Drew this last Sunday, envisioning a trump renovation of the Lincoln Memorial as he “cleans up” DC. Wake up to find South Park had the same idea. Should have posted it sooner. John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I have to admit that my heroes have always been Nobel Prize Winners in Economics. Between hearing family stories about living through the Great Depression and my own experience of inflation and stagflation, I just totally fell into my economics major. It was practical, scientific, and consensus-seeking. I have an early copy of Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Moneythat was my father’s economic textbook after the War. I also have my own copy of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. As a Financial Economist, I have strong roots as a monetarist.
As I reached out to study Trade Theory in search of what all countries needed in place to have a stable, growing economy and financial system, I became drawn to Paul Krugman. The headline up top is straight from him. This year, I’ve watched just about everything we’ve learned since the Great Depression on how to stabilize and grow an economy, from all these wise people, being thrown to the wind. I’m opening with the current Krugman critique of the “craziness.” It will be followed by some excellent analysis of what’s passing as policy these days, which is anything but a market economy. You can make a good case that we are moving in the direction of a Soviet-style command and Control system and heading straight into a Maoist one. This is how our regime rolls these days, and as Krugman says, it’s crazy.
I start with Thor Benson’s interview with Dr. Krugman at the Substack Public Notice.
Paul Krugman’s publication here on Substack has quickly become a vital resource for explanatory (and entertaining) coverage of Trump’s self-destructive economic policies. In fact, the Nobel Prize winner recently triggered Trump himself, with the president howling that Krugman is a “Trump Deranged BUM” in an unhinged Truth Social screed.
So with economic indicators weakening and talk of stagflation in the air, we connected with Krugman for a wide-ranging conversation about tariffs, inflation, why the AI bubble is reminiscent of the late 1990s, Trump’s teetering economy, and more.
“I think there’s a high likelihood of what we used to call a ‘growth recession’ or a jobless recovery — a situation where the economy isn’t plunging, but in fact unemployment is going up,” Krugman told us. “The economy is growing too slowly right now to generate enough jobs and there’s real weakness, which we’ve already seen in the data.”
“The thing that’s extra damaging now is the craziness. Nobody knows what the tariff rates will be in six months. Businesses making investment decisions want to know what things are going to be like over the next five years, but nobody has the faintest idea.”
The key to the crazy car is indeed tariffs. The damage, like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff ActCongress imposed in 1929, made the Great Depression what it turned out to be. The media has pushed the idea that the current tariff regime has been limited because of the TACO craziness. Read Krugman’s thoughts on that.
Thor Benson
Why haven’t tariffs inflicted more damage on the economy already? There were a lot of dire warnings in the lead-up to Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement nearly five months ago.
Paul Krugman
The scale of Trump’s tariffs is beyond the highest expectations people had. When he was talking about 10 percent tariffs globally, people thought, “Well, he won’t really do that.” In fact, it looks like we’re going to end up with an average tariff rate of around 18 percent, which is huge. We knew the reaction would be delayed, and it’s been even more delayed than expected, but it’s starting to show now.
The first thing to say is that, in general, protectionism is bad, but people tend to overstate the case. I’ve written about that a few times. It sounds important, because it has global effects, but it gets overhyped. Our screwed-up healthcare system does way more damage to the economy than Trump’s tariffs. Reasonable estimates of the long-run impact of these tariffs is a 0.4 or 0.5 percent cut to GDP — not trivial, but not apocalyptic.
In terms of the inflationary impacts of tariffs, there was a lot of front-running. Companies that import stuff rushed to do so earlier this year before the tariffs kicked in. To some extent, we’re still living off inventory that was built up in that period, and you can see it in the data. There was a huge surge in imports early in the year and then a huge drop after the tariffs finally kicked in. We’re still living off inventory that was brought in at much lower tariff rates.
It’s also important to note that the TACO thing is wrong. Trump did not chicken out. We’ve got 15 percent tariffs on the EU and Japan and iron tariffs on a number of countries.
The fact that people kept thinking we were gonna have trade deals and the tariffs were going to come back down meant that companies were reluctant to pass price hikes into stores, because they didn’t want to make customers mad and lose market share. It’s only now really sinking in that this is for real, and so the “let’s eat the tariffs for a while” thing is fading out.
It’s happening a little slower than expected, but for the most part we’re pretty much right in line with what economists were saying earlier this year.
The rest is under a paywall, but you get the general gist of it. So, all of this tariff shit is not coming out of Congress, as it should. That is what led to this very important article in Fortune. You may read all of it. The first author, Jeffrey Sonnenfield, is a Yale University Business Professor. The rest of the authors are equally impressive. There are CEOs of Top Companies as well as other academics, including Distinguished Professor Laura Tyson, a former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, back when we really were doing economic policy. Here’s the headline, folks! “Is MAGA going Marxist and Maoist? Trump’s assault on free-market capitalism.”
As many CEOs understandably grew horrified last month at the prospect that New York City, the capital of capitalism, is on the brink of going socialist with the mayoral momentum of the inexperienced candidate Zohran Mamdani, they were ignoring the greater assault on free market capitalism that has already overtaken the nation in the Republican Party. While we agree that Mamdani’s solutions to affordable housing and grocery prices threaten to undermine free markets by bowing to the appeal of populist anger, President Donald Trump has already begun doing so, but to suit his own grandiose political agenda instead.
Unlike any leader of any free-market economy around the world, President Trump has seized control of private enterprise’s strategic decision-making and investment policies while invading corporate board rooms so that he may dictate leadership staffing, punish corporate critics, and demand public compliance with his political agenda. This is far more dangerous to capitalism than a city-run grocery store.
Many free-market economists and business leaders who have long worshipped the free-market ideals of Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Milton Friedman should be aware that their idols would be rolling in their graves right now, as rather than pursue standard laissez-faire conservative economic policies, MAGA has gone Marxist and even, increasingly, Maoist
That sounds dour, doesn’t it?
As Greg Ip warned this week in The Wall Street Journal, “The US marches toward state capitalism with American characteristics … President Trump is imitating [the] Chinese Communist Party by extending political control ever deeper into the economy.” Ip pointed out that in the past, crisis-driven government bailouts of the banking and automotive sectors, such as TARP, were acute, targeted assistance, with brief and bipartisan rescue aims. Similarly, government incentives to drive investments in chips manufacturing, oil exploration, space exploration, internet development, agricultural vitality, cancer detection, disease treatment, and clean energy were not ownership deals with preferred companies or corporate cronies.
Indeed, Ip’s warnings mirror our own, as we were the first to accurately, presciently warn—over a year ago—that many of Trump’s economic positions more closely resemble communism than capitalism, as part of what we called “the coming MAGA assault on capitalism.” It certainly looks like MAGA is going Marxist if not even Maoist, especially across Trump’s vicious personal targeting of individual business leaders; government crackdown on business freedom of expression; weaponization of government powers; apparent extortion of businesses; and insertion of government into an unprecedented, outsized role in private sector strategic investment, capital flows and business decision-making.
Marxism and Maoism were both, of course, expressions of the communist theory that spilled forth from Karl Marx’s pen in the 19th century, brought to life in the brutal one-party states of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China under its leader Mao Zedong, before it evolved into “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” starting in the 1970s, around the time of President Richard Nixon’s fateful visit to Beijing.
Both Marxism and Maoism claimed to champion “ordinary people” against corrupt or exploitative elites, while both targeted intellectuals, bureaucrats, and traditionalists, and purged institutions to enforce ideological purity, especially during Stalin’s “Great Terror” and Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.” Both centralized leadership to the point of creating a cult of personality, demanding intense loyalty and the glorification of the sole figure who could fix the country’s problems. Both prized loyalty over expertise, sidelining critics and dissenters in favor of a tightly controlled political narrative. Sound familiar?
The essence of market capitalism is that owners—shareholders and the management they appoint share in the profits. These deals give share of profits to government in return for favors. Friedman said that federal government should never own anything—that it should not run a surplus because it would have funds to invest in the private sector. What strategic decision-making rights would the government have in such deals, then?
So, I have studied all of these things in both comparative economic systems and comparative political systems, as well as Russian and Chinese history courses. If you ever did any of this, you would be as scared as I am. You may also watch the latest South Park episode, where all these institutional leaders line up and gift solid gold and silver gee-gaws to Yam Tits. Once again, dark humor mimics a dark regime.
You may read all the listed evidence at the link. This is not normal. This is heavy-handed interference in all our markets. Evidently, regulation is good if it’s the #FARTUS openly demanding he be cut in on all deals. There are so many things going on that are not normal; all alarms should be blaring loudly by now. “Trump’s FBI Raid of John Bolton’s Home Looks Like a ‘Five-Alarm Fire. Thus far, little is known about Friday’s law enforcement action against a top Trump critic. But we’re seeing an escalation of authoritarian power on many fronts that has grown unmistakable.” This is from the New Republic. It’s written by Greg Sargent.
