Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 48
March 14, 2025
March 14, 2025
Today the Senate passed a stopgap measure from the House of Representatives to fund the government for six months through September 30. The measure is necessary because the Republican-dominated House has been unable to pass the appropriations bills necessary to fund the government in 2025. Congress has kept the government open by agreeing to pass a series of continuing resolutions, or CRs, that fund the government at the levels of the previous budget. The most recent continuing resolution to keep the government funded expires at midnight tonight. The Republicans in the House passed a new measure to replace it on Tuesday and then left town, forcing the Senate either to pass it or to kill it and leave the government unfunded.
The new measure is not a so-called clean CR that simply extends previous funding. Instead, the Republican majority passed it without input from Democrats and with a number of poison pills added. The measure increases defense spending by about $6 billion from the previous year, cuts about $13 billion from nondefense spending, and cuts $20 billion in funding for the Internal Revenue Service. It forces Washington, D.C., to cut $1 billion from its budget, protects President Donald Trump’s ability to raise or lower tariffs as he wishes, and gives him considerable leeway in deciding where money goes.
House Democrats stood virtually united against the measure—only Jared Golden of Maine voted yes—and initially, Republican defectors on the far right who oppose levels of funding that add to the deficit appeared likely to kill it. But Trump signed on to the bill and urged Republicans to support it. In the end, on the Republican side, only Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) voted against it.
Like the House, the Senate is dominated by Republicans, who hold 53 seats, but the institution of the filibuster, which requires a two-thirds majority of the Senate to end it, gave Democrats room to stop the measure from coming to a vote. Whether they should do so or not became a heated fight over the past three days. To vote on the measure itself, Republicans needed 60 votes to end the potential for a filibuster. To get to 60 votes, Republicans would need some Democrats to agree to move on to a vote that would require a simple majority.
The struggle within the Democratic Party over how to proceed says a lot about the larger political struggle in the United States.
House Democrats took a strong stand against enabling the Trump Republicans, calling for Democratic senators to maintain the filibuster and try to force the Republicans to negotiate for a one-month continuing resolution that would give Congress time to negotiate a bipartisan bill to fund the government.
But Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said he would support advancing the spending bill. He argued that permitting the Republicans to shut down the government would not only hurt people. It would also give Trump and his sidekick billionaire Elon Musk full control over government spending, he said, because under a shutdown, the administration gets to determine which functions of the government are essential and which are not.
In an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday, Schumer noted that Musk has said he was looking forward to a government shutdown. Jake Lahut, Leah Feiger, and Vittoria Elliott reported in Wired on Tuesday that Musk wanted a government shutdown because it would make it easier to get rid of hundreds of thousands of government workers. During a shutdown, the executive branch determines which workers are essential and which are not, and as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo highlights, Trump has issued an executive order calling for the government to stabilize at the skeleton crew that a government shutdown would call essential. Yesterday was the government-imposed deadline for agencies to submit plans to slash their budgets with a second wave of mass layoffs, so at least part of a plan is already in place.
Schumer said that Trump and the Republicans were forcing Democrats into a choice between a bad bill and a shutdown that would hand even more power to Trump. “[T]he Republican bill is a terrible option,” he wrote. “It is deeply partisan. It doesn’t address this country’s needs. But…Trump and Elon Musk want a shutdown. We should not give them one. The risk of allowing the president to take even more power via a government shutdown is a much worse path.”
There appeared to be evidence this morning that Trump and Musk wanted a shutdown when before the vote had taken place, Trump publicly congratulated Schumer for voting to fund the government, seemingly goading him into voting against it. “[R]eally good and smart move by Senator Schumer,” he posted.
But as Schumer and a few of his colleagues contemplated allowing the Republicans to pass their funding measure, a number of Democrats called on them to resist the Trump administration and its congressional enablers. House Democrats urged their Senate colleagues to take a stand against the destruction Trump and Musk are wreaking and to maintain a filibuster. At the forefront, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) mobilized her large following to stop Schumer and those like him from deciding to “completely roll over and give up on protecting the Constitution.”
Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the former speaker of the House, backed Ocasio-Cortez, issuing a statement calling the choice between a shutdown and the proposed bill a “false choice.” She called instead for fighting the Republican bill and praised the House Democrats who had voted against the measure. “Democratic senators should listen to the women,” she wrote, who have called for a short-term extension and a negotiated bipartisan agreement. “America has experienced a Trump shutdown before—but this damaging legislation only makes matters worse. Democrats must not buy into this false choice. We must fight back for a better way. Listen to the women, For The People.”
In the end, Schumer voted to move the measure forward. Joining him were Democratic senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Gary Peters of Michigan, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, and Independent Angus King of Maine. One Republican—Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky—voted against moving the measure forward.
