179 thoughts on “Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25”

  3. Last week I wrote about the 26 year old Kat Abughazaleh the primary challenger to 80 year Jan Schkowsky for Illinois’ 9th District and how this might be a big political mismatch since the Illinois 9th District is a very Jewish district and Abughazaleh has taken a very hotile to Israel stance. In more evidence of this mistmatch, Kat has apparently confused AIPAC and J-Street and is going after Representive Jan Schkowsky for getting money from J-Street, which is generally much less hawkish and much more friendly towards the Palestinians than AIPAC.

    https://x.com/TrackAIPAC/status/1904229724731351530Report

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  5. China, Japan, and South Korea have teamed up to respond to US tariffs.

    https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2025-03-31/china-japan-south-korea-will-jointly-respond-to-us-tariffs-chinese-state-media-says

    I repeat. China, Japan, and South Korea.

    In case people are not aware of the relationships between those three countries, none of those countries really like each other that much, mostly because of historic reasons and arguments over said history and how it is understood. All three relationships have slowly been strengthening recently, but this is, frankly, a huge and somewhat unprecedented step. Absolutely no one saw this coming.

    It’s entirely possible we’re about to lose basically all of our East Asian influence to China.Report

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    1. Wait, they’re arguing that the prisoners in El Salvador are no longer under US control? That they are not merely holding our prisoners, but we transfer authority to them ? I assumed their defense was the exact opposite, that El Salvador was basically operating as a private prison.

      I feel that has very serious legal implications that they have not thought through at all. Specifically, the United Nations Convention Against Torture:

      Article 3

      1. No State Party shall expel, return (“refouler”) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.

      2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.

      *ahem*
      https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/el-salvador/

      Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; extensive gender-based violence, including domestic and sexual violence, and femicide; substantial barriers to sexual and reproductive health services access; trafficking in persons, including forced labor; and crimes involving violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons.

      You see that word torture right there? The ‘competent authorities’, aka, the US State Department, appear to have made a very clear statement in 2023 about whether people detained by the El Salvador government are in danger of being tortured. It is the Current Official US Foreign Policy Conclusion that there are credible reports that prisoners in El Salvador are tortured. On their own website. (Guys, you might want to take down the ‘things that will be used as evidence of crimes against humanity’ from your website before ‘Black guy that got a medal’. Just saying.)

      The US government, in court, just claimed they have violated Article 3 of the UN Convention Against Torture. As a _defense_.(1)

      Oopsie-doodle. Bet that’s going to play well.

      The UN Convention Against Torture, incidentally, was signed by the president and ratified by Congress. It is US law.

      Article 3 is a restriction on the government, like a lot of the constitution, and like the constitution, there’s no actual stated penalty for the government breaking it, but the courts ABSOLUTELY can force the government to follow it.

      1) This is, incidentally, why when the Bush administration ferried prisoners overseas to be tortured, it pretended either it still had authority over them and just allowed them to be ‘interrogated’ by others, or that it never had authority over them at all. Or, sometimes, that the place did not torture. But the Bush administration actually understood laws existed.Report

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      1. Oh, just be clear: This is indeed extradition in a legal sense.

        When we talk about extradition in the country, we usually think of the _specific_ legal process that is commonly used.

        But extradition, under international law, is any prisoner handoff between governments that is done via some sort of transfer agreement, whether or not that includes a court proceeding at either end.Report

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  9. Come for the Jon Stewart fun, stay for the autistic nerd talking about the new-center-right economic policies.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgEQeLR-M0g

    To me, Cass is interesting for his Pre-Post-Trump positioning…

    I think he fumbled a couple answers … I don’t think he quite gets across his message that NATO doesn’t have to be destroyed to become renewed/reordered effectively (it kinda gets tacked on at the end after he meanders a bit); and I think he’s too circumspect ‘implying’ what he pretty much says, which is that the Trump Admin is poorly run and even if you enact some policies that *could* be good, if you do them haphazardly and without a clear outline of what other countries can do to amend behaviors to bring trade into alignment… then you aren’t doing good policies at all. Or, per usual, the Trump Admin undermines everything it touches. It’s pretty clear that his long-term Post-Trump objective is tied to younger parts of the party… but he doesn’t define his future goals as either supporting Trump nor directly taking Trump to task for botching things up.

    He addresses this second point directly in this essay (probably written after the interview, I assume) where he critiques the administration for not articulating the point, direction or correction behind tariffs. So, if you were looking for a steelman on the Point/Purpose of Tariffs if handled by a competent administration, this is your article.

    https://www.understandingamerica.co/p/americas-three-demands

    As a supervillain origin story, he tells how he was the guy tasked by Mitt Romney(!) to look at the China trade policies… and turns out, there was a bit of a gap between theory and reality. This is before (I think) Autor’s China Shock came out. So out of the Romney Bain Capital labs …Report

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    1. The ideas are worth taking seriously but the conceit that Trump (or Vance, or Musk) understand or are motivated by them is.. a tough sell. I mean maybe if Rubio was president you could see there being challenges selling some of this in the face of institutional inertia and a fickle public raised on a Steven Spielberg version of World War 2 and the years immediately after but does anyone else in the administration have this kind of vision? I’m unconvinced.Report

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        1. Eh maybe…?

          I mean admittedly I am not the closest Musk follower but my take on him is that his two big political priorities, construed most charitably, are about institutional and/or economic efficiency and a pseudo libertarian set of social values. These things are both in direct conflict with at least 2 of Cass’ 3 big ideas, those being balancing trade with friendlies and coordinated anti-Chinese protectionism across the democratic world.

          If you really wanted to give Cass a kind of push you’d say congratulations, you’ve re-invented the US led liberal world order, just with our allies paying their own freight on defense and being a little less touchy feely on certain questions of values. Maybe also a little more nakedly self interested in our approach to global capitalism. But that’s also not really what Trump is doing, by haphazardly threatening tariffs against friend and foe alike and calling into question our ability to lead the kind of alliance Cass says we should. It also doesn’t seem to be what motivates Musk.Report

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          1. Musk seems to have flipped from Grey to Red (though who knows how long that will last).

