Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 44
April 4, 2025
April 3, 2025
April 3, 2025
Trump’s announcement last night that he was placing high tariffs on countries around the world came after the stock market closed, but it drove stock futures dramatically downward. Overseas, global markets also plunged. Today, before the stock market opened, Trump posted on his social media site: “THE OPERATION IS OVER! THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING. THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
Fittingly, it was former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani who rang the bell opening the stock market today. Giuliani represented Newsmax, the right-wing media channel with ties to Trump. As soon as the market opened, stocks fell straight down. By the end of the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped 1,679 points, falling about 4%, its biggest fall since the coronavirus pandemic took hold in 2020. The S&P 500 fell 274 points, or 4.8%. The Nasdaq Composite fell more than 1,050 points, or almost 6%. The losses wiped out about $2 trillion.
Trump justified the tariffs by declaring that the U.S. is in the midst of a national emergency, but this afternoon he left the White House for a long weekend in Florida, where his private Doral resort outside of Miami is holding the first domestic golf tournament of the season of LIV Golf, which is financed by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia.
Trump’s tariffs are not an economic policy. Tariffs are generally imposed on products, not on nations. By placing them on countries, the White House was able to arrive at its numbers with a nonsensical formula that appears to have been reached by asking AI how to impose tariffs—a suggestion so outlandish that I dismissed when I saw it last night, but economist Paul Krugman today identified it as being a likely possibility. CNBC’s Steve Liesman said: “Nobody ever heard of this formula. Nobody has ever used this formula. So I’m sorry, but the conclusion seems to be the president kind of made this up as he went along....”
Today, former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers posted: “It’s now clear that the [Trump] Administration computed reciprocal tariffs without using tariff data. This is to economics what creationism is to biology, astrology is to astronomy, or RFK thought is to vaccine science. The Trump tariff policy makes little sense EVEN if you believe in protectionist mercantilist economics.”
Editor of The American Prospect David Dayen notes that there is no apparent policy behind the tariffs, no thought, for example, as to whether it is even possible for the U.S. to ramp up the kind of domestic manufacturing Trump claims to want. While Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS, “You’re going to see employment leaping starting today,” in fact, both automaker Stellantis and appliance manufacturer Whirlpool announced layoffs because of the tariffs.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that building and establishing a new plant in the U.S. will take a minimum of three to five years even if investors are inclined to support one, but Victoria Guida reported in Politico that corporate executives are saying they cannot invest in manufacturing until they can project costs, and Trump is far too unpredictable to enable them to do that with any confidence.
Dayen writes that Trump’s tariffs are essentially sanctions on the rest of the world. His behavior is, Dayen says, “no different from a mob boss moving into town and sending his thugs to every business on Main Street, roughing up the proprietors and asking for protection money so they don’t get pushed out of business.” Dayen notes that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent argued last year for using the extraordinary power of the U.S. economy to force other countries to do as the U.S. wants, creating a U.S. sphere of influence through economic pressure.
Extending the comparison to a mob boss, Dayen notes that “protection money” could take many forms: “curbing migration, taking in more U.S. farm exports or weapons systems, reducing industrial capacity in China and forcing more consumption, buying long-dated U.S. debt on the cheap, siding with a war strategy against Iran, literally anything the White House wants.”
Trump’s son Eric appeared to confirm that the tariffs are a shakedown when he posted: “I wouldn’t want to be the last country that tries to negotiate a trade deal with [Trump]. The first to negotiate will win—the last will absolutely lose. I have seen this movie my entire life.…” Foreign affairs journalist David Rothkopf was more graphic: “These aren’t tariffs,” he wrote. “They are a horse’s head in the bed of (almost) every world government and business leader.” Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman suggested that if a government refused to negotiate with Trump, that country’s major companies should deal directly with Trump, exempting that company’s products from tariffs in exchange for a new factory or some other investment Trump wants.
Trump is overturning the past 80 years of global trade cooperation in order to concentrate power in his own hands. Congress began to take down the tariff walls of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it passed the 1934 Reciprocal Tariff Act enabling the president to lower the high tariff rates Republicans had established with the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff. That tariff had worsened the Great Depression. With the turn away from tariff walls and toward international cooperation, global trade has fostered international cooperation and created the rising prosperity of the twentieth century.
“The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday,” Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney said today. “The system of global trade anchored on the United States…is over. Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over. The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services is over. While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.”
Ending systems of global free trade dovetails with the idea of getting rid of the international rules-based order created after World War II. After that horrific war, world leaders decided to create a system of international institutions, like the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to provide ways in which countries could protect their sovereignty and work out their differences without going to war.
Trump’s threats against other countries, including Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark, are a direct rejection of those principles. That rejection reinforces the Trump regime’s embrace of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which invaded Ukraine first in 2014 and again in 2022 and is trying to justify grabbing Ukrainian territory. Under Trump, the U.S. is siding with Russia rather than Ukraine in this war in a stunning rejection of the institutions and principles that have stabilized the globe since World War II.