Once freed from the filibuster, Senate Republicans passed the bill by a vote of 54 to 46, with New Hampshire’s Shaheen and Maine’s King joining the Republican majority and Republican Rand Paul voting against.
And so, the government will not shut down tonight. But today’s struggle within the Democratic Party shows a split between those who lead an opposition party devoted to keeping the government functioning, and a number of Democrats who are stepping into the position of leading the resistance to MAGA as it tries to destroy the American government. Praise for those resisters shows the popular demand for leaders who will stand up to Trump and Musk.
In a similar moment in 1856, newly elected representative from Massachusetts Anson Burlingame catapulted to popularity by standing up to the elite southern enslavers who had dominated the government for years. Blustering, threatening, and manipulating the mechanics of the government, southern lawmakers had come to expect their northern political opponents, who valued civil discourse and compromise, to cave. Southern leaders threw their weight around to gather more and more power over the country into their hands. Finally, in 1854, they overreached, forcing through Congress the Kansas-Nebraska Act that permitted them to spread human enslavement into the American West. In the following elections, northerners sent to Congress a very different breed of representatives.
On May 22, 1856, pro-slavery representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina came up behind Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner and beat him nearly to death on the floor of the Senate after Sumner had given an antislavery speech Brooks found objectionable. But rather than pleading for calm and compromise in the wake of the attack, Burlingame had had enough. On June 21 he rose and gave a speech about his colleague and his state, calling it “Defence of Massachusetts.”
Burlingame stood up for his state, refuting the insults southerners had thrown at Massachusetts in recent speeches and insulting southerners in return. And Burlingame did something far more important. He called out the behavior of the southern leaders as they worked to attack the principles that supported “the very existence of the Government itself.”
“[T]he sons of Massachusetts are educated at the knees of their mothers, in the doctrines of peace and good will, and God knows, they desire to cultivate those feelings—feelings of social kindness, and public kindness,” Burlingame said. But he warned his southern colleagues that northerners were excellent soldiers and that “if we are pushed too long and too far,” northerners would fight to defend their lives, their principles, and their country.
Burlingame provoked Brooks, and he, temperamentally unable to resist any slight, challenged Burlingame to a duel. Brooks assumed all Yankees were cowards and figured that Burlingame would decline in embarrassment. But Burlingame accepted with enthusiasm, choosing rifles as the dueling weapons. Burlingame was an expert marksman.
Burlingame also chose to duel in Canada, giving Brooks the opportunity to back out on the grounds that he felt unsafe traveling through the North after his beating of Sumner made him a hated man. The negotiations for the duel went on for months, and the duel never took place. Burlingame had turned Brooks, known as “Bully” Brooks, into a figure of ridicule, revealing that when he faced an equal opponent, his bravado was bluster.
Forgotten now, Burlingame’s speech was once widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history. It marked the moment when northerners shocked southerners by standing up to them and vowing that the North would fight for democracy. Northerners rallied to Burlingame’s call and, in so doing, reshaped politics.
—
Notes:
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/gop-house-spending-bill-vote-shutdown-a73f7f14
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/looking-squarely-at-a-shutdown
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/opinion/trump-musk-shutdown-senate.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/13/politics/ocasio-cortez-schumer-democratic-shutdown-plan/index.html
https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-democrats-voted-trump-gop-spending-bill-2045209
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-has-wanted-the-government-shut-down/
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/AAR7990.0001.001/7
https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/202570
Bluesky:
kenklippenstein.bsky.social/post/3lkdrksntnk2i
March 13, 2025
Stocks fell again today.
The S&P 500, which tracks the stock performance of 500 of the biggest companies that are listed on U.S. stock exchanges and is the world’s most widely followed stock market benchmark, dropped 77.78 points, or 1.39%, ending the day more than 10% off its record high of less than a month ago and entering into “correction” territory. A market correction is a period of rapid change that drops the value of stocks by at least 10%.
Other major indexes have also fallen into correction as President Donald Trump’s tariffs and tariff threats, along with dramatic cuts to federal funding and federal employment, are hobbling the national economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 537 points, or 1.3%, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2%.
In the wake of the dropping markets, Trump announced on his social media platform today that if the European Union did not drop its 50% tariff on whiskey, imposed as retaliation for Trump’s tariffs on aluminum and steel, he would impose a 200% tariff on all “WINES, CHAMPAGNES, & ALCOHOLIC PRODUCTS COMING OUT OF FRANCE AND OTHER E.U. REPRESENTED COUNTRIES.” He added: “This will be great for the Wine and Champagne businesses in the U.S.”
In fact, journalist Dave Infante, who covers drinking in America at Fingers, noted that while it seems counterintuitive, such a tariff would “crush the US wine industry. Booze gets to market on distributors' trucks,” he posted. “These fleets need volume to run efficiently. Subtract EU wine from the equation & it no longer pencils out. Any gains from less competition would likely be paid back out in margin loss.”