            Cass is an old-schooly kind of guy and seems to be the type of Team Red that no longer has a home under the new Stupid Party Paradigm.

            A man out of time but 100% comfortable in the party of McCain and Romney.

            Team Rust?Report

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            1. My read of Cass is he’s trying to grope towards a new synthesis of the right of center. From the essay and other pieces I’ve read by him I think he’d tell the Romneys and McCains that the old world is dead and they had better get used to it. However he still has a sophisticated enough view of geopolitics that he understands that a US that operates totally out of self interest (to say nothing of being totally irresponsibly governed) is a less powerful country. The question I’d ask him is what separates his views from those of, I don’t know, George H.W. Bush and if the answer is nothing then are you sure you’re actually a conservative, as that term is coming to be understood?Report

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              1. I think JB is wrong about McCain/Romney and I don’t think he’s GHWB… so let me see if I can break it down by the good ‘ole stool analogy.

                Leg 1: Economics/Libertarians
                * He’s explicitly taking down the Free Market fundamentalists… Markets are good, but markets are basically all about games/rules/incentives. There is no invisible hand.

                Leg 2: Foreign Policy/Neo-cons
                * He’s explicitly acknowledging a multi-polar world order, and the goal isn’t maximal containment, but strategic alignment; which means honey/carrots/sticks and the willingness to use whichever is needed. Pax Americana comes with duties from those who participate. But the era of hegemony is over and over-extension will lead to losing our allies in the medium term.

                Leg 3: Social/So-Cons
                * He’s not a bootstrap conservative; he thinks the 47% has been ill-served by the economic policies of Leg #1 and that arbitraging labor *isn’t* a comparative advantage in trade; the market should have rules that benefit families and the state has a role in making policies that protect and advance civil society.

                None of those things are ‘conservative’ in the old Republican synthesis kind of way.

                But, what Steward missed (this is pretty common) is that challenging the old consensus doesn’t mean that the Left’s solutions are vindicated — he’s got different ideas from Romney/McCain/Clinton/Obama/Pelosi/Trump/McConnel that he’s peddling.

                Basically everyone thinks he’s wrong about everything, but from different angles. And that’s ok.Report

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              2. Yea it’s all good food for thought. Parts 1 and 2 seem like the kind of thing that could even have bipartisan legs. Part 3 I think may he fundamentally in tension with Parts 1 and 2. Constraints on trade for the greater good of our way of life may well be necessary (I agree that they probably are) but the result of that is going to make us poorer in the aggregate, as is re-arming. Not a lot left over to put your fingers on the scale for working families in that environment.Report

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              3. I take your point; Part 3 is where the votes are.

                But the reason why Cass (and others) are at least interesting to follow is that the goal of Economic Policy shifts for them *isn’t* a friend/enemy reward/punish model… it’s a game referee model and the goal is to stop ignoring rules infractions because they benefit the current order (in the short term)… changing the rules *always* causes some disruption somewhere. Changing the rules stupidly (as Cass is implying about Trump) will bring about more and stupid disruptions (and by implication – somewhat unnecessary).

                But in the end, the point isn’t tariffs or no-tariffs, its addressing the lies about the rules – and who benefits from them.Report

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              4. Yea, on the one hand financialization and globalization have wreaked havoc on low skill manufacturing. On the other times and technology really have changed in important ways.

                Over on Yglesias’ substack someone shared a rather glib tweet (xeet?) about the lack of upside to bringing back the sock factories from Cambodia. It’s harsh but MY isn’t totally wrong about that.

                While we need to on-shore or friend-shore any number of strategic industries those are probably mostly of the high tech manufacturing variety, and importantly not the type that leads to mass low skill employment with unions and good benefits, etc. like in the days of yore. They’re jobs for smaller numbers of people who may still need degrees and/or significant training to operate the mostly automated tools.

                So what do you do for those guys? They probably don’t make enough for tax cuts to mean anything. Resistance to subsidy is bolstered not just by pointy headed economists but by senses of worth and dignity. It’s still not clear to me what you can do for them that doesn’t work against creating and holding the other forms of strategic advantage.Report

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              5. Just because there is a problem doesn’t mean there is a solution. Most of the low skilled work codes feminine or at least insignificantly masculine and a lot of low skill guys won’t take those jobs because of dignity and worth just like they don’t take subsidy for the same reasons. At the same time, there are enough of them to wreck political havoc because their fantasy economy doesn’t exist and they vote out their cultural preferences.Report

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              6. I think we have to be more constructive. The female coded thing is something I feel good telling people to get over. I fully expect that by the time I can retire (if I ever can, God willing) that law will be female coded in a way it was not when I started out. That’s what the pipeline looks like and there’s no harm in it.

                The question becomes what you can do to create mass work at a time when technology is slowly but surely eliminating the demand. Maybe it’s FDR style paying people to go out and clear scrub brush. Maybe it’s, I dunno, paying people to coach little league. Of course you then have to deal with every dollar being spent on that not being spent on the latest ship killer drone that blows up amphibious landing vessels while they’re still out at sea.Report

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              7. Given what I’ve seen AI do to coding, I’m expecting AI to do similar to lawyering.

                That is: you won’t need paralegals or entry-level staff anymore… hell, you won’t need junior partners.

                Just Level 3 Engineers and up.Report

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              8. Yes, my prediction is that the pipeline will also constrict. Clients will still want a guy or gal with a little grey in his or her hair and the bedside manner breaking down the brass tacks but the path to becoming that person will be narrower.Report

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              9. We used to get Level 3 Engineers from the best and brightest of the Level 2 Engineering pool.

                I don’t know where we’ll get Level 3s after they stop making Level 2s.

