Trump is telling giant corporations that they aren’t allowed to raise prices from his tariffs. And apparently they are quaking in their boots, scared and trembling worrying about what the Great Orange Conqueror will do to them if they don’t do exactly what he wants:
When President Trump convened CEOs of some of the country’s top automakers for a call earlier this month, he issued a warning: They better not raise car prices because of tariffs.
Trump told the executives that the White House would look unfavorably on such a move, leaving some of them rattled and worried they would face punishment if they increased prices, people with knowledge of the call said.
Instead, Trump said, they should be grateful for his elimination of what he called former President Joe Biden’s electric-vehicle mandate, which involved subsidies and emissions requirements to encourage electric-car production. He made a lengthy pitch for how they would actually benefit from tariffs, two people on the call said, adding that he was bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. and was better for their industry than previous presidents.
The tariffs would be “great,” Trump said, according to one of the people.
On Wednesday, Trump announced a 25% tariff on all imported vehicles and parts starting April 2, a move almost certain to force American carmakers to raise prices on customers. Most automakers depend on parts and materials from other countries to make cars, including vehicles assembled in the U.S.
“You’re going to see prices going down, but going to go down specifically because they’re going to buy what we’re doing, incentivizing companies to—and even countries—companies to come into America,” he said at the event.
All the brand new plants will be here by magic in a matter of weeks and all the laid off and fired scientists and engineers will be factory workers happily earning minimum wage! It’s the American Dream!
I’m not sure what the car company executives are afraid Trump is going to do to them but I’m sure it’s much worse than anything their shareholders would do if they lose money and their stock crashes. Dear Leader Uber Alles.
Aaron Rupar’s great newsletter Public Notice features a great interview today by Thor Benson with historian Eric Rauchway discussing William McKinley and Trump’s ignorant obsession with tariffs. I highly recommend reading the whole thing. This sums up Trump’s idiocy on the subject:
“He wants the society of the 1950s with the policies of the 1890s. But you literally don’t get the society of the 1950s without a comprehensive rejection of the policies of the 1890s, even by Republicans.”
A short excerpt of the history lesson.
Thor Benson
Trump loves to talk about the late 1800s and early 1900s, how we paid for everything with tariffs instead of income taxes, and how great that period was. But I’m familiar with that era and know he’s full of it. There was massive income inequality and basically no social safety net. What’s he getting wrong about how average Americans lived during that time?
Eric Rauchway
You’d have to ask the average American who kept voting for socialists and populists and progressives. [laughs] They clearly wanted some kind of change.
That was the great era of unionization. It was the era of broad social protests. Many of the protesters thought tariffs were the cause of their misery.
A tariff is a regressive tax. It hurts people more the less money they have. The most progressive thing progressives wanted to do back then was have an income tax.
There had been an income tax during the Civil War, during the Lincoln administration, and then there was another one in the 1890s, but the Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional. One of the big things progressives wanted to do was bring that back, and ultimately they did with the 16th Amendment in 1913. That allowed the federal government to fund itself with income taxes rather than tariffs. That relieved a lot of people’s sense of unfairness toward the federal government.
The other problem with tariffs, people would say at the time, is that a tariff is the mother of trusts. The current president does not give evidence of understanding the difference between a tariff for revenue and a tariff for protection.
If you set a tariff at three percent, you collect three percent on all of your imports. That’s great. If you set a tariff at 300 percent, then nobody buys imports, so there’s no revenue collection. The president seems to believe he can impose prohibitively high tariffs and collect revenue, which you can’t do.
Thor Benson
But he says McKinley was the best.
Eric Rauchway
The president keeps saying he admires McKinley because of his high tariffs, but there are a couple things people these days like him seem to not understand very well.
One is that the McKinley tariff actually came before the McKinley presidency. The McKinley tariff is a law of 1890, and it’s called that because he was then the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee and a sponsor of the bill. McKinley didn’t get elected president until 1896. The McKinley tariff of 1890 was a prohibitively high protective tariff on many, many things.
