they remain broadly supportive of the efforts by the tech billionaire Elon Musk to reform the federal government, even if they acknowledge that his DOGE team may be going too far in its slashing of spending and personnel.
But I wonder how some other major Trump-supporting leaders whose stock prices have been particularly hard hit now feel, like Stephen Schwarzman, chief executive of Blackstone, the investment group (down 15 percent in two days), and Safra Catz, chief executive of Oracle, the database company (down 12 percent).
Mr. Trump’s actions aren’t the only problem. Almost as important is the lack of clarity as to what policies he is pursuing and why. At times, Mr. Trump implies that the purpose of the tariffs is to bring back manufacturing, which suggests that they will stay in place indefinitely. At other times, he suggests that the goal is to negotiate tariff reductions by other countries (even though much of what Mr. Trump asserts about their tariffs is inaccurate).
The dithering takes a real toll. I see this from my role as a professional investor. How do we evaluate a company that imports goods or engages in international commerce? We seek a lower price, or we grit our teeth, or we pass on the opportunity. As a result, our pace of investing has slowed sharply this year.
And it’s not just us. In the year’s first quarter, the number of newly announced mergers and acquisitions dropped to its lowest level since the financial crisis. “Folks are looking but not pulling the trigger,” one leading investment banker told me. Equity offerings have become similarly challenged; multiple companies planning to go public have postponed their fund-raising since Wednesday.
Aaron Zitner at The Wall Street Journal: Americans Were Souring on Trump’s Economic Plans Even Before Tariff Bloodbath.
Americans elected Donald Trump with a favorable opinion of his economic plans. But his expansive push for tariffs has helped turn that confidence into skepticism, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds.
Tepid support for tariffs through the past year has become disapproval, with 54% of voters opposing Trump’s levies on imported goods, 12 points more than those who support his plans. Three quarters of voters say that tariffs will raise prices on the things they buy, up from 68% who said so in January.
By Lucy Almay Bird
The Journal survey was conducted from March 27 through April 1, when Trump had imposed new tariffs on China and certain goods from Canada, Mexico and elsewhere, but before his announcement Wednesday of a sweeping program of levies on nearly all U.S. trading partners. That announcement shocked America’s trading partners and on Thursday prompted the biggest selloff of U.S. stocks since the early days of the Covid pandemic in 2020. The selloff deepened Friday.
The poll suggests that a president who promised that “tariffs are about making America rich again” is facing unease with his economic leadership, especially over rising prices, the issue that bedeviled Democrats in last year’s election. By 15 percentage points, more voters hold a negative view of Trump’s handling of inflation than a positive one. Negative views of his economic stewardship outweigh positive views by 8 points….
That is a substantial change from late October, when voters by a 10-point margin said they favored rather than opposed Trump’s economic plans. The negative view of tariffs contrasts with earlier Journal surveys that found voters keeping an open mind. In both January and August, before Trump took office and his tariff program became concrete, Journal polls found voters mildly supportive of import levies as a general proposition.
The survey finds the president’s political standing to be resilient in many ways. Some 93% of voters who backed him in November give him favorable job reviews now, suggesting that few are regretting their vote. Majorities approve of his handling of immigration and border security….
Still, the survey shows the political gamble Trump has taken by using America’s muscle to try to reshape the global trading system. Voters are evenly split on whether they believe Trump’s promise that short-term economic “disruption” caused by tariffs, as he put it, will help American workers and companies by forcing other nations to lower their own trade barriers and prompting manufacturers to make more goods in the U.S.
I don’t know how people who aren’t super-rich can support what Trump is doing. I have to believe that these people are either stupid or not paying attention.
On Trump’s Insanity:
Daniel Drezner at Drezner’s World: There Are No Adults in the Room.
On Thursday, as the stock market nosedived from the Trump administration’s stupid, unthinking, destructive, error-ridden tariff policies, a respected reporter from a well-known media outlet pinged me for an interview. The journalist was interested in the roles that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick might have played in the formulation of Trump’s foreign economic policy.
Sardines, by Jennifer Pease
As we started talking, I realized that the reporter and I were starting from rather different premises. The reporter was thinking about the story as how one would cover a significant policy pronouncement in a normal administration: Who is the president listening to on policy? What are the possible faultlines within the administration? Who are the key power brokers? What was their decision-making process?
And I was thinking: there was no process. There are no power brokers. On questions of trade, there’s Donald Trump’s whims, his collection of clown car enablers, and maybe an intern who plugs some things into ChatGPT. That’s pretty much it.
I know why both of us were thinking the way we were. For reporters, looking for power brokers makes sense even when even when the policies themselves seem inexplicable. Bad policy outcomes can nonetheless be explained by rational actors pursuing their interests. Maybe it’s the result of powerful interest groups pushing their narrow interests. On occasion, bureaucratic politics are responsible. Sometimes bad policies are the result of powerful ideas that percolate within particular groups — you know, ideas like “risk assessment is bad” or “democracy is overrated.” This is slightly more unusual but it’s certainly conceivable….