Putin is now threatening NATO countries, prompting them to prepare for defense. “We are not at war,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said recently, “but we are certainly not at peace either.”
Some of those advocating tariff walls and forcing our allies to maintain their own defense suggest that creating a U.S. sphere of influence is the best way to counter a rising China, but there is no doubt that the concept of such spheres caters to the worldview of Russian and Chinese leaders. As scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder points out, weakening the U.S. and its allies also benefits Russia by increasing Russia’s power relative to other countries, making it easier to establish the multipolar world Russia wants.
The Trump administration is also undermining post–World War II democracy at home. Last night, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) identified Trump’s tariffs as “a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief.” Murphy pointed to Trump’s shakedown of prominent law firms, four of which he has attacked with executive orders. He also pointed to Trump’s attacks on universities, withholding government funding until their administrators bow to MAGA’s ideological demands.
Sarah D. Wire of USA Today reported that earlier this week the Institute for Museum and Library Studies was effectively closed, and over the past two days the administration told libraries across the country that grants awarded last year have been terminated. Today the administration cut federal grants for arts and humanities across the country: museums, archives, historic sites, educational projects, and so on—all defunded. It also cut this year’s funding for National History Day, a popular history program in schools that is already underway.
On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services slashed jobs and programs in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), even as measles continues to spread and two Louisiana infants have died of whooping cough. Today, news broke that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is implementing a hiring freeze even as flash floods and tornadoes just today have killed at least seven people in the Midwest to the mid-South.
The plan, as Vice President J.D. Vance explained in a 2021 interview, is to destroy the current government, business, educational, cultural, and scientific pillars of the United States in order to replace them with a new system, although there is tension between the Project 2025 wing of MAGA and the technocrats’ wing over whether that new system will be a theocracy or a technocracy. In either case, it will be an authoritarian government in which power and money concentrate in a very few hands.
The administration’s crusade against the state of Maine shows what this looks like. After Maine governor Janet Mills told Trump the state would follow state and federal law rather than bow to his demands, acting Social Security Administration commissioner Leland Dudek canceled contracts permitting Maine parents to apply for Social Security numbers for their newborns from the hospital and for Maine families to report deaths from funeral homes. Told such a change would risk identity theft and wasteful spending, Dudek told the agency to do it anyway in order to punish Mills.
After an outcry, Dudek backtracked, but yesterday the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, announced she was freezing federal funds for Maine educational programs. The Trump administration would stand against “a leftist social agenda,” Rollins wrote.
The problem for Republicans is that while the sort of inflammatory language Rollins used has been a staple of the party for decades, the MAGA agenda itself is not popular. Only about 4% of voters who knew about Project 2025 wanted to see it enacted, and billionaire Elon Musk, who runs the “Department of Government Efficiency” that is slashing through government programs, is so unpopular that his support for a candidate in Tuesday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election actually appeared to have hurt, rather than helped, that candidate.
Now party members have to deal with the fact their president has tanked the economy by enacting what the National Review says is likely the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history. Now countries around the globe are imposing reciprocal tariffs on the U.S. while also negotiating their own trade agreements that cut out the U.S. Those agreements are not only for products like soybeans, but also for weapons, a development the administration is protesting.
Republican members of Congress could stop Trump at any time. In the case of tariffs, they could simply reassert their constitutional power to manage tariffs. If they choose not to and the economy doesn’t recover and thrive as Trump keeps promising, voters can be expected to hold them, as well as him, to account.
Right now Republican leaders appear to be hoping that Trump’s attempt to extort other countries will work and the tariffs will be short lived. But their enthusiasm for that strategy seems to be well under control.
Today, Bill Ackman resorted to defending the tariffs by posting: “Sometimes the best strategy in a negotiation is convincing the other side you are crazy.”
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/03/economy/us-jobs-report-preview-march-doge-layoffs/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/business/media/newsmax-stock-ipo.html
https://apnews.com/live/donald-trump-news-updates-4-3-2025
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dow-jones-today-stock-tariff-trump-4-3-25/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/these-tariffs-wont-stand-make-political-electoral-hay-now
https://www.ft.com/content/2a6e388e-d4b6-4774-8c47-76dcb13e14b9
https://commonplace.org/2025/03/31/americas-three-demands/
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/04/03/trump-tariffs-manufacturing-confusion-00267945
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/03/nx-s1-5350994/neh-grants-cut-humanities-doge-trump
https://www.wired.com/story/cdc-gutted-rif/
https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDAOC/bulletins/3da109f
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/us/politics/trump-maine-funding-freeze-transgender-athletes.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/track-measles-outbreak-cases-us-map-rcna198932
https://www.ketv.com/article/rising-pertussis-whooping-cough-cases-louisiana/64376803
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/speech-at-chicago-illinois/
Paul KrugmanWill Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy?A quick thank you to my readers. When I struck out on my own, I wasn’t sure if anyone would follow. But I just passed 300K subscribers. I’ll try to be worthy of your support…Read morea day ago · 3828 likes · 696 comments · Paul Krugmanhttps://prospect.org/economy/2025-04-03-theyre-not-tariffs-theyre-sanctions/
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-officials-object-european-push-buy-weapons-locally-2025-04-02/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-officials-object-european-push-050404725.html
Editors, “Americans Will Pay the Price for Reckless Tariffs,” National Review, April 3, 2025.