Here’s the theory of protective tariffs: Let’s say, for example, we’re talking about hats, and the British make hats way better than Americans do. The American consumer, given the choice in an open market, will buy the British hat. American hatmakers suffer. You put a protective tariff on British hats to make it prohibitively expensive to buy a British hat, so people don’t buy British hats.
The federal government gets no money because there are no transactions on British hats. What there is, though, is room for American hatmakers to raise prices on their hats to just under the prohibitively high British price. They can now profit, because people will buy their hats at higher prices. Then, theoretically, they’re supposed to plow that money into research and development, so you are protecting, and therefore promoting, the American hat industry.
But what the United States actually did in the McKinley era is afford “protection” to companies that didn’t need it, like steel, where the United States was already highly competitive. All it allowed companies to do is have artificial room to raise their prices and increase profits. It gave an advantage to these firms to get bigger and bigger.
They were able to buy out the firms that supplied them with raw materials. They vertically integrated and became trusts. Tariffs aid monopolies. They’re to the advantage of people who own capital, who own factories, who employ factory workers. They’re intended to be pro-capital, and they are. That’s what gave rise to the great antitrust movement and the populist movement and ultimately the progressive movement.
There’s much more and it’s all fascinating.
We know Trump’s an idiot. But what excuses the people around him going along with it? Has it not occurred to them to read a book if they are unfamiliar with this history? I guess not. One of the problems with the ultra-rich finance moguls is that they all think they’re geniuses and don’t have anything to learn.
I also think we can’t underestimate the cult psychology at work. It’s clear to me that Trump’s ability to escape from all accountability, his ability to persuade massive numbers of people to believe his lies, his unlikely political comeback after J6 and now forcing powerful institutions like Universities and law firms to kow tow has made otherwise intelligent people to believe that he really does have godlike abilities. They know he’s stupid but somehow it doesn’t matter. he gets what he wants anyway. They’re just going along for the ride now, putting their fates and the fate of the world in his hands. These guys think he has the power to defy logic, reason and all the normal laws of economics.
When Donald Trump won the election last November I think those of us who are mercifully immune to the lure of the MAGA cult knew that this second term was going to be bad. If you were following the campaign closely (many people were not) you knew about Project 2025 and you knew that Trump was inexplicably attached at the hip to the weird multi-billionaire Elon Musk. You also knew that he was fixated on starting a tariff war with America’s biggest trading partners and was irrevocably hostile to our long standing allies around the world. But I don’t think any of us could have predicted the exact confluence of atrocities being committed at warp speed from every direction. Shock and awe doesn’t adequately describe it. It is a cataclysmic political earthquake.
And yet, most of us are still living our lives in more or less normal fashion. Yes, many immigrants, even those in the country legally are now living in a state of abject terror. And vast numbers of workers have abruptly lost their jobs with many more to come. But the vast majority of Americans are still going to work, taking the kids to school, hanging out with their friends, pursuing their hobbies. Life is just going on in the midst of the most serious political crisis of any of our lifetimes and the cognitive dissonance of that is making us feel a little bit crazy.
During the pandemic I binged watched a wonderful series called “A French Village” which chronicled the lives of the people in a small town during the Nazi occupation. It’s not a story about the terror of the Holocaust or even the brave Britons who lived through the blitz in England. This is about living day to day and adapting to fascist oppression as it becomes more and more dangerous and violent. The villagers still had to do business, shop (and later find food), the kids had to go to school, people made love and had babies — and they all had to confront at some point how they were going to deal with the occupiers. Some collaborated, some left, some resisted, some subverted and some just tried to get by. Through it all life went on, even under the Nazis, until it didn’t.
Obviously, we’re not in that situation. It’s only been 68 days since Trump took office and we still have a way to go before it’s clear that the system has completely broken down one way or another. But I think we can all sense that it’s much shakier than we anticipated.