As someone who has studied Donald Trump’s decision-making style at great length, however, I come at questions about Trump’s second-term advisors from a different perspective. The key to understanding Trump’s second term is to understand three basic premises:
- Trump has eliminated all executive branch guardrails;
- Trump has appointed only sycophants to serve him this time around;
- Trump’s policy instincts are the most immature, retrograde opinions out there.
Drezner refers readers to this Washington Post story by Natalie Allison, Jeff Stein, Cat Zakrzewski, and Michael Birnbaum: Inside President Trump’s whirlwind decision to upend global trade.
Not long after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the administration’s economic staff went to work on a daunting task: determining tariff rates for dozens of countries to fulfill the president’s campaign pledge of imposing “reciprocal” trade barriers.
After weeks of work, aides from several government agencies produced a menu of options meant to account for a wide range of trading practices, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Instead, Trump personally selected a formula that was based on two simple variables — the trade deficit with each country and the total value of its U.S. exports, said two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount internal talks. While precisely who proposed that option remains unclear, it bears some striking similarities to a methodology published during Trump’s first administration by Peter Navarro, now the president’s hard-charging economic adviser. After its debut in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, the crude math drew mockery from economists as Trump’s new global trade war prompted a sharp drop in markets.
The president’s decision to impose tariffs on trillions of dollars of goods reflects two key factors animating his second term in office: his resolve to follow his own instincts even if it means bucking long-standing checks on the U.S. presidency, and his choice of a senior team that enables his defiance of those checks.
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. Trump has long characterized import duties as necessary to revive the U.S. economy, at one point calling tariffs “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.”
There simply isn’t any method to his madness.
At Liberal Currents, Alan Elrod writes about Trump and RFK Jr. destroying American scientific research: You’re Not Crazy. America Has Gone Mad.
“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”
This is an oft-quoted passage from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. And it’s one that has proven especially popular in the years since the rise of Trump and explosion of global authoritarianism.
Sanctuary, Lucy Almay Bird
I open with it here because I want to offer an extended reflection on what it feels like to be trapped inside the sort of madhouse she describes. Because I think sheer insanity now rules America. We have gone mad, and the consequence is that sanity now feels itself like a disorder.
We aren’t the first society to come unglued. We almost certainly will not be the last. But right now, each day in America for those of us who do not favor the president or hold to the MAGA worldview feels like we have been sent to some dilapidated asylum by mistake, like the protagonist of a pulp thriller.
Nothing is working as it should. No one is speaking in sentences that add up to anything sensible.
We are throwing the most advanced health science research system into the sea and have turned over our public health infrastructure to quacks and crooks. We are destroying our prosperity to sate the president’s desire to play at 19th century political economy. We are blithely ignoring the potential for war with former allies as Trump crows about annexing Canada and Greenland.
In a rational world, we would already have seen markets balk at Trump’s trade policies, investigations into the mismanagement of our health services, and impeachment proceedings against a man who continues to menace treaty allies for nothing but personal ego.
But it isn’t a rational world, at least not this American corner of it. And so I want to explore madness as the ordering principle of American life by looking at some of the key sites of breakdown. There is nothing curative in this essay, but diagnosis is a first step. And our symptoms are many.
On RFK Jr.’s wrecking ball:
How did a man who admitted he has brain damage from a worm and who has spent decades spreading deadly disinformation about the efficacy of modern medicine become the head of our nation’s health services?
RFK Jr. has done what we all knew he would do. On Tuesday, mass layoffs gutted HHS, threatening everything from the CDC to the FDA to programs like Meals on Wheels.
These are moves that will make Americans less safe and healthy. Our food will be more dangerous. Diseases we might have cured in the not-so-distant future will go under-researched for years. Loved ones will get sick and die. And medicine that should have been available will be stuck in an understaffed and underfunded regulatory pipeline.
Before this, he had already driven out some of HHS’s top scientists, who have warned about the damage his views on healthcare and medical research will do. Under his watch, measles has killed two Americans, and numerous children have been diagnosed with Vitamin A toxicity after their parents followed Kennedy’s recommendation that it be used as a treatment.
Kennedy’s beliefs on medicine and health are bizarre, conspiratorial, and, in some cases, simply hateful.
Read specific examples at the link.
More stories to check out today:
Politico: ‘Everyone is terrified’: Business and government officials are afraid to cross Trump on tariffs.
The New York Times: Senate Approves G.O.P. Budget Plan After Overnight Vote-a-Thon.
The Guardian: I was a British tourist trying to leave America. Then I was detained, shackled and sent to an immigration detention centre.
The New York Times: Trump Weakens U.S. Cyberdefenses at a Moment of Rising Danger.
Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Obama’s Blistering New Takedown of Trump Gives Dems a Way Forward.
The New York Times: These Are the 381 Books Removed From the Naval Academy Library.
Politico: RFK Jr. said HHS would rehire thousands of fired workers. That wasn’t true.
That’s all I have for you today. What’s on your mind?
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Catherine Bouris at The Daily Beast: Axed Vaccine Chief Reveals RFK Jr.’s Crackpot ‘Data’ Demands.
Dr. Peter Marks, a top vaccine chief at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) who tendered his resignation last week, has revealed some of the demands made by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that made his position untenable.