Kai Ryssdal of the radio show Marketplace posted: “I'm honestly running out of words I can use on the air to describe what's happening in and to this economy.”
There is a grim fascination in the 1929 stock market crash, when Americans watched with horror as the bottom fell out of the economy. In our memories, reinforced by jerky black-and-white newsreels, that crisis shows businessmen aghast as fortunes disappeared in heavy trading that left the ticker tape that recorded prices running hours behind only to toll men’s destruction when it finally reached the end of the day’s sales.
But the stock market crisis of 1929 came from structural imbalances in the nation that created a weak economy in which about 5% of the country received about one third of the nation’s income. What really jumps out today is that, in contrast to 1929, the national economy is strong—or was just a month ago. In fact, before Trump took office, it was the strongest of any economically developed country in the world.
The blame for the falling market in the United States today can be laid squarely at the feet of the new presidential administration, with the tariff war it has instigated and the sweeping cuts it has made to United States government employment. President Donald Trump and his staff insist that the pain he is inflicting on Americans will pay off in long-term economic development, but they have deliberately thrust a stick into the wheels of a strong economy.
It is an astonishing thing to watch a single man hamstring the United States economy. It is also astonishing to watch Republican senators try to convince the American people that a falling stock market and contracting economy is a good thing. “Our economy has been on a sugar high for a long time. It’s been distorted by excess government spending,” Montana Senator Tim Sheehy told Fox News Channel host Larry Kudlow today. “What we're seeing here from this administration and what you're gonna see from this Congress is re-disciplining to ensure that our economy is based on private investment and free-market growth, not public sector spending.”
In fact, until a brief spike in spending during the coronavirus crisis, government expenditure in the United States as a percentage of gross domestic product has held relatively steady around 20% since the 1950s.
Today, Trump met with Secretary-General Mark Rutte of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) who was eager to get Trump to reiterate U.S. support for NATO. Trump told Rutte that the United States needs control of Denmark’s autonomous territory of Greenland “for international security, not just security—international—we have a lot of our favorite players cruising around the coast, and we have to be careful.” Asked about whether the U.S. would annex Greenland, he answered: “I think that will happen.”
At that same meeting, Trump talked about his order to release water from two California dams in January allegedly to deliver water to Los Angeles after the devastating wildfires in that region, although water managers in Los Angeles said they had plenty of water for firefighting. A February 3 memo from the Army Corps of Engineers, obtained by Scott Dance and Joshua Partlow of the Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act, makes it clear that officials knew that the 2.5 billion gallons they released in response to Trump’s order “could not be delivered to Southern California.”
In fact, as Ian James explained in the Los Angeles Times, water releases are usually carefully considered, and local water managers and lawmakers thought the sudden plan was potentially “ruinous,” worrying that an abrupt surge of water could damage the lands and people downstream while wasting water that would be needed during the hot growing season.
That’s not how Trump portrayed the sudden release of water. After talking to reporters about the upcoming congressional budget fight, he suddenly pivoted to Los Angeles, and from there to water. "I broke into Los Angeles, can you believe it, I had to break in,” he said. “I invaded Los Angeles and we opened up the water, and the water is now flowing down. They have so much water they don't know what to do. They were sending it out to the Pacific for environmental reasons. Ok, can you believe it? And in the meantime they lost 25,000 houses. They lost, and nobody’s ever seen anything like it. But, uh, we have the water—uh, love to show you a picture, you’ve seen the picture—the water’s flowing through the half-pipes, you know, we have the big half-pipes that go down. Used to, twenty-five years ago they used to have plenty of water but they turned it off for, again, for environmental reasons. Well, I turned it on for environmental reasons and also fire reasons but, ah, and I’ve been asking them to do that during my first term, I said do it, I didn’t think anything like could happen like this, but they didn’t have enough water. Now the farmers are going to have water for their land and the water’s in there, but I actually had to break in. We broke in to do it because, ah, we had people who were afraid to give water. In particular they were trying to protect a certain little fish. And I said, how do you protect a fish if you don’t have water? They didn’t have any water so they’re protecting a fish. And that didn’t work out too well by the way….”
Today, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that federal agencies must immediately offer thousands of probationary workers purged from the government in the early weeks of Trump’s administration their jobs back. Mass firings from the Defense, Treasury, Energy, Interior, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs departments did not follow the law, Alsup said.
The government declined to make witnesses available to the court although Alsup had ordered the acting head of the Office of Personnel Management to appear today. Alsup told lawyers from the Justice Department that he believed they were hiding how the firings had taken place and who was responsible. “You will not bring the people in here to be cross-examined. You’re afraid to do so because you know cross examination would reveal the truth…. I tend to doubt that you’re telling me the truth.… I’m tired of seeing you stonewall on trying to get at the truth.”