It’s been evident for years now that the Republican Party as we once knew it has ceased to exist as anything but the political arm of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. It no longer has a distinct ideology and exists purely to serve his wishes. And yes, the Democrats in Washington seem to be in a state of suspended animation. But I confess that I didn’t expect to see so many of our major institutions, from corporations to universities to elite law firms follow their lead. They are, for the most part, capitulating to the administration’s threats.
We might have expected corporations to resist being told how to run their businesses but dozens of them have eagerly complied with the crusade to ban DEI and abandon all attempts to fulfill the promise of the civil rights act. Men at Wall St firms tell reporters they are thrilled to be able to talk about “p**sy” in the workplace again. Law firms, meanwhile, having been told they will lose their access to the federal government including necessary security clearances due to their previous willingness to defend some of Donald Trump’s personal enemies have bowed down and agreed to do whatever the president orders them to do. Universities, meanwhile, are now allowing the federal government to dictate their policies under threat of losing federal funding. This was unexpected. These giant, wealthy institutions all have the ability to stand up to Trump and chose not to.
I am a little bit surprised that we haven’t seen more of an exodus from the big law firms. I suppose they all figure if the big bosses are terrified, they probably should be too. And I confess that I would have expected some energy from the college campuses but virtually none has materialized. According to this NBC report from Columbia University, the top target of Trump’s strong arm tactics, the students say they are tired after the demonstrations last spring and are terrified of what the government might do to them if they protest against it. Considering that students are being kidnapped, you can’t exactly blame them. Columbia mathematics professor Michael Thaddeus described the campus this way:
“Classes are continuing, athletic competition is continuing, the libraries are open. I was watching a campus tour go by outside. It’s just a weird combination of normal and very abnormal.”
Normal and abnormal. Life goes on.
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that for all the capitulation of the institutions, the paralysis of the official political opposition and the fear and trepidation of employees and students who fear for their futures if they speak out, there is quite a bit of resistance building up out in the country.
Most of us are still watching the unfolding crisis from afar. But before too long what Trump and his accomplices are doing will start to impact us personally and we won’t be able to avoid it any longer. We’ll all have to make a conscious decision as to whether we will resist, collaborate, leave, or just try to keep our heads down until it’s over. Whatever we choose we should be very clear in our own minds that while life does go on in the midst of a political crisis, the country is being changed in some fundamental ways that are not going to be easy to reverse. This nightmare is real and it isn’t going away.
Carney: "The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over." pic.twitter.com/LKYkpO8JD0
As mentioned last week, tourism is a $2.3 trillion industry in this country, roughly 3 percent of GDP, with international visitors spending $155 billion into the economy each year. So with ICE snatching people off the street like Stasi in East Germany and detaining foreigners at U.S. airports, one might think it an inopportune time for Kristi Noem to produce an anti-U.S. tourism commercial.
Y’all don’t come!
But disincentivize U.S. tourism is just what the Homeland Security secretary did on Wednesday, filming in (of all places) an El Salvador gulag before a backdrop of prisoners reminiscent of Nazi concentration camp victims. And wearing, as the New York Post noted, a $60K Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch. If the point was for Frau Schmerz to get attention, she got attention. “Y’all don’t come!” was hardly the artistic choice the U.S. Travel Association might have made to entice foreign visitors to vacation here. But Schmerz-the-dog-shooter has other priorities.
Jeff Sharlet cautions that Noem’s Lara Croft, Tomb Raider look (sans twin automatics and ponytail) is intentional. It carries a certain kind of fascist sexy, “a kind of debased BDSM,” that’s a trap to spotlight because a certain rightwing man finds it seductive. (It’s not dissimilar to the retributive fantasies Donald Trump teased widely to regain the Oval Office.) My first impression was it’s a helluva way to sell a vacation at Disney World or in Las Vegas.