                Maybe we’ll make it so that AI is so good that we’ll only need Level 4s. That’ll solve that problem.Report

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              10. I think it’ll eventually revert to a master and apprentice kind of model where the senior person gets an heir and a spare rather than a department or firm or whatever getting a chunk of a big graduating class. Family businesses may live on. The big boys do too but they shrink drastically.Report

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              11. The Bar Associations still control access to the courts through licensing and since most legislators have a lawyer background, that isn’t going away. Plus the attempts at using AI in law have been an utter disaster, especially in the Court room but I’m guessing AI will make a muck of contracts, wills, and other legal documents as well.Report

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              13. Just to add you look at that situation with the longshoreman and port automation. On the one hand those people have good jobs and you hate to see them go. On the other, is it really in the strategic interest of the US to refuse to automate its ports, while China speeds ahead with the technology? It isn’t easy stuff.Report

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      2. I think the premise that someone like Cass is working with is that Trump and Musk *aren’t* on-board. This isn’t a Trump/Musk explainer.

        Folks like Rubio have flirted with these non-orthodox ideas (they go broader than simple tariffs) but as Cass says, Politicians are lagging indicators — they rarely lead the way. Cass mentions a few other folks on the economic side with whom I believe he has a direct line.

        So yeah, that’s what makes some of the Stewart interview ‘funny’ to watch, Cass doesn’t have a mission to trash Trump… so he just let’s Stewart’s jokes roll over him… and he’s pretty clear that he thinks Trump/Musk are not competently executing whatever plan it is they think they are executing (that’s the point of the article). But his audience isn’t Trump/Musk/McConnel or any of the Old Republicans or MAGA cultists… he explicitly says the targets are 40-under.

        Post-Trump is pretty explicit in his by-line…Report

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        1. Maybe I need to read him more to get that. I read the substack post on the 3 demands that seemed to me to be premised on the idea that there is an audience for this within the Trump administration. I have not been able to watch the interview with Jon Stewart and (mistakenly it sounds like) assumed it covered the same ground.Report

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    1. It’s worth reminding people how absurdly random the death penalty is when you actually look at the crimes committed, and that whether or not the government goes for it (When they can) is about 90% determined by the ratio of the societal power and position between the victim and the accused. The higher the ratio, the more likely it is to be demanded.

      This usually is noticeable via racial disparity, but here we have an example of such a high class person that a well-educated upper-middle white person can be put to death for murdering him!

      Seriously, someone should actually check if we’ve ever executed someone of his social status before. I’m not sure we have, and if we have, I’m sure it wasn’t just for one murder. (Hell, the number of people executed for just one murder is pretty low to start with.)Report

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  11. Cory Booker has exceeded Thurmond’s speaking record and he is still going. Schiff, Gallego, and Schumer announce holdsReport

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  12. Randy Fine wins FL-6 according to the Times with 53.9 percent of the vote to Weil getting 45.4 percent. An R+14 district was always going to be a tough win for Democrats but Walz won reelection in 2024 with 66.5 percent of the vote so this is a marked improvement.Report

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  13. The Daily Beast reviews Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, and Michael McKean playing in a new revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross“.

    I know that we have some theater afficionados here and I think that they’ll really enjoy this review. The reviewer finds the crude and harsh language (including slurs) used by the actors to be offputting and he is disturbed by how the audience laughs at the dialog in the play:

    In the play, the characters that say these words aren’t cautioned or castigated or proven wrong. Mamet simply has them say them; the response of the audience in 2025—laughing at them merrily saying the words—is its own telling-on-itself.

    If you like Mamet, you will *LOVE* this review.Report

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    1. Yahoo News, wow, that sounds official. Except that’s just Telegraph repost, but I guess they sound official, too. Except the story is based on reporting by this site: https://honestreporting.com/

      Hmm. That…actually doesn’t appear to be any sort of neutral researcher group.

      You might notice the distinct lack of any, like, confirmed information in that story. It’s just quoting these guys. Hell, half of them are not quotes of _them_, it’s the quotes of Andrew Fox _talking about_ what those other people’s research, which he has not seen at all, must have uncovered.

      What the utter hell? How can anyone take this seriously?

      I really like how the article talks about how hard it is to compare the lists cause they’re in PDFs and they have to do it by hand. Wow, that sounds like something that _should be made available on the website_, doesn’t it? They could easily reformat and show the last three lists as a table, show the changes, show the ages, show the supposedly corrected birthdates and ages, show any evidence that a person was in Hamas .

      Except that’s actually just Andrew Fox _guessing_ what this other group must have done, so we don’t even know they did that.

      Really feels like the Telegraph should have gotten that, as the story, instead of just quoting these guys about this, or quoting a guy talking about those guys talking about this.Report

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      1. The most important stat is civilian:military ratios.

        My link is to a listing of estimates. The various ratios bounce around over time but between 80% and 66% civilian seem a good median. So between 4:1 and 2:1 civilian:military. At the moment the list leans towards the former but I suspect an edit war.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war#Civilian_to_combatant_ratio

        IMHO the stat “women and children” is so vague to be worthless. We need to know how many of those “children” are male and how many are female.

        The unfortunate reality is a 4:1 ratio is doing better than expected in this kind of war even before factoring in Hamas deliberately putting it’s own civilians in danger.

        Israel seems to be doing a good but not great job by the standards of urban war.Report

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          1. These stats are why I claim that Israel deliberately attacking civilians isn’t supported by the numbers. I get that this is really grim and really brutal, but it’s also expected with Hamas’ style of fighting.

            So if 15 ambulance/medical personal die, Israel is doing a good job if 3 of them were Hamas and a great job if 5 of them were.Report

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        2. What does that have to do with the fact that the Telegraph (And thus Yahoo News) is repeating very obvious unsubstantiated propaganda about how some pro-Israel guy said he looked at some stuff and found some discrepancy that he’s apparently not going to make public in any way, and then most of the article is about another pro-Israel guy talking about what those people probably found.

