i'm a broken record about this but our failure to follow our own ban tiktok law while it's actively being used in a front of the supposedly existential trade war we're in with china is baffling pic.twitter.com/akRaZuOL5k
Trump is so myopic that he is allowing Tik Tok to continue to undermine him and his agenda because someone told him that the young people all voted for him (they didn’t) because of it. I don’t have strong feelings ab out Tik-Tok one way or another but Trump’s incoherent policy is truly something. Talk about clown show fascism…
Something v profound here about the whole Trump experience. Trump stepping over Congress to punish Chinese manufacturers (his tariffs) while stepping over Congress to un-punish Chinese social media (his stay of the TikTok ban) is one of the clearer cases where I don’t think it’s possible to really articulate any coherent ex ante strategy for this administration.
The best a Trump explainer or defender can do is watch what he does and explain after the fact that it’s brilliant. So you get a bunch of very (or mildly) clever ex post explanations but nobody can tell you what’s gonna happen next week. How’s this supposed to work for … four years? I don’t get how you run an economy with a bunch of priests standing around a lottery ball machine, explaining why each new number is the perfect expression of an infallible god.
CNN did a 100 Days program last night that was quite good. But it features several Trump apologists weighing in on each subject and they sounded exactly like that. No matter how obviously insane Trump’s comments or policies, they robotically defended him in just that way — as an infallible god. It’s very creepy.
Trump: And eventually we’ll be reducing taxes very substantially because the money is so great coming in from tariffs that I’ll be able to reduce taxes to a very large extent and maybe almost completely pic.twitter.com/2i5PQyZ3S8
I don’t think anyone can ever dissuade him of this nonsense. The economy will crash and he’ll probably blame the Fed. And Biden. And he’ll just keep saying we need more tariffs. It’s all he knows.
We asked the president if his second term felt different from his first. He said it did. “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
I’ve written that this is all about world domination for him and got quite a bit of blowback. TDS to the max, I’m told. No, he’s just a crazy old man (which he is) not some world historical villain. He just said it. He believes he runs the world.
He doesn’t, of course. He barely runs the White House. But he has a tremendous amount of power to destroy things and he’s doing it:
For weeks, we’d been hearing from both inside and outside the White House that the president was having more fun than he’d had in his first term. “The first time, the first weeks, it was just ‘Let’s blow this place up,’ ” Brian Ballard, a lobbyist and an ally of the president’s, had told us. “This time, he’s blowing it up with a twinkle in his eye.”
This piece by Michael Tomasky in The New Republic defines this well:
When we think of the word fascism, everyone’s mind races immediately to Adolf Hitler. But the world has seen many variants of fascism, Nazism being only one. There’s Italian fascismo, there’s Francoism, there’s Banderism (that was Ukrainian) and Ilminism (South Korean) and more. There’s neofascism and crypto-fascism and ur-fascism and Islamofascism. But Donald Trump has given us something new: clown-show fascism.
Clown-show fascism describes a regime marked simultaneously by hubristic and defiant assaults on the democratic and constitutional order on the one hand and, on the other, a nearly laughable incompetence in just about every other area of the regime’s activity. The first characteristic certainly applies to the Trump administration, and it’s chilling and frightening and not at all funny. Just ask Mahmoud Khalil.
Yet at the same time, in other areas, the incompetence has been staggering. Trump’s constant about-faces and walk backs on tariffs have been an international embarrassment. Elon Musk’s DOGE has fired federal workers willy-nilly only to turn around and rehire many after the Musketeers realized they weren’t deep-state bloodsuckers and the work they did was kind of essential, after all—you know, like the people who tend the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
And then there’s the tariff scheme which is the biggest example of staggeringly incompetent clown show fascism yet. That one hasn’t even begun to bite.
Trump thinks he runs the world and could intimidate every other country into bending to his will. That’s not working out the way he planned it.
