IF YOU failed to spot America being “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far” or it being cruelly denied a “turn to prosper”, then congratulations: you have a firmer grip on reality than the president of the United States. It’s hard to know which is more unsettling: that the leader of the free world could spout complete drivel about its most successful and admired economy. Or the fact that on April 2nd, spurred on by his delusions, Donald Trump announced the biggest break in America’s trade policy in over a century—and committed the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era.
“The most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era.”
For once in his life, Lutnick is right – if factories come back to the U.S., they will be highly automated and will create relatively few good-paying jobs. Which means lots of people will be disappointed. https://t.co/IH4j50E8qY
I’ve been wondering about this. Apparently, there won’t be a whole lot of new manufacturing jobs so if anyone is expecting that this will restore the glory years of good paying factory jobs where Americans were all (supposedly) living large in a thriving middle class, think again.
I guess the idea here is that we’ll destroy the global economy, withdraw to our own shores, build Trump’s Iron Dome over the country to protect ourselves and pick vegetables or work as servants for our wealthy overlords. I’m not sure I’m being sarcastic when I say that.
By the way, here’s our Dear Leader today:
I’m sure you find it as reassuring as I do that the president of the United States is ranting like that on a day when the markets all dropped by more than 5%. Again.
On March 31st, CMS COO Amy Brandt sent out instructions for major cuts that had to take place across CMS. As she explained, HHS had been assigned a total amount of savings from canceled contracts. And of that total amount CMS was responsible for just over $2.7 billion. That amounted to 35% of CMS’s average total spend on contracts from the years FY2023 and 2024. So in technical terms, a shit-ton of money and a huge percentage of the overall budget.
As career CMS people have explained to me, CMS’s work is almost entirely contracted out. So this isn’t a case where you have most stuff done in house and some subset of the work is contracted out. It’s almost entirely contracted out. I further learned that the IT component is responsible for at least $750 million of that. The request came down on March 31st with responses due on April 3rd, i.e., today. So four days to decide how to cut more than a quarter of the CMS budget.
I’m told by knowledgable sources that there’s no way to cut this much without some parts of the system simply ceasing to function. So they’ll come up with a proposed plan, warn about what will break and wait to hear back. The Brandt memo says those recommendations will be reviewed and the final decision on cuts will go into effect on April 18th.
Don’t worry they’re confirming Dr. Oz to run this so I’m sure it will be fine. Maybe his friend Oprah can help.
I don’t even want to think about what happens when they fuck with Medicare. The people who have it use it . A lot. That’s what happens when you get old. If they break this one it’s going to lead directly to people dying. And a whole lot of very angry people who vote.
But then Trump oversaw hundreds of thousands of deaths of elderly people in the pandemic and didn’t blink an eye. Since people restored him to office despite his appalling performance in that crisis, why would anything be different this time?
After a little over a year at market, sales of the 6,600-pound vehicle, priced from $82,000, are laughably below what Musk predicted. Its lousy reputation for quality–with eight recalls in the past 13 months, the latest for body panels that fall off–and polarizing look made it a punchline for comedians. Unlike past auto flops that just looked ridiculous or sold badly, Musk’s truck is also a focal point for global Tesla protests spurred by the billionaire’s job-slashing DOGE role and MAGA politics.
“It’s right up there with Edsel,” said Eric Noble, president of consultancy CARLAB and a professor at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California (Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen, who styled Cybertruck for Musk, is a graduate of its famed transportation design program). “It’s a huge swing and a huge miss.”
They offer a quote from Elon Musk in 2019: “I do zero market research whatsoever.”
[Trump]said in a series of interviews that he does not need to read extensively because he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I already had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”
Trump said he is skeptical of experts because “they can’t see the forest for the trees.” He believes that when he makes decisions, people see that he instinctively knows the right thing to do: “A lot of people said, ‘Man, he was more accurate than guys who have studied it all the time.’ ”
Trump said reading long documents is a waste of time because he absorbs the gist of an issue very quickly. “I’m a very efficient guy,” he said. “Now, I could also do it verbally, which is fine. I’d always rather have — I want it short. There’s no reason to do hundreds of pages because I know exactly what it is.”
Trump claimed he never read any market research for his real estate deals either. He and Elon are two peas in a pod in more ways than one.
Everyone knew that President Trump as going to pull the trigger on his big tariff policy on Wednesday but he actually dropped a nuclear bomb. He put a 10% tariff on every nearly country in the world and added even more on a number of them based upon a goofy formula that reflected false assumptions at best or Trump’s personal whims at worst. It sent shock waves across the globe, with the markets taking a massive tumble and economic forecasters scrambling to revise upwards their predictions for a recession. Let’s just say it was not well received.