          That cannot possible be ‘news’ in any sense. ‘This guy said he discovered some stuff, although produced no evidence of that, and we have another guy here to guess at what he probably discovered!’Report

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            1. This is on top of the fact the entire article is trying to paint ‘Hamas revised the numbers down’ as proving they are a bad actor, when in fact revising the numbers down is…exactly what they should do if they have gotten more information.

              They’re pretending Hamas did it to ‘retain credibility’, that Hamas was somehow forced it into it or people would stop believing them.

              As opposed to ‘Hamas, in the chaos of war, sometimes has wrong numbers, and has fixed those’

              They don’t present any evidence of their interpetation, they do not present any actual specific example of the corrected deaths to let anyone even make their own determination.

              Granted, they don’t even even present any evidence the number did change. In fact, they _literally do not list the numbers_ that they assert have changed. Or link to the PDFs!

              It’s purely ‘This person said the number changed, and this other person has suggested that it was because the first number was deliberately dishonest but they felt they couldn’t get away with this dishonestly anymore’. Just utter vibe-based reporting.Report

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  15. It’s being widely reported that Facebook is taking down recent posts by historian Heather Cox Richardson. The post detail significant alleged wrong doing by the current regime and were removed with no warning or apparent recourse available to the author.

    While corporations are, indeed free to do as they please with their content, suppressing speech like this puts Zuckerberg on par with Musk as slayers of truth.Report

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    1. Did you hear about New York University cancelling Dr. Joanne Liu’s speech? Just happened earlier today.

      Apparently, it was going to mention some stuff that was going to make some students there uncomfortable.Report

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        1. Freedom of Speech doesn’t mean Freedom of Reach. The doctor can still say whatever she wants, the university just said “you aren’t entitled to say it *HERE*”.

          If it prevents violence, you have to agree that it’s the right decision.Report

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          1. Not that I disagree with that, but when you didn’t link to anything I got suspicious. I refer people to the link for an explanation of why she was cancelled and whether it was out of fear of student violence.Report

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            1. From your article:

              Liu, who said she was already in New York when she received the call, told CTV News that she was told that the slides about Gaza “could be perceived as antisemitic” and that the USAID slides might be perceived as “anti-governmental”.

              Hate Speech has never had a place on campus.

              Also, New York University is a private school so it can do whatever it wants.Report

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              1. It’s not “my” article, but it does lay out what actually happened and what the given reasons were. I thought that basic information might be useful. Hence the link.Report

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        2. It’s a Hollywood blacklist redux. How long before we revive HUAC?

          “Are you now, or have you ever been, in opposition to the war in the Palestinian territories?”Report

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            1. Isn’t that what a blacklist is? Now that the word is out on Dr. Liu, it’d take a pretty brave outfit, which surely seem to be in short supply these days, to engage her as a speaker now.Report

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              1. I’m not sure that she has a whole lot in common with the other speakers that have been shut down over the last dozen years or so.

                Isn’t that a requirement for a blacklist? A common theme?

                Well, other than the “potentially harmful” thing?Report

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  16. Judge Crawford easily wins in Wisconsin despite or because of Musk’s 25 million spent on her opponent. Turns out, people really hate the guy.

    Democrats retain Superintendent of Public Education position as well.

    Republicans easily maintain in FL-1 and 6 but Democratic lose was narrower than expected and we carried Escambia County for the first time since 1992Report

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    1. Yeah, looks like the Three Groups of Voters have different takes on him.

      1. AUGH I HATE HIM! I HATE HIM! I’M GOING TO VANDALIZE CARS THAT HIS COMPANY MAKES, I HATE HIM SO MUCH!!!
      2. Eh. He’s annoying but he’s given us a handful of Dubs. He *HAS* given us Dubs… right? DOGE is accomplishing stuff, right? Occasionally?
      3. He’s pretty annoying to the point where I’d vote to have him go away.

      See the difference there? 1 gets fired up, not depressed. 2 is tentative but not particularly energized. 3s are turned off entirely.Report

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      1. I take it as people may be dumb but it’s a bad idea to insult their intelligence. And a guy like Musk just can’t help insulting peoples’ intelligence. Constantly. And with extreme prejudice.Report

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        1. Well, driving a rift between Musk and Trump seemed to be the main goal for a few months there.

          Starting rumors that Musk is the shadow president wasn’t able to do it… but if anything could, something like this will pull it off.Report

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  17. Well, we are now at the time of year where the Fed reports on how things look, and a lot of companies are required to make _legally accurate_ predictions about future revenue.

    This is the things they’re saying on anonymous surveys to the Fed:
    https://www.dallasfed.org/research/surveys/tssos/2025/2503#tab-comments

    Um…not looking so good.

    Meanwhile, Trump keeps saying on Truth Social that people are fighting his tariffs on fentanyl. I would quote the entire thing, but it’s an unreadable mess: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114266599439835683

    But here’s the first sentence: ‘Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul, also of Kentucky, will hopefully get on the Republican bandwagon, for a change, and fight the Democrats wild and flagrant push to not penalize Canada for the sale, into our Country, of large amounts of Fentanyl, by Tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy.’

    I’m…pretty sure we haven’t put tariffs on fentanyl to make it more costly to distribute and buy.Report

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      1. I honestly think Canada should have justified their retaliatory tariffs not as retaliatory, but due to the fentanyl going the other way.

        Which is higher. The US is a net exporter of fentanyl over the border.

        Actually, the funniest possible thing would be for Canada to say ‘Yes, there are things coming across the border illegally, this is a good thing Trump has set up, indeed, we demand a formal treaty that _automatically_ scales tariffs based on outlawed things smuggled over the border.’

        Anything illegal. Not just drugs, but _guns_.