Whatever we end up learning about the rationale for the FBI’s early-morning raid on former national security adviser John Bolton’s Bethesda, Maryland, home on Friday, there’s plainly a major escalation underway in President Donald Trump’s use of law enforcement to persecute his perceived enemies and entrench his authoritarian power. Consider the pattern:
Assaults targeting individual business leaders
Trump has a long history of targeting individual CEOs in highly vicious, personal terms for perceived offenses. This week, Trump called for the firing of Goldman Sachs’ renowned economist Jan Hatzius who accurately called the 2008 financial crisis over the economist’s concern regarding the tariff overhand on the US economy. He also attacked a top-performing financier, David Solomon, the non-partisan CEO of Goldman Sachs, telling him to quit and just be a disc jockey. (Solomon has a famous side hustle as an electronic dance music DJ, known as DJ D-Sol.)
The targeting of Bolton, a major critic of Trump, appears to have been personally authorized by Kash Patel. An apparently official leak to the New York Post deliberately underscored Patel’s involvement, probably to make sure it’s understood by Trump’s other enemies. Remember: Trump installed Patel as FBI director for this very purpose. Patel had openly declared in 2023 that “the conspirators,” that is enemies of Trump and MAGA, must be prosecuted, and also that more loyalists with the resolve to see this through would be recruited to carry this out. Bolton was on Patel’s enemies list.
Trump is now targeting Fed governor Lisa Cook, another proclaimed enemy, and he’s escalating the use of law enforcement and the manipulation of the bureaucracy to do so. Trump loyalist William Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is alleging that Cook committed mortgage fraud, and this has been referred to the Justice Department. Whether or not there’s anything to the fraud claims, they’re minor at best, and it’s already highly suspect that Pulte, an agency head, has taken such an active interest in investigations into individual mortgages that happen to belong to Trump’s highest-profile enemies. Given that Trump personally promoted an article about the referral of the Cook matter to DOJ, Pulte’s move looks even more suspect.
Tellingly, Trump also heavily promoted the news of another supposedly fraudulent mortgage held by an enemy, Senator Adam Schiff. Schiff flatly denies the charges, yet DOJ is now criminally investigating them. Here again, Trump loyalist Pulte was directly involved in the manufacturing of the pretext for this, and experts say the process employed was dubiously manipulated. The same tactic has been used against New York Attorney General Letitia James, another major Trump foe. The question now is whether the White House is directing Pulte to rummage through the mortgages of Trump enemies for material that can serve as a pretext for potential DOJ prosecutions. It’s hard to imagine something of this magnitude proceeding without the White House’s blessing.
After protests broke out over Trump’s attempted takeover of the Washington, D.C. police force and his deployment of the National Guard there—which is itself a major escalation—White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller expressly declared that protests would be met with a surge of additional law enforcement and/or military resources. Notably, there’s been no serious effort to reassure Americans that Trump’s militarization of the city, or of Los Angeles, is rooted in benign intentions. In fact, this week Trump suggested he would personally ride through the city with the National Guard. Though he scrapped the plan, that was probably for logistical reasons, and he plainly wants all this military activity in urban centers to be seen as affirmative confirmation of his ongoing consolidation of power.
Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon explicitly declared the other day that ICE officers will indeed be employed during the 2026 midterm elections in large numbers to monitor voting booths, again floating undocumented voters as the bullshit pretext to justify it. Bannon is not in a position to compel this, of course, but it’s clear the MAGA movement now sees Trump’s militarization of cities as a precursor to the use of law enforcement and/or the military to intimidate voters in large numbers, or foment a crisis atmosphere designed to help the GOP, or both.
Last but not least, as we reported, a recent internal Department of Homeland Security memo outlines the hopes of senior DHS officials for substantially escalated military involvement in domestic law enforcement going forward. It even declares that military operations like the one in L.A. may be needed “for years to come.”
The raid of Bolton’s home was authorized by a court, and it is seeking to “determine whether he illegally shared or possessed classified information,” according to The New York Times. Trump told reporters Friday that he’d been unaware of the raid, but responded to it ominously.
WTF is going on? This is not normal. This is not democratic. This is not how our republic is supposed to work. Meanwhile, Donald’s dash for the Nobel Peace Prize is dashed again. Put so played him. This is from Politico. “Trump’s peace bid flops as Kremlin says no plans for Putin-Zelenskyy summit. Moscow obfuscates again in new remarks by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.” Well, inadequate Yam Tits strike again and cost the country more of our hard-earned dollars.
Russia’s top diplomat said Friday the Kremlin is “not ready at all” for a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, pouring cold water on U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to set up a summit.
Trump announced Monday on social media that he was arranging a bilateral meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin, following crunch talks with European leaders at the White House — but gave scant details.
But Moscow has since been reluctant to commit to a confab between the two leaders, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov saying Tuesday such a meeting would need to be prepared “step by step, gradually, starting from the expert level and then going through all the necessary stages.”
He sowed further doubt Friday, claiming that Zelenskyy was the one not willing to negotiate by refusing to rule out joining NATO or concede to the Kremlin’s maximalist territorial demands.
“Putin is ready to meet with Zelenskyy when the agenda is ready for a summit, and this agenda is not ready at all,” Lavrov told U.S. channel NBC.
“Zelenskyy said no to everything. … How can we meet with a person who is pretending to be a leader?” he added.
While U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier this week the Russian ruler had agreed to a face-to-face meeting, touting his supposed openness to talks as a breakthrough, European diplomats and leaders have voiced skepticism that Moscow is really interested in ending the war and willing to negotiate in good faith.
Zelenskyy accused Moscow on Friday of dragging out peace talks in a bid to hold off punishing American sanctions, which Trump has threatened to impose on Russia and its trading partners if the Kremlin does not participate.
#FARTUS is the most corrupt and inept president we’ve ever had. I have no idea how we’re going to survive much more of this. More things from Memeorandum to check out:
Daniel Dale / CNN: Fact check: Trump and the case of the nonexistent $600 billion EU ‘gift’ — Seventeen days ago, President Donald Trump made a dramatic claim in an interview on the business news channel CNBC. As part of his July trade agreement with the European Union, he said, the EU gave the United States …
Don’t forget, Trump is destroying the Smithsonian, the entire White House, and just about every check and balance enumerated by the U.S. Constitution. You may gag over the Oval Office Changes at Business Insider. His future architectural destruction is outlined in USA Today. It includes the Lincoln Bedroom, and he’s specifically interested in its bathroom. That’s a lot of gag for your buck.
We’re certainly going to get more proof that everything Trump touches dies.
I can’t watch the news much anymore. I think I’ll go watch the Disney Channel now.
What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action list today?
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Looking at the headlines today makes me want to just throw up my hands and give up. Events are moving so quickly that no one could possibly keep track of everything. Things that happened just days ago recede into the past as new horrors arise.
The global economic crisis that Trump has triggered with his insane tariffs is still going on, but the realization that he is going to keep sending innocent people to a torture prison in El Salvador has pushed that into the background for now.
Even though he has “paused” the worst of the tariffs, many still remain in effect and will continue to affect the global economy, as Dakinikat discussed in her post yesterday. Meanwhile, the trade war with China continues, and it’s clear that China won’t back down.
On the immigration front, Trump is involving the military in border enforcement, even though that is illegal, and he is trying to find a way to send American citizens to the El Salvador gulag.
And of course Social Security is being ravaged by DOGE, while RFK, Jr. lays waste to the FDA and the U.S. health care system, and DOGE plans to take over control of all government grants.
According to longtime columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr., Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff threats almost makes it appear he wants to be impeached, with Jenkins writing, “A future Trump impeachment seemed all but guaranteed by last Wednesday morning. It seems only slightly less likely now. It may even be desirable to restore America’s standing with creditors and trade partners.”
As he sees it, the president’s last great achievement was being re-elected in 2024, and the damage he has been creating since then belies his promise of a “golden age,” so an impeachment is “already in the cards.”
“No consensus or even significant coalition exists for trying to force into existence a new American ‘golden age’ with tariffs, which anyway is like asking a chicken to give birth to a lioness. He invented this mission out of his own confused intuition,” he accused.
Noting that conservative historian Niall Ferguson labeled Trump’s trade policy going “full retard,” he contributed, “I go with ‘neurotic’ for the word’s wider applicability to any leader who, lacking a clear bead on his times, fabricates a gratuitously ambitious mission to meet his misguided sense of importance.”