Everyone knew something was coming but no one expected his plan to be so random and incoherent. The fact that it included tariffs on uninhabited islands and territories that are essentially U.S. military bases just proved that it was sloppily put together, likely by AI, and hadn’t been vetted by anyone who knew what they were talking about. It is a radical, re-ordering of the global trading system by a president who is clueless about how any of this works.
The big question hovering over all these tariffs, starting with Mexico and Canada and now the rest of the world, is what does Donald Trump really want? It’s not been entirely clear. He claims that Canada must stop the flow of fentanyl into our country in order to get their tariffs lifted but there is no flow of fentanyl. He wants Mexico to stop immigrants from coming over the border and likewise stop fentanyl from coming into the country and they’ve done everything asked of them to make that happen. It didn’t matter.
Canada has come to believe that Trump is actually serious about wanting to annex their country and is intent upon collapsing their economy in order to make that happen. Mexico almost certainly understands that Trump is readying a military incursion of some kind ostensibly to “take out” the drug cartels. Neither of those things have anything to do with trade. In fact, Trump himself negotiated the USMCA trade agreement just 7 years ago between the three countries calling it “the largest, fairest, most balanced, and modern trade agreement ever achieved, there’s never been anything like it.” This is something else entirely.
But what about all these other countries? What does he want from them? He doesn’t believe in the idea that has organized global trading for almost a century now, which Amanda Taub of the NY Times defined as, “the ‘positive-sum’ game: a collection of overlapping systems that benefit all who participate in them, even if the costs and benefits of participation aren’t distributed equally.” Or as we might call it, “win-win.” That is anathema to Donald Trump. To him all of life is zero-sum.
So this isn’t really about “trade” at least as it’s commonly defined, as we can see with his behavior toward Mexico and Canada. This isn’t really a trade war. It’s a shake down. Trump simply sees tariffs as a weapon to be used to force the rest of the world to America’s will.
Trump has been on this crusade since the 1980s when he saw Japanese businessmen buying up U.S. properties and getting rich selling their cars to Americans eager to buy them. According to Barbara Res, a former Executive Vice President of the Trump Organization, “he had a tremendous resentment for Japan” and was jealous that they were considered business geniuses. He felt they were “taking advantage” of the United States by not paying for their defense and should be “taxed” accordingly.
He took out an ad in the New York Times back in 1987, expressing all of this in no uncertain terms and has not changed his rhetoric at all except to add more countries to his list of grievances:
He came to believe that tariffs were the tool you could use to force these nations to pay for their security.
He was uninterested, or perhaps unable to understand, the reason why America had been the “free world’s” security guarantor during the cold war and almost certainly failed to grasp the complexities of the nuclear age. During the 2016 election he had no idea what the nuclear triad was in one of the presidential debates and once said “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all” after he was elected. (In the years since he has pretended to fret about nuclear arms even as he was telling his military leaders he wanted to build back the nuclear arsenal to what it was at the height of the cold war.) His erratic and provocative behavior since he took office the second time has now raised the spectre of a new nuclear arms race.
His belief that the allies should be paying America for their defense has now evolved into a full-fledged protection racket in which he is using these tariffs to say “nice little country you have here, be a shame if anything happened to it.” Last night, on Air Force One, as he was jetting off to attend a golf tournament at his club in Florida (sponsored by his partners and for which he receives a cut of the profits) he told the press corps:
Every country is calling us. That’s the beauty of what we do. We put ourselves in the driver’s seat. If we would have asked these countries to do us a favor, they would have said no. Now they will do anything for us. The tariffs give us great power to negotiate. They always have.”
Note that he used the words “do us a favor” the same words he used to shake down Volodymyr Zelensky in the “perfect phone call” that got him impeached the first time. He’s not negotiating, he’s extorting.
We don’t know what he specifically wants from all these countries. I would assume that some of them will gain his favor with elaborate obsequiousness and flamboyant flattery. Others may have to offer up something a bit more material, perhaps a nice gift of some sort. And he will punish others, particularly those he sees as having been disloyal. In other words he’s going to treat the world as if it’s the Republican Party, under his thumb and answering to his whim.
It’s possible that he will be able to coerce some companies to move their manufacturing to the U.S. (or at least make an announcement to that effect which is what he really wants.) But it’s unlikely that he’ll ever take tariffs off the table regardless of whatever “deal” is made. Why would he? If they get him what he wants he’ll use them over and over again.
