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.
Watch This: Trump’s Word Is Not His Bondi
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”Refunds for Some
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.
Small Businesses Are Being Left Out of Tariff Refund Process, CBP Data Suggests
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 Lloyd, 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, Lloyd 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.”
Congressional Pratfalls Unpacked
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.
Donald Trump Is the Worst Attorney General in History
Cry Me a River for Pam Bondi
The parallels between President Trump’s firings of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi are so striking that I was tempted to copy and paste the March 6 Morning Memo, and merely swap the names.
It’s not that there’s no news value in reporting Bondi’s ouster. It’s that the old journalistic tropes for cabinet shuffles not only don’t work when every department is being run directly out of the White House; instead, they actively mislead, blur, and obscure the truth of Trump’s iron (if erratic) grip on the Justice Department. What difference does it make, really, who runs these departments if they are at the beck and call of Stephen Miller all day. Said one former DOJ prosecutor:
The traditional journalistic approach to a sacking also hyper-personalizes the emotional experience and career prospects of the ousted official in a way that feels gross in the current moment. Bondi has decimated the historic foundations of the Justice Department, served as a willing cipher for President Trump’s campaign of retribution against his political foes, overseen the purging of career prosecutors and investigators, put hapless line attorneys in impossible positions in court, and defied court orders to the point that the government’s hard-earned presumption of regularity evaporated during her tenure.
But tell us more about how hard this all is on her:
- NYT: Bondi “grew emotional … in conversations with friends and colleagues after she realized she was out.”
- WSJ: “While Bondi has been stung by the dismissal she has been heartened by the support she has received and a flood of job offers …”
“It’s ALL so positive,” Bondi herself texted the WSJ.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, where palace intrigue entirely misses the point, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the president’s own criminal defense attorney who operationalized all of what Bondi presided over, was elevated to acting attorney general.
A lot of ink will be spilled on who will replace Bondi permanently, but so long as the DOJ is run out of the Trump White House, the attorney general is just window-dressing. And one thing remains depressingly true: Across two terms, each Trump attorney general has been worse than the last one.
Trump Wants a MAL Docs Redo?
In a lazy, sloppy, predetermined memo, the deeply compromised Trump DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that the 1978 post-Watergate Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional and that Congress cannot force the president to surrender his records to the National Archives at the end of his administration.
The memo was written by the OLC head: 36-year-old T. Elliot Gaiser, a former law clerk to the 5th Circuit’s Edith Jones, D.C. Circuit’s Neomi Rao, and Justice Samuel Alito.
Violations of the Presidential Records Act were at the core of the Mar-a-Lago criminal case against the president, though the charges related the sensitivity of the documents in question and Trump’s alleged obstruction of the investigation.
Tina Peters Will Be Resentenced
A Colorado appeals court threw out the nine-year prison sentence — but not the conviction of election denier Tina Peters — and ordered her to be resentenced, ruling that the trial judge has improperly taken into account her improperly her repeated false claims about elections in violation of her First Amendment rights.
The Purges: Pentagon Edition
In his ongoing crusade to stack the Pentagon with white, male loyalists, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth:
- fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, whose term typically wouldn’t have ended until 2027. The new acting chief of staff will be Gen. Christopher LaNeve, who was Hegseth’s military aide before being named the vice chief of staff, in a move seen as a prelude to canning George. In his year in office, Hegseth has now removed the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and the chiefs of staff of the Army, Navy and Air Force.
- forced out two other Army generals: Gen. David Hodne, who became the head of the service’s Training and Transformation Command in October, and Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., the chief of Army chaplains.
George had attempted to stand up to Hegseth over his decision to block the promotions of one-star general of two Black officers and two women officers, the NYT reports:
Two weeks ago, General George asked Mr. Hegseth to meet with him to discuss the removal of the four officers from the one-star list, as well as the general’s view that Mr. Hegseth was interfering unnecessarily in Army personnel decisions overall, the officials said. Mr. Hegseth refused to meet with General George about the matter, they said.
In other Pentagon news: Hegseth directed military commanders to allow troops to carry personal firearms on base.
Must Read
A truly insightful analysis by Garrett Graff on how DEI has become the stabbed-in-the-back excuse in the post-Global War on Terror era that left-behind POWs were in the post-Vietnam era (and before that Jews were in the German post-World War I era) — and how Pete Hegseth wholly subscribes to this mythos.