The BulwarkThe American Age Is Over1. Canada…Read more15 hours ago · 2013 likes · 755 comments · Jonathan V. LastBluesky:
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April 2, 2025
April 2, 2025 (Wednesday)
Just five months ago, on October 19, 2024, The Economist ran a special report on America’s economy. That economy was, the magazine said, “the envy of the world.” Today, stock market futures plummeted after President Donald J. Trump announced that he will impose a 10% tariff on all imports to the United States, with higher rates on about 60 countries he claims engage in unfair trade practices, including China, Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea, as well as the European Union.
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures lost more than 1,000 points upon the news, falling by 2.5%; the S&P 500 dropped 3.6%.
Trump’s erratic approach to the economy had already rattled markets, which dropped significantly in the first quarter of this year, and consumer confidence, which recently hit a twelve-year low. Trump waited until the stock market had closed today before he announced the new tariffs. Then, in a speech in the White House Rose Garden, he said: “For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike. But it is not going to happen anymore.” Instead, he said, tariffs would create “the golden age of America.”
“Never before has an hour of Presidential rhetoric cost so many people so much,” former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers posted. “The best estimate of the loss from tariff policy is now [close] to $30 trillion or $300,000 per family of four.” “The Trump Tariff Tax is the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history,” posted former vice president Mike Pence.
Trump claims he is imposing “reciprocal tariffs” and says they are about half of what other countries levy on U.S. goods. In fact, the numbers he is using for his claim that other countries are imposing high tariffs on U.S. goods are bonkers. Economist Paul Krugman points out that the European Union places tariffs of less than 3% on average on U.S. goods, while Trump maintained its tariffs are 39%.
Krugman said he had no idea where that number had come from, but financial journalist James Surowiecki figured out that the White House “just took our trade deficit with [each] country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.” He called it “extraordinary nonsense.” Washington Post economic writer Catherine Rampell posted that she was reluctant to amplify Surowiecki’s theory that the tariff rates were based on such a “dumb calculation,” but then the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative confirmed it.
Certain observers in business had apparently persuaded themselves that Trump didn’t really intend to raise tariffs very much and that his many vows to do so were simply rhetoric, since economists agree that tariffs are a tax on consumers and will raise inflation and slow down growth. Today’s tariffs are higher than expected, and business leaders are alarmed.
JPMorgan tonight said that they “view the full implementation of these policies as a substantial macro economic shock not currently incorporated in our forecasts” and that “these policies, if sustained, would likely push the US and global economy into recession this year.”
Economist Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations agreed. He told David J. Lynch and Jeff Stein of the Washington Post: “In the short run, the effect is probably a recession. It’s going to raise the price of so many goods that can’t be made in the United States…. In the long run, it’s a vision of the U.S. that is very isolated from the world.”
But not from every other country. While Trump imposed tariffs on Australia’s remote Heard and McDonald Islands, which are uninhabited except by wildlife like seals and penguins, it did not put tariffs on Russia. A different financial shift lifted sanctions against senior Russian negotiator Kirill Dmitriev, to permit him to travel to Washington, D.C., today to meet with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff for what Alex Marquardt, Jennifer Hansler, and Alayna Treene of CNN refer to as “talks on strengthening relations between the two countries as they seek to end the war in Ukraine.”
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted tonight that the tariffs make no economic sense because “[t]hey aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool.” Murphy suggests they are a way to make private industry dependent on the president the same way he has tried to make law firms and universities dependent on him. Industries and companies “will need to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief.”
Murphy warns that “[t]he tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship…[s]o that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry. As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears.”
There is also Trump’s apparent fascination with President William McKinley, who held office from 1897 to 1901, at a time when high tariffs concentrated wealth in the hands of industrialists while workers and farmers, as well as their families, faced injury, hunger, and homelessness from dangerous working conditions, low wages and commodity prices, and seasonal factory closings.
Trump has frequently claimed those years were the nation’s wealthiest, and today he helped to explain his focus on that era when he referred to the 1913 Revenue Act, a law that has angered the right wing for decades. That act began the process of replacing the high tariffs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with an income tax, thus shifting the burden of funding the treasury from ordinary Americans through tariffs to wealthier Americans through the income tax. At least some of Trump’s tariff plans seem tied to his enthusiasm for tax cuts on wealthy individuals and corporations.
But in trying to reestablish the financial patterns of the late nineteenth century—patterns that led to profound economic instability in the U.S., including economic crashes—Trump is undermining the system of global trade that has fostered international cooperation since World War II. CNN global economic analyst Rana Foroohar told CNN’s John Vause: “This is Trump saying…I am going to overturn globalization as we’ve known it.” She added: “I’m hoping it doesn’t push the U.S. and the world into recession.”