        Which would not only put Canada far ahead, but Mexico also.Report

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      1. It cannot be emphasized how much this guy has _never_ been coherent, and how much he has fallen apart over the past decade on top of that. He’s just a blathering idiot, and I don’t mean he’s wrong (I mean, he is), but he absolutely has no ability to sit down and produce a coherent paragraph or lay out an argument from start to end.

        This is totally distinct from the fact I politically disagree with him! His brain is fricking mush. He can _mostly_ read a speech, but it’s incredibly obvious when he leaves the text and start rambling.

        This is the sort of person that, if you ran across him in at a party, you would immediately try to get away from because he’s started rambling about how horrible windmills are or how batteries can electrocute you.

        It is _absurd_ we elected someone this incoherent as president, and even more absurd we did it again.Report

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    3. The string “uncertain” occurs 34 times in that Fed report. If we want the government to be “ran like a business” as DJT’s supporters so often say, I’d say creating uncertainty is the last thing the administration would want to create. That’s just me spitballing, however.Report

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      1. The entire plan, such as it seems to be a coherent plan at all, is to let Trump do whatever he feels like while Musk and Trumps other hangers on run around damaging as many government functions (especially tax collection) as they can while trying to generate enough distraction that the GOP will somehow be able to eviscerate the safety net legislatively and pass an even bigger deficit exploding tax cut. The longer-term hope seems to be that somehow the voting rubes won’t be angry enough to give Dems a big enough or long enough majority to undo the damage and tax the fish out of the plutocrats to pay for all their chicanery.Report

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        1. They don’t have a coherent plan. Full Stop.

          There are people focused on the tax cut. There are people focused on “reforming” gov. There are people focused on Israel. There are people focused on Ukraine/Russia. There are people focused on “making vaccines safe”.

          There are no doubt several also focused on enriching themselves.

          The people focused on vaccines don’t understand vaccines. The people focused on Ukraine/Russia apparently get a lot of their info from Russian “news” feeds. The people focused on the tax cuts either don’t know or don’t care about the economic side effects. Ditto whoever is feeding Trump ideas on tariffs.

          This is a clown show, there are no realistic “long term plans”.

          The interesting part will be what happens when they run into facts. What happens when Putin refuses to make peace. What happens when they try to dismantle vaccines. What happens when the various department heads discover they need the next two layers of management back because they were doing useful things.
          What happens when Trump running wild with tariffs crashes the economy.

          Trump isn’t going to accept responsibility for anything bad, but hopefully the voters will.Report

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          2. I think this is the most persuasive hypothesis and among the most direct causes is just how Extremely Online this administration is, and it’s even worse than it was in 2017. For all the talk about social media giving politicians a direct line to their supporters without any gatekeepers one wonders if the way the internet distorts reality won’t ultimately cause this approach to he self defeating. Twitter gazes back at you, or something like that.Report

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  19. Well here comes the big f- you to working families everywhere. I predict hard lessons are about to be learned when everything gets way more expensive and any new investment in the US in return is minimal.Report

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        1. It’s a new height of idiocy from a dude who already was setting new records for it. He even, fishing, tariffed the Israeli’s after they dropped all tariffs against the US.Report

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          1. Yea I don’t can’t decide whether I want the rest of the world to take it in stride in light of Trump’s own propensity to turn on a dime and spare us some pain or to hit us super hard in hopes of pushing along a correction. What a cluster. What stupidity.Report

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            1. The people I feel for are older folks nearing retirement or depending on investments for fixed income. The stock market, surely, is going to crater like nothing we’ve seen before. I’m in my mid forties so I can just avert my gaze from the 401k and chant “so long as you keep working you can ride this out” but if I was near retirement age… brrrr… I can’t imagine.Report

              Reply

              1. Oh for sure, I’m in the same boat. Not planning on looking at my 401(k) until approximately 2029 but I’ve got at least twenty some working years still ahead of me, maybe more once social security is converted into an exotic reverse equity investment portfolio of some kind. Really tough morning though, and potentially many more to come for anyone who thought they were retiring in the immediate future.Report

                Reply

              2. I’m looking at retirement in the next couple of years, so I switched to mostly cash a few weeks back.

                The last time we saw anything this idiotic was Smoot-Hawley. At least that was voted on by Congress, so the perpetrators could be gotten rid of in a couple years. Now that Congress has inexplicably ceded that authority to the president, we have 4 years of this idiocy.Report

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              4. In theory congress could knock this whole flaming edifice of feces down. The law Trump is using to impose these tariffs obligates Congress to weigh in on it. The current congress actually fiddled with their legislative calendar (IIRC) to functionally make their entire legislative session “day one” of this term specifically to evade a legally required vote on Trumps tarrifs. A new congress (in less than 2 years) or even this congress, if they notice the whining of the rails under their feet or the shrieking of their (suddenly much less) wealthy paymasters could put an end to this stuff with a vote.

                But I’m very glad you saw the writing on the wall and jumped off near the peak.Report

                Reply

              5. I was going to do that too, but I have a decent amount of unrealized gains and was worried about the tax impact… then just put off doing any actual research or decision-making. Still a few years away from retirement so hopefully by some miracle it all rights itself soon.Report

                Reply

    2. Fun fact that the American Media has not noticed but China sure as hell has: The tariffs list Taiwan as a separate country from China. Probably cuz the list was generated by AI.

      That…um… Look, I don’t actually like our One China policy, and think we should do a little more to help Taiwan, but not only is it dangerous for us to stop it, I don’t think these are the guys that are smart enough to transition us away from it.

      And these geniuses have almost certainly done it because they are literally too stupid to know that listing Taiwan separate from China in a political document has Implications.

      Toddlers are running our government. Vicious, petty, evil toddlers.

      I find myself wondering if China is going to respond as if competent adults have changed US policy, or do they understand that it is pure incompetency over here?

      Or will they understand but sort of be required to pretend that the US did this on purpose. Like, ‘I know this guy is an idiot and didn’t break the rules on purpose, but I still have to make an example of him keep order because if I let him get away with it, other people will start pushing the boundaries’.

