Tag Archives: Trump administration

Are Trump’s Tariffs Legal?

June 2, 2025 – 10:21 am

Can Trump decide for himself the extent of his own power?

Many of the Trump administration’s most controversial actions are based on novel (and perhaps far-fetched) interpretations of existing laws. The most objectionable deportations are based on a bizarre reading of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, and soon the Supreme Court will have to rule on whether it really does give Trump he power he claims. Similarly, many of the tariffs he has declared are based on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977.

But the same question arises: In the IEEPA, Congress delegated certain powers to the President. But did it delegate these powers, to be used in this situation.

Wednesday, the United States Court of International Trade said no.

The argument. Simplifying somewhat, the Trump administration argues that the IEEPA gives Trump essentially unlimited powers over tariffs. He can invoke the IEEPA by declaring a national emergency of his choosing, and once he does, the emergency powers Congress has delegated to the President allow him to do just about whatever he wants. Courts have no power to intervene, because the existence of an emergency and the measures necessary to deal with it are “political questions” that unelected judges have no business resolving.

The counter-argument is that emergency laws like the IEEPA delegate specific powers with limitations, not dictatorial powers for the President to use however he likes. Even if you could interpret the language of the law to grant unlimited power, that would itself be unconstitutional: Congress can only delegate its power up to a point.

Moreover, the courts have a necessary role in interpreting whether a President’s use of an emergency power is within the limitations of the statute. Otherwise we’re back in the dictatorial situation: The President has as much power as he says he has, and no one can say otherwise.

Ordinary tariffs. Some background: Presidents don’t ordinarily make tariffs. Tariffs are taxes, and the Constitution assigns Congress “Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises”. Congress is also empowered to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations”. So that’s typically how tariffs get done: Congress passes a law establishing them, like the ill-fated Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930.

This Congress has not passed a tariff bill, and Trump has not asked it to. Instead he has invoked the IEEPA, which Wikipedia describes like this:

The IEEPA authorizes the president to declare the existence of an “unusual and extraordinary threat … to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States” that originates “in whole or substantial part outside the United States.” It further authorizes the president, after such a declaration, to block transactions and freeze assets to deal with the threat and requires the president to report to Congress every 6 months on the circumstances, threats and actions taken. In the event of an actual attack on the United States, the president can also confiscate property connected with a country, group, or person that aided in the attack.

IEEPA falls under the provisions of the National Emergencies Act (NEA), which means that an emergency declared under the act must be renewed annually to remain in effect.

A textbook example of the IEEPA in action was what President Bush II did after 9-11: He declared an emergency and blocked the assets of organizations identified as terrorist.

Emergency tariffs. Tariffs come into the picture because President Nixon used a predecessor of IEEPA (the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917, or TWEA) to raise tariffs across the board. That action was contested in court, and an appeals court reversed a lower-court finding that the tariffs exceeded the power Nixon was delegated under TWEA. In reversing that decision, the higher court emphasized that the President’s power was not unlimited. Nixon had

imposed a limited surcharge, as a temporary measure calculated to help meet a particular national emergency, which is quite different from imposing whatever tariff rates he deems desirable

After that ruling, Congress passed IEEPA to pull back some of the power it had delegated to the President. The TWEA powers were now reserved for wartime, while IEEPA covered “national emergencies” short of war. These powers

may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose.

Questions related to the balance of trade are dealt with in a separate piece of legislation: Section 122 of the Trade Act, where the President’s powers are still more restricted: Tariff surcharges are limited to 15% and 150 days.

But the Trump administration’s position in court is that the IEEPA’s delegation of power is essentially unlimited: It’s up to the President to decide what a national emergency is and what measures are necessary to “deal with” it. Courts can’t second-guess him, because that’s a “political question” off limits to the unelected judiciary. (So if the President declares that vaping constitutes a national emergency and banning pogo sticks is necessary to deal with it, courts have no power to intervene.)

The court didn’t buy any of that. The language of the statute is not the President’s to interpret.

This language, importantly, does not commit the question of whether IEEPA authority “deal[s] with an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the President’s judgment. It does not grant IEEPA authority to the
President simply when he “finds” or “determines” that an unusual and extraordinary threat exists. … Indeed, “[t]he question here is not whether something should be done; it is who has the authority to do it.” [Biden v. Nebraska, 600 U.S. at 501]. The court simply asks whether the President’s action “deal[s] with an unusual and extraordinary threat.” Congress provided the necessary standards for resolving this inquiry when it enacted IEEPA, and the court’s task is to apply them.

Which tariffs are at issue? Trump used IEEPA authority to impose tariffs of three types

  • worldwide tariffs. The 10% tariff on all imports.
  • retaliatory tariffs. The country-by-country tariffs Trump announced on “liberation day”.
  • trafficking tariffs. Tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China to pressure them to prevent fentanyl smuggling into the US.

The court rejects all of them. There are other tariffs, including tariffs on metals and car parts, that Trump invoked on other authorities. Those were not questioned.

Nondelegation and Major Questions. During the Biden administration, the Supreme Court created new legal principles to restrain executive power. Nondelegation is essentially the idea that certain powers are so central to Congress’ role that they can’t be delegated. So legislation that delegates those powers broadly, rather than in very specifically defined circumstances, is unconstitutional.

The major questions doctrine says that large-scale grants of power to the executive branch must be made explicitly in the authorizing legislation. For example, the Court used this doctrine to knock down President Biden’s cancellation of student debt. The authorizing legislation allowed the executive branch to tinker with student loan repayments. But if Congress had intended to allow the President to cancel over a trillion dollars of debt, it would have said so explicitly.

Findings. The Court of International Trade found that Trump’s worldwide and retaliatory tariffs were balance-of-trade remedies that belonged under the restrictions of Section 122, not the IEEPA. A trade deficit by itself is not an “unusual and extraordinary threat” that invokes IEEPA emergency powers.

The President’s assertion of tariff-making authority in the instant case, unbounded as it is by any limitation in duration or scope, exceeds any tariff authority delegated to the President under IEEPA. The Worldwide and Retaliatory tariffs are thus ultra vires and contrary to law

The trafficking tariffs fail because they do not “deal with” the emergency that the President has declared. Fentanyl smuggling may well be a national emergency, but the connection to tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China is too indirect and tenuous.

“Deal with” connotes a direct link between an act and the problem it purports to address. A tax deals with a budget deficit by raising revenue. A dam deals with flooding by holding back a river. But there is no such association between the act of imposing a tariff and the “unusual and extraordinary threat[s]” that the Trafficking Orders purport to combat.

Trump argues that the tariffs are necessary to put pressure on the targeted nations, so that they will crack down on fentanyl smuggling.

The Government’s “pressure” argument effectively concedes that the direct effect of the country-specific tariffs is simply to burden the countries they target. It is the prospect of mitigating this burden, the Government explains, that will induce the target countries to crack down on trafficking within their jurisdictions. See Gov’t Resp. to Oregon Mots. at 39. But however sound this might be as a diplomatic strategy, it does not comfortably meet the statutory definition of “deal[ing] with” the cited emergency. It is hard to conceive of any IEEPA power that could not be justified on the same ground of “pressure.”

The Government’s reading would cause the meaning of “deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat” to permit any infliction of a burden on a counterparty to exact concessions, regardless of the relationship between the burden inflicted and the concessions exacted. If “deal with” can mean “impose a burden until someone else deals with,” then everything is permitted. It means a President may use IEEPA to take whatever actions he chooses simply by declaring them “pressure” or “leverage” tactics that will elicit a third party’s response to an unconnected “threat.” Surely this is not what Congress meant when it clarified that IEEPA powers “may not be exercised for any other purpose” than to “deal with” a threat.

The ruling concludes:

In so holding, the court does not pass upon the wisdom or likely effectiveness of the President’s use of tariffs as leverage. That use is impermissible not because it is unwise or ineffective, but because [the law] does not allow it.