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo makes the important point that “Presidents have no inherent power over tariffs whatsoever.” The Constitution gives to Congress, not the president, the power to impose tariffs. But the International Emergency Economic Powers Act allows the president to impose tariffs if he declares a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act, which Trump did today, declaring a “national emergency to increase our competitive edge, protect our sovereignty, and strengthen our national and economic security.”
That same law allows Congress to end such a declaration of emergency, but so far, Republicans have declined to do so. Today the Senate rebuked Trump by passing a resolution to block his tariffs on Canadian products, with four Republicans—Susan Collins (ME), Mitch McConnell (KY), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Rand Paul (KY)—joining Democrats to pass the resolution. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is unlikely to take the measure up.
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/04/02/trump-tariffs-liberation-day-trade/
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/02/nx-s1-5345802/trump-tariffs-liberation-day
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/02/stock-market-today-live-updates-trump-tariffs.html
Paul KrugmanTrump Goes Crazy on TradeJust a quick update after Trump’s Rose Garden speech…Read more16 hours ago · 2642 likes · 660 comments · Paul Krugmanhttps://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/02/us-tariffs-around-the-world-030348
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/04/02/business/trump-tariffs-liberation-day
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/01/politics/senior-russian-official-washington-visit/index.html
https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/two-thoughts-on-trumps-inferno-tariffs
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5229035-trump-tariffs-great-depression/
https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/tariffs-trump-news-04-02-25#cm90wmufk00293b6nsm9aanla
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April 1, 2025
Today Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) made history.
For more than 25 hours he held the floor of the Senate, not reading from the phone book or children’s literature, as some of his predecessors have done, but delivering a coherent, powerful speech about the meaning of America and the ways in which the Trump regime is destroying our democracy.
On the same day that John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that members of Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including national security advisor Michael Waltz, have been skirting presidential records laws and exposing national security by using Gmail accounts to conduct government business, and the same day that mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Booker launched a full-throated defense of the United States of America.
Booker began his marathon speech at 7:00 on the evening of March 31 with little fanfare. In a video recorded before he began, he said that he had “been hearing from people from all over my state and indeed all over the nation calling upon folks in Congress to do more, to do things that recognize the urgency—the crisis—of the moment. And so we all have a responsibility, I believe to do something different to cause, as John Lewis said, good trouble, and that includes me.”
On the floor of the Senate, Booker again invoked the late Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who had been one of the original Freedom Riders challenging racial segregation in 1961 and whose skull law enforcement officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 as Lewis joined the marchers on their way to Montgomery to demand their voting rights be protected.
Booker reminded listeners that Lewis was famous for telling people to “get in good trouble, necessary trouble. Help redeem the soul of America.” Booker said that in the years since Trump took office, he has been asking himself, “[H]ow am I living up to his words?”
“Tonight I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis and I believe that not in a partisan sense,” he said, “because so many of the people that have been reaching out to my office in pain, in fear, having their lives upended—so many of them identify themselves as Republicans.”
Standing for the next 25 hours and 5 minutes, without a break to use the restroom and pausing only when colleagues asked questions to enable him to rest his voice, Booker called out the Trump administration’s violations of the Constitution and detailed the ways in which the administration is hurting Americans. Farmers have lost government contracts, putting them in a financial crisis. Cuts to environmental protections that protect clean air and water are affecting Americans’ health. Housing is unaffordable, and the administration is making things worse. Cuts to education and medical research and national security breaches have made Americans less safe. The regime accidentally deported a legal resident because of “administrative error” and now says it cannot get him back.
“These are not normal times in America, and they should not be treated as such,” he said. “This is our moral moment. This is when the most precious ideas of our country are being tested…. Where does the Constitution live, on paper or in our hearts?”
Throughout his speech, Booker emphasized the power of the American people. He told their stories and read their letters. And he urged them to stand up for the country. “In this democracy,” he said, “the power of people is greater than the people in power.”
He emphasized the power of the people by calling out South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who until today held the record for the longest Senate speech: a filibuster he launched in 1957 to try to stop the passage of that year’s Civil Rights Act. Thurmond spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes, but unlike Booker, who used his time to make a powerful and coherent case for reclaiming American democracy, Thurmond filled time with tactics like reading from an encyclopedia.
But, Booker noted, Thurmond’s attempt to stop racial equality failed. After he ended his filibuster, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and Black Americans and their allies used it to demand the equal protection of the law, including the right to vote. “I’m not here…because of his speech,” Booker said. “I’m here despite his speech. I’m here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.”
“It is time to heed the words of the man I began this whole thing with: John Lewis. I beg folks to take his example of his early days when he made himself determined to show his love for his country at a time the country didn’t love him, to love this country so much, to be such a patriot that he endured beatings, savagely, on the Edmund Pettus bridge, at lunch counters, on freedom rides. He said he had to do something. He would not normalize a moment like this. He would not just go along with business as usual. He wouldn’t know how to solve it, but there’s one thing that he would do, that I hope we all can do, that I think I did a little bit of tonight.
