https://x.com/KeithOlbermann/status/1911077795951759442
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So the national security arguments people have been using to justify these tariffs are now that making Nikes at home is a national security imperative, but china can continue to have the complex electronics market.
Going public to defend a trump action is a fools errand. Short order he will either change his mind or totally contradict you.
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How are you cynical if you think it makes a difference at all?
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Trumpâs reindustrialization policy is forcing manufacturers to leave because itâs too expensive to import the components/materials they need to make their shit here
https://x.com/typesfast/status/1911088357712773238?s=61&t=VxX1vHU3NOwwNhlbyICG-g
https://x.com/armanddoma/status/1911076182365442536?s=61&t=VxX1vHU3NOwwNhlbyICG-g
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https://x.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1911133709450764751
Is there an English word for âfremdschämenâ btw? The word âembarrassingâ is not enough
https://x.com/EricLDaugh/status/1911085259333976149
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https://x.com/NidiaCavazosTV/status/1911156100461932764
https://x.com/Victorshi2020/status/1911158701748314185
https://x.com/krassenstein/status/1911171121233219934
With all the shit going on,how many people from Overseas will risk jail or deportation by going anywhere near the World Cup next year?.
FIFA may have a problem!
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Tribute will be paid, as was custom to monarchs in ye olde days of yore. And the wise benevolence, and flatulence, of the great king known of the Orange One shall decree that all are welcome in these former Great States of America thus opening the path for the acolytes of the beautiful game to pilgrim to see their Chosen Team.
Alas, the King proved faithless and the tribute, though paid, proved to be of little import and Fifa in their despair were shown to grovel at his feet and tribute anew required and behold, it was given and upon Twitter the outpourings fell and were taken up by the multitudes to implore and yet, the Orange One remained unmoved in his gaudy room of Oval Proportions until lo, he changed his mind once again.
So it is written.
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And is replaced by Vance? That would be frying pan into the fire.
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If it did pan out , Vance wouldnât even be a lame duck , more a dead duck.
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Well said and close to the truth!
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From Heather Cox Richardson:
April 12, 2025 (Saturday)
It was just 20 days agoâon March 24âthat editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg reported that the most senior members of the Trump administration discussed a military strike on the Houthis in Yemen on an unsecure commercial messaging app and that they included him on the chat.
Their Signal chat, which Goldberg published later in response to the administrationâs insistence that there was nothing classified in the chat, showed that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had posted precise details of the munitions and planes involved in the strikes. It showed that neither President Donald Trump nor the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffâa Biden appointeeâwas on the chat, and that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller apparently made the decision to strike based on his interpretation of what President Donald Trump wanted. In violation of the Presidential Records Act, the app was set to delete the messages. There was apparently no larger strategy or diplomatic plan other than to strike, and participants greeted news of the collapse of an apartment building into which a Houthi leader had allegedly walked with emojis of fists, fire, and a U.S. flag.
This extraordinary lapse in national security protections would normally have defined an administration and caused a number of resignations, but the White House called the case âclosedâ on March 31. And there was more: On April 2, Dasha Burns of Politico reported that the team working with national security advisor Mike Waltz regularly used the unsecure Signal app to communicate about issues involving Ukraine, China, Gaza, the Middle East, the U.S., and Europe. The officials to whom Burns spoke said they had personal knowledge of at least 20 such chats.
That story has been almost completely driven out of the news by President Donald Trumpâs tariff machinations since April 2. On that day, after teasing the idea of what he called âLiberation Day,â Trump announced that at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, April 9, he would be imposing a 10% tariff on all imports to the United States, with significantly higher rates on countries he claims engage in unfair trade practices. By the next day it had been established that his team, led by trade advisor Peter Navarro, arrived at the tariff rates with a nonsensical formula that simply took the U.S. trade deficit with a country, divided it by the value of that countryâs exports to the U.S., and cut the resulting number in half.
