As President Trump imposes tariffs on products from countries around the world, foreign governments are answering back with tariffs of their own.
China has targeted corn farmers and carmakers. Canada has put tariffs on poultry plants and air-conditioning manufacturers, while Europe will hit American steel mills and slaughter houses.
The retaliatory tariffs are an attempt to put pressure on the president to relent. And they have been carefully designed to hit Mr. Trump where it hurts: Nearly 8 million Americans work in industries targeted by the levies and the majority are Trump voters, a New York Times analysis shows.
The figures underscore the dramatic impact that a trade war could have on American workers, potentially causing Mr. Trump’s economic strategy to backfire. Mr. Trump has argued that tariffs will help boost American jobs. But economists say that retaliatory tariffs can cancel out that effect.
The other countries are right to target them. They did this to all of us, the whole world.
When you combine this with the federal layoffs, massive cuts on programs and loss of services, it’s going to be quite a whammy on those red states. Well, on everyone, but it looks like the red states will get hit hardest.
One might expect him to care about such things but he doesn’t intend to run again. It’s not as if he actually cares about anyone but himself. You’d think other Republicans would care but I guess they’ve all just thrown their fates into Superhero Trump’s hands. So, I doubt it will change anyone’s mind. But there’s a tiny bit of justice in it anyway.
“A video released Friday shows the moment federal immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate student whose detention alarmed free-speech advocates.” – Associated Press.
“What did they do?” a relation asked Saturday after hearing about two arriving foreign nationals detained for deportation at Boston’s Logan Airport.
Trump needs a reason? He’s doing it because he can, to show who’s boss, and to intimidate the rest of us into submission. (Do not obey in advance.)
To recap a busy weekend:
Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 35, a researcher at Brown Medicine on an H-1B visa, was detained at Boston-Logan airport for unknown reasons upon returning from visiting family in Lebanon. Immigration officials deported her in defiance of a federal court order. 1/www.providencejournal.com/story/news/l…
Fabian Schmidt, a German electrical engineer, was detained at Logan for unknown reasons upon arriving from Luxembourg. He's in Mass General after (mother claims) being pressured to surrender his green card, “violently interrogated,” stripped & put in a cold shower. 2/#www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2025…
Those actions were Thursday and Friday, and on top of the Trump administration’s March 8 detention and jailing Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and green card holder over political speech.
On Saturday, the administration published an executive order invoking the law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to target Venezuelan gang members in the United States.
But shortly after the announcement, James E. Boasberg, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., said he would issue a temporary order blocking the government from deporting any immigrants under the law.
The judge ordered any planes that had departed to return.
A little before 7:00 p.m. Saturday, a federal judge issued an order temporarily stopping deportations set in motion by President Donald Trump hours earlier when he announced that he had invoked a law last used to justify Japanese internment camps.
With planes departing nearly immediately following Trump’s announcement that he had invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — planes full of people the Trump administration would be deporting with no process — Chief Judge James Boasberg said at the conclusion of a Saturday evening hearing, “I am required to act immediately.”
Boasberg issued a nationwide temporary restraining order blocking removal of “all noncitizens in U.S. custody who are subject to [Trump’s order]” — people who the government decides are members of Tren de Aragua (TdA), a Venezuelan gang — for the next 14 days or until a further order from the court.
At the hearing, Boasberg added that planes in the air were to be turned around, telling the Justice Department lawyer that his clients needed to be informed of the TRO “immediately.”
Yeah, good luck with that. The Times follows up with a report that “As of early Sunday morning, it was unclear whether any such planes had departed or returned.”
The ACLU and Democracy Forward filed suit to stop the deportations under the law, arguing that the law “plainly only applies to warlike actions: it cannot be used here against nationals of a country—Venezuela— with whom the United States is not at war, which is not invading the United States, and which has not launched a predatory incursion into the United States.”
Furthermore, the filing states, “The government’s Proclamation would allow agents to immediately put noncitizens on planes without any review of any aspect of the determination that they are Alien Enemies. Upon information and belief, the government has transferred Venezuelans who are in ongoing immigration proceedings in other states, bringing them to Texas to prepare to summarily remove them and to do so before any judicial review—including by this Court.”
Except the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, suggests (posted to Twitter at 8:13 AM ET this morning) DHS may have defied the federal court (depending on the flight timing). Bukele states that “238 members of the Venezuelan criminal organization, Tren de Aragua” arrived in his country last night along with “23 MS-13 members wanted by Salvadoran justice.” It appears that the U.S. is paying El Salvador for jailing the Venezuelans.