Marks quit his job as director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research last week after being told that if he did not resign, he would be fired. He had been in his post since 2016, and played a key role in overseeing the development and regulation of vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking to The Wall Street Journalahead of his last day in the role on Saturday, Marks revealed that Kennedy’s team sought nonexistent data that they could use to justify the anti-vaccine narratives Kennedy has become known for.
Marks told the paper, “I can never give allegiance to anyone else other than to follow the science as we see it. That does not mean that I can just roll over and take conspiracy theories and justify them.”
Marks described Kennedy’s tenure thus far as “very scary” and expressed concern about the decision to fire so many employees, telling the Journal, “They broke something without real plans to fix it, because the people who were doing the breaking didn’t have any idea.”
He continued, “They took the place apart without having an instruction manual of how to put it back together.”
The New York Times: Why Measles Outbreaks May Be the New Normal.
As the Trump administration moves to dismantle international public health safeguards, pull funding from local health departments and legitimize health misinformation, some experts now fear that the country is setting the stage for a long-term measles resurgence.
If federal health officials do not change course, large multistate outbreaks like the one that has torn through West Texas, jumping to neighboring states and killing two people, may become the norm.
“We have really opened the door for this virus to come back,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In order for an outbreak to occur in the United States, the virus must first be imported into the country, and it must reach a large, unvaccinated population.
Recent events have made both conditions seem increasingly likely, said Dr. William Moss, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Efforts to control the spread of measles internationally have been disrupted by the Trump administration’s recent decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization, which runs a network of more than 700 laboratories that track measles cases in 164 countries.
Ali Breland at The Atlantic (gift link): Laura Loomer is a Warning.
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. Over the past decade, she has earned a reputation as an unapologetically racist troll. In 2018, after she was banned from Twitter for criticizing then-incoming Representative Ilhan Omar and her Muslim faith, she famously handcuffed herself to the door of Twitter’s New York City headquarters. She was reinstated after Elon Musk bought the platform, and has continued to post racist things on X: In September, she suggested that a Kamala Harris election win would mean that “the White House will smell like curry.” (Loomer did not respond to a request for comment.)
Loomer’s power marks how little Trump now seems to care about being around people who have expressed racist and extremist ideas and kept racist and extremist company. She is a bit like the Forrest Gump of Trumpworld—an unlikely but persistent character who just keeps popping up during some of the right’s biggest moments. When Trump got off his private plane on his way to the presidential debate in September, Loomer appeared with him. The next day, when Trump traveled to New York for a 9/11-anniversary memorial, Loomer was again there with him. (She has called 9/11 an “inside job.”) As I wrote at the time, prominent Republicans did not like that their presidential candidate was associating himself with Loomer, and publicly challenged Trump over it. He seemingly has not listened.
It seems the only access to the White House these days is for the insane, those surrendering and the usual countries that are bad actors. And he’s just off golfing like everything is normal.
This is a Saturday! We should be reading your nice Caturday reads! Thank you for the information. It’s necessary and you’ve done a great job with all this crap!!!
I was really looking forward to going to the protests happening now but I just have been so out of it since all those tests on Wednesday I can’t even take Temple on very long walks.
I never miss a good protest!
Anyway, it’s going to take a lot of work and time to correct this damage. I hate to see him be able to use these tariffs to blackmail corporations. He’s already doing a number of law firms. I just hope our Judiciary holds up and that some how these protests and recent elections force the House into action. He shouldn’t be able to just declare an economic emergency and do this. Congress is not doing it’s job at all.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/apr/3/sen-chris-murphy-rips-trump-using-tariffs-gain-fealty-private/
“Sen. Chris Murphy rips Trump for using tariffs to gain fealty from private industry
With the world assessing the fiscal fallout from President Trump’s bold tariff plans, Sen. Chris Murphy is bashing him by saying the levies aren’t about economics at all.
Rather, the Connecticut Democrat says Mr. Trump’s plan should be viewed as a political tool to win loyalty from industrial sectors.
In a lengthy thread on X, he said the president will use potential relief from the tariffs to gain fealty from private industry.
“Independent industry has power. The tariffs are Trump’s tool to erode that independence,” Mr. Murphy wrote on X. “Now, one by one, every industry or company will need to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief.”
Mr. Trump announced a 10% baseline tariff on all imports, plus higher, reciprocal levies on dozens of nations that impose expensive barriers on U.S. goods entering their countries.
Mr. Murphy, a constant Trump antagonist, likened the tariffs to the president’s drive to punish law firms and universities whose policies and practices run afoul of his agenda or amount to “lawfare” against him. Some lawyers and universities are pushing back, while others have been conciliatory toward the White House and struck deals to lessen the pain.
“The tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship. Why? So that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry,” Mr. Murphy wrote. “As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears.” “
Manipulating private industry – that makes sense. Even if it wasn’t Dump’s initial intention, he’d be sure to sniff it out eventually. Taking advantage of people and situations is baked into his sleazy paranoid personality.
And about American voters wanting him – I think something like 40% of eligible voters stayed home? I could be wrong. Doesn’t absolve us of the fact he’s back of course.
Enheduanna – mad as hell