Tonight, U.S. District Judge James Bredar ordered the administration to reinstate thousands of probationary workers in the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, as well as the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the General Service Administration, and the Small Business Administration.
Bredar said it was “likely” that “the Government has engaged in an illegal scheme spanning broad swaths of the federal workforce.” The government claimed it did not have to give advance notice of the firings because it had dismissed the probationary workers for “performance” or other individual reasons. "On the record before the Court, this isn’t true,” Bredar said. “There were no individualized assessments of employees. They were all just fired. Collectively.”
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/business/sp-500-stocks-market-correction.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c984pnedd6do
https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-expresses-confidence-that-us-will-annex-greenland-2025-03-13/
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
https://apnews.com/article/stocks-markets-rates-tariffs-1c8e59d6f2661c6e3c6aeda8ab07a583
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/03/07/trump-water-release-california-fires/
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-03-13/trump-army-corps-dam-water-dumped
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/13/fired-federal-probationary-employees-court-ruling-00228721
Bluesky:
dinfontay.com/post/3lkbepw3vg222
kairyssdal.bsky.social/post/3lkbpec2oe72x
atrupar.com/post/3lkbpeiodkb2o
atrupar.com/post/3lkbxtdszo32r
YouTube:
watch?v=BxmNYQiUzxE, water quotation starts at 42:19.
March 13, 2025
March 12, 2025
March 12, 2025
Trump’s 25% tariffs on all aluminum and steel imported into the U.S. went into effect today, prompting retaliatory tariffs from the European Union and Canada. The E.U. announced tariffs on about $28 billion worth of products, including beef and whiskey, mostly produced by Republican-dominated states. “We deeply regret this measure,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said. “Tariffs are taxes. They are bad for business, and even worse for consumers. These tariffs are disrupting supply chains. They bring uncertainty for the economy.”
Canada also announced new tariffs on Wednesday on about $21 billion worth of U.S. products, in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs. François-Philippe Champagne, Canada's minister of innovation, science, and industry, said: “The U.S. administration is once again inserting disruption and disorder into an incredibly successful trading partnership and raising the costs of everyday goods for Canadians and American households alike.”
With the stock market falling and business leaders begging Trump to stop the trade machinations that are creating the volatility that is wrenching the economy downward, Trump said yesterday to reporters: “[L]ong-term, what I’m doing is making our country strong again.”
In an interview on the CBS Evening News last night, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a billionaire financial executive, was asked whether Trump’s economic policies were “worth it” even if they cause a recession.
“These policies are the most important thing America has ever had,” Lutnick answered. “It is worth it.”
Former representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) reposted Lutnick’s assertion and said: “In my graduate thesis, I quoted a hardline communist official from Poland in the 1950s who was asked about terrible shortages of food and housing. He said people had to sacrifice and “if that’s what it takes to prove the superiority of socialism, it’s worth it.”
The days when the Republican Party were conservatives are long gone. Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish politician and political thinker who began the process of articulating a conservative political philosophy, did so most famously in response to the French Revolution. In 1790, a year after the storming of the Bastille prison symbolized the rebellion of the people against the monarchy, Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Burke had supported the American Revolution that had ended less than a decade before largely because he believed that the American colonists were trying to restore their traditional rights. But the French Revolution, he thought, was an entirely different proposition. As revolutionaries in France replaced their country’s traditions with laws and systems based on their theory of an ideal government, Burke drew back.
He took a stand against radical change driven by people trying to make the government enforce a specific political ideology. Ideologically driven government was radical and dangerous, he thought: quickly, the ideology became more important than the complex reality of the way society—and people—actually worked.
In 1790, Burke argued that the role of government was not to impose a worldview, but rather to promote stability, and that lawmakers could achieve that stability most effectively by supporting the structures that had proven themselves effective in the past; in his time, that meant social hierarchies, the church, property, and the family. “Conservative” meant, literally, conserving what was already there, without reference to an ideology. Those in charge of government should make changes slowly, according to facts on the ground, in order to keep the country stable, he thought. If it behaved this way, the government, which in his time was usually seen as a negative force in society, could be a positive one.
In 2025 the Republicans in charge of the United States of America are not the conservatives they call themselves; they are the dangerous ideological radicals Burke feared. They are abruptly dismantling a government that has kept the United States relatively prosperous, secure, and healthy for the past 80 years. In its place, they are trying to impose a government based in the idea that a few men should rule.
The Trump administration’s hits to the economy have monopolized the news this week, but its swing away from Europe and toward Russia, antagonizing allies and partners while fawning over authoritarians like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, is also a radical stand, and one that seems likely to destabilize American security. Former allies have expressed concern over sharing intelligence with the U.S. in the future, and yesterday, 34 army leaders from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, Japan, and Australia met in Paris without inviting the United States.