“He said for us to go out and cause some good trouble, necessary trouble, to redeem the soul of our nation. I want you to redeem the dream…. Let’s be bolder in America with a vision that inspires with hope. It starts with the people of the United States of America—that’s how this country started: ‘We the people.’ Let’s get back to the ideals that others are threatening, let's get back to our founding documents…. Those imperfect geniuses had some very special words at the end of the Declaration of Independence…when our founders said we must mutually pledge, pledge to each other ‘our lives, our fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.’ We need that now from all Americans. This is a moral moment. It’s not left or right, it's right or wrong.
“Let’s get in good trouble.
“My friend, madam president, I yield the floor.”
According to Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell, before he was through, Booker’s speech had been liked on TikTok 400 million times.
The people spoke today in special elections. Republican candidates in Florida won by about 14 points in each of two U.S. House races, but just five months ago, Republicans won those seats by 30 and 37 points. It appears that voters are angry at the Republican Party.
In Wisconsin, the state supreme court race showed a similar dynamic. The candidate endorsed by President Trump and backed by more than $20 million from Elon Musk, lost the race to his opponent, circuit court judge Susan Crawford. Musk had campaigned in the state for Crawford’s opponent, handing out two $1 million checks and saying that the election could determine “the future of America and Western Civilization.”
Crawford won by about 10 points.
“As a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls,” Crawford said in her victory speech, “I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin. And we won.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/politics/booker-senate-trump.html
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5227136-democrats-wisconsin-florida-special-elections/
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-wisconsin-supreme-court-election-loss-2053668
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/us/elon-musk-wisconsin-supreme-court.html
https://www.wpr.org/news/susan-crawford-wins-wisconsin-supreme-court-race-democrats-elon-musk
https://www.wpr.org/news/susan-crawford-wins-wisconsin-supreme-court-race-democrats-elon-musk
Bluesky:
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April 1, 2025
March 31, 2025
On April 1, 1861, Secretary of State William Henry Seward wrote an astonishing letter to President Abraham Lincoln. Less than a month after Lincoln had taken office, Seward had little faith in the apparently uneducated president from the raw West and was angry that the Cabinet had overruled him to provision South Carolina’s Fort Sumter rather than evacuating it. Seward was convinced that he, rather than Lincoln, should lead the administration.
Seward complained that Lincoln had not yet established “a policy either domestic or foreign” and said he had figured out the solution to the nation’s political crisis, in which seven states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—had seceded from the Union in the weeks after Lincoln was elected president but before he took office. “[W]e must,” Seward wrote, “Change the question before the Public from one upon Slavery, or about Slavery for a question upon Union or Disunion.”
The way to do that, he wrote, was to rally Americans around the flag. To do so, he told Lincoln, “I would demand explanations from Spain and France, categorically, at once. I would seek explanations from Great Britain and Russia, and send agents into Canada, Mexico and Central America, to rouse a vigorous continental spirit of independence on this continent against European intervention. And if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France, Would convene Congress and declare war against them.”
Modestly, Seward concluded: “Either the President must do it himself…or Devolve it upon some member of his Cabinet…. It is not in my especial province. But I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.”
In other words, Seward proposed taking charge of the U.S. government from the elected president, and then bringing Americans together by starting a war with Spain, France, Great Britain, or Russia—who was on the other side really didn’t matter. A crisis could be created with any of them. The point was to quell dissent at home by turning Americans against another country.
Lincoln spoke directly to Seward about his letter and then dropped the matter, leaving the secretary of state’s preposterous suggestion on the floor like the lead balloon it was. The two went on to forge a strong relationship, with Lincoln as the head of the administration and without starting a war with another country.
But Seward’s missive demonstrated a historical truism: when one country invades another, it usually reflects the problems of the invader’s domestic politics, no matter what the justification for the invasion is.
Although President Donald Trump never mentioned taking over Greenland—or Canada, or Panama, or Mexico—during the 2024 campaign, he has made such takeovers a key objective of his administration. On March 6, Trump addressed “the incredible people of Greenland” during a joint session of Congress, telling them that the U.S. needs Greenland “for national security and even international security…. And I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it.” On March 29, Trump told Kristen Welker of NBC News: “We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100%.” He said that there’s a “good possibility that we could do it without military force” but that “I don’t take anything off the table.”
On Friday, Vice President J.D. Vance led a delegation to Greenland, an island of about 56,000 people that is a semiautonomous territory of Denmark. As founding members of both the United Nations in 1945 and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, Denmark and the United States are allies of long standing. Immediately after World War II, the American military maintained 17 bases and installations in Greenland, with thousands of soldiers, but now it maintains only the Pituffik Space Base on Greenland’s northwest coast with about 200 soldiers. It was there that Vance landed with his wife, as well as disgraced national security advisor Mike Waltz, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) on Friday after Greenlanders and Danes opposed a more extended itinerary.