      There are a lot of people trying to figure out things in China right now, and the US government literally might not even understand conceptually what has happened.Report

      Reply

      1. One China in theory, two in practice. For example, Taiwan has long had permission to buy almost leading edge US weapons systems that China would never get. Taiwan has purchased both Patriot and HIMARS missile systems. There is active discussion to let them buy Excalibur artillery rounds. Remember when F-35 deliveries were curtailed after it was discovered that some parts supplier had included Chinese magnets? The F-35 incorporates integrated circuits fabbed in Taiwan without any complaints.Report

        Reply

        1. Yes, the official premise at this point is we will talk about Taiwan and China as if they were one entity, while we do things that support Taiwan… I don’t want to say secretly, cuz it’s not secret, but we do not make a big deal of it.

          I honestly do not know enough about the balancing act of officially not recognizing Taiwan while still practically recognizing Taiwan, but I do know enough about the Trump Administration to know they don’t know they walked into a minefield by merely putting that name on the listReport

          Reply

            1. Typical drivel. Can’t answer a question, can’t stay on topic. Instead you wander into what you want to talk about regardless of the conversation.Report

              Reply

        2. Going around Derek for a bit, this equation and the results it produces are really bonkers.

          Consider a couple of examples. First, Cambodia, which was given a 49% tariff rate. Cambodia is very poor, which means: a.) it doesn’t buy much stuff from wealthy nations, including the U.S., because it can’t afford to, and b.) its workers have very low wages, so they can make stuff cheap, which means they can sell a lot of stuff to us because we like to buy cheap things. So, according to Trump’s data, Cambodia exported 12.66B worth of stuff, and imported around 0.32B. Using Trump’s equation above, you’d do (.32B-12.66B)/12.66B, which gets you .975, which they presumably rounded to .98, then divided that by two, to get the “reciprocal” tariff rate of .49. In other word, because Cambodia is really poor, and can’t buy stuff from us, but can sell us stuff cheap, we’ve imposed an almost 50% tariff on their goods. Will this compel Cambodia to become rich and start buying as much stuff from us as they sell to us? Only time will tell. Also, so much for buying cheap stuff from Cambodia.

          It gets worse. Recall these are called reciprocal tariff rates, with the equation in Derek’s link (which he hasn’t read) actually supposed to show the tariff rate that we’re reciprocating. But it’s just a calculation of the trade deficit. So, using the silly equation, we’re told that St. Pierre, a tiny island of fewer than 6k inhabitants with no actual tariffs has a 99% tariff rate on U.S. goods, meaning, because we divide that rate by two (see Derek’s article, which he should read), our reciprocal tariff is 50%:

          https://x.com/a60483647/status/1907845183762268378?t=2fDogTqNqbKsncntRHVoYg&s=19

          But wait, what is the source of the trade deficit? Inhabitants bought some sort of equipment from the US, and wasn’t working and needed to be replaced or repaired, so they returned it, the Trump administration used that return as an export to the U.S., and now they get a 50% tariff.

          I was not joking when I said this is hardly better than using AI. Really, I think they’d have produced less ridiculous results if they’d just used AI instead of their silly little equation (from Derek’s article, which he really should read before commenting about it).Report

          Reply

          2. Finally an actual answer. Took enough to pry the answers out of you.

            So, the whole issue is it is not fair the way they applied the tariffs. Poor countries with a high relative trade imbalance should have a break from what is imposed on the other countries.

            For the most part, I agree with you on the very small ones like Cambodia. We are talking about such a relatively minor amount of trade for the US and because the country is so poor, they do not buy much. Also, there is little to no ability for the country to make changes that would make this “fairer”. One size fits all strategies rarely fit the outliers.

            As for the rest, please, if they used AI you would be railing against it like the those above and say he has no plan. If Trump did not impose the tariffs he said he would, you would say he caved to pressure and is waffling with no plan. If he did not apply the plan evenly, you would have said he randomly applied tariffs and has no plan.

            There was no tariff plan you would have been okay with. Hell, I doubt there is much of anything President Trump could do that you would agree with.

            But, at least, with effort we found something we agree with.

            Whew, wasted way more time than I had hoped to have an actual conversation. Time to take a break from this place again….Report

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            1. No, the issue is that the way the tariffs were set is very, very stupid. Like, no rational person with even a basic understanding of economics or international trade would set tariffs that way.

              More importantly, on a personal level, I’m not online as much as I used to be, so the opportunities for serious owns are few and far between, so thank you, man, for teeing one up for me. Next time, read the articles you post.Report

              Reply

            2. There was no tariff plan you would have been okay with. Hell, I doubt there is much of anything President Trump could do that you would agree with.

              I don’t think that’s quite the own you seem to think it is.Report

              Reply

    1. It’s only sane if you believe it’s going to result in major reinvestment in low skill manufacturing in the US, so things may be (way) more expensive but there are more jobs that may or may not be preferable to restaurants and retail. Of course you have to be stupid to believe that’s a likely outcome, which he is.

      The only tariff that makes any sense are those on China and that’s only because some sacrifice is worth it to strangle a motivated, highly hostile adversary wherever we can. What we should really be doing is loosening and harmonizing trade with the free world and not exactly free Asian countries on condition they impose similar restrictions on the Chinese.Report

      Reply

  25. Something Chait muses about over at the Atlantic and something I’d agonized about right after the election in November, was that this is a historically massive own goal on Trumps’ part. All he needed to do was to do nothing substantively but switch his jawjaw tune from “The economy is garbage” to “The economy is great thanks to me” and the vibessession would have ended and the media would have been wall to wall with “the genius of Trump” nonsense. Trump utterly cratering the economy is, politically, the less dangerous thing he could have done vis a vis trying to topple the electoral order. It’d be a lot harder to try it with a hostile populace and congress controlled by the Dems which Trump seems to be working hard to conjure.