The wholesale destruction of the U.S.A.’s advanced medical research, especially cancer research, by firing scientists, canceling grants, banning communications and collaboration, and stopping travel is also radical and seems unlikely to leave Americans healthier than before.
Yesterday, news broke that the administration canceled $800 million worth of grants to Johns Hopkins University, one of the nation’s top research universities in science and medicine. Meanwhile, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has cast doubt on the safe, effective measles vaccine as the disease continues to spread across the Southwest.
Today, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin boasted that the administration is taking 31 actions to roll back environmental protections. Those include regulations about electric vehicles and pollution from coal-fired plants. The administration intends to rescind the EPA’s 2009 finding that the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change endanger public health. That finding is the legal argument for regulations governing car and truck emissions and power plants.
Also today, the United States Department of Agriculture, which oversees supplemental food programs, announced it was cutting about $1 billion in funding that enables schools and food banks to buy directly from local farms and ranches. This will hit farmers and producers as well as children and food-insecure families.
In place of the system that has created relative stability for almost a century, Republicans under President Donald Trump and his sidekick billionaire Elon Musk are imposing a government that is based in the idea that a government that works to make people safe, prosperous, and healthy is simply ripping off wealthy people. Asked if he felt sorry for those losing their jobs in the government purges, Trump told NBC News, without evidence: “Sure I do. I feel very badly...but many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work.”
The administration promises that it is eliminating “waste, fraud, and corruption,” but Judd Legum of Popular Information today launched the “Musk Watch DOGE Tracker,” which shows that Musk has overstated the savings he claims by at least 92%, with the warning that since these identified cuts are illegal and unconstitutional—Congress appropriates money and writes the laws for how it’s spent, and courts have agreed that the executive branch has to execute the laws as they are written—the contracts might not be canceled at all.
That the administration knows it is not operating on the up-and-up seems clear from its attempts to hide what it is doing. It has taken weeks for courts to get the administration to say who is running the “Department of Government Efficiency” and what the body actually is. The White House has tried to characterize Musk as a senior advisor to the president to shield him from questioning.
But today, in response to a lawsuit by 14 attorneys general from Democratic-dominated states arguing that Musk is acting unconstitutionally, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered Musk and DOGE to turn over their records and answer questions, giving them three weeks to comply.
On Tuesday, remaining staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) received an email under the name of acting executive secretary Erica Carr at USAID telling them to shred or burn agency records, despite strict laws about the preservation of federal documents. “Haphazardly shredding and burning USAID documents and personnel files seems like a great way to get rid of evidence of wrongdoing when you’re illegally dismantling the agency,” said Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Two lawsuits are already challenging the order.
And the corruption in the administration was out in the open yesterday. After Trump advertised Elon Musk’s cars at the White House, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that Musk “has signaled to President Trump’s advisers in recent days that he wants to put $100 million into groups controlled by the Trump political operation.” This is separate from Musk’s own political action committee, which dropped almost $300 million into the 2024 election and which is now pouring money into next month’s election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The government that Trump and Musk are destroying, with the complicity of their party, is popular, and Republican members of Congress are apparently unwilling to have to vote on the policies that are putting their radical ideology into place. In an extraordinary move yesterday, House Republicans made it impossible for Congress to challenge Trump’s tariffs.
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 on February 1. That same law allows Congress to end such a declaration of emergency, but if such a termination is introduced—as Democrats have recently done—it has to be taken up in a matter of days.
But this would force Republicans to go on record as either supporting or opposing the unpopular economic ideology Trump and Musk are imposing. So Republicans just passed a measure saying that for the rest of this congressional session, “each day…shall not constitute a calendar day” for the purposes of terminating Trump’s emergency declaration.
The Republicans’ legislation that a day is not a day seems to prove the truth of Burke’s observation that by trying to force reality to fit their ideology, radical ideologues will end up imposing tyranny in the name of liberty.
—
Notes:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/europe-hits-back-trump-tariffs-131301710.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/11/economy/us-stocks-tariffs-trump/index.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/howard-lutnick-divest-corporate-holdings-commerce-secretary/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lutnick-trumps-policies-worth-it-recession/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/act-now
https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/johns-hopkins-federal-funding-foreign-aid-cut-ca841d31
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/lee-zeldin-epa-ends-the-green-new-deal-aa81de06
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/usda-cancels-local-food-purchasing-food-banks-school-meals/
Popular InformationIntroducing: The Musk Watch DOGE TrackerElon Musk claims that the U.S. DOGE Service (DOGE) — a small group of Musk associates embedded in virtually every department of the federal government — have already saved taxpayers over $100 billion. In an appearance on…Read morea day ago · 560 likes · 23 comments · Judd Legumhttps://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/12/elon-musk-judge-orders-discovery-00227924
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5191064-usaids-document-destruction/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/us/politics/elon-musk-trump-donation.html
https://beyer.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx
X:
malinowski/status/1899815143757824483
Malinowski/status/1886191004983685536
March 11, 2025
The stock market continued to fall today. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell another 478 points, or 1.14%; the S&P 500 fell almost 0.8%; and the Nasdaq Composite fell almost 0.2%. The S&P 500 briefly held its own in trading today, but then Trump announced on his social media platform that he was going to double the tariffs on steel and aluminum from the new 25% rates to a 50% rate on Canada and might increase tariffs to “permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada.”