“Nobody in Mr. Trump’s orbit actually shares his belief in the magical efficacy of tariffs because it makes sense only in a world that doesn’t exist, where other countries don’t retaliate,” he pointed out before concluding, “The founders never anticipated today’s instantly responsive trillion-dollar financial markets. And yet these markets neatly adumbrate the founders’ scheme of checks and balances, also known as feedback. Mr. Trump, still sane enough to appreciate what’s good for Mr. Trump, listened this week to their feedback.”
The guidance, issued late Friday evening, comes after Trump earlier this month imposed 145% tariffs on products from China, a move that threatened to take a toll on tech giants like Apple, which makes iPhones and most of its other products in China.
The guidance also includes exclusions for other electronic devices and components, including semiconductors, solar cells, flat panel TV displays, flash drives, and memory cards.
These products could eventually be subject to additional duties, but they are likely to be far lower than the 145% rate that Trump had imposed on goods from China.
The exemptions are a win for tech companies like Apple, which makes the majority of its products in China. The country manufactures 80% of iPads and more than half of Mac computers produced, according to Evercore ISI.
“This is the dream scenario for tech investors,” Dan Ives, global head of technology research at Wedbush Securities, told CNBC. “Smartphones, chips being excluded is a game changer scenario when it comes to China tariffs.”
I wonder what Trump got from the tech companies in return for these exemptions?
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump bragged that many foreign leaders were “kissing his ass” to avoid the steep tariffs he’d imposed on their countries. But China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was not one of them. “We are waiting for their call,” Trump said of China’s leadership in a social-media post.
He might be waiting for a while. Xi became China’s most powerful political figure in half a century by promoting a new Chinese nationalism—not by kowtowing to anyone, least of all the president of the United States.
“Seeking to negotiate on U.S. terms would be deeply embarrassing for Xi and could potentially weaken his standing and even control over the Communist Party and the country,” Steve Tsang, the director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, told me. That’s because the party justifies Xi’s dictatorship by portraying him as the ultimate defender of the Chinese people—the man who will restore China’s past glory and attain the “Chinese dream” of national rejuvenation. He must be seen standing up to foreign oppressors who seek to humiliate China and thwart its rightful rise.
“The Chinese people will never allow foreign forces to bully, oppress, or enslave us,” Xi said in a speech commemorating the centennial of the Communist Party in 2021. “Whoever nurses delusions of doing that will crack their heads and spill blood on the Great Wall of steel.
Little wonder, then, that Xi has been quick to retaliate against Trump while other leaders have held back. Trump slapped an additional 34 percent duty on Chinese imports on April 2, and Xi responded two days later with a 34 percent tariff on U.S. imports. Trump then retaliated by imposing another 50 percent duty, which Xi matched the next day. On Wednesday, Trump tried isolating Xi by pausing most tariffs on all countries for 90 days—except for China, on which he increased his duties yet again. On Friday, Beijing raised its duties on American imports once more….
The Chinese Communist Party is characterizing Trump’s trade war as an American effort to contain and suppress China’s economic success—one the government is fully prepared to thwart, according to one commentary in the People’s Daily. This framing commits Beijing to holding out, because the alternative is for a party that predicates its power on the projection of strength to appear to be capitulating to a hostile onslaught.
Trump and his team do not seem to understand Xi’s political realities. They seem to believe that if they keep turning up the pressure, Xi will eventually come to heel. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent asserted that Xi’s retaliation was “a big mistake.” Because China exports so much more to the U.S. than it imports, “they’re playing with a pair of twos,” he said.
This is going to really hurt small businesses who buy parts and inventory from China and farmers who sell soybeans to China.
The upheaval in stocks has been grabbing all the headlines, but there is a bigger problem looming in another corner of the financial markets that rarely gets headlines: Investors are dumping U.S. government bonds.
Normally, investors rush into Treasurys at a whiff of economic chaos but now they are selling them as not even the lure of higher interest payments on the bonds is getting them to buy. The freak development has experts worried that big banks, funds and traders are losing faith in America as a stable, predictable, good place to store their money.
“The fear is the U.S. is losing its standing as the safe haven,” said George Cipolloni, a fund manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management. “Our bond market is the biggest and most stable in the world, but when you add instability, bad things can happen.”
That could be bad news for taxpayers paying interest on the ballooning U.S. debt, consumers taking out mortgages or car loans — and for President Donald Trump, who had hoped his tariff pause earlier this week would restore confidence in the markets.
A 60-foot wide strip of land along three southwestern border states will be placed under the jurisdiction of the U.S. military to help deter illegal immigration, the White House said Friday.
President Donald Trump issued a memorandum directing the military to take temporary control over the Roosevelt Reservation, a corridor that runs along the border line in California, Arizona and New Mexico.
The order would empower troops to detain people attempting to illegally enter the U.S. within the stretch of land, which was established by President Theodore Roosevelt for border security in 1907. Trump authorized the military to operate in the same area during his first administration to aid construction of a wall to deter migrant crossings.
The memorandum marks an escalation in the president’s use of the military to facilitate his sweeping crackdown on immigration. And while unclear how far the administration will go, it could be an additional step to militarizing the nation’s southwestern border….
Immigration, military and legal experts have said that Trump’s move to militarize the border could raise legal questions about potential violations to the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law that generally prohibits active-duty troops from being used in domestic law enforcement.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said it appeared the administration was trying to find a way around restrictions on the use of the U.S. military for civilian border enforcement.
Donald Trump and his White House have moved to deport green-card holders for espousing pro-Palestinian views, shipped hundreds of migrants to a notorious Salvadoran mega-prison without due process (in defiance of a judge’s order), and are now publicly musing about sending United States citizens to prison in El Salvador.
Trump said last weekend he would “love” to send American criminals there — and would even be “honored” to, depending on “what the law says.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed this week that the president has discussed this idea privately, too, adding he would only do this “if it’s legal.” El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has for months been offering to hold U.S. citizens in his country’s prison system, which he has turned into “a judicial black hole” rife with “systematic torture,” as one human rights advocate recently told Rolling Stone.
Consuelo by Olga Sacharoff, 1924
Legal experts agree that sending American citizens to prison in El Salvador would be flagrantly illegal under both U.S. and international law — and that the idea itself is shockingly authoritarian, with few parallels in our nation’s history.
The Trump administration is indeed discussing this idea behind the scenes, two sources familiar with the matter confirmed to Rolling Stone. In their most serious form, these conversations have revolved around attempting to denaturalize American citizens and deport them to other countries, including El Salvador.
“You can’t deport U.S. citizens. There’s no emergency exception, there’s no special wartime authority, there’s no secret clause. You just can’t deport citizens,” says Steve Vladeck, a legal commentator and law professor at Georgetown. “Whatever grounds they try to come up with for denaturalization or expatriation, the one thing that is absolutely undeniable is that people are entitled to individualized processes, before that process can be effectuated.”
In the United States, the grounds to strip a naturalized individual of their citizenship encompass serious material offenses. They include: committing treason or terrorism, enlisting in a foreign military engaged in opposition to the United States, or lying in applications for citizenship or as part of the naturalization process.
The Trump administration on Friday continued to pursue its stubborn fight against securing the freedom of a Maryland man it inadvertently deported to a Salvadoran prison last month despite a court order that expressly said he could remain in the United States.
Taking an increasingly combative stance, the administration defied a federal judge’s order to provide a written road map of its plans to free the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. Trump officials then repeatedly stonewalled her efforts to get the most basic information about him at a court hearing.
During the hearing, in Federal District Court in Maryland, the judge, Paula Xinis, called the administration’s evasions “extremely troubling” and demanded that the Justice Department provide her with daily updates on the White House’s progress in getting Mr. Abrego Garcia back on U.S. soil.
“The court finds that the defendants have failed to comply with this court’s order,” Judge Xinis wrote in a ruling Friday afternoon.
The conflict between the judge and the White House arose just one day after the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the administration to “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody and only a few days before President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador was set to arrive in Washington for an official visit.
Asked about the case on Friday, President Trump appeared in no hurry to take steps to ensure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return, despite repeated court orders and a Supreme Court intervention.
“If the Supreme Court said, ‘Bring somebody back,’ I would do that,” he said, seeming to ignore the court’s order. “I respect the Supreme Court.”
By Hedda Oppenheim
Of course the Supreme Court has already said that.
The public recalcitrance on the part of Mr. Trump and his officials highlighted questions about why they have been so reluctant to follow the orders or leverage the president’s relationship with Mr. Bukele to simply ask for Mr. Abrego Garcia to be freed.
Judge Xinis, by ordering the government to detail its progress in getting Mr. Abrego Garcia out of El Salvador, managed to avoid an immediate showdown with the White House. But the fiery clashes left open the possibility of a future standoff.