For the next week, the stock market plummeted, jumping only with rumors that Trump would back off on the tariffs, while economists and financial analysts revised the chances of inflation and recession upward, and economic growth downward. News coming out of the White House was contradictory: one advisor would say that Trump would not negotiate over tariffs and they were here to stay, while another would say he intended to negotiate and they were just starting points.
Meanwhile, as predicted, other countries began to put tariffs on goods from the United States or pause exports, and global markets fell. Americans from business leaders to small business owners to consumers and wage workers called out the âstupidityâ of Trumpâs trade war. Others noted that the tariffs appeared to be intended as a shakedown as countries or businesses who offered Trump the right price could get exemptions.
As trillions of dollars in stock values evaporated, Trump insisted the tariffs were here to stay. âI know what the hell Iâm doing,â Trump told Republicans on Tuesday, April 8. He boasted that global leaders were âkissing my ass.â On Wednesday, April 9, at 9:33 a.m, he posted: âBE COOL! Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!â At 9:37, he posted âTHIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJTâ
But, as Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Ana Swanson, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported, Trumpâs team, led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, was worried about setting off a financial panic that could not be stopped. Driving their concern was a broad sell-off of U.S. government bonds, which in the past investors had seen as a safe haven during times of market turmoil, and the rise in popularity of the government bonds of other countries.
Former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers noted that global financial markets were backing away from U.S. assets. Fund manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management George Cipolloni told Bernard Condon and Stan Choe of the Associated Press: âThe fear is the U.S. is losing its standing as the safe haven. Our bond market is the biggest and most stable in the world, but when you add instability, bad things can happen.â
On April 8, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer defended Trumpâs tariffs to the Senate Finance Committee. He was offering similar testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee at 1:18 p.m. when a social media post from Trump pulled the rug out from under him. Trump paused most of the highest tariffs for 90 days and instituted an across-the-board tariff of 10% in their place. But, perhaps unwilling to look weak, he announced that he was raising tariffs on goods from China to 125% effective immediately, â[b]ased on the lack of respect that China has shown to the Worldâs Markets.â
With Trumpâs tariff pause, stocks jumped upward in one of the biggest single-day gains since World War II. Hedge fund manager Spencer Hakimian posted a graph showing that Nasdaq call volumeâbets that stock values would riseâspiked minutes before Trumpâs announcement. He commented: âNot a good look at all.â Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) reposted Hakimianâs post and added: âAny member of Congress who purchased stocks in the last 48 hours should probably disclose that now. Iâve been hearing some interesting chatter on the floor. Disclosure deadline is May 15th. Weâre about to learn a few things. Itâs time to ban insider trading in Congress.â
David Smith of The Guardian noted that the juxtaposition of Trump golfing, dining with donors, and meeting with race car drivers even as economic chaos tanked peopleâs retirement accounts prompted accusations that he has lost touch with reality. A widely circulated video that appears to be Trump bragging to NASCAR drivers visiting the White House that investor Charles Schwab made $2.5 billion on Wednesday and that another investor made $900 million has fed anger at Trumpâs economic chaos. On Friday the University of Michigan released its well-respected consumer-sentiment index, showing that consumer sentiment about the economy and personal finances fell for the fourth straight month, dropping 11% from March. Consumers from all political affiliations fear recession, inflation, and unemployment.
This level of consumer sentiment is the second lowest since the index began in 1952. Chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics Samuel Tombs told the Wall Street Journalâs Harriet Torry: âConsumers have spiraled from anxious to petrified.â James Knightley, the chief international economist at the multinational banking and financial services company ING, noted that consumers appear to blame Trump for their concerns. While in January 44% of respondents told researchers that the government was doing a poor job of managing inflation and unemployment, now 67% say so.
The change happened so quickly that White House officials could not tell reporters what the actual tariff rates were for different countries. When more information was available, Kevin Schaul of the Washington Post noted that Trumpâs new tariff levies had actually increased tariffs rather than lowered them because he had dropped rates only on goods from countries that donât export much to the U.S. He had raised them significantlyânot just to 125% but to 145%âon China, a major trading partner.