What happens now. The International Trade Court is not the final authority, and the administration has already appealed to the appellate court for the Federal Circuit. That court has put a stay on the ITC’s ruling until it has time to consider the case. Ultimately, this is probably headed to the Supreme Court.

That will be an interesting test for this Supreme Court, which expanded its own power to overrule presidential orders during the Biden administration. But do the same limitations apply to Democratic and Republican presidents? Or has the law become partisan, so that what was done matters less than who did it?

The politics. The Trump administration interprets all its losses in court as judges making their own policy decisions and trying to impose them on the executive branch. Stephen Miller, for example, decried how “15 Communist judges” spread through the courts can “block and freeze each executive action”.

That framing allows Trump’s people to describe the issues the way they want, and then say that judges are against what the administration is for. Trump wants to deport dangerous criminals, while judges want to stop him. Trump wants to defend our economy from predatory foreign countries, but judges want to stop him, and so on.

But that framing sidesteps whether the United States will continue to be a country of laws, or whether it will become a Trump dictatorship. The Constitution defines the powers of our government, and assigns them to different branches. When Trump gathers all those powers to himself — and more powers that the Constitution does not assign to anyone — our way of life is endangered.

Whatever legitimate goals Trump may have — deporting criminals or protecting American jobs or whatever — can be accomplished in legal ways. (For example, Trump could ask Congress for a new tariff law. He could deport criminals through the immigration courts.) When he ignores legal pathways in favor of illegal ones, he needs to be stopped.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (3)

The Greatness Paradox

May 26, 2025 – 8:50 am

Trump’s notion of national greatness is stuck in the Napoleonic Era.
That’s causing him to destroy everything that makes America great today.

Nothing is more central to the positive version of Trump’s image or to the aspirations of his followers than the idea of greatness. Throughout his political career, policies come and go, allies are cast out as enemies and then welcomed back into his good graces, and whether he wants more or less of something may change from the beginning of a speech to the end. But the slogan never changes: Make America Great Again. It’s been so steady that everyone knows it just by its initials, MAGA. You talk about MAGA followers or the MAGA Party, and everyone knows what you mean.

And who can argue with that goal? Don’t all loyal Americans want their country to be greater rather than lesser? The “again” may be controversial — when exactly are we talking about? — but “greatness”, who doesn’t aspire to greatness?

And yet, every day we see Trump tear down the things that have made America great: scientific excellence, the rule of law, trade, alliances, our open society, and the soft power that comes from the attractiveness of our vision. How does that make any sense? Is it just hypocrisy? Is “greatness” just a buzzword to exploit? A false banner for the gullible to flock behind?

I want to propose a different explanation. When we asked what era “again” referred to, we were on the right track, but we didn’t take it far enough. What era does “greatness” refer to?

Look at some of the things Trump thinks will make America “great again” and ask yourself what era they belong to. Invariably, they fit a Napoleonic view of greatness, not a 21st-century view.

  • Territorial expansion. Great nations gain territory while lesser nations lose territory. Taking over Greenland, regaining the Panama Canal, and annexing Canada, would be a sure sign of our renewed greatness.
  • Mercantile dominance. A great nation exports more goods than it imports, drawing in gold and silver. This was the dominant theory of economics at least until Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations came out in 1776 and for some while thereafter. Such mercantilism is the primary motive behind Trump’s tariff policy.
  • Manliness. In the Napoleonic years, Frenchmen were confident of their ultimate victory over England, because the English were “a nation of shopkeepers” that did not properly center martial valor in their national identity. This attitude resonates with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s prioritization of “restoring the warrior ethos” in our military, and getting rid of efforts to promote diversity and inclusion. “We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind. And refocusing on lethality”. As if armies still relied on glorious cavalry charges rather than drone pilots who might have any sex, sexual preference, or gender identity.
  • A Great Leader. A primary knock on democracy centuries ago was that it could not produce great leaders like Louis XIV or Peter the Great. Democratic leaders were barely larger than their voters and changed every few years. How could a comparative nonentity like Prime Minister William Pitt compete with a world-bestriding figure like the Emperor Napoleon? Similarly, how could a Kamala Harris or Tim Walz stand up to a contemporary czar like Vladimir Putin? Centuries ago, the pettiness and towering rages of absolute rulers were signs of greatness, while the self-control of a democratic leader seemed weak.

But think for a minute about what has made America great these last hundred years:

  • Science. Yes, the United States fielded valiant soldiers during World War II. But so did our enemies. Our margin of victory came from developments like radar, code-breaking, and the atomic bomb. As we enter into an era of war-fighting AI, global pandemics, and drones, scientific leadership is more important than ever.
  • Trustworthy institutions. The primacy of the US in the postwar era has less to do with being a military hegemon than with being at the heart of a global order. The dollar is the global currency. The US banking system is the nerve center of the world economy. US Treasury bills have been the default investment of all other nations’ central banks. Wall Street is the world’s stock market. Other countries tolerate this because (until recently) they have trusted US institutions to be reliable partners.
  • The rule of law. Why have so many entrepreneurs come to America to found their businesses? Because a fortune made in America was protected by law and safe from predatory rulers like Putin or Viktor Orban. Contracts were enforceable in America, rather than subject to reinterpretation every time an autocrat changed his mind.
  • Education. Around the world, families aspire to send their most promising children to top American universities like Harvard or Columbia. Much of that talent has stayed in America, and even the graduates who returned home brought with them American ideals and an appreciation of American culture.
  • Alliances and treaties. US power has been multiplied by the NATO alliance America leads. American support for international law and international standards has enabled global trade that produced much wealth.
  • Immigration. Immigrants have never been welcomed in America with open arms. But throughout our history, oppressed people around the world have seen America as a refuge, and have hoped their descendants could be fully integrated into our “melting pot”. This influx of energy and talent has kept our society young and vibrant. The freshness and openness of American culture has made the US a place of aspiration.
  • Moral leadership. No great power has ever been mistaken for a saint, and the US won’t be the first. But when disaster strikes anywhere in the world, the US has been among the first nations to help. This generosity has paid dividends for us, both in terms of influence and in our ability to fight epidemics overseas before they can arrive here.
  • Freedom. Much of the mystique of America has revolved around freedom: If you come here, you are free. You can say what you want and believe what you want without fear of government retribution.

Now look at what the Trump administration has been doing.

So is Trump pursuing national greatness? Yes, but according to a notion of greatness that passed its sell-by date centuries ago. He aspires to a Napoleonic greatness and is oblivious to everything that makes a 21st-century nation great. That’s why his policies have America on its way to the dustbin of history, not to a new “golden age“.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (13)

What’s up with the Supreme Court?

May 19, 2025 – 9:19 am

Consider this a follow-up to last week’s post of qualified optimism about the prospects for American democracy to outlive the Trump administration. We continue to be steaming towards a direct clash between Trump and the Supreme Court. How that plays out will be a big factor in whether our way of government survives.

A lot of the pessimists I talk with say this clash has already happened and the bad guys won. Specifically, the Court told the Trump administration to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from the concentration camp Trump has established in El Salvador. Trump has ignored that order and gotten away with it. So: courts and laws are powerless and Trump will do as he pleases. For all practical purposes, American democracy is already dead.

I read the situation somewhat differently. To me, the Supreme Court and the Trump administration look like two fighters circling each other warily, each waiting to see if the other really wants to do this.

It already seems clear that the Court will not endorse Trump’s most obviously illegal acts. It will not deny that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship, no matter how badly Trump wants that denial. It won’t agree that he can invoke wartime powers (like the Alien Enemies Act) when there is no war. It won’t endorse him unilaterally unmaking agencies made and funded by Congress. The administration seems to understand this, which is why it hasn’t pushed for the Court to resolve those issues quickly.