If indeed these people are criminals in the U.S. illegally, as the Trump administration claims — it also declared Ned Johnson, 82, of Seattle dead, deducted Social Security deposits from his bank, stopped future Social Security checks, and cancelled his Medicare insurance — few will regret their removal. But Americans will have time to regret the administration’s ignoring a federal court at their leisure. And likely sooner rather than later.
First they came for the noncitizens, etc., is going to get old really fast. Trump is looking for an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law. With his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, he’s not even trying to conceal his intentions.
Did Elon Musk and his DOGE hackers never have to produce answers for grades?
David A. Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine reported last week how Musk’s DOGEes “repeatedly posted error-filled data that inflated its success at saving taxpayer money. ” Called out on it by people who don’t reflexively believe what’s spit out by a computer, DOGE has made its exaggerated claims impossible to reality-check. They removed embedded identifiers from their “wall of receipts”:
The New York Times, at first, found a way around the group’s obfuscation. That is because Mr. Musk’s group had briefly embedded the federal identification numbers of these grants in the publicly available source code. The Times used those numbers to match DOGE’s claims with reality, and to discover that they contained the same kind of errors that it had made in the past.
And then the identifying codes were gone. Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, tells the Times, “They responded by giving less information publicly, so that it’s harder to question them … without doing anything to suggest that they’re actually correcting the mistakes, or learning from them.”
But the Times had downloaded what was live before DOGE stripped the data. The paper’s team used it to match savings claims with the actual programs.
At least five of the 20 largest “savings” appeared to be exaggerated, according to federal data and interviews with the nonprofits whose grants were on the list.
The largest item on the list was savings of $1.75 billion, which the group said it achieved by cutting a U.S. Agency for International Development grant. But the organization that got the grant — a public-health nonprofit called Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — said that information was wrong twice over.
For one, the grant had not been terminated. Second, the government had already paid out all the money it owed. So even if the grant had been terminated, the savings would have been $0.
In other cases, Mr. Musk’s group seemed to misunderstand a key figure in U.S.A.I.D. grants.
Nonprofits said these grants often contain a ceiling value — an upper limit on what the government might pay. But the groups said that this top amount is not always guaranteed. In some cases, the actual payments are worked out separately, they said, and often total far less.
“It’s not a promise, in any sense,” said Traci Baird, the chief executive of a nonprofit called EngenderHealth.
There’s more in the reporting, including the White House claiming that terminating the grants saves what might have been spent, blah, blah, blah.
In other words, the DOGE naifs don’t know what they’re looking at and don’t know that they don’t know. Or don’t care, if it hastens the techbro efforts to install a techno-monarchy and quash “political dissent [using] algorithms that no citizen can vote against and no court can oversee,” warns The UnPopulist:
If we do not act now, we may wake up one day to find that democracy was not overthrown in a dramatic coup—but simply deleted, line by line, from the code that governs our lives.
With Saint Patrick’s celebrations in full swing this weekend, I thought I’d help you get your Irish up and drive those snakes from your media room with 15 grand film recommendations.
Sláinte!
The Commitments – Casting talented yet unknown actor/musicians to portray a group of talented yet unknown musicians was a stroke of genius by director Alan Parker. This “life imitating art imitating life” trick works wonders. The Commitments can be seen as a riff on Parker’s 1980 film Fame; swapping the locale from New York City to Dublin (there’s a bit of a wink in a scene where one of the band members breaks into a parody of the Fame theme).
However, these working-class kids don’t have the luxury of attending a performing arts academy; there’s an undercurrent referencing the economic downturn in the British Isles. The acting chemistry is superb, but it’s the musical performances that shine, especially from (then) 16-year old Andrew Strong. In 2007, cast member Glen Hansard co-starred in John Carney’s surprise low-budget hit, Once, a lovely character study that would make a perfect double bill with The Commitments.
Darby O’Gill and the Little People – Sean Connery…in a film about leprechauns?! Well, stranger things have happened. Albert Sharpe gives a delightful performance as lead character Darby O’Gill in this 1959 fantasy from perennially family-friendly director Robert Stevenson (Mary Poppins, The Love Bug, The Absent-Minded Professor, ThatDarn Cat!).