The greater irony is that many of the Venezuelan “terrorists” hastily shipped to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) without due process are there because U.S. authorities believe any and all tattoos mark them as members of a violent criminal gang. SecDef Pete Hegseth had best watch his back. (What is on his back?)
The fashion critics at ICE seem to have decided that any tattoos, so long as they’re on a Venezuelan migrant, are enough to condemn a person to a lifetime of hard labor in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center. That may be in keeping with the Trumpian recipe for “common sense” (a dash of racism, a dollop of excessive force, a wave of the hand at the law, and a few dozen viewings of Dirty Harry), but it is exactly what the rule of law is meant to prevent. And considering that border czar Tom Homan has even admitted ICE is sweeping up plenty of innocent “collaterals” in their attempt to sow terror, it’s pretty clear his front-line troops have no idea what they’re seeing, let alone know it when they see it. Whatever it is.
As for Noem’s “extras” arrayed “to create a visual for Noem’s use,” Jonathan Last writes at The Bulwark, “We have seen this kind of thing before. Just not from America.” To be clear, “I want to be deadly serious about this: We are now the bad guys.”
The Geneva Conventions that White House Chief Counsel Alberto Gonzales described as quaint when defending the Bush “enhanced interrogation” (torture) program prohibit display of prisoners for propaganda purposes. Yet here we are. Our system failed to bring the torturers and their bosses to justice then, just as it failed to hold Wall Street banks accountable after the 2008 financial crash. We are no longer a nation of laws.
In case the message Noem is sending this week is unclear, with Stasi-like DHS kidnappings and her gulag photo-op, Last is blunt:
The message is this:
America is no longer a shining city on a hill. It is no longer the leader of the free world. It no longer stands on the side of liberty as a beacon for those who yearn to breathe free.
Carney: "The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over." pic.twitter.com/LKYkpO8JD0
Ezra Klein in October 2021 interviewed data geek David Shor on the source of Democrats’ failure to deliver more on what Democrats claim they want. To win, Schor believed (in Klein’s words), “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.” It was surprisingly controversial for reasons Klein describes in his essay.
David Dayen, responding at The American Prospect, suggested:
This bumps up against Democratic activist goals around diversity and inclusion and edge-pushing ideas around policing and immigration, and that’s the source of nearly all the tension around popularism. But I would argue that popularism is not only self-evident but approximately what Democrats have been doing in virtually every race of national import for the past 30 years. And that’s precisely the problem. You cannot talk about the same popular items, fail to deliver on them, and expect the voting public to keep listening to you. There are diminishing returns to parties that never seem to get results. At this moment, the only thing that will give Democrats a fighting chance is what my friend Matt Stoller just coined as “deliverism.”
Being a big-tent party means a lot of people want their say in how things get done. They demand that their voices be heard and their interests be represented. The problem is that sometimes those interests are not complementary but in competition. “Please all, please none” comes to mind.
After Kamala Harris lost in November, Sam Stein tapped out a piece for The Bulwark suggesting why Joe Biden’s deliverism didn’t deliver. “Biden’s domestic achievements didn’t resonate with voters,” Stein wrote. “And it’s left the party questioning whether deliverism is smart politics at all.”
But there is a tension there, somewhat, between Democrats’ legislative ability to deliver and their political ability to market those achievements. It’s not that they don’t have decent messages. (They’ve gotten better.) It’s that the left doesn’t have the right’s multifaceted, billionaire-funded media vectors for delivering it to people’s ears. What I’ve called the left’s “tree falls in the forest” problem.
But Klein and co-author Derek Thompson think it’s more than that. In “Abundance,” the pair argue that in liberals trying to satisfy every sub-interest group in their big tent, they’ve burdened the government with Jacob Marley-like chains. With the best of inclusive and environmental intentions, trying to please all has kept government from being nimble enough to build things on time and on budget that make people’s lives better. And not just at the national level, but the municipal as well. This is not helping. It’s undermined people’s faith in government action and it’s dragging down the Democrats’ brand with working people.