Instead, Trump’s lawyers keep offering the Court ways to surrender quietly, by writing itself out of the picture. For example, the portion of the birthright citizenship case that the administration argued in front of the Court this week did not seek an answer to the central question. Instead, it focused on whether lower court injunctions could cover the entire country. The acting Solicitor General argued for a system in which each loss in a lower court only affected the specific plaintiffs involved, leaving the administration free to ignore the birthright citizenship of any other Americans until they sued too. Only a Supreme Court ruling could shut the administration down completely.

This leaves an enormous loophole: If the administration simply refused to appeal a series of lower-court losses, none of the cases would make it to the Supreme Court, so there could be no national ruling against them.

In other words: You don’t have to endorse our position, Supremes, just write yourself out of the picture and let us proceed.

For its part, the Court has so far treated the Trump administration as if it were a good-faith actor, which it clearly is not. In the Garcia case, the Supremes supported a lower-court order to “facilitate” Garcia’s release, leaving the details to the executive branch. (That’s appropriate if the executive branch is acting in good faith, because the executive is presumed to be better equipped to deal with foreign governments.) In essence, it was offering Trump the opportunity to stop all this nonsense and start behaving like the kind of American president the Constitution envisions.

But of course he did not. The Trump administration interpreted “facilitate” in a ridiculously narrow way, and — surprise! — the details of Garcia’s release haven’t worked out. The government continues to give the lower-court judge a run-around as to what it is or is not doing to get Garcia back.

Sooner or later, Judge Xinis is going to tire of this and order the administration to present Garcia in his court on a particular date. That order will also get appealed up to the Supreme Court, which will then have to decide whether it is ready to confront Trump or surrender to him. If it isn’t ready to surrender, then Trump will have to decide whether he recognizes the authority of the Court. If he doesn’t, that’s the crisis point.

I don’t think anyone knows whether we’ll get there, or what will happen then. Trump himself may not know, and the answer may turn on how popular Trump is at the time, how the economy is going, how vigorously Republicans in Congress are standing up for him, how well organized anti-Trump protesters are, and a lot of other factors that have nothing to do with the case at hand.

It’s worth noting that so far the Trump administration is not acting as if it had thrown off the burden of judicial oversight. For example, on Friday the Supreme Court extended its previous ban on deporting any more people under the authority of the Alien Enemies Act until the administration’s invocation of the AEA’s wartime powers can be fully adjudicated. As best we can tell, the administration is obeying the order.

At least for now.

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As we approach our crisis of democracy, we’re in better shape than I expected

May 12, 2025 – 9:24 am

During my two weeks off, I drove cross-country and saw a lot of my old friends plus a few like-minded relatives. I was struck by how depressed so many of them are with the current political situation. Again and again, I had to be the voice of optimism in the room. For the sake of depressed Sift readers I didn’t see during my travels, maybe I should explain why.

Partly, I feel optimistic because I got my pessimism out of the way early. After Trump’s inauguration, I think a lot of people were expecting a second Trump administration a lot like the first. We got through that, they thought, so we’ll probably get through this too.

I was much more negative. Everything and everybody who had restrained Trump’s worst impulses during his first administration was gone now, so it seemed obvious he would make a play to become a dictator. It was also clear how that would play out: He would keep pushing until either Congress or the Supreme Court tried to stop him. Then there would be a crisis and we’d see who won.

We seem to be reaching that crisis point now, as the Supreme Court is going to have to decide whether to call Trump out on his flouting of their Abrego Garcia ruling. (To be clear, the administration is denying that it’s ignoring the Court’s order, but it’s interpreting that order in an absurd way that makes it meaningless.) So now we see whether the Court has the courage to stand up to Trump, whether Trump will decide that the Court has no power over him, and whether (if he does) Congress will just stand by and let him do it.

In addition, courts up-and-down the line have been restraining Trump’s illegal actions. And surprisingly often, Trump officials are obeying. Rümeysa Öztürk, the Turkish Tufts student masked DHS agents snatched off the streets, is now free on bail and walking the streets of Somerville rather than rotting in a Louisiana detention camp. She seems likely to prevail in her attempts to complete her degree in the US. Another detained student, Mohsen Mahdawi, is also free.

This is the point we have been headed towards ever since Trump was elected last November. What I feel good about is that we’re hitting this point in much better shape than I thought we would. For several reasons:

  • Trump is unpopular. Imagine if he had just taken credit for the good Biden economy rather than starting all this tariff nonsense. Imagine if Musk had focused on actual government waste and could point to real accomplishments.
  • He has visibly declined. Falling asleep at Pope Francis’ funeral (while wearing an inappropriate blue suit) is just the most obvious example. (Imagine if Biden had done that.) And while he’s always had moments of incoherence, it’s now unusual when he appears coherent.
  • The administration has multiple competing factions. You can see this in the persistent leaks saying Trump as about to reverse his position on something. That’s an internal faction trying to nudge him to reverse a position backed by a different faction.
  • His promises are failing. Trump has always been good at declaring victory and making his followers believe him. But he made some very definite promises that are obviously not being fulfilled: Prices did not start dropping “on Day 1”. He didn’t solve the Ukraine War in 24 hours. And so on.
  • Popular opposition is rising. Early in the administration, I kept hearing anti-Trump people express their sense of isolation. No more.
  • Congress is wavering. You can see this in the floundering negotiations over the FY 2026 budget. More and more Republican congresspeople are realizing that they can’t get reelected on Trump’s endorsement alone.

All these factors add up to give the Supreme Court a little more spine, and to make Trump and his minions waver about open defiance. If Trump were riding high in the polls, at the peak of his powers, leading a united administration, facing little public protest, and backed by a solid Republican majority in Congress, standing up to him would be far more difficult, even for somebody like John Roberts who has an independent constitutional mandate.

That’s not to say that everything is going to go smoothly. There still might be rough waters ahead, and a Trump dictatorship is not impossible. But trends are going our way, and we’re in better shape than we were on Inauguration Day.

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On Tariffs and the Markets

April 7, 2025 – 10:29 am

Wednesday, Trump announced sweeping tariffs against almost every nation on Earth, with Russia being a notable exception. The plan included a 10% tariff on all imports, supplemented by specific tariffs ranging up to 50% on a long list of nations (including a few islands that are uninhabited).

He pitched the tariffs as “reciprocal”, i.e., matching our tariffs on imports to the tariffs other nations have put on our exports. However, no one can find nations whose tariffs are anything like the ones Trump is imposing in return. In his announcement, Trump also referred to “non-tariff barriers” to American exports. He framed any trade deficit as the result of some form of unfairness to American exports, which the new tariffs attempt to equalize.

As a result, when people finally figured out how the tariffs were being calculated, the tariff rate was simply half of the trade deficit with that country as a percentage of that country’s total exports to the US. So it’s a function of that country’s trade surplus/deficit with the US, not any specific unfairness in its tariffs or laws.

That’s how the highest tariff rate wound up falling on Lesotho, a tiny poor country surrounded by South Africa. Lesotho makes denim for jeans and also exports diamonds and a few other commodities. Few Lesothans can afford imported goods from the US.

The administration has made three cases for its tariffs, which The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson points out contradict each other. The tariffs are supposed to

  • Raise $6 trillion in revenue (if you believe Trump aide Peter Navarro).
  • Restore free trade by incentivizing other nations to negotiate away their trade barriers against us (if you believe Palmer Luckey).
  • Bring manufacturing jobs back to the US (if you believe Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers).

In order to raise revenue and increase US manufacturing, the tariffs have to last for many years, which they can’t do if they are a negotiating ploy to lower other country’s tariffs and trade barriers. Similarly, no tariff is going to restore coffee production to the US, because our climate doesn’t lend itself to coffee production.