The 100 day polling continues to be dismal for President Donald Trump and his administration. The Washington Post/ABC/Ipsos and the AP/NORC poll out in the last couple of days even show him with a 39% approval rating which is astonishing for a president this early in his term. It’s the presidential honeymoon from hell — for all of us, unfortunately.
One of the most unexpected results of these new polls is the fact that Trump is underwater on every issue now, even his supposed strong suits, immigration and the economy. On the latter he is in terrible shape hovering in the low 30s in some of the polls and even on immigration people are rejecting his tactics. Across the board on every other issue, from tariffs to the assault on DEI to the reckless cutting of government agencies and odious foreign policy, a majority rejects his actions.
Now, it must be said that Republicans, by and large, still support Trump. His numbers aren’t in the 90s but they’re still pretty high, usually in the 60s to 70s and Republican officials living in their cloistered little cult compounds for the most part consider that to be all they need to justify staying the course. Trump believes he is the president of Trumplandia, not America, so he’s fine with that too. He’s so lost in his own reality in which anything that doesn’t comport with his increasingly delusional hype is dismissed as fake that I don’t think he’s even aware of how fully he’s been rejected by the vast majority of Americans.
There are some Republicans who have to worry, however. House members in swing districts and senators in purple states are probably starting to feel a little bit antsy. If this pattern follows previous midterms, they could be looking at a blow out if Trump doesn’t improve his numbers. This may play out over the next month as the congress comes back into session and takes up the budget talks in earnest. Whatever divisions exist are going to manifest over the next month and we’ll begin to see if there are any real cracks in the coalition in light of Trump’s pathetic approval ratings.
The Democrats are trying to bring attention to some of these unpopular issues and have had some success recently. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s 24 hr floor speech, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Sen Bernie Sanders’ Fighting Oligarchy Tour, Maryland Sen Chris Van Hollan’s trip to the Salvadoran prison to see wrongfully deported immigrant Kilmar Obrego Garcia are all excellent examples of tactics to expose the Trump administration’s extreme policies to more media scrutiny. The town halls all over the country (which Trump is now demanding be met with violence) are taking it to -places where the Republicans are afraid to show up and big protests are happening with regularity.
But there remains some division within the party about whether they should spend their time hammering Trump and his accomplices on their authoritarian takeover or concentrate on the perennial “kitchen table issues.” ” Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar told CNN’s “State of the Union” that the Republicans are using police state tactics “because they want to distract people from the fact that our economy is in a tailspin thanks to them, their tariffs” and California Gov. Gavin Newsom exhorted Democrats not to ” get distracted by distractions” referring to the Abrego Garcia case. And according to the Washington Post, the leadership has made the decision to party like it’s 2005 and focus on cuts to Social Security:
Early Democratic ads are targeting Republican senators on Social Security. Democrats have visited Social Security offices around the country, sometimes getting turned away and going public. Senate Democrats have set up a “war room” to deliver the message.
The message has been a perennial for decades now, mostly because Republicans have always wanted to cut the program and there’s every reason to believe they will do everything they can to cripple it. According to the Post, Trump is worried and reportedly upset to see it in the news and everyone wishes Elon Musk had never publicly called it a ponzi scheme. There’s no doubt that the issue still has juice, particularly with seniors who are very reliable voters. But it’s myopic to see this as the only potent political issue and these new polls show that the American people are having no problem wrapping their minds around the full spectrum of atrocities being perpetrated by this administration.
I doubt most people know the scope of what’s going on and the Democrats should tell them. According to the Post/ABC poll voters already say, by a margin of 70-28%, that they don’t think the federal government should be telling universities how to operate. Imagine how they will feel when they find out that in order to win a culture war battle against DEI and “woke” policies, Trump is withholding billions that are spent almost entirely on biomedical research. It’s enraging.
