"what digby sez..."
Month: January 2024
It’s always 1987 in Trump’s world
A big new economic plan on the way:
Former president Donald Trump is weighing options for a major new economic attack on China if reelected, considering plans that are widely viewed as likely to spark a global trade war.
Publicly, the GOP front-runner has endorsed downgrading China’s trade status with the United States — a move that would lead tariffs between the world’s two largest economies to skyrocket. Revoking China’s status as a “most favored nation” for trade — which is applied to almost all countries the United States trades with — could lead to federal tariffs on Chinese imports of more than 40 percent, according to one analysis. Trump has floated imposing a 10 percent tariff on nearly all $3 trillion in annual imports from all countries, including China.
Privately, Trump has discussed with advisers the possibility of imposing a flat 60 percent tariff on all Chinese imports, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to relay private conversations.
All these options would lead to enormous disruptions to the U.S. and global economies that would far surpass the impact of the trade wars of Trump’s first term, economists of both parties say. Although he often praised Xi Jinping as president and signed a 2020 trade deal with China, Trump now repeatedly bashes Beijing on the campaign trail and has promised a tougher stance than President Biden.
Trump’s determination to ratchet up trade fights with Beijing reflects the emerging economic stakes of the 2024 election, as the former president appears increasingly sure of winning the GOP nomination. Trump has floated some fanciful new ideas for his second term — like building “Freedom Cities” in different parts of the United States with flying cars — but has primarily focused on intensifying policies he pursued during his first term, such as a severe immigration crackdown, cuts to corporate taxes and disruptive new tariffs on U.S. trading partners.
“The 2018 to 2019 trade war was immensely damaging, and this would go so far beyond that it’s hard to even compare to that,” said Erica York, senior economist at the Tax Foundation, a right-leaning think tank that opposes the tariffs. “This threatens to upend and fragment global trade to an extent we haven’t seen in centuries.”
[…]
In the White House and on the campaign trail, Trump has argued that tariffs on imports bolster domestic industry while raising money for the federal government, ignoring — or dismissing — economists of both parties who say they raise costs for U.S. consumers and producers. Trump repeatedly boasts of bringing in billions of dollars to U.S. coffers through the tariffs of his first term, though he added roughly $8 trillion to the national debt during his first term through higher spending and tax cuts. He also approved roughly $30 billion in a bailout to compensate farmers who had been hurt by retaliatory tariffs imposed by China.
Despite tariffs’ destabilizing impact on the global and U.S. economies, Trump has promised to dramatically expand their use in a second term. He has floated enacting a “universal baseline tariff” on virtually all imports, or roughly $3 trillion worth of goods, which would amount to more than a ninefold increase in the amount of goods subject to tariffs compared with his first term. He has also talked about pushing legislation to have the United States automatically impose “reciprocal” tariffs matching those of all countries on U.S. exports, which would almost certainly lead to a sharp rise of trade hostilities.
But Trump’s plans for China may be the most dramatic — and disruptive. Both publicly and privately, Trump has talked about his China tariffs as a key accomplishment of his first term — despite the opposition of many Republican officeholders — and vowed to double down on that approach if elected again.
China was the third-largest U.S. trading partner as of November, behind only Mexico and Canada, accounting for 11.7 percent of total U.S. foreign trade.
Manufacturing has exploded under Biden and he’s put in place policies to require semi-conductors to be manufactured in the US. Trump did none of that but sure, he’s a very stable economic genius.
Trump saw Japanese cars being offloaded at the Long beach port back in the 1980s and had the brilliant insight that we needed to stop them from doing that. There’s nothing more to it than that.
And that’s all that matters to the cult
Dahlia Litwick with a fascinating observation about the Trump trials and the effect they are having in the political culture:
Tacopina’s mistake in representing Trump’s interests in that first defamation suit lay in trying to win the case in the eyes of the law, which meant keeping Trump far away from the jurors. Trump has corrected for that by retaining Habba, who understands that whether Trump wins or loses matters less than ensuring that he feels like a winner, whatever the verdict. And what is winning if not getting to do the thing you were instructed, under penalty of sanctions, not to do? Habba knows that the outcome of these trials (how much money he has to pay) doesn’t matter nearly as much as establishing that Trump is as immune to law, judges, gag orders, and threats of sanctions as he is immune to reality, fact, science, and election results. She is the stage mother who comes to all his ballet recitals and T-ball games and tells him he’s a star and that everyone else is doping. And if a little lawyering happens on the side, well, that’s a solid day’s work.