Global stock markets reacted to the tariffs by collapsing. If you’re an investor yourself, you may not realize how unusual this is. A market truism is “Buy on rumor, sell on news.” In other words, you make your moves in anticipation of events, not in reaction to them. Once a thing is announced, you close the position you based on it and look for the next thing you think is going to happen.

So the widespread expectation, as the world awaited the tariff announcement, was that the stock market would get a small bounce out of it. Rumors of tariffs had been depressing stock prices for months, but once the news was out, investor attention would shift to something else. But the actual tariffs turned out to be far worse than anything investors had anticipated, so the reaction was down instead of up.

And boy, was it down. The S&P 500 lost more than 10% of its value Thursday and Friday, and opened sharply down again today.

So if the market isn’t anticipating tariffs any more, what is it anticipating? The recession these tariffs are expected to cause. J. P. Morgan is one of many forecasters now predicting a recession. Morgan economists anticipate the unemployment rate rising to 5.3%.

But no one knows how far the predicted downturn will go, because recession fears can be self-validating. People afraid of losing their jobs tend not to spend as much, which in turn causes other people to lose their jobs. Businesses expecting a downturn will cancel expansion plans and emphasize cost-cutting.

The administration’s response to these fears has been a no-pain/no-gain message that was totally absent from Trump’s 2024 campaign. On the campaign trail, Trump kept talking about positive change that would happen “very quickly” or “on Day One“.

But now, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant is talking about a “detox period” where the economy breaks its addiction to government spending.

The right-wing news bubble is doing its best to help push the administration’s story, or just to distract its viewers from the bad news. When the market started crashing Thursday morning, I channel-scanned and observed the same thing The Daily Show saw:

CNN: Stock market plummets
MSNBC: Stock market craters
Highlights for Children: Stock market down big
FOX News: New info about alleged cover-up of Biden’s decline

Fox also focused on some silly thing Alec Baldwin said, as if he were the voice of the Democratic Party. Fox also removed the stock ticker from the corner of its screen.

So the 30% or so of the country that is die-hard Trump is likely to keep drinking the kool-aid. But the additional 20% that won the election for him is experiencing considerable cognitive dissonance and even buyers’ remorse. To them, Trump was a great businessman who would handle the economy better than Biden did. That image is hard to sustain as you worry about your job, watch prices of foreign-produced goods rise, and see your 401(k) investments sink.

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Is this a turning point?

April 7, 2025 – 8:35 am

The scenario where American democracy survives Trump got a little more credible this week.

Consider the events of this week, all of which will be described in more detail in the weekly summary I’ll post later this morning:

It’s tricky to evaluate the significance of all this. If you look at it all pessimistically, Booker’s speech was a stunt that produced no direct congressional action, off-year elections are notoriously bad predictors of subsequent elections, Trump has announced and withdrawn tariff plans before that whipsawed the markets, and massive protests in his first term seemed to have little consequence. A month or two from now, none of this may look all that important.

But.

Six weeks ago, I posted “How Things Stand“, a summary of how Trump was threatening American democracy and where things might go from there.

So now we’ve seen Trump’s opening moves: a blizzard of executive orders claiming unprecedented powers that can be found nowhere in the Constitution. That was all predictable.

What wasn’t predictable, and is still unknown, is how the other American power centers would respond. I’m talking about Congress, the courts, the state governments, and the People. That’s all still very hard to predict, because each of those power centers will influence the behavior of the others.

It’s important for us to be neither complacent about all this nor resigned to our fate.

I projected a scenario that avoided the establishment of a lasting Trump autocracy, emphasizing that it was just a scenario, not a prediction. My point was that a way out of this was still possible. The first steps were:

  • Trump continues losing popularity. He never had much, but his brand becomes politically toxic.
  • That lack of voter support makes support from congressional Republicans waver. They may not openly defy Trump, but the slim Republican majorities (especially in the House) lose their cohesion, making it impossible to pass legislation without at least some Democratic support.

I had hoped that the looming government shutdown of March 14 would be the time when congressional support would waver, and that Republicans wouldn’t be able to pass a continuing resolution without negotiating a deal with the Democrats. That didn’t happen. Mike Johnson was able to hold his small majority together to pass the CR on a nearly party-line vote. Then Chuck Schumer folded in the Senate (for reasons I found plausible but not necessarily convincing), ending the threat of a Democratic filibuster. So the government is funded through September.

However, the events of this week show that we’re still on the path I laid out. Again, I’m not saying that success is certain, just that there is still a way out of this through political processes, without widespread riots or civil war.

There is no legal or political mechanism that directly links public opinion, market crashes, or elections for relatively minor offices to the kinds of legal or congressional action that will halt the Trump/Musk coup or lead to the restoration of American democracy. However, autocratic movements rely on a sense of inevitability and self-confidence, with each usurpation of power emboldening its leaders and foot-soldiers to dare the next one. Autocrats depend on a sense of public helplessness that demoralizes opposition and makes each successive victim feel alone and unsupported.

The narrative of Trump’s inevitability and his opposition’s powerlessness ran aground this week. He remains in office and retains his grip on the levers of executive power. But his true supporters have never been more than about 1/3 of the American public, and many in Congress, the courts, the media, the business community, and elsewhere have lined up behind him more from intimidation or a lack of attractive alternatives than real conviction.

The momentum that has swept Trump forward can turn, with each act of opposition emboldening the next. All along, there has been a scenario in which his seizure of unconstitutional power fails. That scenario is still intact, and is more credible today than it was a week ago.

The Hands Off march in Portland, Oregon Saturday.
By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (5)

How Bad Was the Signal Fiasco?

March 31, 2025 – 8:51 am

By now you’ve undoubtedly heard the basics: Last Monday, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg reported that for several days (March 11-15) he had a connection with Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz over the private messaging service Signal.

  • On March 11 Goldberg received a Signal connection request from Waltz. He was puzzled and doubted its authenticity, but he accepted.
  • On March 13 he was invited to join the “Houthi PC small group”, a chat that eventually included Vice President Vance, several members of the Trump cabinet, and a variety of other high-ranking members of the administration. Waltz described the group as a “principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours”. (Goldberg explains: “The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA.”)
  • On March 14, members of the group (who had apparently received a classified communication Goldberg did not get) began discussing whether to attack the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have been shooting missiles at ships in the Red Sea. Vance wanted to delay the attack for a month, Defense Secretary Hegseth was for launching it immediately, and some others ambivalent. Vance yields, texting to Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go”. (Strangely, President Trump was not on the chat and apparently did not make the final decision to launch the attack.)
  • On March 15, Hegseth began giving the group a play-by-play of the attack as it was carried out, beginning two hours before the bombs fell. Goldberg summarizes: “the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”

Up until he received news reports of explosions in Yemen, Goldberg had not completely believed the chat group was genuine. The previous day,

I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.

After becoming convinced that he had been overhearing an actual Principals meeting discussing highly classified information, Goldberg left the group.

So much is wrong with this series of events that the subsequent public discussion has often gotten confused, starting off talking about one issue before veering off onto another one. So let’s start by listing the various wrongnesses I’ve heard about or noticed.