And that’s not all. Just a couple of weeks ago the Washington Post reported on a White House budget document that proposes:
Under a more than 30 percent cut to the agency’s budget, public health initiatives aimed at HIV/AIDS prevention would no longer exist, major parts of the National Institutes of Health would be abolished and the FDA would cease routine inspections at food facilities. Funding for top Trump administration priorities — like programs on autism, chronic disease, drug abuse and mental health — is also on the chopping block.
I realize that this is just another of the many horrific cuts all across the federal government but it seems to me that it’s a particularly potent one. This is a top line concern for most people and it intersects with DOGE, immigration, foreign policy and Trump’s reckless abandonment of America’s role as a leader in science.
Maybe the MAGA hardcore and RFK Jr’s woo-woo followers want to put their lives in the hands of proponents of raw milk and Ivermectin cocktails, but I’m fairly sure the rest of us would prefer that we remain in the 21st century where kids don’t die of measles and cures for new viruses can be put on the fast track and save many millions of lives. Americans will sit around their kitchen tables and be grateful for the politicians who make that case.
Over the weekend, I took another step back from leadeship here so people decades younger could put a hand on the tiller. I helped elect a 25-year-old woman for N.C. state chair in 2023. I welcome a 27-year old woman as our newly elected county chair. I still complain that some Democratic Party organizations have the institutional vitality and cultural relevance of (no offense) the Loyal Order of Moose (founded 1888).
A couple of items this morning on why recognizing that and acting on it is important. Because younger voters are justifiably fed up with the two party system.
Exit polling that Newsweek reported in November showed that not only did Kamala Harris’s support slump 13 points among 18 to 29 Gen Z voters over Joe Biden’s 2020 electorate, but they swung right by several points.
Yale’s Youth Poll from last week found that for “a generic Democrat vs. Republican ballot for 2026, respondents ages 18-21 supported Republicans by nearly 12 points, while those ages 22-29 backed Democrats by about 6 points,” Rachel Janfaza reported at Politico:
It was a stunning gap that undermined the longstanding notion of younger voters always trending more liberal. On the contrary, today’s youngest eligible voters are more conservative than their older counterparts: According to the poll, they are less likely to support transgender athletes participating in sports, less likely to support sending aid to Ukraine and more likely to approve of President Donald Trump. Fifty-one percent of younger Gen Zers view him favorably, compared to 46 percent of older Gen Z.
An NBC News Stay Tuned Poll reported this morning as Donald Trump approaches his first 100 days that “64% of independents have an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party and 71% have an unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party,” polling by Survey Monkey found:
Meanwhile, Gen Zers and millennials were more likely than Gen X and baby boomers to identify themselves as independents. And it’s under these uncertain conditions that many voters are coming into politics without strong ties to the traditional parties.
In North Carolina, registered independents (“unaffiliateds” here) now outnumber Democrats by seven points. When cheerleading candidates urge party volunteers to turn out our Democrats, I wonder, “Have you seen the registration numbers?”
Corruption and corrosive partisanship are concerns NBC found among young independents.
The new poll found that 65% of Gen Z independents believe neither Democrats nor Republicans fight for people like them, with 78% saying the country is on the wrong track.
The poll also revealed 67% of all independent voters somewhat or strongly disapprove of the way Trump is handling his job as president. Nearly half (48%) of Gen Zers strongly disapprove, and Gen Z women have the highest disapproval.
An op-ed from Rob Flaherty, a Biden White House veteran and deputy campaign manager on Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, considers what this means for Democrats going forward.
Flaherty concurs with the late Andrew Breitbart that politics is downstream of culture. But in a digital culture in which voters increasingly opt in to curated information bubbles, Democrats have failed to leave theirs. And to recognize that people can if they wish opt out of politics. Those who have, voters Democrats failed to reach, decided the 2024 elections (The New York Times, gift link):
But opting out of politics doesn’t mean never hearing about it. Opt-out voters aren’t watching CNN or paying for news subscriptions, but they still get a lot of information from social media, friends and family. Politics, for them, tends to show up as cultural drift — bits of stories, values and secondhand outrage shared online by friends, influencers and nonpolitical creators. It’s ambient, not deliberate. It’s culture, not news. A young dad scrolling Instagram for parenting tips stumbles across a clip about “traditional family values.” A small-business owner watching finance videos gets fed posts about why “woke policies” are destroying the economy. A 25-year-old gym enthusiast on TikTok starts seeing content about masculinity, personal responsibility and — soon enough — right-wing politics.