The administration has already had friction with judges in other cases — particularly those involving Mr. Trump’s deportation policies — but the conflict with Judge Xinis was one of the most contentious yet. Last week, a federal judge in Washington said there was a “fair likelihood” that the administration had violated one of his rulings ordering the White House to stop using a powerful wartime statute to deport scores of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador.
The dispute involving Judge Xinis emerged after the Supreme Court late Thursday told Trump officials to take steps to free Mr. Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Salvadoran migrant, from the CECOT prison in El Salvador, where he was sent with scores of other migrants on March 15.
DOGE’s bread and butter has been slashing headcounts but it is now wielding its influence deep inside the nation’s immigration system — an initiative led by one of Elon Musk’s closest friends, three Trump administration officials granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics told POLITICO.
Antonio Gracias, a Musk confidante whose history with the billionaire goes back more than 20 years, is quietly heading up a specialized DOGE immigration task force that’s embedded engineers and staffers across nearly every nook of the Department of Homeland Security, two of the people said. The task force is also working with DOGE operatives stationed at other agencies like the Social Security Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, which house sensitive data on undocumented immigrants.
With Musk’s trusted friend and fixer at the helm, the task force marks a significant expansion of DOGE’s portfolio — from primarily working on agency-wide layoffs to executing the president’s most hardline immigration policies. It’s also a test for how far DOGE’s reach can extend.
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.
They are providing the technical infrastructure for a sweeping set of actions aimed at revoking parole, terminating visas, and later on, reengineering the asylum adjudication process, according to the officials.
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. Their theory is that without effective Social Security numbers – needed for bank accounts and loans, among other things – these people would “self deport.”
The Social Security Administration will no longer be communicating with the media and the public through press releases and “dear colleague” letters, as it shifts its public communication exclusively to X, sources tell WIRED. The news comes amid major staffing cuts at the agency.
“We are no longer planning to issue press releases or those dear colleague letters to inform the media and public about programmatic and service changes,” said SSA regional commissioner Linda Kerr-Davis in a meeting with managers earlier this week. “Instead, the agency will be using X to communicate to the press and the public … so this will become our communication mechanism.”
Woman holding cat, by Liang Yi Er
Previously, the agency used dear colleague letters to engage with advocacy groups and third-party organizations that help people access social security benefits. Recent letters covered everything from the agency’s new identity verification procedures to updates on the accuracy of SSA death records (“less than one-third of 1 percent are erroneously reported deaths that need to be corrected,” the agency wrote, in contrast to what Elon Musk claims).
The letters and press releases were also a crucial communications tool for SSA employees, who used them to stay up on agency news. Since SSA staff cannot sign up for social media on government computers without submitting a special security request, the change could have negative consequences on the ability for employees to do their jobs.
It could also impact people receiving social security benefits who rely on the letters for information about access benefits. “Do they really expect senior citizens will join this platform?” asked one current employee. “Most managers aren’t even on it. How isn’t this a conflict of interest?” Another staffer added: “This will ensure that the public does not get the information they need to stay up-to-date.”
The White House response to the Wired story:
“This reporting is misleading. The Social Security Administration is actively communicating with beneficiaries and stakeholders,” says Liz Huston, a White House spokesperson. “There has not been a reduction in workforce. Rather, to improve the delivery of services, staff are being reassigned from regional offices to front-line help – allocating finite resources where they are most needed. President Trump will continue to always protect Social Security.”
I guess we’ll find out eventually. Social security advocates are warning that the system is going to collapse and the 73 million recipients could go months with out payments.
Two days after the Social Security Administration purposely and falselylabeled 6,100 living immigrants as dead, security guards arrived at the office of a well-regarded senior executive in the agency’s Woodlawn, Maryland, headquarters.
Greg Pearre, who oversaw a staff of hundreds of technology experts, had pushed back on the Trump administration’s plan to move the migrants’ names into a Social Security death database, eliminating their ability to legally earn wages and, officials hoped, spurring them to leave the country. In particular, Pearre had clashed with Scott Coulter, the new chief information officer installed by Elon Musk. Pearre told Coulter that the plan was illegal, cruel and risked declaring the wrong people dead, according to three people familiar with the events.
Buthisobjections did not go over well with Trump political appointees. And so on Thursday, the security guards in Pearre’s office told him it was time to leave.
They walked Pearre out of the building, capping a momentous internal battle over the novel strategy — pushed by Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service and the Department of Homeland Security — to add thousands of immigrants ranging in age from teenagers to octogenarians to the agency’s Death Master File. The dataset is used by government agencies, employers, banks and landlords to check the status of employees, residents, clients and others.
The episode also followed earlier warnings from senior Social Security officials that the database was insecure and could be easily edited without proof of death — a vulnerability, staffers say, that the Trump administration has now exploited….
Experts in government, consumer rights and immigration law said the administration’s action is illegal. Labeling people dead strips them of the privacy protections granted to living individuals — and knowingly classifying living people as dead counts as falsifying government records, they said. This is in addition to the harm inflicted on those suddenly declared dead, who become unable to legally earn a living wage or draw benefits they may be eligible for. Social Security itself has acknowledged that an incorrect death declaration is a “devastating” blow….
“This is an unprecedented step,” said Devin O’Connor, a senior fellow on the federal fiscal policy team for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank. “The administration seems to basically be saying they have the right to essentially declare people equivalent to dead who have not died. That’s a hard concept to believe, but it brings enormous risks and consequences.”
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s visit to the FDA Friday was supposed to introduce him as a trusted leader to agency employees. It did anything but.
Over the course of 40 minutes, Kennedy, in largely off-the-cuff remarks, asserted that the “Deep State” is real, referenced past CIA experiments on human mind control and accused the employees he was speaking to of becoming a “sock puppet” of the industries they regulate.
Little Girl with Cat, by Pierre Bonnard
“Because of my family’s commitment to these issues, I spent 200 hours at Wassaic Home for the Retarded when I was in high school,” Kennedy said, in a reference to the Wassaic State School for the Mentally Retarded in Wassaic, New York. “So I was seeing people with intellectual disabilities all the time. I never saw anybody with autism.”
The remark jolted several FDA employees in the audience, who misheard the reference and thought he was making a derogatory remark about people with intellectual disabilities, according to two employees granted anonymity for fear of retaliation.
By the end of the event, billed as a welcome from the new commissioner, Marty Makary, several FDA staffers had walked out of the rooms where the speech was being broadcast at the agency’s headquarters in White Oak, Maryland, according to two employees granted anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“President Trump always talks about the Deep State, and the media, you know, disparages him and says that he’s paranoid,” Kennedy said, according to a transcript and audio of his remarks obtained by POLITICO. “But the Deep State is real. And it’s not, you know, just George Soros and Bill Gates and a bunch of nefarious individuals sitting together in a room and plotting the, you know, the destruction of humanity.”
He said “every institution that’s created by human beings” is inevitably captured by powerful interests, and urged FDA employees to take advantage of a four-year period under his leadership where he vowed that the Department of Health and Human Services would not be subjected to undue influence and would listen to “dissidents.”
U.S. DOGE Service employees have inserted themselves into the government’s long-established process to alert the public about potential federal grants and allow organizations to apply for funds, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive situation.
The changes to the process — which will allow DOGE to review and approve proposed grant opportunities across the federal government — threaten to further delay or even halt billions of dollars that agencies usually make in federal awards, the people said. The moves come amid the Trump administration’s broader push to cut federal spending and crack down on grants that DOGE and other officials say conflict with White House priorities.
DOGE employees have made changes to grants.gov, a federal website that has traditionally served as a clearinghouse for more than $500 billion in annual awards and is used by thousands of outside organizations, the people said. Federal agencies including the Defense, State and Interior departments have historically posted their grant opportunities directly to the site. Nonprofits, universities and local governments respond to these grant opportunities with applications to receive federal funding for activities that include cancer research, cybersecurity, highway construction and wastewater management.
But a DOGE engineer recently deleted many federal officials’ permissions to post grant opportunities, without informing them that their permissions had been removed, the people said. Now the responsibility of posting these grant opportunities is poised to rest with DOGE — and if its employees delay those postings or stop them altogether, “it could effectively shut down federal-grant making,” said one federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal operations.
Agency officials have been told that the grants.gov site has been under systems maintenance. They have been instructed to email their planned grant notices to grantreview@hhs.gov, an inbox at the Department of Health and Human Services that is being monitored by DOGE, the people said.
About 5,000 notices of funding opportunities are typically posted on grants.gov each year, with more than 10 million visitors to the site, according to people with knowledge of its operations. Some federal agencies have been able to post grant opportunities, known as Notice of Funding Opportunities or NOFOs, but the vast majority rely on grants.gov, the people said.
Unbelievable.