Vance told Denmark it had “underinvested in the people of Greenland, and you have underinvested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful landmass filled with incredible people. That has to change.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Fredriksen dismissed Vance’s assertion, saying that Denmark is “a good and strong ally.” Danish foreign minister Løkke Rasmussen noted that a 1951 agreement between the U.S. and Denmark “offers ample opportunity for the United States to have a much stronger military presence in Greenland. If that is what you wish, then let us discuss it.”
Greenland sits between the United States, Europe, and Russia on the Arctic Circle, where melting ice is making the seas more navigable. Climate change also offers access to Greenland’s rare earth minerals that are of strategic importance for modern economies, as well as oil and gas reserves.
The Trump regime wants those resources, but perhaps even more to the point, the U.S. invading another country—any other country, but particularly an ally—demolishes a key founding principle of the post–World War II order: that countries will respect each other’s borders and sovereignty. In seizing Greenland from Denmark, the U.S. would justify Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory.
That the United States is even talking about this is bonkers. Leaders from Greenland and Denmark have said the island is not for sale. National security scholar Tom Nichols posted: “The President of the United States just implied he would use force against an ally in an unprovoked war of aggression and conquest—and the entire world is so used to ignoring him like a crazy grandpa in the attic that it’s not the biggest story on the planet.”
A Fox News poll conducted from March 14 to March 17 showed that only 26% of Americans like the idea of taking over Greenland.
Americans also aren’t keen about the regime sweeping up legal U.S. residents in its deportation programs. A CBS News/YouGov survey from March 27–28 showed that 71% of Americans thought it was “not acceptable” for immigration authorities to mistakenly detain legal U.S. residents as part of the regime’s larger deportation program, while only 29% thought it would be acceptable.
And yet, today Nick Miroff of The Atlantic reported that Trump administration attorneys admitted in a court filing that officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement had seized and deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia by accident. Abrego Garcia fled gang threats in El Salvador when he was 16, and came to the U.S. He has no criminal record, works full time as a union sheet metal apprentice, is married to an American citizen, and is the father of a disabled U.S. citizen. He had been granted legal protected status from return to El Salvador after a judge found he was likely to be targeted by gangs if he was sent back.
The U.S. government did not charge Abrego Garcia with a crime but deported him to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) because of an administrative error. “This was an oversight,” the government told the court. But, because he is no longer in U.S. custody, the government said it is beyond the reach of U.S. courts to get him back.
Abrego Garcia’s attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, told Miroff he had never seen a case where the government ignored protective legal status and deported someone. “They claim that the court is powerless to order any relief,’’ he told Miroff. “If that’s true, the immigration laws are meaningless—all of them—because the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”
Tomorrow, voters will have a chance to weigh in on the government when elections take place in two Florida districts to fill seats vacated by the resignations of Mike Waltz, now national security advisor, and Matt Gaetz. Wisconsin, too, will hold an election, for a ten-year term on the state supreme court. That position will likely determine whether Wisconsin’s congressional maps remain gerrymandered in favor of Republicans, permitting them to pick up more seats than they have earned. Such skewing has made it possible for Republicans to retain control of the House of Representatives, and candidate Susan Crawford is likely to vote in favor of fair maps to replace the gerrymandered ones.
While it is supposed to be a nonpartisan election, President Trump has thrown his weight behind candidate Brad Schimel. Billionaire Elon Musk has thrown his checkbook, putting almost $20 million behind Schimel. On Sunday Musk traveled to Wisconsin, where he said the election could determine “the future of America and Western Civilization,” warning that a court with Crawford on it would redraw the gerrymandered districts and “add seats for Democrats.”
On Sunday, Musk gave away two checks for $1 million each to individuals who attended his rally for Schimel and signed a petition against “activist judges”. Musk got around the Wisconsin law against exchanging an item of value to get someone to vote or not to vote by claiming the checks were for “spokesperson agreements.” But the video recorded by one of the recipients linked her vote to Musk’s check, saying, “I did exactly what Elon Musk told everyone to do: sign the petition, refer friends and family, vote, and now I have a million dollars.”
The other check for a million dollars went to the chair of the Wisconsin College Republicans, who has worked for Republican campaigns.
“Let me talk for a minute or two about my opponent, Elon Musk,” Crawford told supporters on Monday. She announced her candidacy for the race before Trump was elected, and according to Scott Bauer of the Associated Press, she said she never imagined she would be fighting against “the richest man in the world.”
Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler said he thought “people do not want to see Elon Musk buying election after election after election. If it works here, he’s going to do it all over the country.”
Meanwhile Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) has been speaking on the floor of the Senate since 7:00 tonight because, he said, “I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis.” “These are not normal times in America. And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate.”