The right makes money wooing them too.
Younger opt-out voters view the system as broken and Democrats as defending the status quo. When they hear from them at all, Flaherty adds:
If you don’t trust the mainstream press, we’re not for you — because it’s the only way we know how to reach people.
If you’re looking for fast relief, we’ve got a white paper to explain our phased-in tax credit through the fiscal year 2030. Sorry, am I boring you?
Point is, the right dominates the opt-out media ecosystem while Democrats are as attractive as the Loyal Order of Moose when it comes young independents. “In style, substance and communication, Democrats have become an opt-in party in an opt-out country,” Flaherty cautions.
So we’re stuck: We’ve got opt-in media for an opt-out electorate. At a time when many Americans don’t trust the mainstream press or Hollywood, the left owns where voters used to be. The right owns where voters are going. It leaves Democrats unable to influence the culture that really matters today, which leaves us unable to make our case to the voters we need.
David Hogg, 25, gun control activist and recently elected DNC Vice Chair, is pissing off defenders of the party’s status quo by threatening to challenge quiescent Democratic House members in secure seats. Independents don’t see Democrats fighting for them. Hogg means to give incumbents a reason to or else replace some with politicians who will. They’ll likely be younger and more readily penetrate the opt-out world than their older compatriots. Because as Flaherty sees it, “We are now seeing a generation of 70-year-olds who called for the departure of an 81-year-old fail to understand how anyone under 60 gets information about their world.”
Many of those running the Democratic Party bring 20th-century knives to a 21st-century gunfight. For the party to remain vital, new blood should be more welcome and allowed to lead, and to lead their elders into media spaces they don’t know how to navigate. There are more Americans out there than Democrats who need champions. Democrats cannot afford to opt out of talking to them where they hang out.
Google Gemini can’t seem to get a simple epitaph right after multiple attempts.
There is too much doomsaying out there. It is hard to say how much is aimed, like trolling, at getting a rise out of people. Maybe just for the hell of it. Maybe just to get them to snap out of their stupor and goad them into action.
The problem for non-news junkies is that most of their neighbors aren’t glued to cable news. How they hear what’s going on in the world is less intentional, more organic. Our readers here may believe Rome is burning while life goes on for non-politicos.
I glanced around an uncrowded downtown restaurant about 10 days ago while waiting for our dinner and said, “This is life in a dictatorship.” Nothing seemed any different.
The rolling national 50501, etc. protests may change that. Or not. Calls for a nationwide general strike are mounting, if slowly and not yet loudly. I’d like to see one if, for no other reason, to see what happens.
Columnist Joe Mathews contributed to the doomsaying genre on Sunday by publishing an obituary for the United States of America in the San Francisco Chronicle:
The American democratic republic, a modest British colony that transformed itself into the world’s richest country and greatest military power, has died.
It was 236 years old.
No official announcement was made of the end of the long-enduring republic, which was launched in 1789. No autopsy was scheduled.
Mathews goes on without saying whether the death was of natural causes or the result of foul play. He notes pointedly that a multiple felon named Trump who launched a failed coup and in his second term “governed in a way that drew comparisons to the Mafia” had a hand in terminating the Constitution.
The American democratic republic is survived by a country of the same name, the United States of America, now a presidential dictatorship.
The dictator not identified as the Constitution’s murderer had a slew of accomplices who go unnamed in the obituary. Among them, the Supreme Court with its “2024 decision putting the president explicitly above the law and immune from criminal punishment for official actions.” And the Americans who called for burning it down plus others who stood by and watched as it heaved its last breath. (And the tech bros whose AI products can’t seem to get a simple epitaph right after multiple attempts.)
