Join me for a casual conversation with Brian Beutler, the proprietor of the newsletter Off Message and a former TPM colleague. Brian and I will use the news of the day as a jumping off point to chat about the Trump II era. We’ll be biting off some small topics like:
We’ll be talking on Substack Live at 2 p.m. ET. See you then.
After a run-in with the police that ended in his arrest, Andry’s husband was supposed to be released from a New York jail in November 2024. Instead, he was transferred into ICE’s custody. The couple had come to the United States 18 years ago from the Dominican Republic. Her husband was incarcerated for all of last year.
In December, Andry (who asked not to use her last name to protect her family) seemed to catch a break: an immigration judge granted her husband bond, the only way to get out of immigration detention. The decision was far from a given: the second Trump administration has tried to make broad swaths of immigrants ineligible for bond, detaining them with no ability to get released, and even those who are eligible for a bond hearing might not be granted it. But the amount Andry was told she had to pay in order to secure his freedom was $25,000. Unlike in the pretrial bail system, where defendants can usually pay a fraction of their bail to get released, immigration courts demand the entire amount.
Andry had nothing like that kind of money sitting around. For over a year, she had been raising their two daughters alone without her husband’s income, running their remittance business while driving for Uber as much as she could in between. Beyond making $900 rent payments and covering their family’s expenses, she was using any extra funds to send her husband money so he could make calls or go to the commissary. “¿Qué voy a hacer?” she asked: What could I do?
Continue reading “Your Loved One Is Stuck in Immigration Detention. It Will Cost $25,000 to Get Them Out.”You’ve certainly seen or heard about President Trump’s morning threat to destroy Iran’s civil energy and bridge infrastructure if the country doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday. To quote him: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.” (That’s not my arch summary. That’s a direct quote.) I will set aside that these would appear to constitute war crimes as going without saying. The man is careening from one day to the next, from ‘the strait doesn’t matter,’ to (alternatively) ‘not our problem/it will open itself’ to ‘I give you two fucking days or you’ll be living in hell.’ Of course, then, he has then repeatedly “postponed” the day of destruction after encouraging talks with Iran leaders, talks which we then learn a few days later never occurred. But now he says, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran.” (This time I really, really mean it!)
In other words, talk like an insane person and carry a really small stick. He thinks these outbursts make him look stronger but each threat and retreat makes him look weaker and more clearly not in control of the situation. These are the words of a man who has spent a lifetime either TACOing or bullshitting his way out of messes suddenly coming up against an immovable object and at a moment when he already appears to be under some mix of extreme psychic strain and a more general senescent decompensation.
Continue reading “There’s Another Big Reason Trump Is Stuck in the Gulf”Learning from her predecessors, ex-Attorney General Pam Bondi was the ultimate yes man.
Perhaps unflagging sycophancy could protect her from the fate of Jeff Sessions, President Trump’s first Attorney General back in 2017, who provoked his rage by recusing himself from investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Trump forced him out, then put a coda on his political career by endorsing Tommy Tuberville in the 2020 Alabama Senate primary.
Continue reading “A Case Study in How Trump Treats His Friends “These days we often think of memes that capture a particular moment or idea. In the old days it was cartoons. There’s a classic that captures a big part of what is happening now with the stoppage of tankers (they’re not all oil or even other hydrocarbons) in the Strait of Hormuz. I think the cartoon in question is from The New Yorker. If anyone has a copy, do send it. In the cartoon a guy has jumped off a skyscraper. As he flies by the 50th floor a guy in the building asks him, “How’s it going?” The guy flying by says, “So far, so good!”
Continue reading “The Inflation Surge Is Just Getting Started”I just had two emailers in a row who I had back and forths with about the comparison between the Iran War and the Suez Crisis of 1956. And at the end of each exchange they said, hey, looking forward to the live podcast in Austin next week! (Who knows? Maybe Austin is a big Suez Crisis town.) More important, it reminded me that we’ve secured additional space and now have small additional number of tickets for next Wednesday. So if you’re in Austin or near enough that it’s convenient to get there, come see us in Austin next Wednesday night, April 8. Click here for tickets.
Kate and Josh talk Pam Bondi’s ouster, Trump’s Iran stemwinder and the birthright citizenship oral arguments.
Continue reading “Watch This: Trump’s Word Is Not His Bondi”Many of the smaller businesses that took a hit from Trump’s tariffs are not, court filings suggest, set up to collect a refund, and they may never be, Layla A. Jones reports.