Mass Deportation Watch
- NYT: ICE Arrests the Head of Wisconsin’s Largest Islamic Group
- WaPo: Despite signaling change, ICE still arrests many immigrants with no record
- NYT: Lawsuit Challenges Warrantless Searches and Forced Entries by ICE
- WaPo: First group of 12 deportees from the US dumped in Uganda
Quote of the Day
Former senior State Department official Vali Nasr, now a professor at Johns Hopkins University:
To the Iranians, the Strait of Hormuz now matters more than the nuclear program. The nuclear program was symbolic, but didn’t provide them with any deterrence. Now, the only reason why they are surviving this war is because of the strait. The Iranian thinking is that, at the end, the strait must remain under their control because it is their only deterrence and only source of revenue.
Latest From the Middle East …
- Politico: ‘Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!’ Trump threatens Iran’s civilian infrastructure
- WSJ: Control Over Strait of Hormuz Will Determine Who Wins the War
- NYT: How Israel Is Taking Control of Southern Lebanon
Good Read
Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post: The Trump presidential library would be a giant tower of grift
A Special Ask
I’m hoping to catch you in a quiet moment on your Friday and make a special ask for you to take a minute to join TPM.
None of us here loves promoting our own stories let alone hawking the annual membership drive or touting the Journalism Fund. We’d all rather just be doing the work you’ve come to expect from us. Refining our craft, getting closer to the truth, moving the national conversation toward what really matters is infinitely rewarding.
But we have to attend to the business of the business, and practical realities force us a couple of times a year to make a concerted effort to pitch readers who aren’t members yet on joining TPM. If you’re a lurker — a regular Morning Memo reader who hasn’t take the plunge yet — make today the day.
Artemis II in Super Slo-Mo
National Geographic used it special high-resolution, slow-motion camera—the Ember s2.5k by Freefly Systems—to record Wednesday’s launch at 2,000 frames per second:
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Who’s the Next Lady on Trump’s Chopping Block
In the before times, when a president wanted to make a change at the top of a department, he had a talk with that person or have an intermediary do so and explain it was time for a change. The secretary was allowed to make the decision on their own, even if it was usually known that it wasn’t really their choice. I was thinking about that this week as Pam Bondi’s ouster speedran from hint to certainty in … what? 24 hours? Why doesn’t she just step down on her own, I thought? But I quickly realized why, just on the basis of thinking about the pattern and about Trump. If Trump is getting ready to fire you and you quit, I strongly suspect this would enrage him. He’d see it as a major and perhaps unforgivable act of defiance. Trump gets to fire you. Period. I think he would see anything else the way others might see a subordinate announcing and claiming credit for a project the executive felt he owned.
Continue reading “Who’s the Next Lady on Trump’s Chopping Block”What Trump Might See in Lee Zeldin
Retribution Attack Dog?
President Trump fired Pam Bondi as attorney general on Thursday, just hours after reports began to surface suggesting he may have informed her before his national address on Iran Wednesday night that she was getting sacked. She will be replaced by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, another of Trump’s former personal lawyers, for now. Multiple outlets are reporting that he may nominate Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin as Bondi’s permanent replacement.
Continue reading “What Trump Might See in Lee Zeldin”Always Stuck in the 1950s, Trump Courts His Own Suez
Iran said today that after the war with the U.S. and Israel concludes that it will “oversee” transit through the Strait of Hormuz. It says it will do so in some kind of common arrangement with Oman. (Oman is the country on the other side of narrowest point of the Strait.) This was mixed with statements that this does not mean ships will be blocked. Basically Iran and Oman will try to make it a better cargo experience for everyone. The Times reports that Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs says that this oversight “will naturally not mean restrictions; rather, they are intended to facilitate and ensure safe passage and to provide better services to ships passing through this route.”
Continue reading “Always Stuck in the 1950s, Trump Courts His Own Suez”Dems Immediately Sue to Block Trump’s Ominous New ‘Citizenship List’ Executive Order
Welcome back to The Franchise! I (Nicole LaFond) am tag-teaming this week’s edition with Khaya Himmelman. We’ve got lots to unpack below, but first …
Continue reading “Dems Immediately Sue to Block Trump’s Ominous New ‘Citizenship List’ Executive Order”