“Few Americans were aware of the republic’s death,” Mathews explains. “Confusion and fear of violence reigned among those who recognized the loss.” The rest were enjoying their meals at downtown restaurants.
You get the point.
Since irony is dead too, the piece feels less like a wake-up call than a shrug. Not sure how that works as a troll. Maybe it’s a San Francisco thing.
Over the next few weeks we are going to see a congressional free-for-all in which the Republican congress negotiates with itself (they’re using the Reconciliation process which doesn’t require Democrats’ votes and they aren’t even trying to get any) over the budget.
The WSJ had a nice rundown of the various factions that are warring with each other, starting with the usual deficit cranks:
Deficit hard-liners
A group of so-called budget hawks have hinged their support of the president’s reconciliation bill on the idea that the tax cuts must be paired with significant spending cuts. These Republicans are willing to allow some deficit increases because they assume that economic growth will cover some of the costs. But they’ve indicated that—even though they’ve moved the process along so far—they aren’t automatic yes votes.
They want $2 trillion in cuts and that means serious pain for the American people at a time when Trumpk already screwed the pooch with DOGE and tariffs. Yeah. Great politics.
Medicaid defenders
One area likely to be targeted in the pursuit of steep spending cuts is Medicaid, a health insurance program that covers more than 70 million people who are low-income and is a big part of state budgets and the healthcare economy. There is a bloc of Republicans warning that deep reductions in coverage will hurt constituents and make GOP efforts to keep the House majority more difficult in 2026.
Even Josh Hawley is against this which could mean that the Senate can’t get it through either.
SALT caucus
A group of Republican lawmakers are vowing that their support for the Trump tax bill depends on raising the cap on state and local tax deductions, which was limited to $10,000 in 2017 as part of Trump’s tax law.
Most of these lawmakers hail from states that have higher costs of living and property taxes, like New York, New Jersey and California. Reps. Nick LaLota, Mike Lawler and Andrew Garbarino of New York, and New Jersey’s Jeff Van Drew and Tom Kean Jr. are among those pushing strongly to address the issue, with some threatening to withhold their support from the GOP package if the cap isn’t raised.
I’ll bet they cave … and lose their seats anyway,
Inflation Reduction Act protectors
Republicans whose states and districts received billions in funding that went towards clean energy projects through the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act are also warning party leaders against clawing back this funding and limiting tax credits that provide incentives. Such a clawback could be used to help offset the cost of other tax cuts, and Trump has repeatedly vowed to repeal the law.
There are quite a few Republicans who’ll be negatively affected by this. It will be up to Democrats to put the pressure on them with their constituents as this battle proceeds.
I really doubt they’re going to get these big cuts. My guess is that they’ll settle for cuts to culture war targets like NPR and Planed Parenthood and extend the tax cuts for another year and call it a victory, Their voters won’t know the difference and everyone else will be relieved it wasn’t worse. Meanwhile we’ll be dealing with something even more horrible that the administration is doing. At the end of the day it’s pretty clear that congressional Republicans have decided to keep their heads down and just try to get through this. They believe in nothing.
A year after his presidential ambitions collapsed, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his wife Casey can no longer lay claim to the future of the Republican Party. And in Florida, even their present is in jeopardy.
Once firmly in his corner, many Sunshine State Republicans have lately turned on DeSantis, stymying his agenda and frustrating him to no end. At the same time, Casey DeSantis, long regarded as a political force in her own right, is encountering quiet but firm resistance as she lays the groundwork for a potential run to succeed her husband — a campaign that would pit her against President Donald Trump’s handpicked choice to lead the state, Rep. Byron Donalds.