  • The chat group shouldn’t exist at all. The Signal message chain in question was set up to be deleted after four weeks. This violates the Presidential Records Act and Federal Records Act, which require that require records to be kept of all communication involving official government business.
  • Signal is not an approved channel for discussing classified information. By law and policy, classified information can only be sent over very specific government systems.
  • Signal exchanges can be hacked. The security rules being broken here exist for good reasons, and are not just cumbersome or outdated regulations. The encryption feature in Signal is believed to be crackable by intelligence services of hostile foreign governments like Russia and possibly others. And even if an adversary has not hacked Signal, the cell phones or laptops several participants seem to have used could be compromised by malware.
  • Hegseth’s posts violate the Espionage Act. Apologists for the Trump administration have played legal/verbal games with the term “classified information”. Because Hegseth himself is the classifying authority for information like attack plans, they claim, he was implicitly declassifying it by posting it on Signal. But The Hill reports: “the Espionage Act … doesn’t rely on classification. Instead, it allows prosecution of those who share national defense information, whether intentionally or inadvertently. ‘While you can argue that it wasn’t classified — probably in bad faith — you cannot argue that it was not national defense information,’ said Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, a nonprofit law firm.” Whatever word-games you play, information about an imminent or ongoing attack is precisely the kind of thing the classification system was designed to protect.
  • No one on the chat objected. Back in the days when I had a Top Secret clearance myself, I was occasionally in conversations where an issue was alluded to, and then someone would say: “But we can’t talk about that here.” Everyone on the chat had an obligation to say that, and no one did. (The implication here is that this situation is not unusual. Possibly, highly-classified Signal chats are a regular occurrence in the Trump administration. I have not heard any Trump official address this precise point.)
  • Goldberg should not have been invited to the chat. People tend to focus on this part of the wrongness, but look how far we’ve gotten without mentioning it. The Russians could have been listening, and could have tipped off the Houthis to counter our attack or move what we were targeting. Goldberg is an inconsequential risk by comparison.
  • Hegseth had an obligation to verify that everyone on the chat had appropriate clearances to receive the information he was sending, but he did not. This is a problem even if you overlook the fundamental insecurity of Signal. Even if everyone on the chat had been gathered in a secure location like the Situation Room, attack plans shouldn’t have been shared when an uncleared person (i.e., Goldberg) was present. Protecting defense secrets is Hegseth’s job, not Goldberg’s, so the fault lies with him.
  • Waltz endangered intelligence sources in his after-action report. “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.” So the Houthis know that somebody with a view of the building that day was an American agent. Undoubtedly they are trying to find and kill this person.
  • The attack’s “success” is no excuse. Attorney General Bondi was one of many administration officials making this point: “what we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission”. The best analogy I’ve heard is to drunk driving: The fact that you made it home safely doesn’t excuse it, or justify doing something similar in the future. If you take enough unnecessary risks, you will pay eventually. (BTW: Was the attack a success? Killing people and blowing things up is not an end in itself. The point of the attack was to either incapacitate or intimidate the Houthis so that they’ll stop shooting at ships. We don’t know yet whether the raid achieved that purpose. “The Signal chat reveals no suggestion of a strategic framework — or even the concept of a plan — into which the attack clearly fit.”)

So this is the kind of multi-layer screw-up that is hard to wrap your mind around. (An analogy: Imagine that your 15-year-old daughter is threatening suicide because her uncle has broken off their incestuous relationship after discovering that she’s pregnant. What aspect of the situation do you react to first? What’s the core problem here?)

Responses. One of the adages I heard while growing up was “It takes a big man to admit he’s wrong.” By that standard, there are no big men (or women) in the Trump administration. Across the board, everyone involved or implicated in the meeting has deflected, pointed elsewhere, or outright lied in order to deny responsibility.

Goldberg’s first article was circumspect about what he revealed. He wrote in generalities, like the quote above about “targets, weapons, … and attack sequencing”. Not wanting to damage national security himself, he didn’t spell out any details.

But Goldberg’s caution just made an opening for Hegseth and others to lie about the content of the chat.

I’ve heard how it was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.

White House apologists took up the “no classified information” talking point. Director of National Intellligence Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee

There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to make the whole incident a he-said/she-said issue.

Do you trust the secretary of defense — who was nominated for this role, voted by the United States Senate into this role, who has served in combat, honorably served our nation in uniform — or do you trust Jeffrey Goldberg?

Goldberg’s response was basically: Don’t trust me; trust your eyes and your common sense.

The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions.

Since there was “no classified information” involved, he had no reason not to publish chunks of the transcript of the chat. Goldberg summarized one section:

This Signal message shows that the U.S. secretary of defense texted a group that included a phone number unknown to him—Goldberg’s cellphone—at 11:44 a.m. This was 31 minutes before the first U.S. warplanes launched, and two hours and one minute before the beginning of a period in which a primary target, the Houthi “Target Terrorist,” was expected to be killed by these American aircraft. If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds. The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.

The release of the transcript should (but won’t) put an end to the attempts to dodge responsibility by vilifying Goldberg. (Leavitt: “arguably no one in the media who loves manufacturing and pushing hoaxes more than Jeffrey Goldberg.” Trump: “The guy is a total sleazebag.” Hegseth: “a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again”.) Goldberg’s transcript is either accurate or it’s not. If it’s not, other participants can release their own records. But they haven’t. So we can assume Goldberg’s reporting here is accurate, independent of what you think of the rest of his career. (Personally, I respect him as a journalist.)

How did this happen? The larger wrong — discussing an ongoing attack on an insecure platform — happened because the Trump administration is full of people who don’t take security seriously. Many of them — Hegseth in particular — are totally unqualified for their jobs. (Whenever the administration talks about “merit” as opposed to DEI, I think of Hegseth. Only a White man could ever get such an important job with such a flimsy resume and so many red flags in his personal life. Hegseth is a walking advertisement for why DEI is necessary.)

But none of that explains how Goldberg wound up on the chat. If we believe Goldberg’s account, it was a two-part process. First Mike Waltz (or somebody with access to Waltz’ Signal account) made a connection with Goldberg. Then two days later Goldberg was invited to join the Houthi PC small group. So it’s not just somebody hitting Goldberg’s number by fat-fingering a list. (That explanation would be more convincing if some “Johnny Goldsmith” should have been in the group and wasn’t. But I have heard no suggestion of who that person might be. And doesn’t anybody double-check lists with national security implications?)

The explanation (offered by Waltz) that Goldberg may have hacked his way onto the chat group is not only unlikely, but is damning in a different way. It’s bad enough to think that Trump officials are relying on an app that Russian or Chinese intelligence agencies might hack. But magazine editors?

Lacking any other explanation, I’m driven to a conspiracy theory formulated by former West Point history professor Terrence Goggin: “a highly effective cell operating deep in the Pentagon and National Security Council” that Goggin dubs “Deep Throat 2.0”. (Waltz denied this: “A staffer wasn’t responsible.”)

Goggin connects the Signal story with another leak that embarrassed the Trump defense establishment: The NYT finding out that Elon Musk was about to get a briefing on the Pentagon’s plans for a war with China.

Someone contacted the New York Times with a copy of a written order to brief Musk on the Operational Plan to oppose a massive invasion of Taiwan by the People’s Liberation Army Navy (“PLAN”). … Someone transmitted the written order instructing the Joint Chiefs to brief Musk to the New York Times, 12 hours before the briefing was to take place, in order for this to reach its 10 million digital subscribers worldwide. … The leak was timed for a last minute shock without warning, for maximum public damage and embarrassment. This was not an accident, but a deadly strike.

Adding Goldberg to the Houthi PC small group was similarly “not a mistake” but “a well planed clandestine operation”.

Clearly rattled, President Trump declared today that the uproar is a “Witch Hunt”. Actually he may be right. But the witches are His Own Men! It is a planned and organized operation to destroy his ability to govern with unqualified and deficient officials using and exposing his Administration’s own national security mistakes to do so.

Imagine that you’re a career staffer at the Pentagon. You’ve seen people live and die by the book, and now a bunch of yahoos who can’t be bothered to take even minimal security precautions are in charge. You’ve tried to impress on them the reasons for doing things in the standard way, but they always think they know better.

What better way to get your point across than to let the public see what’s happening?

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (25)

Politics in the Attention Economy

March 24, 2025 – 8:57 am

What happens to democracy when directing and misdirecting public attention becomes more important than convincing voters to agree with you?