I’ll end there. I know this is way too long. Take care, everyone!
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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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
“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.
There are only 19 days to go until November 5. I believe that Kamala Harris will win, but I was also sure Hillary Clinton would win in 2016.
Both Harris and Trump have been holding rallies and giving interviews. She speaks in complete sentences and discusses her policies in a coherent fashion. He can’t complete a sentence, mispronounces words, rambles nonsensically, and has no understanding of his own policies. And, of course, he is a pathological liar.
Harris is a former prosecutor who is committed to the rule of law. Trump is a convicted felon out on bail, with multiple indictments hanging over his head. How can the race be close?
One positive development is that Trump’s dementia and his violent rhetoric and threats are getting more attention in the media. He and his advisers may well live to regret driving Joe Biden out of the race.
I feel as if my life is on hold until I know who will win this election. If Harris wins, my life will continue on its current track. If Trump wins, everything will change–and not in a good way. In addition, the chaos we have all lived through in the past 9 years will continue and most likely get much worse. That’s where things stand right now, as I see it.
State of the Race
In the latest national polls, Harris leads by a few points.
In the presidential contest, Vice President Kamala Harris leads former President Donald Trump by five points among likely voters, including those who are undecided yet leaning toward a candidate. The race gets closer, however, among registered voters nationally. Here, three points separate the two candidates.
Harris (52%) leads Trump (47%) among likely voters nationally, including those who are undecided yet leaning toward a candidate. Earlier this month, two points separated Harris (50%) and Trump (48%) among likely voters.
The contest is tighter among registered voters. Among the general electorate, Harris receives 51% to 48% for Trump. In early October, the same margin separated Harris (50%) and Trump (47%) among the broader electorate.
Trump (54%) leads Harris (44%) among independents who are likely to vote, widening the 4-point edge Trump (50%) had against Harris (46%) previously.
Trump (53%) leads Harris (47%) among men who are likely to vote while Harris (57%) has the advantage over Trump (42%) among women.
While members of Gen X divide (51% for Harris to 48% for Trump), Harris has majority support among GenZ/Millennials (53%) and among Baby Boomers/the Silent-Greatest Generations (55%).
While the gap between the two remained steady compared with a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted a week earlier, the new poll, which closed on Sunday, gave signs that voters – particularly Democrats – might be more enthused about this year’s election than they were ahead of the November 2020 presidential election when Democrat Joe Biden defeated Trump.
Some 78% of registered voters in the three-day poll – including 86% of Democrats and 81% of Republicans – said they were “completely certain” they would cast a ballot in the presidential election. The share of sure-to-vote poll respondents was up from 74% in a Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted Oct. 23-27, 2020, when 74% of Democrats and 79% of Republicans said they were certain to cast ballots.
The poll had a margin of error of around 4 percentage points.
A record number of early votes have been cast in Georgia on Tuesday as residents headed to the polls in a critical battleground state that is grappling with the fallout from Hurricane Helene and controversial election administration changes that have spurred a flurry of lawsuits.
More than 328,000 ballots were cast Tuesday, Gabe Sterling of the Georgia secretary of state’s office said on X. “So with the record breaking 1st day of early voting and accepted absentees we have had over 328,000 total votes cast so far,” he said.
The previous first day record was 136,000 in 2020, Sterling said.
The swing state is one of the most closely watched this election, with former President Donald Trump trying to reclaim it after losing there to President Joe Biden by a small margin four years ago, leading Trump and his allies to unsuccessfully push to overturn his defeat.
Those efforts have loomed large this year as new changes to how the state conducts elections have been approved by Republican members of the State Election Board, leading Democrats and others to mount legal challenges, many of which have yet to be resolved even as Election Day nears.
Despite the massive turnout on Tuesday, the process appeared to go smoother this year for some Atlanta-area voters who spoke with CNN.
“Last time I voted, I voted in the city and the lines were out the door. They only had like, maybe like three people working,” said Corine Canada. “So people honestly just started leaving because it was like that. Yeah, like, ‘This is too long. I can’t sit here (and) wait, I have to go back to work.’ But here, no, it was easy.”
Dementia Don
Yesterday Trump appeared at the Economic Club of Chicago and gave a disastrous interview. He mostly talked about his plan to put high tariffs on imports, and continued to claim that these tariffs would be paid by foreign countries and not by Americans paying higher prices. Other news from the interview: he would not commit to allowing a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election.
Donald Trump continued his pre-election economic event tour on Tuesday with a lengthy interview with Bloomberg at the Economic Club of Chicago. It was a total mess.
Bloomberg Editor-In-Chief John Micklethwait did not take it easy on Trump, and it quickly became clear that the former president has no conception of the mechanics of or the potential ramifications of the economic platform he’s running on. Bluntly, the former president was incoherent when pressed with real questions about his policies.
Micklethwait spent most of the interview attempting to break Trump out of what the former president repeatedly referred to as “the weave,” his term for his rambling digressions — with ever-decreasing intelligibility — and general inability to focus on a given topic for more than a few seconds during his rallies and interviews.
Micklethwait didn’t weave along with Trump, however, repeatedly working to bring him back on topic and answer the actual questions. The grilling exposed Trump’s total cluelessness with regard to his own economic policy, and led Trump to attack Micklethwait as biased….
The central pillar of Trump’s economic plan is widespread tariffs on all imported goods, with penalties appearing to increase depending on how much he dislikes the country. Economists have warned that such a policy could have devastating effects on American consumers, who would be saddled with increased costs for all imported goods.
When questioned about the specifics of his plan, and if he was aware of its pitfalls, Trump seemed ignorant of basic economic principles, insisting that other countries, not American consumers, would pay for the tariffs.
A bit more:
Micklethwait tried to explain the actual impact. “Three-trillion worth of imports and you will add tariffs to every single one of them, and push up the cost for all of these people to buy foreign goods,” he said. “That is just simple mathematics.”
Trump countered that he was “always good at mathematics,” and that high tariffs — and thus costs — would force companies to move production into the United States.
Anxiety, by Edvard Munch
“That will take many, many, many years,” Micklethwait said, to which Trump replied that high enough penalties would make the move immediate as if companies could simply wand wave production plants, orchards, wineries, factories, and the like into existence.
The former president also insisted that his tariff proposal would not result in the loss of jobs that are dependent on trade, because companies that moved to the U.S. would not be subject to the tax. “All you have to do is build your plant in the United States and you don’t have any tariffs,” he said…..
Micklethwait’s attempts to keep Trump on topic earned him no grace from the former president, who hates few things more than being contradicted.
When Micklethwait asked Trump to address a report by The Wall Street Journal estimating that his economic proposals would raise the national debt by upwards of $7 trillion, the former president fell back on his standard playbook: bashing the interviewer.
“What does The Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything, and so have you by the way, you’ve been wrong,” Trump replied, crossing his arms and curling into his seat.
“You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff,” he added.
There’s more at the link. I didn’t encounter a paywall when I clicked on the link at Memeorandum.
Former president Donald Trump is campaigning on the most significant increase in tariffs in close to a century, preparing an attack on the international trade order that would likely raise prices, hurt the stock market and spark economic feuds with much of the world.
Trump’s trade plans, a staple of his stump speeches, have fluctuated, but he consistently calls for steep duties to discourage imports and promote domestic production. The former president has floated “automatic” tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on every U.S. trading partner, 60 percent levies on goods from China, and rates as high as 100, 200 or even 1,000 percent in other circumstances.
These proposals would go far beyond the disruptive trade wars of his first term even if they are only partially implemented. They would wrench the nation out of the system of global interdependence that arose in recent decades, making the U.S. economy much more isolated and autonomous, like it was in the late 19th century. (Trump last week falsely claimed that the United States was never richer than in the 1890s, when it had high trade barriers.)
“To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff. And it’s my favorite,” Trump said in Chicago on Tuesday. “I’m a believer in tariffs.”
The consequences would be far-reaching: Americans would be hit by higher prices for grocery staples from abroad, such as fruit, vegetables and coffee. Domestic firms dependent on imports would need to either figure out new supply chains or raise costs for consumers. U.S. manufacturers would almost certainly see sharp declines in orders from abroad as foreign nations impose retaliatory tariffs.
“We are talking about a plan of historic significance: It would be enormous, and the blowback would be even more enormous,” said Douglas A. Irwin, an economist at Dartmouth College who authored a 2017 book on the history of U.S. trade policy. “This would stand way off the charts.”
Companies and governments around the world have begun preparing contingency plans for the potential Trump tariffs. Diplomats and business leaders from Latin America, Europe, Asia and even Canada have in recent weeks asked their U.S. counterparts about Trump’s intentions and authorities, according to interviews with several domestic and international economic advisers, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private planning.