Now, a funding scandal involving one of Casey’s signature initiatives — a state assistance program known as Hope Florida — is casting a shadow over the governor’s legacy and complicating her political ambitions. Lawmakers spent the spring investigating why $10 million from a state Medicaid settlement was routed to a charity connected to Hope Florida, which then transferred the same amount to two groups that financially backed a DeSantis-led campaign against legalizing recreational marijuana. Key lawmakers have publicly suggested the flow of money appearsillegal.
The couple have fiercely stood by their work and denied wrongdoing. DeSantis this week called the criticism of Hope Florida “all political.” Standing alongside her husband Thursday, Casey DeSantis characterized the program as “a philosophy” that “shows we can help people in need.”
Remarkably, the investigation into Hope Florida was not by Democrats, but by Republicans — a striking sign of DeSantis’ eroding clout in a state capital he once controlled with unchallenged authority. Outside Tallahassee, some of Trump’s staunchest allies in Florida have helped to amplify the controversy to their MAGA followers.
I don’t know about you but it sure makes me happy to see this happening to that creepy piece of work and his equally creepy wife. They thought she was going to be Governor (for some reason.) Nat gonna happen.
The question is whether this is a sign that Florida is coming out of its two decade descent into madness. I hope for their sake that it is. It should. Trump is destroying tourism, terrorising Latinos and making old people insecure and afraid. He’s even destroying the weather service. Florida is going to feel the brunt of all this. Maybe they’ll finally wake up.
It’s only getting much play in the trade/transport niche press. But pretty real product shortages beginning in mid-May or so are already locked in. They’re maybe a thousand miles out in the Pacific Ocean. Modern trade takes place in gargantuan container ships. There are very detailed records for every one at sea, when it left China, the US port it’s traveling to etc.
I’m doing this from memory so the rough dates may be a few days off. But this last week we were still in a surge of week over week and year over year shipping as shippers and buyers tried to get out ahead of the tariffs. So it’s actually higher than usual because of that. But in the first and second week of May it drops off dramatically.
I’ve heard the drop off described in different ways. But the most optimistic seems to be a reduction in imports of about 50% or a bit less. Ships to the west coast go and to the east coast through the canal. So it hits the west coast first. Then it shows up in Chicago a week or so later as rail and trucking freight drop off. Then on the east coast as ships don’t arrive there.
I was talking to one regional banker in the mid Atlantic who told me that after the first week or may there are simply no ships from China arriving. Whatever the precise specifics the point is that this is already locked in. The severe drop off has already happened but it’s all off set by weeks because the Pacific Ocean is big and ocean freight speed is relatively slow. And it has knock on effects in domestic shipping.
It will hit trucking hard but that’s still a couple weeks away. Even if you only have roughly a 50% drop off in volume that shows up not just as rising costs but shortages. And even Trump woke up tomorrow and called everything off you’d still have a significant period of shortages locked in. And obviously that’s not going to happen.
We will also almost certainly see a limited version of the supply chain snarls we say during the pandemic. There are reports of some containers simply sitting or being abandoned in ports. Also when there’s no product you start laying off truckers or independents do something else. So when the product comes back on line the system to move the product out of port doesn’t come back immediately.
The upshot is that we’ve already locked in a long hot imports summer regardless of what happens now.
There are local stories here in LA about truckers being laid off and the Porto of Long Beach already feeling the effects. That’s about to go into warp speed in the next week or so.
Someone must have told Trump this would happen. I assume he said (as he’s been reported to have said on a number of subjects) “fuck it.” He thinks America loves him so much they’re willing to sacrifice themselves for his genius and once other countries feel the pain they will bend to his will and eliminate tariffs and America will somehow become richer than ever. It never made sense but for some reason people voted for him anyway and the Republican party saw his popularity among about 40% of politically illiterate voters as a mandate to go along with it.
The markets felt the earthquake first but the tsunami is about to hit the real economy next. When you combine it with the assault on the federal government from Vought and Musk, and all the safety nets being dismantled, you are looking at an epic disaster coming at us.
Buckle up. As Marshall says, it’s going to be a long hot summer.