Stocks fell again.
Unable to admit that he might be wrong, President Donald Trump is doubling down on the policies that are crashing the economy. In addition to his tariff threats, he also reiterated that “the only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State,” an outrageous position that he suddenly began to advance after the 2024 presidential election and which has Canadians so furious they are boycotting U.S. goods and booing the Star-Spangled Banner.
More than 100 top business leaders met with Trump today to urge him to stop destabilizing what had been a booming economy with his on-again-off-again tariffs. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, told Jeff Stein and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post that in private, “[b]usiness leaders, CEOs and COOs are nervous, bordering on unnerved, by the policies that are being implemented, how they’re being implemented and what the fallout is. There’s overwhelming uncertainty and increasing discomfort with how policy is being implemented.”
The extreme unpredictability means that no one knows where or how to invest. Market strategist Art Hogan told CNN’s Matt Egan, “This market is just blatantly sick and tired of the back and forth on trade policy.” Yesterday, Delta Air Lines cut its forecasts for its first-quarter revenue and profits by half, a sign of weakening corporate and consumer confidence and concerns about the safety of air travel. Today, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines cut their forecasts, and American Airlines forecast a first-quarter loss.
When he talked to reporters, Trump reasserted that he intends to do what he wants regardless of the business leaders’ input. “Markets are going to go up and they’re going to go down, but you know what, we have to rebuild our country. Long-term what I’m doing is making our country strong again.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt advised, “If people are looking for certainty, they should look at the record of this president.”
Not everyone will find that suggestion comforting.
Trump backed off on his threat to raise the tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum to 50%, but went ahead with his threat to place 25% tariffs on all imported steel and aluminum products. Those tariffs took effect at midnight.
In the face of his own troubles, Trump’s sidekick billionaire Elon Musk is also escalating his destructive behavior. Yesterday Musk’s social media platform X underwent three separate outages that spanned more than six hours. Lily Jamali and Liv McMahon of the BBC reported that Oxford professor Ciaran Martin, former head of the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Center, said that the outages appear to have been an attack called a “distributed denial of service,” or DDoS, attack. This is an old technique in which hackers flood a server to prevent authentic users from reaching a website.
"I can't think of a company of the size and standing internationally of X that's fallen over to a DDoS attack for a very long time," Martin said. The outage "doesn't reflect well on their cyber security." Without any evidence, Musk blamed hackers in Ukraine for the outages, an accusation Martin called “pretty much garbage.”
Four days ago, another of Musk’s SpaceX rockets exploded after takeoff, and now SpaceX’s Starlink internet service is facing headwinds. In February, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim canceled his collaborations with Starlink after growing tensions with Musk culminated with Musk alleging on X that Slim is tied to organized crime. The loss of that deal cost Musk about $7 billion in the short term, but more in the long term as Slim will work with European and Chinese companies in 25 Latin American countries rather than Starlink. Slim has said he would invest $22 billion in those projects over the next three years.
Also in February, after U.S. negotiators threatened to cut Ukraine’s access to the 42,000 Starlink terminals that supply information to the front lines, the European Commission began to look for either government or commercial alternatives. The European Commission is made up of a college of commissioners from each of the 27 European Union countries. It acts as the main executive branch of the European Union.
On Sunday, Musk posted: “[M]y Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army. Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.” Poland pays for about half the Starlink terminals in Ukraine, about $50 million a year. Poland’s minister of foreign affairs, Radosław Sikorski, responded that “if SpaceX proves to be an unreliable provider we will be forced to look for other suppliers.” “Be quiet, small man,” Musk replied. “You pay a tiny fraction of the cost. And there is no substitute for Starlink.”
After all the tariff drama with Canada, last week Ontario also cancelled a deal it had with Starlink.
But perhaps the biggest hit Musk has taken lately is over his Tesla car brand. On February 6, Musk’s younger brother Kimbal, who sits on Tesla’s board, sold more than $27 million worth of shares in the company. Tesla chair Robyn Denholm sold about $43 million worth of Tesla stock in February and recently sold another $33 million. Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja has sold $8 million worth over the past 90 days. Yesterday, board member James Murdoch sold just over $13 million worth of stock.