While some business leaders and congressional Republicans remain optimistic that the former president is engaged in election-year posturing, Trump has repeatedly insisted that tariffs represent an unmitigated positive for the U.S. economy, recently calling them “the greatest thing ever invented.” Tariffs have been a constant bedrock of his economic agenda since he first ran in 2016, along with lower taxes, increased energy production and deregulation.
You should watch the interview Trump did yesterday at the Economic Club of Chicago. You might think you’ve got a pretty good idea of the big guy’s solipsism, his buffoonish overconfidence, his utter inability to engage on matters of policy. Watch a few answers, and you’ll be forced to conclude: It’s way worse than you thought.
Victor Wang, Emotional tension and psychological drama
Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait began by asking Trump simple questions, like how he plans to pay for the $7 trillion hole his proposals would blow in the federal deficit. Trump responded with his ordinary magical thinking about making that sum back through a combination of growth and tariffs. “To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff,’” he said. “It’s my favorite word . . . the most beautiful word.”
Micklethwait asked how Trump planned to follow through on his promises of trimming the fat of wasteful spending. Trump responded with a lengthy story about him personally spending months negotiating with Boeing over a contract for new planes to serve as Air Force One, which ultimately saved the government more than a billion dollars. A cool story—until you remember the federal government spends an average of nearly $17 billion a day.
It takes a certain amount of ego and delusion to run for president. Trump has those characteristics in excess. But what stood out at the talk yesterday was the degree to which these are now the only elements undergirding his vision. Gone is the talk about surrounding himself with the best people. Dropped is the pretense that his answers are coherent. (Trump has started referring to his meandering logorrhea as “the weave.”) The pitch instead is that some sort of mad genius remains within him: Trust me, I’m the deals guy! I’ll get the best deals!
But there’s a lot more to guiding the economy than dealmaking, and even the most capable, hard-nosed, mano-a-mano negotiating with individual vendors can only take you so far.
There’s more about the interview at the link. There’s no paywall.
Donald Trump on Tuesday dodged the question of whether he will allow for a peaceful certification of election results if Kamala Harris defeats him in three weeks.
During an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago, Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait asked Trump if he would commit “to respecting and encouraging a peaceful transfer of power,” especially in light of Jan. 6, 2021, which the journalist called “unruly and violent.”
Trump didn’t answer the question. Instead, he rejected the premise and blamed Micklethwait as “a man that has not been a big Trump fan over the years.” He also falsely claimed that he allowed for a peaceful transfer of power in 2020, when Joe Biden defeated him.
“Come on, President Trump, you had a peaceful transfer of power compared to Venezuela, but it was by far the worst transfer of power for a long time,” Micklethwait insisted.
The audience booed and Trump thanked them. The former president then admitted that people were angry when they arrived in Washington to protest the results that January—but according to him, they were perfectly behaved.
“It was love and peace, and some people went to the Capitol,” Trump said. “And a lot of strange things happened there, a lot of strange things, with people being waved into the Capitol by police.”
For perhaps the first time, Trump downplayed his crowd size.
He added that he left the White House the morning he was supposed to and that only a fraction of the protestors were among those who breached and defaced the Capitol.
“Not one of those people had a gun, nobody was killed, except for Ashli Babbitt,” he said.
MAGA-friendly CNBC host Joe Kernen dropped an interesting nugget right as Squawk Box went to commercial break on Tuesday.
“Well, Trump canceled, and he was going to come on,” Kernen said.
Not only did Trump once love going on CNBC, but Kernen’s revelation comes on the heels of Trump declining or canceling a number of other high-profile opportunities to make a pitch to voters on mainstream TV. Trump refused to debate Kamala Harris a second time, which would’ve aired on CNN. Trump then refused CNN’s offer to host a town hall. And Trump of course also recently backed out of a 60 Minutes interview.
Still Tension, Wassily Kandinsky
The explanation for all this is not that Trump has suddenly become camera shy. It’s that his campaign undoubtedly realizes his rapidly degrading condition doesn’t play well with audiences beyond the MAGA cult. As a result, they’re retreating to the safer terrain of nonstop rallies and fawning Fox hits….
The reason Trump’s campaign isn’t keen to get him in front of swing voters on mainstream platforms was on stark display Tuesday when Trump did a rare event that wasn’t a festival of sycophancy.
By any objective standard, Trump’s Economic Club of Chicago interview was a disaster. He came out of the gates with an asinine proposal for 2,000 percent tariffs on imported cars, then was quickly reduced to insulting the moderator, Bloomberg’s John Micklethwait, when Micklethwait rightly pointed out that his his economic proposals are an inflationary disaster. (Watch below.)
By the end of the event, Trump had veered into making an impassioned defense of the big lie and his coup attempt, bragging about his crowd size on January 6 and absurdly claiming the events of that day were just “love and peace.” (Watch below.)
OAKS, Pa. — The town hall, moderated by South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R), began with questions from preselected attendees for the former president. Donald Trump offered meandering answers on how he would address housing affordability and help small businesses. But it took a sudden turn after two attendees required medical attention.
And so Trump, after jokingly asking the crowd whether “anybody else would like to faint,” took a different approach.
“Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” he said.
For 39 minutes, Trump swayed, bopped — sometimes stopping to speak — as he turned the event into almost a living-room listening session of his favorite songs from his self-curated rally playlist.
He played nine tracks. He danced. He shook hands with people onstage. He pointed to the crowd. Noem stood beside him, nodding with her hands clasped. Trump stayed in place onstage, slowly moving back and forth. He was done answering questions for the night….
As Trump stood onstage in his oversize suit and bright red tie, swaying back and forth, it was almost as if he were taking a trip back to decades past. Trump’s decision to cut short the question-and-answer portion of the town hall and instead have the crowd stay to listen to his favorite songs was a somewhat bizarre move, given that the election was only 22 days away. Vice President Kamala Harris has called Trump, 78, unstable and questioned his mental acuity.
Some in the crowd began to leave. Some looked around, wondering whether he was done speaking for the night and how much longer the dance — or sway — session would last. Many stayed holding their cameras and watched as Trump took in the music, at times looking over at a screen beside him that showed videos of James Brown singing “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’sWorld” and Sinéad O’Connor performing “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
For 38 minutes or so, former President Donald Trump was in a happy place. After some people collapsed at his town hall, Trump got frustrated, decided he’d had enough softball questions from Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) and asked to play music. For nearly 40 minutes, Trump kept asking for more music, swaying oddly in front of the crowd, occasionally closing his eyes, and retreating to a comforting place in his mind, like being wrapped in a warm blanket.
The Anxiety Monster, by Jeremy Campbell
For those of us who’ve had family members slip into dementia, it was a familiar sight. Both of my grandmothers suffered it near the ends of their lives. Even before they were sent to nursing homes, they started to exhibit increased frustration and even anger. My maternal grandmother accused her caretaker of purposely turning the shower knob too tight so she would have to come in and see my grandmother naked. But she also liked to sing old-time songs she remembered. She had her happy place—an oasis in a time of increasing confusion. Then, there were other times she was completely lucid. She would talk about the situation in the Middle East (which was still a thing back then, too) with total clarity. There were good days and there were bad days.
It isn’t like we haven’t seen Trump’s behavior with our own eyes. It isn’t like media hasn’t noticed it, either. And yet, no one seems to want to talk about the distinct possibility that Trump is well on the way to the same state my grandmothers found themselves in and that millions of Americans find friends and family in – severe cognitive decline, if not outright dementia.
For 38 minutes or so, former President Donald Trump was in a happy place. After some people collapsed at his town hall, Trump got frustrated, decided he’d had enough softball questions from Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) and asked to play music. For nearly 40 minutes, Trump kept asking for more music, swaying oddly in front of the crowd, occasionally closing his eyes, and retreating to a comforting place in his mind, like being wrapped in a warm blanket.
For those of us who’ve had family members slip into dementia, it was a familiar sight. Both of my grandmothers suffered it near the ends of their lives. Even before they were sent to nursing homes, they started to exhibit increased frustration and even anger. My maternal grandmother accused her caretaker of purposely turning the shower knob too tight so she would have to come in and see my grandmother naked. But she also liked to sing old-time songs she remembered. She had her happy place—an oasis in a time of increasing confusion. Then, there were other times she was completely lucid. She would talk about the situation in the Middle East (which was still a thing back then, too) with total clarity. There were good days and there were bad days.
It isn’t like we haven’t seen Trump’s behavior with our own eyes. It isn’t like media hasn’t noticed it, either. And yet, no one seems to want to talk about the distinct possibility that Trump is well on the way to the same state my grandmothers found themselves in and that millions of Americans find friends and family in – severe cognitive decline, if not outright dementia.