Darby is a crusty yet benign b.s. artist who finds himself embroiled in the kind of tale no one would believe if he told them it were true-matching wits with the King of the Leprechauns (Jimmy O’Dea), who has offered to play matchmaker between Darby’s daughter (Janet Munro) and the strapping pre-Bond Connery. The special effects hold up surprisingly well (considering the limitations of the time). The scenes between Sharpe and O’Dea are especially amusing. “Careful what you say…I speak Gaelic too!”.
A Date for Mad Mary – Seana Kerslake makes a remarkable debut in Darren Thornton’s 2017 dramedy (co-written by the director with his brother Colin) about a troubled young woman being dragged kicking and screaming (and swearing like a sailor) into adulthood. Fresh from 6 months in a Dublin jail for instigating a drunken altercation, 20-year-old “mad” Mary (Kerslake) is asked to be maid of honor by her BFF Charlene. Assuming that her volatile friend won’t find a date, Charlene refuses her a “plus one”. Ever the contrarian, Mary insists she will; leading to an unexpected relationship.
Garage – At once heartbreaking and uplifting, this 2007 character study by director Leonard Abrahamson and writer Mark O’Halloran is an underappreciated gem. It’s a deceptively simple story about an emotionally stunted yet affable thirty-something bachelor named Josie (Pat Shortt), who tends a gas station in a small country village (he bunks in the garage). When he befriends a teenager (Conor Ryan) who takes a summer job at the gas station, it unexpectedly sets off a chain of life-shaking events for Josie. Shortt (a popular comic in his home country) gives an astonishing performance. I like the way the film continually challenges expectations. An insightful and affecting glimpse at the human condition.
Hear My Song – This charming, quirky comedy-drama from writer-director Peter Chelsom (Funny Bones) concerns an Irish club-owner in England (Adrian Dunbar) who’s having a streak of bad luck. He’s not only on the outs with his lovely fiancée (Tara Fitzgerald), but is forced to shut down his venue after a series of dud bookings (like “Franc Cinatra”) puts him seriously in the red. Determined to win back his ladylove and get his club back in the black, he stows away on a freighter headed for his native Dublin. He enlists an old pal to help him hunt down and book a legendary tenor (Ned Beatty, in one of his best roles) who has hasn’t performed publicly in decades. Fabulous script, direction, and acting. Funny, touching and guaranteed to lift your spirits.
I Am Belfast -I try not to use “visual tone poem” as a descriptive if I can avoid it…but sometimes, there is no avoiding it. As in this case, with Irish director Mark Cousins’ meditation on his beloved home city. Part documentary and part (here it comes) visual tone poem, Cousins ponders the past, present and possible future of Belfast’s people, legacy and spirit.
I’m fairly sure Cousins is going for the vibe of the 1988 Terence Davies film Distant Voices, Still Lives, a similar mélange of sense memory, fluid timelines and painterly visuals (he waxes poetically about the aforementioned film in his epic 15-hour documentary, The Story of Film). Lovely cinematography by Christopher Doyle. A rewarding experience for patient viewers.
In Bruges – OK, full disclosure. In my original review, I gave this 2008 Sundance hit a somewhat lukewarm appraisal. But upon a second viewing, then a third… I realized that I like this film quite a lot (happens sometimes…nobody’s perfect!).
A pair of Irish hit men (Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell) botch a job in London and are exiled to the Belgian city of Bruges, where they are ordered to lay low until their piqued Cockney employer (an over the top Ray Fiennes) dictates their next move. What ensues can be best described as a tragicomic Boschian nightmare (which will make more sense once you’ve seen it).
Writer-director Martin McDonagh (who deftly juggles “fook” as a noun, adverb, super adverb and adjective) re-enlisted In Bruges stars Gleeson and Farrell as the leads for his Oscar-nominated 2022 dramedy The Banshees of Inisherin (also recommended!).
Into the West – A gem from one of the more underappreciated “all-purpose” directors, Mike Newell (DanceWith a Stranger, Enchanted April, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Donnie Brasco, Pushing Tin). At first glance, it falls into the “magical family film” category, but it carries a subtly dark undercurrent with it throughout, which keeps it interesting for the adults in the room. Lovely performances, a magic horse, and one pretty pair o’ humans (Ellen Barkin and Gabriel Byrne, real-life spouses at the time).