Chris Hayes’ recent book The Sirens’ Call is worth reading in its entirety, but there is one particular aspect of it that I want to highlight. Once you’ve had this thought, it’s perfectly obvious, but I’ve never seen it spelled out so clearly before: Getting attention and holding attention are two very different problems. Getting attention is easy; holding attention is hard.

If you’re in a roomful of people and you want to get their attention, you have a lot of options: Drop something breakable, start yelling obscenities, run through the room naked or covered in blood, fire a gun in the air. The possibilities are endless.

But now imagine that you want to hold people’s attention long enough to explain something to them or convince them of something. That’s much harder. If the waiter who just dropped a tray of glasses starts trying to tell you about the dangers of climate change or rising government debt, you’re probably going to tune him out pretty quickly.

Traditionally, politics has been all about holding people’s attention long enough to change their minds about something or motivate them to do something. Politically active people might want to convince you that abortion is wrong or gays are people too or the rich have too much money or government regulations stifle economic growth, just to name a few possibilities. Yes, they need to get your attention. But more than that, they need to hold your attention long enough to present their case, maybe even long enough to overcome your initial resistance.

Hayes flashes back to something that seems unimaginable now: the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Back in 1858, people in Illinois more or less agreed that the biggest issue the nation faced was slavery and what to do about it. So that year’s two Senate candidates, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, toured the state together, debating the slavery issue for three hours at a time. (My home town, Quincy, hosted one of the debates.) That format gave each man a chance to explain some fairly complex and subtle ideas.

Admittedly, that’s unusual. For well over a century, most American politics has revolved around slogans: “Equal pay for equal work”, “No third term”, “Remember the Maine”, and many others. A slogan boils a political message down to its absolute minimum. You still have to hold attention, but you don’t have to hold it very long. Sometime a slogan is just a placeholder that your supporters will flesh out later; it makes people curious to find out what the slogan means. In 2024, “Make America great again” and “Democracy is on the ballot” were both like that. If you didn’t have at least a little background, both were so vague as to be meaningless.

But Hayes describes a way of managing attention that skips the difficult hold-attention step completely. It has been pioneered by the social-media platforms and has now been adapted to politics: If you want to keep somebody on your platform for hours at a time, you don’t need to produce an epic like Lord of the Rings or Lawrence of Arabia — content capable of holding a person’s attention that long. Instead, you just grab somebody’s attention, then grab it again, and grab it again. Keep doing that for hours. That’s the secret of the infinite scroll. Hardly anybody sits down thinking they’re going to devote the next two hours to TikTok or Facebook. They just look up and realize they’re late for something.

Now apply that idea to politics. What if I’m not trying to explain anything at all, even at the slogan level? What if I’m just trying to grab your attention in a particular way and prevent my opponent from grabbing it some other way?

This is something the Trump campaign seemed to understand much better than the Harris campaign. If a voter went into the voting booth thinking about inflation, immigration, or trans athletes, probably that vote would go to Trump. But a voter thinking about democracy, climate change, racism, or healthcare probably would probably choose Harris. It almost didn’t matter what a voter thought about any of those issues. Just direct their attention and you command their vote.

That was the method behind the madness of the Trump campaign. As far back as 2015, Trump has been saying things that were supposed to be political suicide. When he said that immigrants were “animals” or spouted “facts” about them that were obviously false, it didn’t matter if he looked like an ignorant asshole, because he made you think about immigration. If he grossly overstated the price of bacon and was proven wrong the next day, so what? He made you think about inflation — and the debunking article the next morning made you think about it again.

Harris could never catch up. I kept reading columns by pundits frustrated that Harris didn’t just say X — and those columns frustrated me, because I knew that Harris DID say X, but nobody paid attention.

The big thing I got wrong about the election was that I expected voters to get serious at the end of the campaign; low-interest and low-information voters who had been checked out all summer would check back in long enough to decide who to vote for. It never happened. Right up to the last day, Trump dominated the news cycle with his look-here, look-there, look-at-this-other-thing tactics. He had no message to speak of, just the idea that things were bad and he would somehow make them better.

What we’ve been seeing these last two months is the new attention-politics as a governing strategy. In traditional politics, an incoming administration tried to focus on a few simple themes, with the idea of raising enough public support to push one or two big ideas through Congress. So George W. Bush came in promoting his tax cut. Barack Obama was focused on his stimulus plan and then healthcare. (I remember the frustration many environmentalists felt when a carbon tax and other items from a climate-change agenda were sidelined so as not to interfere with the healthcare push.)

Trump hasn’t been doing anything like that. Instead, he’s doing a million things at once, including many that circumvent Congress in a way that is flatly illegal. By ignoring Congress and relying on executive actions, he avoids the need to marshal public opinion. Quite the reverse: It’s the opposition that needs to marshal public opinion to stop him. And that’s difficult, because what opposition leader or opposition agenda can get attention when Trump grabs all the attention in the room with a new outrage every day? (Invade Greenland! Annex Canada! Brief Musk about China war plans! Defy court orders! Fire the people who keep track of nuclear weapons! Turn Gaza into a seaside resort!)

I’m frankly unsure what I ought to be rooting for. Eventually, assuming Trump doesn’t establish his own version of the Thousand-Year Reich, some Democrat will figure out how to master the new attention politics and become president. But how good is that outcome really? The new politics lends itself to autocracy. Probably a Democratic autocrat would do more things I like than Trump is doing. But I’m not sure what would take us back in the direction of democracy.

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Those Mysterious Tariffs

March 10, 2025 – 10:12 am

It’s clear that Trump loves tariffs. It’s not clear why.

LIstening to President Trump talk about tariffs is like listening to a teen-age boy talk about the object of his crush. Tariffs have every conceivable virtue and no drawbacks. The Daily Show runs together a series of Trump tariff quotes:

Tariffs are easy. They’re fast. They’re efficient. And they bring fairness. … We’re going to bring so many things back to our country, and the thing that’s going to get us there is tariffs. … We’ll take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs. And we’re going to make our country so strong and so rich. It will never be so rich. … Tariffs. It’s a beautiful word, isn’t it?

It’s like listening to Tony sing about Maria.

Maria! Say it loud and there’s music playing.
Say it soft and it’s almost like praying.
Maria! I’ll never stop saying “Maria”.

To hear Trump tell it:

  • The threat of tariffs will make other countries do what he wants.
  • Tariffs are essentially free money. They will provide a dependable stream of government revenue that comes from foreigners rather than Americans.
  • In order to avoid tariffs, corporations will move production facilities from other countries to the United States, creating good jobs here.

What’s not to like? But strangely, most economists don’t like tariffs, and the stock market tanks whenever it looks like Trump is getting serious about imposing them. So what’s going on?

Well, to start with, those justifications contradict each other. If tariffs are going to raise money and cause corporations to change their production patterns and supply chains, they need to be imposed for the long term. (Ford isn’t going to move a Mexican factory back to the US unless they expect a tariff to be in place for years.) But if a tariff is supposed to change a country’s behavior, it has to come off as soon as the behavior changes. (Tariffs won’t make Mexico crack down on fentanyl-smuggling cartels unless the Mexican government expects the tariffs to end when it does.)

So which is it? Does he want long-term tariffs to raise money and move supply chains, or short-term tariffs to threaten other countries with?

And even if you pick one or the other, it doesn’t really work. Using a tariff to change a country’s behavior might (or might not) work once, acting like a threat from a protection racket. (“Nice economy you got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”) But national leaders are smart enough to know that extortionists never go away after they’re paid. If a country gives Trump some concession to avoid a tariff, and then he comes back and threatens it again, they going to figure out that he intends to bleed them dry. Resisting being pushed around by the US is always a good look for a foreign politician, so they’re going to dig in their heels. Some already are.