On Friday, China imposed 125% tariffs on goods from the U.S. A spokesperson for the Chinese Finance Ministry said that Trumpâs tariff machinations âwill become a joke in the history of the world economy.â At 9:20 a.m. President Trump posted: âWe are doing really well on our TARIFF POLICY. Very exciting for America, and the World!!! It is moving along quickly. DJT.â The new tariffs had badly threatened Apple Inc., and at 10:36 p.m. the U.S. Customs and Border Protection posted a notice that various electronics, including smartphone and computer monitors, are exempt from the tariffs.
When economist Justin Wolfers commented: âI just want to tip my hat to the crack team of White House economists who were able to discoverâin just a few short daysâthat the U.S. is dependent on China for smartphones, computers and semiconductors.â Dr. Soumya Rangarajan noted that âa basic medicine we use 1000x per day in the hospital, heparin, is also dependent on China, and people will die without it.â As Sabrina Malhi of the Washington Post explained, about 12 million people hospitalized in the U.S. need heparin every year, and it is only one of the many medications that will be affected by Trumpâs tariffs on goods from China.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted that a â[g]ood way to see the current tariffs, as of literally today, is no tariffs on high value add manufactured goods marketed to middle and upper middle classes. Massive tariffs for cheap consumer itemsâ that benefit those lower on the economic ladder.
While the damage from the tariffs both to the domestic and global economy, as well as the USAâs standing in the world, is not yet clearâall the chaos has been about the prospect of Trumpâs high tariff rates, not their actual effectâTrump appears to be trying to downplay that story in favor of demonstrating his power.
As the tariff saga played out on Wednesday, Trump signed a memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies informing them that they no longer need to let the public know when they get rid of regulations that they determine are obviously unlawful. Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo notes that âunlawfulâ appears to mean anything Trump doesnât like.
In a breathtaking violation of the Constitution, on Wednesday Trump also went after two individuals: Christopher Krebs and Miles Taylor. Trump appointed Krebs to head the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), where in 2020 Krebs assured the American people that the presidential election had not been stolen. Trump now claims Krebs thus censored the speech of Trump loyalists.
As a Department of Homeland Security staffer, Taylor wrote an op-ed under the pseudonym âAnonymousâ saying that members of the first Trump administration were pushing back against the presidentâs policies. Taylor later wrote a book about his time in the White House that Trump claims was âdesigned to sow chaos and distrust in Governmentâ and thus âcould properly be characterized as treasonous and as possibly violating the Espionage Act.â A grand jury believed Trump himself violated the Espionage Act by retaining classified documents.
Trump stripped security clearances from Krebs and Taylor and also from their employers. He ordered government officials to investigate the two men and to recommend âappropriate remedial or preventative actions to be taken to protect Americaâs interests.â Employees at CISA told Kevin Collier of NBC News they were disheartened by the attack on Krebs and noted that staffing cuts at CISA had âalready severely degraded our capacity to defend critical infrastructure.â
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Well, he looks like Paul Rutherford from Frankie Goes To Hollywood, so there may well be something in it.
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âThe whole world has decided that the U.S. government has no idea what itâs doing,â said Mark Blyth, a political economist at Brown University.
An erosion of faith in the governance of the worldâs largest economy appears at least in part responsible for the sharp sell-off in the bond market in recent days. When large numbers of investors sell bonds at once, that forces the government to offer higher interest rates to entice others to buy its debt. And that tends to push up interest rates throughout the economy, increasing payments for mortgages, car loans and credit card balances.
There appears to be an effective downgrading of the American place in global finance, from a safe haven to a source of volatility and danger. Treasury bills have devolved from so-called information invariant assets â rock-solid investments regardless of the news â to ârisk assetsâ that are vulnerable to getting sold when fear seizes the market.
The Trump administration has championed tariffs in the name of bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States, asserting that a short-term period of turbulence will be followed by long-term gains. But as most economists describe it, global trade is being sabotaged without a coherent strategy. And the chaotic way in which tariffs have been administered â frequently announced and then suspended â has undercut confidence in the American system."
(Free to read.)
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