Fred Lambert of Electrek, which follows the news about electric vehicles and Tesla, noted that Tesla stock dropped 15% yesterday, “down more than 50% from its all-time high just a few months ago.” “Tesla insiders are unloading,” he concluded.
Tesla sales are dropping across the globe owing to the unpopularity of Musk’s antics, along with the cuts and data breaches from his “Department of Government Efficiency.” Protesters have been gathering at Tesla dealerships to express their dismay. While the protests have been peaceful, as Chris Isidore of CNN reports, there have also been reports of vandalism. Tesla owners are facing ridicule as protesters take out their anger toward Musk on his customers, and at least one competitor is working to lure consumers away from Musk’s brand by offering a discount to Tesla owners.
Trump has jumped to Musk’s defense, posting just after midnight this morning that “Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby,’ in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for. They tried to do it to me at the 2024 Presidential Ballot Box, but how did that work out? In any event, I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American.”
Indeed, today Trump used the office of the presidency to bolster Musk’s business. Teslas were lined up at the White House, where Trump read from a Tesla sales pitch—photographer Andrew Harnik caught an image of his notes. And then the same man who gave a blanket pardon to those convicted of violent crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol called those protesting at Tesla dealerships “domestic terrorists” and promised that the government would make sure they “go through hell.”
Trump and Musk appear to have taken the downturn in their fortunes by becoming more aggressive. Martin Pengelly of The Guardian noted that in the middle of Monday’s stock market plunge, Trump posted or reposted more than 100 messages on his social media channel. All of them showed him in a positive light, including reminders of the 2004 first season of the television show The Apprentice, in which Trump starred: a golden moment in Trump’s past when his ratings were high and the audience seemed to believe he was a brilliant and powerful businessman.
Today, egged on by Musk, Trump pushed again to take over other countries. He told reporters: "When you take away that artificial line that looks like it was done with a ruler…and you look at that beautiful formation of Canada and the United States, there is no place anywhere in the world that looks like that…. And then if you add Greenland…that's pretty good."
The Trump administration also announced today it was cutting about half the employees in the Department of Education. The Senate confirmed Linda McMahon, who has little experience with education, to head the department on March 3 by a party-line vote. Shutting down the department "was the president's mandate—his directive to me," McMahon told Fox News Channel host Laura Ingraham. McMahon assured Ingraham that existing grants and programs would not “fall through the cracks.”
But when Ingraham asked her what IDEA stood for—the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—she wasn’t sure, although she knew it was “the programs for disabled and needs.” Ingraham knew what the acronym meant but assured McMahon that after 30 years on the job, she still didn’t know all the acronyms. McMahon replied: “This is my fifth day on the job and I’m really trying to learn them very quickly.”
Musk lashed out at Arizona senator Mark Kelly on social media yesterday, after Kelly posted pictures of his recent trip to Ukraine and discussed the history of Russia’s invasion, concluding “it’s important we stand with Ukraine.” Musk responded: “You are a traitor.”
Kelly, who was in the Navy for 25 years and flew 39 combat missions in the Gulf War before becoming an astronaut, responded: “Traitor? Elon, if you don’t understand that defending freedom is a basic tenet of what makes America great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do.”
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Notes:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/10/stock-market-today-live-updates.html
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5324700/tariffs-stocks-wall-street-trump-priorities-markets
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/11/trump-tariffs-stock-market-uncertainty/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62x5k44rl0o
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/11/economy/us-stocks-tariffs-trump/index.html
https://globalnews.ca/news/11067542/ontario-permenant-starlink-contract-cancel/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy87vg38dnpo
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/10/delta-air-lines-cuts-forecast-softer-demand.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy87vg38dnpo
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-to-help-ukraine-replace-musks-starlink/
https://fortune.com/2025/03/07/tesla-cfo-vaibhav-taneja-sells-stock/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/10/business/tesla-vandalism-protest-stock/index.html
https://www.404media.co/facebook-cybertruck-owners-group-copes-with-relentless-mockery/
https://insideevs.com/news/748190/polestar-targets-tesla-buyers-unhappy-with-musk/
https://zecar.com/reviews/polestar-lures-disgrunted-tesla-owners-with-new-offer
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, March 11, 2025, 12:14 am.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/11/trump-truth-social-economy-stock-market
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/linda-mcmahon-education-secretary-confirmed/
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-will-buy-new-tesla-show-support-musk-2025-03-11/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/12/economy/trump-steel-aluminum-tariffs-hnk-intl/index.html
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March 11, 2025
March 10, 2025
March 10, 2025
Last week’s dramatically dropping stock market prompted Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo to ask Trump in an interview that aired yesterday if he was expecting a recession. Trump answered: “I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition because what we’re doing is very big.”