We have met the enemy and he is us.
I’m in the middle of the book now, so I don’t have fully formed thoughts. But I figured I’d drop in this conversation between Jon Stewart and Klein (that I’ve only just started) for some weekend listening.
D.C. police say they are investigating the ‘Nazi’ comment, an apparent reference to a gesture criticized as a Nazi-style salute that Musk made on Inauguration Day, and one other, as potential hate crimes. [my emphasis]
[…]
“I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20-year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” the president wrote on social media on Friday. “Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”
The FBI announced this week that it has formed a task force to investigate “the increase in violent activity toward Tesla.” In a post on X, FBI Director Kash Patel called the attacks “domestic terrorism” and said that “those responsible will be pursued, caught, and brought to justice.”
After police released a statement on the D.C. incidents that included photos of the two people being sought, Musk took to his platform X and reposted it, without comment. In a separate response to a post on X about an arrest in a vandalism case targeting a Tesla in Massachusetts, Musk wrote: “Damaging the property of others, aka vandalism, is not free speech!”
Prosecutors must prove a person was motivated by prejudice to secure a conviction in a bias-related crime. While targeting someone based on their political affiliation opens the door for such a charge, prosecutors ultimately decide after an arrest has been made and a motive developed. Police statistics show that until now they have not investigated a politically motived hate crime in the past four years in D.C. Through the end of February, police have investigated 17 crimes as hate-related this year, based on ethnicity, national origin, race, gender identity and religion.
None of the defendants on January 6th were charged with hate crimes. But sure, vandalizing Trump’s BFFs cars is a horrific act of political violence that requires a long jail sentence, maybe even the death penalty.
The country is being run by your drunken uncle sitting in his recliner watching Fox and yelling “throw the book at ’em!”
They should be able to keep her seat. The internals must be pretty bad for them to stab Elise in the back like this. Nobody’s been a better soldier than Stefanik.
On the other hand, she’s just another woman … who cares, right?
In an interview with Newsmax Tuesday, host Greg Kelly asked Trump if there’s any talk of a “compensation fund” for prosecuted January 6 rioters, because they lost “opportunity” and “income.”
“Well there’s talk about that, we have a lot of people talking about it, a lot of the people that are in government now talk about it, because a lot of people in government really like that group of people,” Trump responded, referring to the rioters as “patriots” who went to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically.”
Upon taking office, Trump issued a sweeping pardon for some 1,500 people who tried to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election.
“These people are incredible people; they were treated so unfairly, so horribly,” Trump said of the insurrectionists. […]
The president claimed that no other group in history has been treated as badly as January 6 rioters. “The judges, the system, the hatred, the vitriol, the prosecutors, the way they wanted to destroy these people,” Trump said.
Nothing shows how far down the rabbit hole he and his cult have fallen than this. And when I say his “cult” I mean the entire Republican Party. Anyone who can claim that this was perfectly fine and that these rioters were victimized by the justice system is living in an alternate universe. That it’s a bunch of flag-waving authoritarians who constantly scream about “law and order” and allegedly love the police is simply mind-boggling.
Whenever I see any of the savvy cynical pundits shrug their shoulders and say we’re being hysterical about what’s happening, even with all the current atrocities (and they are legion) this is what immediately comes to mind. How can we survive with so many people having such a total break with reality, much less common decency and morality?
JV Last’s comment on this whole thing speaks for me. Speaking of those dystopian images he writes:
Look at these images. What do you see?
In the background are a few dozen men, crammed into a cell. Their bunks are stacked four-high. Their heads are freshly shaved. They wear identical white shorts. They are all shirtless.
Their poses are similar. Three rows of prisoners stand still in the front as Noem speaks, their hands either at their sides or clasped in front of them. The rest of them are arrayed on the bunks so as to create a visual for Noem’s use. None of these men is speaking. Or moving. Or making any facial expressions. They have clearly been posed by the jailers, forced to hold position so that they can be useful props for the American woman so that she can manufacture propaganda for her regime.