What’s frightening about these sequential Trumpian performances of above-the-law-ness is that, as they accrue, he is trained to both believe even more obstinately that the law is what he says it is, and attempt to push the boundaries ever further the next time. For the folks who didn’t believe that Trump would testify this week because he had nothing to gain and everything to lose, we missed the foundational point. Losing the jury or the case is less important than showing, yet again, that they are irrelevant constructs in a world in which he declaims his innocence and millions still believe him.
Perhaps the scariest takeaway from the three minutes or so Donald Trump spent on the stand Thursday was that he was really just testifying that he can do and say whatever he wants, and his followers will come away thinking that the law is fake and Trump is real. The chilling irony of the only truly substantive thing Trump said—that he didn’t order his followers to harm E. Jean Carroll—is that his trials are seemingly becoming exercises in ordering his followers to disregard the law, as he does, or to choose their own legal endings, as he does. Because if he is above the law, they must be as well.
I just watched some interviews with people at the Trump rally in Las Vegas and she is absolutely right. These people all believe that this is a conspiracy to take down Trump and destroy America. Their belief in him is impermeable and his insistence that the rule of law in America is entirely corrupt has become an article of faith. They now believe that the law is what Trump says it is.
Take a look at what this man, the Governor of Oklahoma is saying:
Apparently, he’s going to decide for us what the Constitution says. Or Trump. Or maybe Lauren Boebert.
How about this?
Also, they are stupid:
She’s a terrible lawyer and a terrible actress
And she’s just as nuts as he is:
Following a massive verdict where a New York federal jury ordered Donald Trump to pay over $83 million in damages to E. Jean Carroll for making defamatory statements about her, Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, exited the courtroom, on the brink of tears, and lambasted the court and the process for holding Donald Trump accountable. Watch the moment below:
Following her meltdown, CNN’s Jake Tapper put her speech into perspective by talking about her “effectiveness” as Trump’s attorney. Watch for yourself:
This is the woman who said she’d rather be pretty than smart because she can fake being smart. Actually, she can’t. She proved that with her embarrassing performance in federal court. She’s better hope that Trump keeps her on for the rest of his life and actually pays his bills because no one else in their right mind would hire this ridiculous person.
The Wall St. Journal breaks from the MAGA GOP which may have some effect on donors and, therefore, Republican politicians:
The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board is warning Republicans that they may pay a political price for letting Donald Trump rip up a deal to beef up border security measures and provide more aid to Ukraine.
On Wednesday, Punchbowl News reported that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had told his colleagues that they were in a “quandary” because Trump opposes the deal and the caucus doesn’t want to do anything to “undermine” the likely Republican presidential nominee.
The Journal submitted that following Trump’s command “would be a self-inflicted wound.”
“President Biden would claim, with cause, that Republicans want border chaos as an election issue rather than solving the problem,” argued its editors. “Voter anger may over time move from Mr. Biden to the GOP, and the public will have a point. Cynical is the only word that fits Republicans panning a border deal whose details aren’t even known.”
They’re worried that they’re going to lose their tax cuts which is apparently even more important than the excellent economy they are experiencing under Biden. Priorities.
This crack in the coalition with money on one side and racist fear-mongers on the other is always there but this time it may just break wide open, at least on this issue. GOP pols are caught in the middle. We’ll have to see which side they believe their bread is buttered on.
Who’s a civilian?
The International Court of Justice in The Hague today made an initial ruling, four weeks after an application from South Africa that accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians. The court ordered Israel to ensure that its military does not commit acts of genocide against Palestinians, to immediately improve humanitarian aid to Palestinians, and to prevent and punish genocidal incitement against Palestinians.
However, the court stopped short of ordering Israel to end its military operations against Hamas, a nod to Israel’s right to respond in self-defense after the deadly Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7. South Africa had hoped the court would order such a cessation, in effect ruling in favor of an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. The court did also call for the immediate release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
Given the dreadful toll of civilian deaths in Gaza, reportedly now topping 25,000, Israel should answer questions about its conduct. Every member of the United Nations’ 1948 Genocide Convention has an obligation to raise concerns if they have evidence that a group of people is at risk of genocide. Given previous catastrophic failures to prevent genocide—in Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur—more referrals to the court could be good news for the protection of civilians at risk. And unlike Russia, against which Ukraine made a complaint to the court in February 2022, Israel has indicated that it takes the charges seriously, attending the court to dispute the accusation.