Angry, frustrated, confused, unable to focus. And now, he retreats to his happy place in a time of stress. Put it all together and ask yourself if that’s someone you’d trust to take care of your kids in a house with a working stove.
With three weeks left before Election Day, former President Donald J. Trump is pushing to the forefront of his campaign a menacing political threat: that he would use the power of the presidency to crush those who disagree with him.
In a Fox News interview on Sunday, Mr. Trump framed Democrats as a pernicious “enemy from within” that would cause chaos on Election Day that he speculated the National Guard might need to handle.
A day later, he closed his remarks to a crowd at what was billed as a town hall in Pennsylvania with a stark message about his political opponents.
“They are so bad and frankly, they’re evil,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re evil. What they’ve done, they’ve weaponized, they’ve weaponized our elections. They’ve done things that nobody thought was even possible.”
And on Tuesday, he once again refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power when pressed by an interviewer at an economic forum in Chicago.
With early voting underway in key battlegrounds, the race for the White House is moving toward Election Day in an extraordinary and sobering fashion. Mr. Trump has long flirted with, if not openly endorsed, anti-democratic tendencies with his continued refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, embrace of conspiracy theories of large-scale voter fraud and accusations that the justice system is being weaponized against him. He has praised leaders including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary for being authoritarian strongmen.
But never before has a presidential nominee — let alone a former president — openly suggested turning the military on American citizens simply because they oppose his candidacy. As he escalates his threats of political retribution, Mr. Trump is offering voters the choice of a very different, and far less democratic, form of American government.
“There is not a case in American history where a presidential candidate has run for office on a promise that they would exact retribution against anyone they perceive as not supporting them in the campaign,” said Ian Bassin, a former associate White House counsel under Barack Obama who leads the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “It’s so fundamentally, outrageously beyond the pale of how this country has worked that it’s hard to articulate how insane it is.”
Harris and Waltz are also calling attention to Trump’s cognitive issues and threats. They have three weeks left to educate the public an get legacy media to focus on Trump’s age and obvious dementia.
Take care everyone and keep hope alive, as Jesse Jackson used to say.
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Yesterday we got some earth-shaking news: Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris for president. His daughter Liz had announced her endorsement a couple of days ago. Of course neither Cheney is announcing agreement with Harris’s policies, but they both see the danger that another Trump term would pose for our country and for democracy here and around the world. With just two months to go before the 2024 election, we the people are building a coalition of people with differing political views who will act together to save us from the forces of fascism.
CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Former Vice President Dick Cheney, a lifelong Republican, will vote for Kamala Harris for president, he announced Friday.
Liz Cheney, who herself endorsed Harris on Wednesday, first announced her father’s endorsement when asked by Mark Leibovich of The Atlantic magazine during an onstage interview at The Texas Tribune Festival in Austin.
“Wow,” Leibovich replied as the audience cheered.
Like his daughter, Dick Cheney has been an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump, notably during Liz Cheney’s ill-fated reelection campaign in 2022.
Dick Cheney put out a statement Friday confirming his endorsement, which read almost entirely as opposition to Trump rather than support of Harris.
“He can never be trusted with power again,” the statement said. “As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.” [….]
Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’ campaign chair, released a statement saying, “The Vice President is proud to have the support of Vice President Cheney, and deeply respects his courage to put country over party.”
Former Vice President and influential Republican Dick Cheney released a statement announcing his endorsement of Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris for President. Speaking out against the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, Cheney said that he can “never be trusted with power again.”
“In our nation’s 248 year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney, 83, said in the statement shared on Sept. 6. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,” he continued, referencing the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Cheney, who served as Vice President under President George W. Bush between 2001 and 2009 went on to say that American citizens have a “duty” to prioritize the nation over partisan politics.
Cheney’s endorsement marks the most high profile Republican politician to announce that they will vote for Harris over Republican nominee Trump, further spotlighting other former establishment Republicans who have yet to come out to endorse Trump during this run for the presidency—many of whom have been critical of Trump in the past—including his own former Vice President Mike Pence, former President George W. Bush, and former Republican nominee for President Mitt Romney.
Miroco Machiko, 1981-present
Liz Cheney also announced that she will vote for Democrat Colin Allred, who is challenging Ted Cruz for the Senate.
Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said she would be backing Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas) in the Texas Senate race, endorsing the House member over the Republican incumbent, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
“I want to say specifically, though, here in Texas, you guys do have a tremendous, serious candidate running for the United States Senate,” Cheney said during her Friday appearance at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, stopping as she was cut off by a raucous applause.
“Oh, well, it’s not Ted Cruz, but Colin Allred is somebody I served with in the House, and somebody who really, when you think about the kind of leaders our country needs, and going to this point about, you know, you might not agree on every policy position, but we need people who are going to serve in good faith,” she said.
“We need people who are honorable public servants and in this race that is Colin Allred so I’ll be working on his behalf.”
Allred, who is waging an uphill run to unseat the third-term Cruz, thanked Cheney shortly after on social media, saying the former No. 3 leader of the House Republican Conference is a “patriot who continuously puts country over party because she believes in the importance of protecting our democracy.
“I am so honored to have her support. In the Senate, I will work across party lines to get things done for Texas,” Allred said.
Naturally, the mainstream media is not treating this news with the seriousness it deserves. So far the NYT is AWOL.
As Nicolle Wallace exclaimed on her show Friday, Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have all gathered together around a cause. That cause is democracy and its standard bearer is Kamala Harris.
This is a momentous time in the United States, unprecedented at least in this century and likely since long before the Civil War. It is the biggest story in my journalism career. The question is whether our national media will understand this moment — or whether they will continue to insist on their trope of a divided America.
By Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi
It is not a divided America. Patriots are gathering together and putting past differences aside to forestall a next civil war, to support and defend the Constitution. The movement that matters is not Trump’s and the Republicans’ fascist insurrection, which is the one that gets attention in news media. The movement that matters now is this one: the movement for democracy.
In recent days, in The Times, Nick Kristof scolded liberals, telling us why we should not demean Trump voters. A few days later in The Washington Post, Matt Bai rebutted, saying he understands Trump voters but asking why he should give them empathy. I say both framings are wrong, for each centers Trump and his fascists.
A much more profound phenomenon is growing — not on the “other side” of the fascists, but instead at the new and true core of American politics and governance. The question is not whether we should demean or understand or empathize with fascists. What we should be concentrating on instead is welcoming those who will stand for democracy in a larger movement.
Jarvis pleads with the both-sides-ing political press:
For God’s sake, political reporters, stop framing these two movements — one to tear down democracy, one to build it up — as equivalent sides across your imaginary continental divide. Stop your false balance. Stop washing the insanity of the fascist party’s leader — and the insanity of his followers for following him. Stop normalizing his and their patently abnormal and abhorrent behavior. Stop trying to predict (in this unprecedented moment, all your “models” and experience and presumptions are worthless). Stop hoping for bad news. Stop making the story about yourself — yes, I am looking at you, A.G. Sulzberger — and please try to understand the threats to democracy, liberty, and life from the perspectives of those who do not share the power and privilege of your platforms. Stop ignoring the rising chorus of critics who are trying to make you and your journalism better — to save journalism from your lapses of judgment. Stop your amnesia about what Trump and company have already shown us to be. Stop making up new white-gloved euphemisms for racism, misogyny, lies, insurgency, corruption, hatred, and grift — call these things what they are, otherwise you are not doing journalism, not informing and explaining reality to your publics.
Yesterday, Trump made a fool of himself again–what else is new? He attended a court hearing on his effort to appeal the jury verdict in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case. Afterward he gave a “press conference” in which he for some strange reason described in detail some of the accusations against him by various women. Trump took no questions as this purported “press conference.”
Former President Trump appeared before a federal appeals court Friday where his attorney argued that he should get a new trial in writer E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit accusing him of sexual abuse and defamation that ended in a multimillion-dollar jury verdict.
Cat and butterfly Woodblock print by Ohara Koson
The argument delved into whether Trump’s trial judge erred by allowing the jury to hear from two other women who accused the former president of sexual assault and the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump can be heard bragging about groping women without their permission.
“It’s very hard to overturn a jury verdict based on evidentiary rulings,” noted Circuit Judge Denny Chin.
The three-judge panel on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, all appointed by Democratic presidents, heard arguments for less than a half-hour, hewing closely to the allotted argument time….
Trump himself attended Friday’s proceeding after not attending any of the trial and later blaming his lawyers for the loss….
Much of the argument revolved around the former president’s claim that his trial judge erred in allowing the jury to hear from two women who accused Trump of sexual assault on a 1979 airplane flight and during a magazine interview in 2005.