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Notes:
William Henry Seward to Abraham Lincoln, April 1, 1861, Library of Congress, available at: https://www.loc.gov/resource/mal.0866000/?sp=1&st=image
Lincoln to William Henry Seward, April 1, 1861, Library of Congress, available at: https://www.loc.gov/resource/mal.0860800/?st=text&r=-0.083,0.179,1.112,1.26,0
https://www.whitehouse.gov/remarks/2025/03/remarks-by-president-trump-in-joint-address-to-congress/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/heres-why-us-picking-fight-223528197.html
https://www.politico.eu/article/usa-donald-trump-military-intervention-greenland-again-denmark/
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/30/nx-s1-5344942/trump-military-force-not-off-the-table-for-greenland
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/danish-foreign-minister-scolds-trump-administration-jd-vance-greenland/
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-28/why-trump-wants-greenland-explainer/104937608
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-greenland-takeover-idea-unpopular-what-polls-show-2052581
https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-greenland-why.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/opinion-poll-trump-economy-tariffs-deportation-immigration/
https://www.politico.eu/article/usa-donald-trump-military-intervention-greenland-again-denmark/
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.11.0.pdf
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wisconsin-supreme-court-rejects-effort-block-musks-1m/story?id=120319945
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5223074-trump-schimel-wisconsin-supreme-court/
https://apnews.com/article/wisconsin-supreme-court-elon-musk-trump-acc4066ecd0e5222c4ecb9ddcb880df5
https://apnews.com/article/wisconsin-supreme-court-elon-musk-trump-8fe006c7f8fa40b663eccd6751bada98
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/31/politics/booker-senate-floor-speech-trump-protest/index.html
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March 31, 2025
March 30, 2025
March 30, 2025
On the Fox News Channel this morning, Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett said: “President Trump has a long run vision of a golden age of America and we’re working really, really hard to get it out there in time. But I can't give you any forward-looking guidance on what's gonna happen this week. The president has got a heck of a lot of analysis before him, and he's gonna make the right choice, I'm sure.”
The National Economic Council is the primary group the president uses to develop domestic and international economic policy, so the fact that Hassett appears to have no idea what’s coming is concerning. Trump has declared April 2 “Liberation Day” because he will announce big new tariffs, posting on his social media site on March 21: “For DECADES we have been ripped off and abused by every nation in the World, both friend and foe. Now it is finally time for the Good Ol’ USA to get some of that MONEY and RESPECT, BACK. GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!”
Other Trump regime officials appear similarly uninformed about Trump’s plans. Fox News Channel personality Shannon Bream asked Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, what to say to consumers who worry that tariffs are going to raise prices, he answered: “Trust in Trump.” He then claimed that “tariffs are tax cuts,” which makes sense only if he means that tariffs, which raise prices on consumers, might provide enough revenue for the government to enable Republicans to justify tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations.
Trump campaigned on the promise to “immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One,” but his tariffs have already helped to push inflation upward. Josh Dawsey and Ryan Felton of the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Trump warned the chief executive officers of “some of the country’s top auto manufacturers not to raise prices because of the 25% tariffs he has just put on cars and car parts, telling them that the tariffs are good for them.
On Saturday, Trump denied he had made such a request and told NBC News’s Kristen Welker that “I couldn’t care less if they raise prices, because people are going to start buying American cars.”
“I couldn’t care less,” he repeated. “I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are going to buy American-made cars. We have plenty.” A White House aide told NBC News that the president was referring to foreign car prices.
And then there is Friday’s story that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been taking not only his brother but also his wife along with him to “meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed.” Katherine Long, Max Colchester, Daniel Michaels, and Lindsay Wise of the Wall Street Journal note that her inclusion in such meetings is unusual. Jennifer Hegseth also accompanied Hegseth to his private meetings with senators during the process of his Senate confirmation, “making it awkward to ask questions about allegations related to infidelity and sexual misconduct.”
Both Trump and Hegseth have made it their goal to purge the United States of what they call “Marxism” and what Hegseth calls “woke sh*t”: that is, the racial, gender, and religious diversity that Americans have embraced since World War II. That means taking the government the country has built over the past 80 years down to the ground and rebuilding it as they imagine it was before, with men like them in charge.
The Trump regime is the result of at least 45 years of Republican rhetoric that undermined the idea of a government that worked for the good of everyone by claiming that such a government was “socialism” or “Marxism.” That argument had nothing to do with actual Marxism, which called for the people to take over farms and factories, and everything to do with America’s peculiar history.
During the Civil War of the 1860s, the Republicans in Congress both ended human enslavement in the U.S. except as punishment for crime and invented the nation’s first system of national taxation, including the income tax. After the war, racist former Confederates in the South refused to accept the idea that Black Americans were equal to their white neighbors and tried to force formerly enslaved people into subservience. To stop that from happening, Americans in 1868 added the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, putting the weight of the federal government behind equal rights. In 1870, Americans added to the Constitution the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing the right of Black men to vote. Also in 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to prosecute those in the South who continued to persecute their Black neighbors on grounds of race.