“Dreadful toll” is certainly apt. It may be an “angels dancing on the head of a pin” matter, but “civilian deaths” is difficult to quantify when the Gaza health ministry does not distinguish between combatant “civilians” and civilian civilians. People are dying of wounds and on the edge of starving as Israeli bombs keep falling and Israeli tanks keep lobbing shells.
“Please, Israel, do not commit genocide while you are conducting your self-defense operations in a dense strip of land from which civilians are not allowed to flee” is pretty thin gruel.
Meantime, Israel charges that United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) members in the region particpated in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in southern Israel that sparked Israeli retaliation (CBS News):
The United States government said Friday that it was temporarily pausing additional funding for UNRWA, the United Nations humanitarian agency that serves Palestinians, as the organization said it had opened an investigation into allegations from Israel that some of its staff members participated in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.
Those attacks about 1,200. Canada, U.K., and Australia have also paused funding. UNRWA said it had fired the employees who were accused.
“The Israeli authorities have provided UNRWA with information about the alleged involvement of several UNRWA employees in the horrific attacks on Israel on October 7,” Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA Commissioner-General, said in a statement Friday, according to the Reuters news agency. “To protect the agency’s ability to deliver humanitarian assistance, I have taken the decision to immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and launch an investigation in order to establish the truth without delay.”
Lazzarini did not say how many UNRWA employees were accused of participating in the attack, but said “any UNRWA employee who was involved in acts of terror” would be held accountable, and possibly face criminal prosecution. 30,000 people work for UNWRA, according to its website. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said 12 UNRWA employees had been accused of participating in the Oct. 7 attack.
What “particpating” means is left undefined in that report.
BBC offers this detail:
On Friday, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister told the BBC that the 7 October Hamas attacks had involved “people who are on their [UNRWA] salaries”.
Mark Regev said there was information showing teachers working in UNRWA schools had “openly celebrated” the 7 October attacks.
He also referred to an Israeli hostage who, on her release, said she had been “held in the house of someone who worked for UNRWA”.
Josh Holland (We’ve Got Issues podcast) expresses skepticism at Mastodon:
Unless there’s more to it than this story lays out, the allegations made by a far-right gov that sees humanitarian orgs as mortal enemies and is notoriously loose with the facts seem exceptionally thin. A teacher in an UNRA school “celebrated” 10/7 and Hamas kept hostages in an UNRA employee’s apt?
Investigating the claim is one thing, but pausing funding when 2 million people are suffering the worst humanitarian crisis in memory is horrific.
What a mess.
What do Democrats offer instead?
Donald “91 Counts” Trump will appeal the judgment, of course. It’s what he does as surely as “grab them.” He’ll appeal the $83.3 million judgment a Manhattan jury on Friday awarded E. Jean Carroll in her defamation case (The Guardian):
Carroll will receive $18.3m in compensatory damages and $65m in punitive retribution. The former president is paying Carroll compensatory damages of $18.3m – $11m to fund a reputational repair campaign. The $7.3m is for the emotional harm caused by Trump’s 2019 public statements. Carroll and her legal team were beaming as they left court in a black SUV. They did not answer questions immediately after court let out.
Moments after the decision was announced, Trump decried it as “absolutely ridiculous” on Truth Social, and said he would be filing an appeal.
Naturally.
Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper she’d never seen someone as contemptuous of the U.S. justice system as Trump. (Unless he can turn it againt his enemies, also naturally.)
Trump is not enough
Democrats will use this case and Trump’s other legal troubles against him in this year’s elections. And against his fellow Republicans (Politico):
So far, Democrats have launched Trump-themed attacks on a handful of vulnerable Republicans across the country, using billboards in battleground districts.
In New York, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee plans to highlight Trump’s role in restricting abortion through his Supreme Court appointees who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. They are also pointing out a 2017 law that limited state and local tax deductions to $10,000 — a provision known as SALT that hurt homeowners in high-tax states like New York and that suburban GOP lawmakers have pushed to change.