Donald Trump railed against women who have accused him of sexual assault. He baselessly blamed the Biden-Harris administration for his legal difficulties. He appeared to criticize the physical appearances of some of his accusers. “She would not have been the chosen one,” he said of one, later adding that he would “not want to be” involved with another accuser, even as he acknowledged his advisers urged him not to make such a comment.
And those were only some of the ways he veered away from topics voters have said they care most about in what his campaign billed as a “press conference” Friday, with the first ballots to be cast soon in the presidential election. Trump took no questions from the news media.
It was yet another striking strategic choice by the former president, who is in a toss-up race with Vice President Kamala Harris in the polls and facing what could be a historic gender gap in November as he struggles to appeal to women voters. After attending oral arguments Friday morning in his appeal of the verdict that found him liable for sexually abusing advice writer E. Jean Carroll decades ago, he went before the cameras and repeatedly impugned his accusers. He dismissed a string of allegations as entirely meritless as he leaned into his core message that he is a victim of political persecution.
In a roughly 49-minute appearance that sometimes verged into a stream-of-consciousness rant that was hard to follow, Trump also reminisced about his early career as a real estate mogul and reality television star. (“I was,” he said, “a celebrity for a long time.”) He lamented his two impeachments, calling them “impeachment hoax number one, impeachment hoax number two.” And he mentioned Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern who had an affair with President Bill Clinton, at least three times.
“This is the weaponization of justice at a level that nobody’s ever seen in this country before,” Trump said, blaming the Biden-Harris administration’s Justice Department for his state and federal legal entanglements, even though there is no evidence that the White House has sought to influence any of Trump’s criminal cases. “You see it in Third World countries. You see it in banana republics, but you don’t see it in the United States of America. And it’s a very sad thing. And I think I’m doing a great service by having gone through it.”
“She would not have been the chosen one.” In other words, she was not attractive enough for him to force his sexual attentions on.
Former president Donald Trump is near a crucial juncture of the 2024 campaign. Mail ballots are due to go out soon, his only scheduled debate with Vice President Kamala Harris is happening in four days and Trump is trying to reverse the momentum Harris has generated in her six-plus weeks as a presidential candidate.
By Kanoko Takeuchi
With that as the backdrop, Trump decided to spend nearly an hour Friday rehashing old grievances, offering a laundry list of false and debunked claims, criticizing his lawyers and going into great and seemingly ill-advised detail about the sexual assault allegations and verdicts against him.
Trump even acknowledged he was advised not to say some of what he said, either because it raised the possibility of yet more legal jeopardy or because it was obviously counterproductive politically.
Trump’s ability to go off-message and rant in ways that make his advisers — and, potentially, voters — squirm is unmatched. But even against that backdrop, this was on another level.
The impetus for the media event at Trump Tower was Trump’s appeal of the E. Jean Carroll sexual assault and defamation civil verdict, which was argued Friday morning. (This is the $5 million verdict against Trump — compared to the later $83.3 million case in another Carroll defamation suit.)
Some examples from Trump’s insane rant:
Trump began by repeating many claims he has made before, including that he doesn’t know Carroll and never met her, despite a photo showing the two of them meeting at one point. He said she made up the story of his assaulting her. The claims closely resembled the ones that were found to be defamatory in both of his cases. Carroll could seemingly sue again, an option her lawyer has reserved in the past when Trump kept saying such things. Her lawyer raised the prospect again Friday.
But Trump actually took things a step further.
At one point, he suggested that the 1987 photo of him and Carroll showing them, in fact, meeting “could have been AI-generated.” (This is the photo in which Trump in a deposition mistook Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples.) This is as nonsensical as Trump’s claim that recent images of Harris’s crowd size were faked. The photo first circulated in 2019, when Carroll brought her allegations forward.
At another point, Trump echoed his previous claims about another woman who accused him of sexual misconduct, suggesting that she wouldn’t have been desirable enough — a theme he returned to repeatedly throughout the appearance.
“I know you’re going to say it’s a terrible thing to say, but it couldn’t have happened,” Trump said of the other woman, Jessica Leeds, before adding that “she would not have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.”
The “chosen one” being the one he would choose to assault? Even the most generous interpretation of his bizarre comment makes it hard to conclude otherwise.
Trump has previously suggested he wasn’t attracted to the women who have accused him. But here he was casting assaulting women as something of a selection process.
Trump dwelled on that point, too, despite indicating that a lawyer had told him, “Please don’t say that I would not want to be involved with her.” He said at another point that his “people” told him not to say that, before saying it: “I would not want to be involved with her.”
Trump used a speech to the New York Economic Forum on Thursday to set out his fiscal plans, which included claiming that he would pay for child care by raising tariffs on imports—but left many who saw it confused and unable to explain it.
Among them were the co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box Becky Quick, who was on stage watching while Trump spoke for half an hour.
On Friday morning, she said she couldn’t make any sense of his plans for tariffs.
“The idea you are going to raise a lot of money through tariffs and not have it be inflationary does not make a lot of sense to me,” Quick said on Friday morning’s Squawk Box.
Quick added, “You are either changing behavior or raising money. If you are raising money from it, it is inherently inflationary. Your consumers are not getting low prices.”
Quick’s co-host, Joe Kernen—named in court papers as one of the people on Trump’s contact list when he was in the White House—was equally perplexed at how Trump planned to hike tariffs on foreign goods without sending inflation into overdrive. He called Trump’s plan a “bad, populist idea.”
Trump’s incoherent rant Thursday on tariffs came after—of all things—he was asked what sort of legislation he’d support to make child care affordable.
“If you win in November,” a nonprofit founder asked, “can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable, and, if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”
Trump suggested that he’d bring down prices for parents by subsidizing it with money made from higher tariffs on countries like China, but offered no explanation on how that would actually work. His answer went on for two minutes and totaled 360 words, but was mocked by critics as an “absolute word salad.” [….]
I wish someone in the media would follow Lawrence O’Donnell’s suggestion to ask Trump to explain what a tariff is. He describes it as a “tax” on foreign countries, and either doesn’t understand or is lying about the fact that tariffs are simply added to price Americans pay for foreign goods and are obviously inflationary.
One more story before I wrap this up. We haven’t heard much about Ron DeSantis since failed miserably in the Republican primaries. But he is still down in Florida pushing his fascist agenda.
Isaac Menasche remembers being at the Cape Coral farmer’s market last year when someone asked him if he’d sign a petition to get Florida’s abortion amendment on the ballot.
He said yes — and he told a law enforcement officer as much when one showed up at the door of his Lee County home earlier this week.
Cat in Bamboo, Hiroshima, by Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani
Menasche said he was surprised when the plainclothes officer twice asked if it was really Menasche who had signed the petition. The officer said he was looking into potential petition fraud.
Though the officer was professional and courteous, Menasche, who has had little interaction with police in his life, said the encounter left him shaken.
“I’m not a person who is going out there protesting for abortion,” Menasche said. “I just felt strongly and I took the opportunity when the person asked me, to say yeah, I’ll sign that petition.”
The officer’s visit appears to be part of a broad — and unusual — effort by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration to inspect thousands of already verified and validated petitions for Amendment 4 in the final two months before Election Day. The amendment would overturnFlorida’s six-week abortion ban by proposing to protectabortion access in Florida until viability.
Since last week, DeSantis’ secretary of state has ordered elections supervisors in at leastfour counties to send to Tallahassee at least36,000 petition forms already deemed to have been signed by real people. Since the Times first reported on this effort, Alachua and Broward counties have confirmed they also received requests from the state.
One 16-year supervisor said the request was unprecedented. The state did not ask for rejected petitions, which have been the basis for past fraud cases….
Menasche later posted on Facebook that it was “obvious to me that a significant effort was exerted to determine if indeed I had signed the petition.” He told the Times that the officer who showed up at his door had a copy of Menasche’s driver’s license and other documents related to him.Menasche said he does not recall which agency the officer was with.
I’m so glad I live in a blue state.
That’s all I have for you today. Have a nice weekend!
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
The key to the crazy car is indeed tariffs. 
The rest is under a paywall, but you get the general gist of it. So, all of this tariff shit is not coming out of Congress, as it should. That is what led to this very important article in Fortune. You may read all of it. The first author, Jeffrey Sonnenfield, is a Yale University Business Professor. The rest of the authors are equally impressive. There are CEOs of Top Companies as well as other academics, including Distinguished Professor Laura Tyson, a former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, back when we really were doing economic policy. Here’s the headline, folks! 
You may read all the listed evidence at the link. This is not normal. This is heavy-handed interference in all our markets. Evidently, regulation is good if it’s the 
WTF is going on? This is not normal. This is not democratic. This is not how our republic is supposed to work. Meanwhile, Donald’s dash for the Nobel Peace Prize is dashed again. Put so played him. This is from 
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