Miller’s Crossing– This 1990 gangster flick could only come from the unique mind-meld of Joel and Ethan Coen (with shades of Dasheill Hammet). The late Albert Finney is excellent as an Irish mob boss engaging in a power struggle with the local Italian mob during the Prohibition era. Gabriel Byrne (the central character of the film) portrays his advisor, who attempts to broker peace.
You do have to pay attention in order to keep up with the constantly shifting alliances and betrayals and such; but as with most Coen Brothers movies, if you lose track of the narrative you always have plenty of great supporting performances (particularly from Marcia Gay Harden and John Torturro), stylish flourishes, and mordant humor to chew on until you catch up again.
My Left Foot – The first (and best) of three collaborations between writer-director Jim Sheridan and actor Daniel Day-Lewis (1993’s In the Name of theFather and 1997’s The Boxer were to follow). This moving 1989 biopic concerns Christy Brown, a severely palsied man who became a renowned author, poet and painter despite daunting physical challenges.
Thankfully, the film makers avoid the audience-pandering shtick of turning its protagonist into the cinematic equivalent of a lovable puppy (see Rainman, I Am Sam); Brown is fearlessly portrayed by Day-Lewis “warts and all” with peccadilloes laid bare. As a result, you acclimate to Day-Lewis’ physical tics, allowing Brown to emerge as a complex human being, not merely an object of pity.
Day-Lewis deservedly picked up an Oscar, as did Brenda Fricker, who snagged Best Supporting Actress as Brown’s mother. Don’t let Day-Lewis’ presence overshadow 13-year old Hugh O’Conor’s work as young Christy; he gives an equally impressive performance.
Odd Man Out – An absorbing film noir from the great director Carol Reed (The ThirdMan, The Fallen Idol). James Mason is excellent as a gravely wounded Irish rebel who is on the run from the authorities through the shadowy backstreets of Belfast. Interestingly, the I.R.A. is never referred to directly, but the turmoil borne of Northern Ireland’s “troubles” is definitely implied by word and action throughout F.L. Green and R.C. Sherriff’s intelligent screenplay (adapted from Green’s original novel). Unique for its time, it still holds up well as a “heist gone wrong”/chase thriller with political undercurrents. The top-notch cast includes Robert Newton and Cyril Cusack.
Older Than Ireland – With age, comes wisdom. Just don’t ask a centenarian to impart any, because they might smack you. Not that there is violence in Alex Fegan and Garry Walsh’s doc, but there is consensus among interviewees (aged 100-113) that the question they find most irksome is: “What’s your secret to living so long?” Once that hurdle is cleared, Fegan and Walsh’s subjects have much to impart in this moving and entertaining pastiche of the human experience. Do yourself a favor: turn off your personal devices, watch this wondrous film and plug yourself into humankind’s forgotten backup system: the Oral Tradition. (Full review)
The Quiet Man – I’ll admit to never having been a huge John Wayne fan, but he’s perfect in this John Ford classic as a down-on-his-luck boxer who leaves America to get in touch with his roots in his native Ireland. The most entertaining (and purloined) donnybrook of all time, plus a fiery performance from gorgeous Maureen O’Hara round things off nicely. Although tame by modern standards, romantic scenes between Wayne and O’Hara are quite fervid for the era. The pastoral valleys and rolling hills of the Irish countryside have never looked lovelier, thanks to Winton C. Hoch and Archie Stout’s Oscar-winning cinematography.
The Secret of Roan Inish – John Sayles delivers an engaging fairy tale, devoid of the usual genre clichés. Wistful, haunting and beautifully shot by the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who captures the misty desolation of County Donegal’s rugged coastline in a way that frequently recalls Michael Powell’s similarly effective utilization of Scotland’s Shetland Islands for his 1937 classic, The Edge of the World. The seals should have received a special Oscar for Best Performance by a Sea Mammal. Ork, ork!
Song of the Sea – This 2014 animated fantasy from writer-director Tomm Moore centers on a melancholic lighthouse keeper named Conor (voiced by Brendan Gleeson), who is raising his young son and daughter following the tragic loss of his wife, who died in childbirth.
After his daughter is nearly swept out to sea one night, Conor decides the children would be better off staying with their grandmother in the city. The kids aren’t so crazy about this plan; after a few days with grandma they make a run for it. Before they can wend their way back home, they are waylaid by a succession of characters that seem to have popped out of one of the traditional Irish fairy tales that Conor’s mother used to tell him as a child.