A tariff can raise money, but that money will come from Americans, not foreigners. The American importer pays the tax, and probably passes it on to its customers. In the end, a big broad-based tariff will act like a national sales tax, which raises money by raising the cost of whatever is sold. Worse, that money tends to come from poorer Americans, who have to spend nearly all the money they get their hands on. (Meanwhile, the rich can pile up savings and pay nothing.) All those working-class Trump voters have essentially voted to shift the tax burden onto themselves.

Tariffs can work to change production and investment decisions — that’s their traditional use. (Typically, a developing country tariffs imported goods to encourage local manufacturers to replace the import. That was how the US used them in the 1800s, and how nations like South Korea used them more recently.) But in order to have that influence, a tariff needs to be predictable. And that’s a problem for Trump:

  • February 1: Trump orders 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
  • February 3: He pauses the Mexico and Canada tariffs for a month.
  • February 27: He announces that the 25% Mexico/Canada tariffs will be back on when the month runs out.
  • March 4: The 25% tariffs go into effect.
  • March 5: The tariffs related to the auto industry are paused for a month.
  • March 6: Tariffs on goods covered by the USMCA (a trade agreement Trump signed in his first term) are paused for a month. (That covers about half of Mexican imports and 38% of Canadian imports.)
  • March 7. Trump threatens tariffs on Canadian lumber and dairy products.

So OK, imagine you’re a CEO trying to decide where to invest your company’s capital. How do you plan for that?

Conspiracy theories. When the reasons a leader gives for his actions don’t make sense, inevitably people start trying to imagine what the real reason is. The most prominent conspiracy theories about the tariffs that I’ve heard are

  • It’s a shakedown. Your tariffs go up until you figure out who to bribe. The Big Picture blog quotes a study describing what happened during the trade war with China in Trump’s first term: “Politically connected companies were far more likely to receive valuable tariff exemptions than those that were not connected to Trump or Republicans. Specifically, the authors found that companies that had invested substantially into the GOP before or at the start of Trump 1.0 were more likely to win exemptions to Trump’s tariffs than those that had not.”
  • It’s a market manipulation. The market crashes whenever Trump announces a tariff. So if you know when he’ wa’s going to do that, you can make a killing by selling short, and then covering your short after he reverses himself. So Trump jerking the markets around is a way for well-connected insiders to make money.
  • Trump hates Canada.

The Canada-hating theory requires a little explanation. Trump’s original reason for both the Canada and Mexico tariffs was to defend the border from illegal immigrants and fentanyl smuggling. So in order to avoid the tariffs, Canada would have to address those problems and show real results. But there’s a catch: There is no problem to address in Canada. Take fentanyl, for example. According to the Council on Foreign Relations:

Canada plays virtually no role in the U.S. fentanyl influx, especially compared to the other countries. The country contributes less than 1 percent to its southern neighbor’s street fentanyl supply, as both the Canadian government and data from the DEA report. 

Paul Krugman puts it like this:

[R]emember that Canada can’t concede to U.S. demands, even if it were in a mood to do so (which it very much isn’t) because there aren’t any coherent U.S. demands; Canada has done nothing wrong!

But hey, truth has never been a problem for a Trump administration. Sunday, the White House sent National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett (and maybe some other people I didn’t notice) out to lie on the talk shows.

I can tell you that in the situation room I’ve seen photographs of fentanyl labs in Canada that the law enforcement folks were leaving alone. Canada’s got a big drug problem.

Yes, Hassett has seen photographs he can’t show you. I haven’t heard such convincing evidence since Bush and Cheney were getting ready to invade Iraq.

And here’s a graph no Republican will display: Fentanyl deaths in the US had been plunging for at least a year before Trump took office. Eventually, he’ll declare victory and take credit for everything that has happened since 2023.

Meanwhile, Trump himself is doing everything he can to piss off Canadians, suggesting they become the 51st state and referring to their former prime minister as “Governor Trudeau“. As a result, the US national anthem is getting booed at hockey games. And the patriotic “Joe Canada” character created by Molson Beer in 2000 has come back to defend his country from US imperialism.

They mistake our modesty for meekness, our kindness for consent, our nation for another star on their flag and our love of a hot cheesy poutine with their love of a hot cheesy Putin. … We are not the 51st anything. We are the first to unite in the crisis, the first to build bridges – not walls – and the first to stand on guard for thee.

So whatever Trump is trying to do to Canada, I don’t think it’s working. But what is he trying to do? That question is just as mysterious as the tariffs themselves. Krugman’s theory goes like this:

In any case, efforts to find some kind of economic justification for Trump’s Canada-hatred have the feeling of desperate efforts to avoid the obvious. Canada is a pretty decent place, as nations go. And Trump, whom nobody would describe as a decent person, dislikes and maybe even fears people who are.

Let me put a less psychological spin on this: Trump is building a hellscape, an America where people hate each other, let each other go hungry or die without healthcare, where diseases once eradicated come back, where corrupt oligarchs pillage the government and corporations are free to despoil the environment and treat workers like slaves. And then there’s Canada, right across the border, ready to demonstrate that life doesn’t have to be this way.

Sure, countries like Denmark or New Zealand also prove that point, but they’re far enough away that nobody in Trump’s base needs to notice them. Your cousin from Des Moines probably isn’t going to come home raving about Copenhagen or Christchurch. But Toronto, Vancouver — maybe. So Canada needs to be slandered in advance, painted as an enemy country full of propaganda that can’t be trusted. Say something about Canada and MAGA types will roll their eyes as if you’d just quoted something you heard on MSNBC.

And as for the tariffs, I’ll explain them like this: Tariffs are a power that Congress has yielded almost entirely to the President. So they’re a model for what Trump wants the country to be. He can announce a tariff without anybody wondering whether he has the votes for it. He says “tariffs” and there are tariffs. A day later he can say “no tariffs” and they go away. And every time he does, there are headlines and big moves in the stock market and people getting upset. Trump loves that stuff. He’ll never learn how to use his tariff power constructively, because it’s a toy that is just too tempting to leave on the shelf. For as long as he’s president, he’ll feel compelled to take that toy down and play with it.

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How Things Stand

February 24, 2025 – 9:48 am

The struggle to preserve American democracy is still undecided.
Neither despair nor complacency is warranted.

I keep having the same conversation with my friends, who are anxious and/or depressed about the Trump/Musk attempt to establish an autocracy, and wonder how I stay so sanguine. There are three reasons, one of which is personal and won’t help anybody else. But the other two might.

The personal reason is that my wife died in December. So from my point of view, nothing worse is going to happen anytime soon. I realize that’s a very self-centered point of view, but it is what it is.

The other two reasons, though, are generalizable and linked:

  • Nothing about the current struggle should be all that surprising.
  • The events that will tell us how it plays out haven’t happened yet.

I didn’t read all 900+ pages of Project 2025, but I did see enough of it to realize that the first few months of a second Trump administration would constitute an all-out assault on American democracy. I can’t claim that I foresaw the details of the current mess — Elon’s role in particular surprised me — but the general outline was all there. And I know Trump denied Project 2025 was his plan, but nobody should have taken that denial seriously.

So now we’ve seen Trump’s opening moves: a blizzard of executive orders claiming unprecedented powers that can be found nowhere in the Constitution. That was all predictable.

What wasn’t predictable, and is still unknown, is how the other American power centers would respond. I’m talking about Congress, the courts, the state governments, and the People. That’s all still very hard to predict, because each of those power centers will influence the behavior of the others.

It’s important for us to be neither complacent about all this nor resigned to our fate. Things really are still up in the air. Let’s look at the possible resistance centers one by one.

The People. Let’s start with the People, who elected Trump in November with 49.8% of the vote — hardly the “mandate” he likes to claim. Historically, voters have rewarded election winners with a give-the-guy-a-chance response that pundits sometimes refer to this as a president’s “honeymoon”. So, for example, Barack Obama got 52.9% of the vote in the 2008 election, but his post-inauguration approval rating bounced up to 69% (the highest it ever got).

