As soon as the Supreme Court struck down many of President Donald Trump’s tariffs in February, his administration imposed a new, sweeping 10% tariff on a broad swath of products and countries under a different law, called Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.
Continue reading “5 Points on the Effort to Block Trump’s Latest Tariffs”DC Circuit Smacks Down Boasberg Again in Alien Enemies Act Case
The Trump administration is being saved again from its flagrant contempt of court in the original Alien Enemies Act case, this time by two Trump-appointed judges on the DC Circuit.
Continue reading “DC Circuit Smacks Down Boasberg Again in Alien Enemies Act Case”Trump’s Corruption Is What’s Tanking the Economy
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
In the aftermath of Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary, a typically shallow conventional wisdom has already emerged that unless President Trump gets the economy turned around, Republicans are going to have hell to pay in the 2026 and 2028 elections.
The NYT quotes the right-wing commentator Rod Dreher, who decamped to Hungary to work for an Orbán-funded think tank, as explaining the election result thusly: “When all boats aren’t rising, everybody looks at who’s on the yacht. In terms of MAGA, populism is great, but if you can’t deliver on the economy, none of it is going to matter.”
That is abundantly true and yet terribly misleading because the economic mess we’re in is entirely of Trump’s own doing. He’s not the usual American president held hostage to the vagaries and cycles of an economy largely beyond his control.
In historic fashion, Trump has torpedoed key pillars of the global economy by launching unprecedented trade wars and an unjustified elective war in the Middle East that has bottled up world oil supplies to such an extent that it threatens a recession. At home, he has dramatically throttled back the economic engine of immigration, targeted America’s world leading universities, and decimated its vibrant scientific and biomedical research base.
Except for the racist assault on immigrants, all of these moves are not driven by ideological imperatives but by corrupt impulses. The economic damage Trump has done was crafted purposely to create opportunities for self-enrichment for him and his allies. It generates its own currency which can be used to perpetuate his political power. What he dispenses he can take away.
The AP sums up the Trump family kleptocracy succinctly:
The family real estate business is undergoing the fastest overseas expansion since its founding a century ago, each deal potentially shaping everything from tariffs to military aid.
Led by Eric, and his brother, Donald Jr., the family business has expanded into cryptocurrencies with ventures that brought in billions of dollars but raised questions about whether some big investors received favorable treatment in return.
The brothers have also joined or invested in a number of companies that aim to do business with the government their father runs. Last month, they struck a deal giving them stakes worth millions in an armed drone maker seeking contracts with the Pentagon and with Gulf states under attack by Iran and dependent on the U.S. military led by their father.
It always sounds a bit earnest to deplore corruption, but one of the practical reasons for eschewing corruption is because at best it acts like an invisible tax on economic growth. At worst, it corrodes the economic engine to the point that it doesn’t properly function any longer. Before Trump, the United States was a world leader in combatting corporate and political corruption abroad for the unapologetically realpolitik reason that American companies could win on a level playing field. Under Trump II, the DOJ has explicitly stopped enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and we’re now in a grubby race to the bottom.
Any notion that Trump can get the economy “back on track” or dampen the economic shockwaves he has unleashed ignores the substance of what he’s done. Not only are Trump’s second term attacks on economic growth hard to reverse, let alone quickly, they’re deeply wired into who he is and what he’s about.
The Economic Warning Signs
- The Middle East conflict is causing oil scarcity and rising prices that are contributing to significant “demand destruction” which could lead to the steepest drop-off in demand for oil since the COVID slowdown, the International Energy Agency is forecasting in its latest outlook.
- The International Monetary Fund warns that the Middle East conflict will slow economic growth, fuel inflation and raises the possibility of a global recession.
Latest on the Middle East Conflict …
- Israeli and Lebanese officials gathered in D.C. for rare direct talks — the first in a decade — as the Netanyahu government has seized on the wider conflict to advance Israel’s position on the ground in Lebanon.
- Bitter irony alert: Talks between Iran and Trump administration are complicated by “the risk that any agreement that emerges may resemble the 2015 nuclear accord” that Trump abrogated in his first term, the NYT reports.
- House Republicans have again abdicated their oversight roles by pushing off until at least May testimony originally scheduled for next week from senior Pentagon officials on the war in Iran.
Lawless Boat Strike Death Toll: 170
The U.S. attacked an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Eastern Pacific on Monday, bringing the campaign’s overall death toll to at least 170. In announcing the attack, the U.S. Southern Command introduced new Orwellian language: “Applying total systemic friction on the cartels.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is waging a pressure campaign against the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to squash a potential investigation into the boat strike campaign, The Intercept reports.
Must Read
TPM’s Josh Kovensky reports from Frisco, Texas, the country’s fastest growing city and a haven for South Asian immigrants, which far-right activists are seizing on as “proof” of the Great Replacement Theory.
Thread of the Day
IMPORTANT
Local authorities in St. Paul, Minnesota have launched a criminal investigation into the notorious ICE detention in January of Hmong American ChongLy “Scott” Thao. They’re investigating the warrantless raid on an American citizen’s home as a potential kidnapping, burglary, and false imprisonment.