Moore’s film has a timeless quality and a visual aesthetic on par with the best of Studio Ghibli. There is something in Moore’s hand-drawn animation that I find sorely lacking in the computer-generated “product” glutting multiplexes these days: genuine heart.
Lutnick: "Donald Trump is saying the Panama Canal is fundamental to our security, and he's gonna take care of America. Now Greenland is much easier. We are a great democracy. Greenland is going to join America if the people of Greenland want to vote to join America." pic.twitter.com/R9yr7CEj55
Greenland’s leading political parties have issued a joint statement to condemn Donald Trump’s “unacceptable behaviour”, after the US president seemed to escalate his campaign to take over the island.
The show of unity saw all leaders of parties in the Inatsisartut – the parliament – release a joint message saying they “cannot accept the repeated statements about annexation and control of Greenland”.
It follows a meeting between Trump and Nato’s secretary general Mark Rutte on Thursday, where the president seemed to double down on his annexation plan.
Greenland’s joint statement was orchestrated by outgoing Prime Minister Mute B Egede, whose party was defeated in an election on Tuesday.
“Our country will never be the USA and we Greenlanders will never be Americans,” Egede wrote on Facebook. “Don’t keep treating us with disrespect. Enough is enough.”
I’m sure that’ll just make Trump angry and he’ll double down. Here’s what he said to the NATO Secretary last week:
Greenland was already on the defensive about Trump’s annexing talk, but his comments to Rutte at the White House sent further shockwaves when he implied that Nato’s help might be needed to seize the island.
“You know, Mark, we need that for international security… we have a lot of our favourite players cruising around the coast, and we have to be careful,” Trump said.
“We’ll be talking to you,” he added.
When asked about the prospect of annexation, Trump said: “I think that will happen.”
Rutte has been criticised in both Greenland and Denmark for not reprimanding Trump. Instead, he said he would “leave that [issue] outside… I do not want to drag Nato into that”.
He then pivoted to praise – something several world leaders have used when dealing with Donald Trump – saying he was “totally right” that security in the Arctic must be maintained.
Rutte doesn’t take him seriously and also felt the need to keep the Mad King happy by telling him that he’s “totally right.” but at some point people are going to have to realize that Trump means this.
As do the Canadians. His dream of a “beautiful formation” of the U.S., Canada and Greenland isn’t going to happen.
Trump: "When you take away that artificial line that looks like it was done by a ruler … you look at that beautiful formation of Canada and the US, there is no place anywhere in the world that looks like that. And then if you add Greenland, that's pretty good." pic.twitter.com/O4mm9VKHUV
A New Hampshire man with a green card was detained by immigration officers at Logan Airport and is being held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Donald W. Wyatt detention facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island.
Fabian Schmidt’s family said they are unsure of why he is being held. They said he has a recently renewed green card, and no active issues in court.
Schmidt had been visiting Luxembourg and flew back to the U.S. on Friday. His partner had gone to pick him up at Logan Airport, and waited four hours before calling authorities.
“It was just said that his green card was flagged,” said Astrid Senior, his mother. She said she didn’t hear from her son directly until Tuesday, when she learned he’d been hospitalized.
Senior described Schmidt being “violently interrogated” at Logan Airport for hours, and being stripped naked, put in a cold shower by two officials, and being put back onto a chair.
She said Schmidt told her immigration agents pressured him to give up his green card. She said he was placed on a mat in a bright room with other people at the airport, with little food or water, suffered sleep deprivation, and was denied access to his medication for anxiety and depression.
“He hardly got anything to drink. And then he wasn’t feeling very well and he collapsed,” said Senior.
He was transported by ambulance to Mass General Hospital. He didn’t know it at the time, but he also had influenza.
On Tuesday, Schmidt was transported to the regional headquarters for ICE in Burlington, Massachusetts, and then transferred to the Wyatt facility. The family, including his partner, who is a cardiologist in Nashua, have acquired attorneys and been working with the German consulate in hopes to have him released on bail.
Schmidt and his mother moved to the U.S. in 2007, and received green cards in 2008. He moved from California to New Hampshire in 2022.
Senior described her son as a hardworking electrical engineer with a partner and 8-year-old daughter who are both U.S. citizens.
We’re THAT country now. Any green card holder should probably consider moving back to their home country. The brain drain would be substantial but I’m afraid they aren’t safe here anymore. We have an out-of-control police state that’s been let loose by a president who has declared war on the rest of the world.