    Once again, don’t be fooled by the naked idiocy- there’s no deeper scheme; they really just are idiots. Cold comfort but that’s something.Report

    Reply

    1. Does Chait know who we are talking about? These aren’t very bright people, they are fanatically committed ideologues, radicalized incels, etc. They think they have been finally given the keys to the kingdom to enact their lets reverse the clock to Lochner fantasies and also this is finally their chance to crush those girls that wouldn’t sleep with them (er liberal Marxist cultural elitists)Report

      Reply

      1. I, more than Chait, clearly overestimated the Trumpkins. The choice to simply claim prosperity was Trumps doing rather than go down as the one who ended it seems like a no brainer in the wake of November.Report

        Reply

        1. You can’t use normal political thinking with Trump or anyone around him. That is a big part of the reason we are in this mess. You have to take them seriously and literally and too many people who refused to do so, even people who hate Trump and voted for Harris.Report

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  26. Whenever I post, I get sent to a message like this:

    Warning: Undefined variable $a in /home/ordina27/public_html/wp-load.php on line 18

    Warning: Undefined variable $a in /home/ordina27/public_html/wp-load.php on line 26

    Warning: session_start(): Session cannot be started after headers have already been sent in /home/ordina27/public_html/wp-content/plugins/pe-recent-posts/pe-recent-posts.php on line 21Report

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  27. Yishan has an interesting take:

    Ok, so I am not an administration apologist but I have not heard any intellectually rigorous discussion of the current tariff policy. I’m not sure what I’m about to say is either, but here is a perspective I have not yet seen advanced:

    Before we begin, a shift in perspective. To understand where I’m going, you have to first accept that China is succeeding, that they are not backwards, and that in many areas they are already far beyond the US. If you’re still in the “China’s advantage is low-cost labor” mindset, you’re ngmi and might as well leave now.

    All right, for everyone still around:

    A few years ago, Xi and the CCP made a series of what appeared to be extremely damaging moves for China.

    These included:
    – popping the real estate bubble, crushing investors and bankrupting more than one investment firm
    – wiping out all for-profit student tutoring companies, an entire industry gone overnight
    – severely tamping down the entire Chinese social media and e-commerce startup ecosystem

    These were widely portrayed as damaging to the Chinese economy and part of an authoritarian reassertion of power and retreat from free markets and capitalism.

    Maybe they were.

    But, there was rationale behind all of those – and some people even believed them to be true for the US, namely:

    – “housing is for living in, not investment” so prices should be low, not high
    – for-profit tutoring advantages rich families, corrupting the meritocratic exam system
    – social media and e-commerce make money but aren’t tech that benefits national security, the way aerospace, robotics, and semiconductors do

    A few years later, we see many of the intended results:

    – working-class people have been able refinance their homes for less, even while investors took a bath
    – the exam system is no longer as corrupted
    – China speeds ahead in many hardtech areas

    This isn’t a post about China supremacy.

    (The investment climate in China is still tepid, and China has many other issues)

    This is a post about the fact that large-scale decisions that benefit the national interest often look bad according to conventional metrics and will certainly be decried as bad by the people who have been most successful under the current system!

    That is likely to be as true in China as in the US, or anywhere.

    After all, if they made things look good under the current metrics, we’d already be doing them quite uncontroversially! So anything non-obvious that needs to be done which isn’t already being done is probably going to look really bad by those metrics.

    I use China to illustrate this because it has leaders who are willing to take such actions, whereas the US generally does not.

    Now… I don’t personally know if the tariffs are that thing for the US.

    But I do know that if they aren’t, pointing out that the stock market is tanking is not a useful way to prove it.

    US supply chains are global, and I suspect the tariffs are not focused on punishing other countries, but to force US-owned companies to move their supply chains (and thus physical production) into the United States. But it’s easier for a President to yell and demonize other countries than to do that about your own country’s major industry leaders.

    I don’t know if there’s a better sequence for doing this combined with selected deregulation, but certainly any plan will end up making typical metrics look really bad. I am a fan of detail and finesse myself, and we can’t just cold-start new factories in the US tomorrow.

    If you just want to know how bad things will be bad, you can probably find a best-case scenario by looking at how long it took for the Chinese economy to recover after they took the drastic actions I listed above.

    Report

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    1. He’s assuming an entire drawer full of can openers and also ignoring pretty much the entire field of economics so it’s basically just rather vapid “what if there’s some deep deranged method to the authoritarian madness” post.Report

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      1. He is indeed assuming that… but I wondered if what he said about China was true.

        I mean, if he started stuff off by lying, that’d be a bad start.

        So I learned about the Three Red Lines rule.

        I learned that China did ban private tutoring (and created a black market).

        I learned that China cracked down on luxury influencers as part of a country-wide internet tampdown. (And I’m sure you remember them firewalling off Americans from Chinese folx during the TikTok tempest in the teapot.)

        So he has, at least, started from a position of verifiable statements.Report

        Reply

        1. It’s just… he just… like… it’s such a blizzard of bull that I’m hesitating on where to even start. Like you noted, outlawing private tutoring simply means that it went underground. And characterizing China’s “strengths” as strengths… well I am trying not to call the guy a contrarian or a fool.

          But even his last summary- that Trump is trying to bring supply chains back into the US. This ignores that Trump is tariffing everything. He’s tariffing the parts you’d need to make the US into an more industrial society. He’s tariffing the steel and bauxite and aluminum that the US doesn’t and, by and large CAN’T make itself (you can’t tariff bauxite deposits or the relevant coal and iron deposits into existence). So even if we take him at his most sane washing best; everything he’s saying remains deranged. He seems to me to just be a guy, on twitter, trying to hack out Trumps antics into some kind of industrial policy like a housecat trying to barf out a volleyball sized hairball of steel wool.Report

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          1. Above, you give a fairly insightful statement: ” All he needed to do was to do nothing substantively but switch his jawjaw tune from “The economy is garbage” to “The economy is great thanks to me” and the vibessession would have ended and the media would have been wall to wall with “the genius of Trump” nonsense.”