By contrast, Trump’s post-inauguration approval (as estimated by 538’s polling average) was almost identical to his vote total: 49.7%, with disapproval at 41.5% (indicating that some Americans who voted for Harris or someone else were now neutral. By contrast, Obama’s post-inaugural disapproval was a mere 13%.) Trump’s most recent split is still positive, 48.5%-47.0%, but just barely. Some recent polls have turned sharply negative, like Ipsos, which has gone from a post-inaugural 47%-41% to a recent 44%-51%.

Polls that focus more specifically on what Trump is doing look worse for him. A WaPo/Ipsos poll showed 57% of Americans believe that Trump has overstepped his authority. 54% disapprove of his management of the federal government. Elon Musk’s approval is 15 points underwater with 49% disapproving and only 34% approving.

Short version: As people see what Trump is doing, they’re turning against him. I expect this to continue as more and more Americans notice that Trump’s “temporary” actions aren’t temporary, and aren’t solving any of the problems he campaigned on. (Bought any eggs lately?) I anticipate worse polls for Trump and a lot more demonstrations like the one I participated in February 14 in Boston.

Congress. Republicans hold slim majorities in both houses, so Democratic responses are necessarily limited: Democrats on their own cannot pass legislation, hold hearings, or subpoena witnesses. They can make speeches and create photo ops, but that’s about it. And the press, knowing Democrats can’t do much, don’t pay much attention to them. (I often hear comments like “Why don’t the Democrats say or do X?” Chances are some of them have, but you didn’t hear about it.)

Initially, congressional Republicans have been loyal Trump supporters, including confirming obviously unqualified cabinet nominees like Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard. (No Democrat voted for any of the four.) But Republicans can also read polls, and apparently constituents are burning up their phone lines, so some are beginning to get uneasy about cuts that affect their home districts.

But will they do anything to rein Trump in? The real test happens when the government runs out of money on March 14. It’s easy to be for or against things until somebody puts price tags on them and adds them all up. In order to get the bill he wants, Trump will need support from almost all of the Republicans in the House. If Democrats stay united and only two Republicans vote against a spending deal, it fails.

If that happens, that’s when congressional Democrats begin to have negotiating leverage.

State and local governments. Contrasting with decades of Republican rhetoric idealizing government close to the people and villainizing know-it-alls who meddle from distant Washington, Trump is trying to use federal power to overwhelm the states and cities.

The scandal over Trump’s deal to drop federal corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams is all about Trump trying to make liberal cities dance to his tune, in spite of what their voters want. So is his attempt to cancel in New York City’s congestion pricing. Ditto for border czar Tom Homan’s threat to “bring Hell” to Boston after the Boston police commissioner said he would obey local laws that don’t give him the authority to enforce federal immigration laws. In a White House meeting with governors of both parties, Trump tried to bully Maine Governor Janet Mills into submitting to his executive order banning transwomen from women’s sports. “I’ll see you in court,” Mills replied.

All in all, Democratic officials at the state and local level are standing firm against federal usurpation. Democratic attorneys general are leading a number of the lawsuits against the Trump administration’s overreach. How well they succeed, though, largely depends on the courts.

The courts. Many of the things Trump is doing are illegal or unconstitutional. His attempt to undo birthright citizenship is a blatant contradiction of the 14th Amendment. His refusal to spend money already appropriated by Congress violates both the Constitution’s assignment of spending power to Congress and the Impoundment Act of 1974. He has no authority to disband agencies created by Congress, like USAID or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. His treatment of federal employees violates the laws establishing the civil service, as well as union contracts signed by previous administrations.

But laws do not enforce themselves if lawbreakers are determined to ignore them. Victims of the law-breaking have to go to court. Judges have to rule in accordance with the law in spite of executive pressure against them. Court orders can be appealed, so the process can take a long time.

So far, the lower courts are following the law and the Constitution, so Trump is losing most of the cases.

This is all leading up to two questions:

  • Will the Supreme Court invent new interpretations of our laws to back Trump up, essentially ending the rule of law as we have known it?
  • If the Court does rule against Trump, will he defy the Court’s orders?

In theory, Supreme Court decisions take place in an abstract world of law. In practice, though, public opinion will play an important role. If Trump’s excesses are popular, the Court will be more likely to jump on the fascist bandwagon. But if his poll numbers keep spiraling down the drain, the Court may not want to go down with him.

Similar considerations apply to the defiance option: If the public is solidly behind Trump and sees the Court as blocking him for no good reason, he will be more likely to ignore the Court’s orders. On the other hand, if the public is turning against him, the thought that even this Supreme Court thinks he’s wrong may increase the slide.

The first of the cases has already reached the Supreme Court, briefly, sort of. Hampton Dellinger was the head of the Office of the Special Counsel, and independent agency established by Congress to do things like protect whistleblowers in the government. He was appointed by President Biden and confirmed by the Senate to a five-year term. The statute establishing the position makes provision for the President to fire the special counsel “only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” But on February 7 Trump fired Dellinger without claiming any of those things. A district reinstated Dellinger temporarily, and the Trump administration appealed, losing 2-1 at the appellate level. From there they went to the Supreme Court.

The Court also declined to overturn the district court’s order, but it’s hard to read much into that decision, because essentially it is just giving time for the lower court to complete its work. The restraining order runs out Wednesday, when the district court has a hearing scheduled.

The issues here get to the heart of the separation of powers, because it’s hard to see how the OSC can do its job if the head of it can be fired on a presidential whim. Presidents typically dislike whistleblowers, so the OSC won’t be much of a protector if it has no independence from the President. If it finds for Trump, the Court will be saying that the goal the Congress had in mind can’t be achieved.

The good scenario. Obviously, Trump is going to do a lot of harm no matter what anybody else does. The USAID freeze is already killing people in Africa, and no one knows how much damage American medical research will suffer from having its funding stream interrupted or perhaps cut off altogether. A lot of the near-term impact of the research-funding freeze will depend on unpredictable events like whether some future mutation of bird flu enables human-to-human transmission. Trump’s almost vandal-like approach to Biden’s climate change initiatives is going to make it that much harder to deal with long-term challenges that already threaten catastrophe. In short, the voters made an enormous mistake in November, and that mistake will have consequences.

But in my mind those consequences pale compared to the establishment of a lasting autocracy in the United States — and that outcome is still avoidable. The scenario that avoids it goes like this:

  • Trump continues losing popularity. He never had much, but his brand becomes politically toxic.
  • That lack of voter support makes support from congressional Republicans waver. They may not openly defy Trump, but the slim Republican majorities (especially in the House) lose their cohesion, making it impossible to pass legislation without at least some Democratic support. The lack of legislative accomplishments feeds back into public opinion: Maybe Trump isn’t such a strong leader.
  • The Supreme Court, at least partly influenced by public opinion, refuses to invent new legal principles to justify Trump’s seizures of power.
  • The refusal of congressional Republicans and Trump’s own appointees on the Supreme Court to go along with his wishes feeds back into public opinion: If even his would-be minions can’t fully support him, maybe his critics are right.
  • Facing an extreme lack of public support as well as dissension in his own ranks, Trump reluctantly obeys court orders. Or, if he doesn’t, the military refuses orders to crack down on mass public protests.
  • Republicans get soundly defeated in the November, 2025 Virginia elections, sending Republican elected officials into a panic.
  • Democrats win back control of the House in 2026, putting them in a position to block future usurpations.
  • Trump is dissuaded from trying to hang onto power in 2028. The MAGA movement splinters into its component factions — tech bros, racists, burn-it-down nihilists, etc. — none of which is able to win the national election.

That scenario is far from a sure thing, but the way is still open. We’ll learn a lot from future polls, from how Congress handles the possible March 14 government shutdown, and from what the Supreme Court does as cases arrive on its doorstep.

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