We have seen this kind of thing before. Just not from America.
I want to be deadly serious about this: We are now the bad guys.
As he says, the use of prisoners for propaganda is hardly unprecedented. From ISIS to North Vietnam, it’s a common tactic. Decent liberal societies have standards for the treatment of prisoners and don’t do this. Noem’s little tableau is something we could have expected from the former Phillippines leader Rodrigo Duterte (arrested two weeks ago by the ICC) or Cambodia’s Pol Pot.
Last is actually wrong about one thing. We only need to look back 20 years to the Bush administration’s treatment of suspected terrorists, the pictures of chained, hooded men in orange jumpsuits, to see the recent example of a similar propaganda operation by America, I’m sad to say.
However, having the DHS Secretary stand in front of a prison speaking to the camera and threatening people with the same treatment is way beyond that. We are not in any kind of military action with gang members. There is no war. This is a domestic issue for which they are using wartime propaganda tactics and committing what amounts to war crimes.
Last describes the whole photo-op in chilling detail:
A high-ranking American official visits a prison on foreign soil which we are using to warehouse enemies of her regime. She appears in a fitted long-sleeve tee and active-wear slacks. There is a ballcap on her head and a pound of makeup smeared across her plasticized face. A gold Rolex Daytona—worth more than some of these men will make in their entire lives—sits proudly on her dainty wrist. Every piece of this visual is carefully engineered.
She visits the prison armory and shakes her head approvingly while inspecting the rifles. Then she pauses in front of a cage where human beings have been posed to her liking so that she can speak to the cameras in front of a powerful visual. She is sending a message on behalf of her country.
That message is chilling. As he says, we are the bad guys.
The Trump administration on Thursday announced a layoff of 10,000 employees at the Health and Human Services Department, as part of a broad reorganization designed to bring communications and other functions directly under the purview of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
With the DOGE layoffs that will make it about 20,000 total in just a couple of months.
The restructuring will include creating a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America. “We’re going to do more with less,” Mr. Kennedy said, even as he acknowledged it would be “a painful period for H.H.S.”
It’s all Biden’s fault, of course:
Mr. Kennedy said rates of chronic disease rose under the Biden administration even as the government grew. He pitched the changes as a way to refocus the agency on Americans’ health, but did not outline any specifics on how he would mediate rates of diabetes, heart disease or any other condition.
He’s cutting 3500 jobs from the FDA, 2400 from the CDC, 1200 from the NIH and the rest from Medicare and Medicaid.
Here’s how the wrecking ball is going so far:
Dr. Robert Califf, the F.D.A. administrator during the Biden administration, said his team worked with staff to drum up support for an 8,000 person reorganization to change how its divisions for food and facility inspections operate. Given how morale-crushing the second Trump administration has been for the department, with many staff members laid off on the false premise that their performance was subpar, the effort could be all the more challenging.
“If you are coming to work sick to your stomach, as Russell Vought said he wanted them to,” he said, referring to the head of the Office of Management and Budget, “then people are not going to be able to collaborate as well. They’ll be suspicious of each other, right?”
Mr. Califf said such a sudden and massive reduction in staff and reorganization could also disrupt services and safety oversight that the public relies on.
Speaking of trust:
Mr. Kennedy also suggested in the video that the changes would help his team get more access to data, a prospect that has been fraught, given Mr. Kennedy’s long history of manipulating figures to advance arguments about the harm of vaccines that have widely been deemed safe.
Wow. You go New York Times, telling it like it is.
Apparently, Bobby’s mad about that. Some of the staff there actually tried to keep him away from ” closely guarded databases that might reveal the dangers of certain drugs and medical interventions.”
This is just one more tragedy befalling us because a demented old man seeks vengeance on his own people. It’s beyond Shakespearean. It’s Biblical.