Quote of the Day
Cheryl Kelley in The Hill:
American law is built on a simple rule: The government cannot get around legal limits by creating a new structure to do the same thing another way. The Posse Comitatus Act reflects that rule. It exists to prevent the federal government from using a large, armed force for general policing inside the U.S. But by tripling ICE’s size, giving it $75 billion in multi-year funding insulated from normal oversight, and deploying it far beyond immigration enforcement — from neighborhood operations to general airport security — the administration has achieved in practice what those restrictions were designed to prevent.
Swalwell and Gonzales Both Resign
In a rapid-fire combo of scandal-fueled resignations, Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Tony Gonzales (R-TX) both announced last evening that they would resign their seats — though neither gave a date certain for their departures. Depending on the exact timing, the resignations should be a wash and not effect majority control of the House.
Two Big Wins
- In the lawsuit over the removal of the Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument, the Trump administration has reversed course and confirmed in a new filing that it will reinstate the flag and not remove it again.
- The American Library Association and a union of cultural workers have reached a settlement in their lawsuit against the Trump administration that saves the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, the NYT reports: “The Trump administration reaffirmed that it had reinstated all previously canceled grants, in keeping with a separate legal ruling last year, and reversed all staff reductions. It also promised not to take any further steps to reduce the agency.”
Good Read
Wired: Government Workers Say They’re Getting Inundated With Religion
Pope Making Everyone Look Dumb
The senior senator from Ohio:
Unintentional Edginess From CSPAN
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Senate GOP Leadership Wants An ‘Anorexic-Like’ Reconciliation Package. Not Everyone Agrees.
Congress is back in town from their two-week Easter recess and Senate Republicans are trying to execute on a second reconciliation package as Congress continues to be consumed by a 58-day Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown, resignations and potential Democratic-led war powers votes.
As Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) explained it on Monday night, leadership is hoping to keep the reconciliation package “very, very skinny — anorexic-like skinny.”
“To execute on it and do it with any kind of speed, you’ve got to keep it really tight,” Thune told reporters Monday night.
Continue reading “Senate GOP Leadership Wants An ‘Anorexic-Like’ Reconciliation Package. Not Everyone Agrees.”How a Texas City Became the Far Right’s Next Example of the Great Replacement Theory
FRISCO, TEXAS – Far-right activists are seizing on a new example of the America they fear. It’s a booming, Texas city home to the Dallas Cowboys’ practice facility and a PGA golf resort.
Continue reading “How a Texas City Became the Far Right’s Next Example of the Great Replacement Theory”Blasphemy on Truth Social: A Bridge Too Far
‘An Antichrist Spirit’
Most hardcore evangelical Christians can reverse engineer a case for why any given politician or influential emerging world leader is probably the antichrist. What’s rare is when the hysteria sticks, and there’s a consensus around why — as seems to be the case with growing sinister feelings about President Trump this week.
Continue reading “Blasphemy on Truth Social: A Bridge Too Far”Breaking …
Facing expulsion vote, Swalwell resigns from Congress.
Quite apart from the gravity of the allegations, I simply cannot remember a more rapid and total campaign and, it would now seem, career implosion. Usually loyalists and especially senior staff hold out a bit longer. Just stunning in every dimension.
More Info on the Ceasefire Negotiations
This post at Axios gives us the benefit of Barak Ravid’s reporting on the state of the U.S.-Iran negotiations. His sources suggest that the core hold up was the Iranian nuclear program, with the U.S. insisting on a 20 year moratorium on uranium production and the Iranians countering with something in the single digits. Note that this isn’t that different from what President Obama got with the JCPOA — a longterm but by no means permanent cessation. There’s also no mention in the Ravid piece about the Strait of Hormuz or the sanctions regime. Perhaps I’m wrong in what I noted here and the demand for sanctions relief is merely a bluff. But other reports say that Hormuz was in fact a major stumbling block, as one would expect. While I don’t question Ravid’s reporting as such, this article in the Times, I believe, captures the dynamic more precisely: Iran and the U.S. are now moving into a battle of economic privation, testing which player can endure more economic pain.
Continue reading “More Info on the Ceasefire Negotiations”VIDEO: Allegra Kirkland and Mike Rothschild on Why Some Conspiracy Theories Stick With Us
Conspiracy theories have become an inescapable part of American politics and political culture. I talked to Mike Rothschild, a journalist and conspiracy researcher who writes TPM’s Rough Edges column, about why some conspiracies endure, and what happens when fringe ideas are legitimized by some of the most powerful people on earth.
We got into the long tail of QAnon; just how many central banks the Rothschild family supposedly owns; and why MAGA conspiracy peddlers are turning on President Trump.
Check out our conversation below.
Trump and Iran Are Both in Impossible Positions
I wanted to share a few more thoughts on the current ceasefire and negotiations between the United States and Iran. As I noted earlier, there’s something so rich about sending JD Vance to lead the negotiations since the vice president has bent over backwards to signal to everyone who will listen (or write stories) that he was absolutely, positively against the war in the first place. President Trump has sent Vance to conduct and really own negotiations that almost certainly wouldn’t go well for the United States.
This cannot be an accident.
I started this post before the news broke that the first attempt at negotiations had broken down or, at least for now, had failed. That news just tightened the box into which Trump placed Vance. If the war resumes, Vance owns that continuation because he walked away from the negotiating table. It’s almost as though he gave the original order. If the negotiations fail, that’s on Vance too.
So where are we now?
Continue reading “Trump and Iran Are Both in Impossible Positions”