He has gotten away with everything in his life and his belief in his own power is now limitless. It sounds crazy to say it but it’s true — Donald Trump is trying to dominate the world. As I have said many times, “America First” never meant isolationism to Donald Trump. It meant “America Above All.” And yes it does sound better in the original German.
So much of the tariff commentary today examines how Donald Trump’s demented attempt to get the world to kiss his feet will impact the economy and people’s pocketbooks. It will. But the bigger picture is that Trump will die but he’s taking the United States with him.
The Bulwark’s gunwales are awash in doomsaying this morning, starting with this quote from Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney:
The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. The system of global trade anchored on the United States, that Canada has relied on since the end of the Second World War—a system that, while not perfect, has helped to deliver prosperity for our country for decades—is over.
JV Last laments, “The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it.”
“[W]e now find ourselves bowing before a power-drunk man-child,” writes Mona Charon. (Who’s we, Mona?)
Bill Kristol quotes Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Ours is now a time “of terrible mistakes, monstrous deeds, and disastrous consequences.”
Or it could be a mass uprising, starting with tomorrow.
Several monsters run major countries, including ours. As markets collapse and the fortunes of the richest turn sour, it may not be an assassin’s bullet that removes our monster from power, but the massed financial clout of oligarchs who saw him as a useful idiot so long as he served to increase their wealth. And now he’s red ink.
But that’s all finance. The world will not trust us now, even after Trump is gone. Try to find the humor in an idiot such as this destroying the American-led world order in a mere 71 days. He had help. Lots oif it. Charlton Heston said it best.
Americans in the streets is the only way to apply enough pressure to Donald Trump eunuchs in Congress to take action to rein in He-Who-Would-Be-King. If those who’ve never joined a street protest before needed a good reason to join their neighbors in the streets tomorrow, Donald Trump gave them one this week. His garbled tariffs plan sent stocks off the cliff. Even Americans with little of their life’s savings in the markets can read that chart. And headlines. Everything they are already struggling to afford at Walmart is going to get even harder to afford just so Trump can scratch his McKinley itch.
NBC News: “White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN on Thursday morning that Wall Street should ‘trust President Trump.’ ” Good luck with that.
If Trump thought the world was out to get him before, he ain’t seen nothin’ yet. He punched the world in the nose on Tuesday Wednesday (it’s been a week) and the world is punching back:
In France, President Emmanuel Macron called for companies to pause investments in the United States. China pledged retaliation against Trump’s “typical bullying.” Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba warned that the tariffs would have “significant repercussions” on the global economy.
Stock markets in Asia and Europe fell Thursday after Trump levied sweeping global tariffs on Wednesday, although some recovered losses during the trading day.
Analysts warned that the measures risk strengthening China’s hand.
You get the idea. So, about tomorrow.
Indivisible reported Thursday night that 514,000 had signed up to attend 1,000 events in all 50 states tomorrow. Even with a 50% flake rate, that’s still a quarter million people in the streets. Still, Indivisible saw an over 25% increase in signups just since Thursday morning. Fewer pissed-off Americans will flake tomorrow.
State of play: Protesters are rallying against several Trump administration policies, including its handling of Social Security benefits, layoffs across the federal workforce, attacks on consumer protections and anti-immigrant policies and attacks on transgender people.
The protests are also against Elon Musk’s involvement in the federal government via DOGE — after he’s already faced a wave of demonstrations at Tesla dealerships worldwide via the #TeslaTakedown movement.
The Hands Off! demonstrations will occur at state capitals, federal buildings, congressional offices and city centers.
Dozens of advocacy organizations are partnering to support Saturday’s action, including the Center for LGBTQ Economic Advancement & Research, Declaration for American Democracy, the Human Rights Campaign, Indivisible and Planned Parenthood.
The ACLU will hold an online training tonight at 8 p.m. ET for those who need to know their protest rights. Indivisible has more help here.
But I have a request.
I’ve been frustrated for years that the left seems not to have grown much since the 60s when it comes to street actions. I am so over squads of Grim Reapers and coffin bearers and die-ins and “clowns for peace.” Like any of that speaks to middle America.
But one protest staple that sets my teeth on edge is a chant template that dates from the 1950s. It’s tired. It’s boring. I immediately roll my eyes and tune it out.
God, can’t we do better? Something fresher and more ear-catching?
Late Night writer Amber Ruffin shares what she’s learned about the importance of both sides after her White House Correspondents’ Dinner gig was cancelled.
FirstTime
(@LongTimeHistory) 