Taken together, they are aiming to build a case against anyone who shares a party ID with the controversial former president and native New Yorker as the Democrats fend off attacks on their own record on migrants and crime.
[…]
Democrats also want to make Rep. Elise Stefanik, the House GOP conference chair and a lightning rod for liberals, a liability for Republicans this year. Stefanik is a prominent Trump supporter and has been floated as a potential running mate.
It’s what Republicans have done with Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for years: tie any and every Democratic candidate to the “San Francisco liberal” no matter how ridiculous the association. Despite the fact that it frequently doesn’t work. They believe it gins up the GOP base, and maybe it does.
Tying GOP candidates to Trump might do that with Democratic voters. But what Democrats need if they expect to win is to give “low-propensity” unaffiliated voters a reason to turn out for Democratic candidates in the fall. “We’re not Tump” is not enough. “There has to be a dream. We have to be for a thing,” messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio tells students. Rev. Martin Luther King is not famous for saying, “I have a complaint.”
“Chaos follows him,” former South Carolina Gov. Nikki says of Trump as though his hands are clean of sending his MAGA mob to sack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Voters not in the Trump cult have had enough Trump chaos. They will vote against that, as they did in New Hampshire this week.
But Democrats have to offer a positive alternative and sell it hard if they expect to generate enough youth turnout to do more than sqeak by. Running hard on women’s rights is already a proven vote-getter. Winning 55 percent of the national vote is not out of the question, says Simon Rosenberg, and “may be the only way we’re going to get the Republicans to abandon MAGA and become a more traditional center-right party.”
Not that I won’t settle for squeaking by. But a decisive win for Biden in November will help put MAGA back in the box and help avoid another Jan. 6. So paint the beautiful tomorrow, Democrats. Sell the brownie, not the recipe. Let the Lincoln Project do what it does better than you anyway.
Some beautiful creatures:
He just can’t do anything right
The House Oversight Committee on Tuesday released the transcript of the testimony of Kevin Morris, a friend of and attorney for Hunter Biden, and his statements undercut everything Republicans have said about the embattled first son.
Morris is a high-powered entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles who met Hunter at a 2019 presidential fundraiser for his father, Joe Biden. Morris has loaned Hunter nearly $5 million in the years since. He testified about his relationship with Hunter in a closed-door committee hearing last week.
Initially, Oversight Chair James Comer just released a list of paraphrased highlights from Morris’s testimony. Comer claimed that Morris informally loaned Hunter the money and does not expect to be repaid until after the 2024 election—or possibly ever. But the transcript shows this couldn’t be further from the truth.
In reality, Morris never once mentioned the possibility of forgiving the loans. Instead, he said he has a “100 percent” expectation that Hunter will repay him, and repeatedly states that he and Hunter have a series of promissory notes agreeing the younger Biden will pay back the money.
[…]
The only person who mentions loan forgiveness in the entire interview is Representative Andy Biggs. The Arizona Republican has been a vocal critic of the Biden family, accusing them of criminal wrongdoing. Biggs asked what consequences Hunter would face if he defaulted on these loans.
Morris joked that, hypothetically, a lender could ask the borrower to “come over and wash your car for the rest of their life.”
Biggs replied, “Or you can forgive. You can forgive it.”
Morris agreed that was an option, but he never said he would.
Morris also repeatedly stated that Hunter never asked him for the money. Morris would voluntarily send money through his lawyers to Hunter’s, but the younger Biden did not ask him to do so. Morris only gave Hunter cash directly once, when he bought two paintings on their second meeting in 2019. And again, he wants the rest of the money he loaned paid back with interest.
Look, we all know it’s skeevy that the children of powerful people get special opportunities to make money by trading on their famous family’s name. This has been going on since time began. I’m against it. But all this “investigation” of poor Hunter Biden, a man who has had some mammoth personal struggles, has turned up absolutely no evidence of any kind of corruption. I still maintain that this is mostly in order to make Joe Biden cry but it’s not working. And Hunter seems to be a lot smarter and tougher than they gave him credit for.
What a clown show this is.
It tells you a lot about the cult and why they love him
Philip Bump reads Trump’s social media so you don’t have to. And his analysis of what it tells us is right on:
Truth Social is a weird place.