            He did *NOT* do that. We agree about that too, right?

            So then we’re stuck with whether he’s stupid and clueless or whether he’s actually trying to accomplish something.

            Does “stupid and clueless” make more sense to you?Report

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            1. While stupid and clueless probably covers a lot of ground there’s also an angle that Trump was simply psychologically unable to simply take the accomplishments of the man who whupped him in 2020 and not try and destroy them. Other writers have also pointed out that Trumps protectionist impulses have a long pedigree in what passes for his thoughts.

              Which is all somewhat besides my point that Yishans’ analysis is just as incoherent as Trumps policy.Report

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              4. Oh good lord.

                Years ago when I worked in downtown DC I used to encounter a guy near Union Station passing out ‘literature’ on this sort of thing. I remember occasionally taking it to thumb through for laughs. In addition to chemtrails there were stories about fruit drinks turning children into lizard creatures and Jimmy Carter being secretly replaced with an android. There was kind of a sad story behind it. IIRC the guy’s son had been killed in Iraq which I can only assume contributed to the break with reality he was experiencing.

                In any case I miss the days when there was a little more distance between crazy street proselytizers and those in the halls of government.Report

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              5. and Jimmy Carter being secretly replaced with an android.

                That was a joke in a movie (parody).

                There was a Chinese official explaining that… “The Jimmy Carter who went to China wasn’t the one we sent back”.Report

                Reply

          2. I would say that Trump clearly believes Tariffs are a net positive to the economy and not (at best) a net negative, much less (at worse) a disaster.

            For example a car whose parts cross the border 20 times during manufacture will be massively affected, and it takes years, not months, to move manufacturing plants.

            What we’re seeing showcased is economic ignorance, the idea that if you keep “American Jobs in America” then that’s a good thing.

            However that’s like a heart surgeon mowing his own lawn “to save money” when he could instead hire a service and do more surgery.Report

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            1. I’ve come across a number of writers arguing that Trump’s statements going back to the 80s suggest that this may be one of the few policies he actually believes in. Last time the remaining traditional Republicans floating around his administration were able to talk him back but now there’s no one to do that and we are all going to suffer for it. I hope all the big business and wall street types that got on board and who are now taking a bath feel like the total moronic trash they are. The Mooch was right all along.Report

              Reply

              3. Strange to have a self-described billionaire as president, and the richest man on the planet as, er, co-president, and ask where the oligarchs are.

                I mean, I get the joke, but the oligarchs are in the fishin’ building.Report

                Reply

    3. If you just want to know how bad things will be bad, you can probably find a best-case scenario by looking at how long it took for the Chinese economy to recover after they took the drastic actions I listed above.

      The Chinese economy has used Enron style accounting+economics to the point where they have built homes for 3 Billion more people than is needed. That’s more than 3x as much as they need if their population is 1.3b, if their population is actually more like 800m then it’s more like 5x. See link below.

      They have responded to various negative economic indicators by outlawing the collection of data.

      Their GDP figures are clearly (and deliberately) made up. If we measure their GDP by lumens (i.e. light produced by cities at night is somewhat relatable to GDP and we can measure light from space), then their actual GDP is something like a third to 40% less than is claimed.

      They got a “dead cat bounce” from the latest massive injection of state money into failing businesses and local state govs. However they have not yet started to reform their economy much less “recovered” from anything.

      https://www.businessinsider.com/china-vacant-homes-3-billion-people-housing-crisis-ex-official-2023-9Report

      Reply

  29. YOU CANT USE RATIONAL THOUGHTS WHEN ANALYZING TRUMP’S ACTIONS. THERE ARE NO PLANS. THERE JUST THE RAGES AND OBSESSIONS OF AN OLD AND VERY STUPID MAN.

    Any time someone tries to analyze Trump’s actions rationally, I imagine their neurons are saying raise the cognitive defense shields, raise the cognitive defense shields!!

    Embrace the madnessReport

    Reply

  32. This WaPo article is making the rounds from (anonymous) inside sources on how the ‘tariff’ formula was picked.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/04/trump-tariffs-reason-advisers/

    There’s also additional (anonymous) reporting on some of the pre-negotiations with other nations… the operative point (IMO) is this: ““It’s not clear what they want to achieve,” the diplomat said.”

    Putting the two things together… the article suggests that negotiations were unclear on what was needed — i.e. Tariff reductions or barriers to trade or both and what would happen if they did them. In the end, those ‘concessions’ were fruitless because the formula Trump selected wasn’t one of the ones that factored tariffs and barriers.

    And, implied is that now none of the states know exactly how to get out of the box because changing the trade imbalance is downstream of lots of other things and not something govts can simply control by negotiations.Report

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    2. As I’ve said before, my working assumption is that the goal is the North American Empire under Donald the First. If you’re on the Donald’s side, it doesn’t matter how you justify the walls at this point, so long as the walls go up.Report

      Reply

      1. Yeah; I think you are right that he sees the American Empire as a thing that was being managed to the benefit of a few; he’s using populist language to reorient the goods of empire to a new few and perhaps along the way share some spectacles and low value gluten. It’s rather crass, but sharing the benefits of empire was always an option we mostly pretended didn’t exist.Report

        Reply

  36. Joel Kaplan, Chief Global Affairs Officer for Meta, announces:

    By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over. That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers. We announced in January we’d be winding down the program & removing penalties. In place of fact checks, the first Community Notes will start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached.

    Report

    Reply

      2. From the article:

        Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in response to Xinis’ ruling that the judge should “contact” the Salvadoran president “because we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador.”

        Leavitt earlier this week called Abrego Garcia a member of the “brutal and vicious” MS-13 gang and said he “will not be returning to our country.”

        The government also appealed the decision immediately to the 4th Circuit.Report

        Reply

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