Data shared earlier this week by U.S. Customs and Border Protection suggests the smallest and most vulnerable importers are being left behind in the early stages of the tariff refund process.
After the Supreme Court overturned most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which the president issued under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, or IEEPA, Judge Richard Eaton of the Court of International Trade mandated that the federal government repay American importers for tariffs collected under the statute. CBP wrote in an early March court filing that there were about 330,000 importers eligible for a slice of the $166 billion in tariff refunds. In a March 30 court filing, Brandon Lord, executive director Trade Programs at CBP, wrote that 26,664 importers had signed up for the system, called Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries or CAPE.
The data shared by CBP, along with interviews with trade attorneys and advocates, shows that the biggest importers are first in line to get paid back. The disparity reveals the ways small business is continuing to be negatively impacted by Trump’s archaic tariff regime, even beyond eating the lion’s share of the levies.
The first 26,664 importers registered for the automated CBP system account for $120 billion in refunds, Lord wrote. That means just about 8% of all importers paid more than 72% of all IEEPA tariffs for an average refund amount of more than $4.5 million. And that leaves more than 300,000 importers to collect the remaining $46 billion in refunds, or about $150,000 per firm.
It suggests, experts said, that smaller firms are struggling to access the CBP system and collect on what the government owes them.
“If you think about a small and medium-size business, they don’t have a trade compliance department,” Eugene Laney, president and CEO of the American Association of Exporters and Importers, told TPM. “They don’t have supply chain managers.”
Laney lauded CBP for its automated system, which his organization advocated for, but said there are still a number of procedural steps required for a business to enroll in the system, presenting challenges for the most vulnerable firms.
Even before SCOTUS struck down Trump’s tariffs, CBP had recently transitioned from issuing paper checks to an electronic automated clearing house payment system. Businesses need an account with CBP’s import and export portal to enroll in that electronic payment system, and need to be enrolled in both to access the refund portal.
CBP did not respond to TPM requests for data about firm size of the 26,664 registered refund participants.
The disparity in the size of firms that have managed to pursue restitution for Trump’s unlawful tariffs illuminates the disproportionate harm those billions of dollars in trade fees had on small U.S. businesses — the very businesses the president purported to help.
“Smaller importers may not have the resources to coordinate with their customs brokers setting them up in CAPE, but they need to do this to receive refunds,” Mark Ludwikowski, who chairs the International Trade Practice at Clark Hill legal firm, told TPM. “They are often at a disadvantage not because they lack legal rights, but because the refund process assumes a level of administrative capacity that many of them do not have in-house.”
Some smaller businesses may never attempt to collect tariff refunds through the CBP system, said Laney. Firstly, some have been forced to shutter because of unsustainable trade costs. Others may just not find the effort worth it, either because the refund wouldn’t be large enough or because it’d just be less burdensome to take a tax loss on the fee, Laney said. Wall Street is also capitalizing on the refund system, with financial services firms offering money-crunched businesses a portion of their refunds up front in exchange for the ability to collect the full refund amount later.
One year after Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariff announcement levying heavy import taxes on businesses and consumers, small businesses continue to report having to increase product prices, eschew expansion plans, and ultimately lose revenue to continue operating. A report from the progressive Center for American Progress thinktank published at the end of March found the average small business spent $306,000 on Trump’s tariffs over the past year.
Trump said his tariff scheme was designed to improve U.S. manufacturing, which has been declining for decades amid the expansion in global trade. But Trump’s tariffs failed to create sustainable manufacturing jobs. The sector actually shed jobs in between January 2025 and January 2026 according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The sheer cost of tariffs isn’t the only burden crushing smaller firms. Laney described that many firms put up additional collateral and took out loans in order to afford the increased import fees and stay afloat. Now, getting that money back is a necessity.
“The refunds would help them alleviate some of the liability,” said Laney, “but there is an urgency around that because a lot of these small and medium sized businesses borrowed so much money that if they don’t get the refunds in time, then they could potentially go out of business.”
This post has been updated to correct a typo.
We discussed a wild few weeks on Capitol Hill yesterday, including a comical series of maneuvers by Senate and House Republicans, each of whom are now swallowing legislation they pledged to oppose, and a seeming attempt by Republican leadership to get Trump off their backs when it comes to the SAVE Act. Watch here.