In response, former Confederates in 1871 began to maintain—falsely—that they had never objected to Black rights on racial grounds. What they opposed, they said, was that poor Black men, impoverished because of their time in slavery, had the right to vote. Those men would, they said, vote for services like roads and schools and hospitals, and such services could be paid for only through tax levies on propertied Americans who overwhelmingly were white men. Thus, permitting Black men to vote meant “socialism” that would destroy the United States. To restore true American values, former Confederates and their northern counterparts insisted, Black Americans must be shut out of a voice in government.
That rhetoric resurfaced after World War II. In that era, the vast majority of Americans embraced a government that worked for everyone by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights. But those Republicans eager to avoid regulation and taxation reached back to Reconstruction to insist that a government that worked in the interest of all Americans was redistributing wealth from hardworking Americans to undeserving minorities and women. Restoring true American values, they said, meant making sure that “Marxists” and minorities could not influence politics, especially after the 1965 Voting Rights Act restored voting rights to Black Americans and people of color.
That rhetoric that tied racism and taxes elected Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980, and it has since metastasized until the top seven donors to the 2024 political cycle together gave almost a billion dollars to Republicans, with Elon Musk alone contributing more than $291 million. The list, compiled by Open Secrets, shows that Democratic donors don’t kick in until number eight on the list, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who gave slightly more than $64 million to Democrats. George Soros, the Republicans’ supervillain, didn’t make the top 25. As those wealthy donors wish, the Trump administration is shredding the post–World War II government and has prioritized tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
Trump’s government is also firing women, Black and Brown Americans, and gender minorities from public positions and working to erase them from our history. MAGA Republicans have fired up their base against immigrants they claim are “invading” the United States, an exaggerated vision in which White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, for example, claims that “[w]e were invaded and occupied. Entire neighborhoods were conquered. Entire towns were subjugated. Our treasury was in the plundered. [sic]”
That wildly exaggerated vision has enabled Republicans to justify throwing overboard the due process on which American rights are based. On Friday, Representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN) told booing constituents: “You violated the rules, you are not entitled to due process.” In fact, in the United States, the due process of law is what establishes whether someone has violated the “rules,” otherwise known as the law.
Just how profoundly the administration is violating civil rights came through today when news broke of an “Alien Enemies Act Validation Guide” obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The guide lays out a point system by which officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can determine if an immigrant is eligible for rendition to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador. The guide tags people as members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang if they reach 8 points on a point system in which officers determine what seems to them a “gang tattoo” or a gang sign, or interact with those ICE says are gang members.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that nearly all of the criteria on the list are subjective, which helps to explain why so many people who are apparently unaffiliated with TdA were swept up in the rendition. “With this checklist,” Reichlin-Melnick writes, “ICE can declare any Venezuelan an ‘Alien Enemy’ without ANY concrete evidence—based solely on an ICE officer's interpretation of tattoos and hand signs which may be completely innocent or the bad luck of having a roommate ICE thinks is TDA.”
The MAGA Republicans’ worldview is the same as that of the Confederates who preceded them: some people are better than others and have the right to rule. It is no coincidence that Trump recently called for the restoration of Confederate statues. But if that worldview is correct, then getting rid of President Joe Biden’s inclusive economy and hiring practices and putting white men in charge of everything should mean exactly what Trump is promising: a golden age of America.
Instead, the strong economy the Biden administration created is tumbling, and Trump administration officials seem to have no plan to stop it except to “Trust in Trump.” The officers in charge of keeping the nation safe have instead broken the law in an epic fail demonstrating that they have no foreign policy plan except military strikes highlighted with emojis. They appear to disdain national security procedures.
And the Signal scandal appears to have been just the tip of the iceberg. Tonight, Alexander Ward, Josh Dawsey, and Meridith McGraw of the Wall Street Journal reported that two U.S. officials told them that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz “has created and hosted multiple other sensitive national-security conversations on Signal with cabinet members.”
When the former Confederates called for cutting Black men out of the vote in the 1870s by insisting their votes would usher in socialism, Americans didn’t know whether a government elected by a wider range of Americans than in the past would thrive. In 2025 we have experienced not only 80 years of a government that created a strong economy and a stable world as it worked for all Americans. We have also experienced the four years recently past, in which the Biden administration demonstrated that such a government worked. It left us with a booming economy and strong national security that the Trump regime is now mangling.
Nonetheless, Trump is digging into the position that some people are better than others and have the right to rule. Today he told NBC News that he is considering a third presidential term, although that is explicitly unconstitutional. “I’m not joking,” he said, “There are methods which you could do it.”
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Notes:
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social, March 21, 2025, 8:01 am.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/12/economy/grocery-prices-inflation-trump-interview/index.html
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/trump-tariffs-automaker-prices-warning-928bc7a9
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-hegseth-woke-democracy-military-dei/
https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/mike-waltz-is-losing-support-inside-the-white-house-2b17459c
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436.67.21.pdf
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-third-term-white-house-methods-rcna198752
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