Eight years ago, President Donald Trump spoke about the U.S.-Canada relationship in glowing terms.
He hosted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the White House in February 2017 for one of his first joint appearances alongside a foreign leader. Trump opened by noting the nations “share much more than a border,” highlighting “the special bonds that come when two nations have shed their blood together — which we have.”
[…]
“Canada only works as a state,” Trump said Thursday. “We don’t need anything they have. As a state, it would be one of the great states anywhere. This would be the most incredible country, visually. If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the U.S. Just a straight, artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago, many many decades ago. Makes no sense. It’s so perfect as a great and cherished state.”
“But why should we subsidize another country for $200 billion?” Trump continued, adding, “And again, we don’t need their lumber, we don’t need their energy. We have more than they do. We don’t need anything. We don’t need their cars. I’d much rather make the cars here. And there’s not a thing that we need. Now, there will be a little disruption, but it won’t be very long. But they need us. We really don’t need them. And we have to do this. I’m sorry.”
[…]
A source with direct knowledge of the discussions told NBC News that Trump is heavily focused on Canada in conversations with aides, who believe he is completely serious about making the country the 51st state — even with Trudeau out of power and a new prime minister in place.
Why is he so fixated now? No one knows. He never raised the issue before.
In private, Trump has made specific demands the Canadians say they could never agree to. The president made clear in a phone call with Trudeau last month that he wants to revise the boundary between the two nations set by a 1908 border treaty, as two Canadian officials said and was previously reported by The New York Times and Toronto Star…
The president has also mentioned renegotiating agreements that dictate how the Great Lakes and Columbia River are governed, the official told NBC News, adding that Trump wants to control the Northwest Passage, a maritime path that begins west of Greenland and cuts through Northern Canada to the Arctic Ocean.
“He wants our water,” the Canadian official added. “He wants to take the water.”
Marc Miller, the Canadian minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, said that for Trump, Canada’s allure is its natural resources. The president separately wants American access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals as compensation for the aid given to the war-torn country.
He’s got it in his head that he’s some kind of Roman conqueror. (He said he “invaded” Los Angeles the other day too.)
“These are dark days — dark days brought on by a country we can no longer trust,” he said. “We are getting over the shock — but let us never forget the lessons. We have to look after ourselves and we have to look out for each other.”
There is no rational explanation for this.
This is not showmanship or “transactionalism.” He has dementia, just like his father, and this global conqueror fantasy isn’t the only sign. His inane obsession with the California water is part of it too. In fact there are dozens of examples in which he’s just way more erratic and bizarre than he used to be (and that’s saying something.) The people around him almost certainly see it and you know that Musk does too.
While grocery shopping the other day, a friend asked how we were doing (in Trump 2.0). A lot of stress-eating, I said. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is hearing the same sort of thing as he travels the country.
There are a couple of reasons for my stress just this week, but even people who don’t immerse themselves in politics (and blog politics every day) are feeling it. People on Donald Trump’s target list are feeling it.
Sanders asks his audiences how living in this America makes them feel. He asks about their stress level, and it connects more than a discussion about policy. It is a big change from the Sanders who campaigned for president in 2016 on income and wealth inequality in a rigged economy. In 2020, he ran on people’s pain. Anand Giridharadas writes at The Ink:
It was something of a departure for a man who is not necessarily the most touchy-feely guy you’ve ever met. I tried to dig in to what Sanders was doing, and why. I spoke to many of his advisers and his wife and him. What I learned is excerpted below.
It was, in short, that he was trying to help citizens better connect their individual pain to the larger forces misgoverning the country.
And it appears now that he is doing it again. While many are banging the drum about fascism and a coup and all the rest, Sanders is reminding us that connecting those issues to the emotional life of voters is vital.
Oligarchy and autocracy and the like are not textbook concepts. They make life suck.
In America today, working class people live, on average, 7 years shorter lives than the wealthy. Stress kills. In Altoona, Wisconsin this weekend I asked people how economic stress impacted their lives. The responses I got were painful, but not surprising.
Democrats need to learn from Sanders, Giridharadas explained this week on “Morning Joe.” Because the key decision point for politically less-engaged people (unlike blog writers and readers) may not be left/right, Democrat/Republican, but “fighter for me or not fighter for me?”
Voters want leaders — even phony ones — willing to fight for them and to risk themselves in the effort. Wimps need not apply. Stern words to not count.