The social media site started by Donald Trump (or, really, by tech-savvy people working for him) is not formally oriented around Trump, but it is in practice. It is largely populated by Trump fans and allies who use the site to orbit Trump like asteroids circling the sun. Trump uses it differently, injecting rhetoric and framing into the national conversation.
Nearly every one of his posts triggers the same response from the site’s users: a flurry of pro-Trump, anti-Biden memes tacked on to Trump’s missive. It’s feudalistic; when the king emerges from the castle, the serfs compete to offer him their wares in the hopes that — glory be! — he might lackadaisically bless them with a reshare.
All of that, the context for the site, offers insight into how Trump approaches power. But one post in particular, offered up by Trump on Wednesday evening, was even more revealing.
What grabbed the most attention was Trump’s announcement that he was excommunicating donors to former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley’s campaign from his political circle.
“Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to [Haley], from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp,” he wrote with his idiosyncratic punctuation and capitalization. “We don’t want them, and will not accept them, because we Put America First, and ALWAYS WILL!”
It wasn’t hard to see this coming. Trump wants to be done with the primaries and understands that Haley, his only remaining opponent, needs financial contributions to press on. So he imposes what costs he can on doing so, a “permanent bar” from “MAGA camp.”
Such promises are often illusory in Trumpworld; Haley herself went from criticizing him forcefully in 2016 to being tapped to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations. It’s also an easy threat to issue when you’re running out the clock in a primary season. When the general election campaign begins and Trump is trying to raise nine figures to defeat President Biden, the apostasy of giving cash to Haley will be easy to forgive.
But step back a bit. This is Trump attempting to impose a penalty on those who defy him, to make democratic expression something for which one can be punished. He could simply wait for Haley’s inevitable concession. Instead, he’s lashing out at the insolence of not falling in line.
If you think he wouldn’t be happy to scale this up, you haven’t been paying attention.
Again, though, that was just part of the social media post.
Haley, he declared at the outset, “is very bad for the Republican Party and, indeed, our Country.”
Why?
Because, the former president wrote, “Her False Statements, Derogatory Comments, and Humiliating Public Loss, is demeaning to True American Patriots.”
If there is one thing Donald Trump will not abide, it is false statements, disparaging people or refusing to accept a humiliating public loss. When one thinks of the things that are least Trump-like, it’s dishonesty, rudeness and a failure to concede elections.
One would be forgiven for marveling at the lack of self-awareness in that phrase or to assume that he is being intentionally ironic. We might also wonder if this is another example of Trump trying to redirect criticism he faced against someone else, either to dilute the criticism or to “what about” it. Either way, it stands out.
In his post, Trump went on to suggest that Haley should be angry not at him but at her consultants. (Unlikely, given that Haley has outperformed every other challenger to the quasi-incumbent Trump.) And then one more insult.
“I knew Nikki well, she was average at best, is not the one to take on World Leaders, and she never did,” Trump wrote. “That was up to me, and that is why they respected the United States.”
We’ve been through this before, too. Someone who worked for Trump and received praise when hired or appointed is transformed, once they defy him, into a bumbling buffoon who relied on Trump to backstop their ineptitude.
Haley was picked to represent the country at the United Nations in November 2016. At the time, Trump’s team put out a statement praising the South Carolina governor.
“Governor Haley has a proven track record of bringing people together regardless of background or party affiliation to move critical policies forward for the betterment of her state and our country,” it read. “She will be a great leader representing us on the world stage.”
“You’ve been fantastic,” Trump said when she eventually resigned the post. “You’re my friend. And I just — on behalf of the country, I want to thank you for a great job.”
As hollow a sentiment as his more recent one.
But this is Trump in a nutshell. No permanent friends, only permanent interests: specifically, accruing power for Donald Trump. It’s all familiar — the disparaging of former allies, the threats, the complaints about things he does.
This, not any policy, constitutes Donald Trump’s politics.
That is exactly right. And his appeal has nothing to do with policy either. I don’t think most of his followers could name one except maybe “the wall” which he failed to build. That’s not why they love him. They love him because they love a man who dominates. And just like him, they are infuriated that half the country is refusing to be dominated.
Trump cultists know on some level that they are patsies which is one reason they are so mad at the rest of us. We make them look bad.