Yesterday evening, on Air Force One, a reporter asked President Donald Trump if he is worried about a recession. “Who knows?” the president answered. “All I know is this: We’re going to take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs, and we’re going to become so rich, you’re not going to know where to spend all that money. I’m telling you, you just watch. We’re going to have jobs. We’re going to have open factories. It’s going to be great.”
Today the stock market plunged.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average of 30 prominent companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges fell by 890 points, more than 2%. The S&P 500, which tracks the stocks of 500 of the largest companies listed in the U.S., fell by 2.7%. The Nasdaq Composite, which tracks tech stocks, fell by 4%. Shares of Elon Musk’s Tesla closed down more than 15%, dropping more than 45% this year. Tonight, as the Asian markets opened on the other side of the world, the slide continued.
According to MarketWatch, this is the worst start to a presidential term since 2009, when the country was in the subprime mortgage crisis. Trump did not inherit an economy mired in crisis, of course; he inherited what was, at the time, the strongest economy in the world. That booming economy is no more: Goldman is now predicting higher inflation and slower growth than it had previously forecast, while its forecast for Europe is now stronger than it had been.
Trump has always been a dodgy salesman more than anything, telling supporters what they want to hear. He insisted that the strong economy under former president Joe Biden was, in fact, a disaster that only he could fix. In October, Trump told attendees at a rally: “We will begin a new era of soaring incomes. Skyrocketing wealth. Millions and millions of new jobs and a booming middle class. We are going to boom like we’ve never boomed before.”
That sales pitch got Trump away from the criminal cases against him and back into the White House. Now, though, he needs to make the sales pitch fit into a reality that it doesn’t match. Trump is “steering the country toward a downturn with his tariffs and cuts to spending and the federal workforce—for no logical reason,” Washington Post economic reporter Heather Long wrote on March 6. “Trump’s whipsaw actions have put businesses and consumers on edge,” she noted. If they stop spending at the same time that the government slashes jobs and spending, a downward spiral could lead to a recession. “Trump is inciting an economic storm,” Long wrote. “The big question is why he’s doing this.”
One answer might be that Trump’s top priority is the extension of the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, at the same time that he has also promised to cut the deficit. Those two things are utterly at odds: the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that extending the tax cuts will cost the country more than $4 trillion over the next ten years.
Tariffs appear to have been Trump’s workaround for that incompatibility. He claimed that tariffs would shift the burden of funding the U.S. government to foreign countries. When economists reiterated that tariffs are paid by U.S. consumers and would drive up prices and slow growth, he insisted they were wrong. Increasingly, tariffs seem to have become for him not just the solution to his economic dilemma, but also a symbol of American strength.
“[T]ariffs are not just about protecting American jobs,” Trump told Congress last week. “They are about protecting the soul of our country. Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again, and it is happening and it will happen rather quickly. There will be a little disturbance, but we are OK with that.”
After watching Trump talk to Fox News Channel host Bret Baier in mid-February, Will Saletan of The Bulwark noted that Trump seemed truly to believe that tariffs would bring in “tremendous amounts of money.” For that, as well as his apparent conviction that Palestinians should evacuate Gaza so the U.S. could “take over” and develop the real estate there, and that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state, and so on, Saletan concluded “Donald Trump is Delusional.”
Another reason for Trump’s dogged determination to impose tariffs despite the pain they are inflicting on Americans might lie in James Fallows’s observation in Breaking the News after the president’s speech to Congress that Trump’s mental acuity is slipping. Fallows noted that Trump’s vocabulary has shrunk markedly since his first term and he appears to be falling back on “more primitive and predictable” phrases. Tonight the president appeared to be moving back in time, as well, advertising the availability of the first season of “the Emmy nominated ORIGINAL APPRENTICE STARRING PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP.”
The White House said today in a statement: “Since President Trump was elected, industry leaders have responded to President Trump’s America First economic agenda of tariffs, deregulation, and the unleashing of American energy with trillions in investment commitments that will create thousands of new jobs. President Trump delivered historic job, wage, and investment growth in his first term, and is set to do so again in his second term.”
As the administration’s economic policies are rocking the economy, the administration’s arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old Syrian-born Palestinian activist who figured prominently in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University last April, seems designed to rock society. According to Democracy Now, Khalil is an Algerian citizen, but he holds a U.S. green card and is married to a U.S. citizen who is 8 months pregnant.
Shortly after he took office, Trump issued an executive order saying he would revoke the student visas of anyone he claimed sympathized with Hamas. On Saturday, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Khalil. Khalil’s lawyer said that ICE agents claimed they were acting on the orders of the State Department to revoke Khalil’s student visa, apparently unaware that Khalil, who graduated from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December 2024, is a lawful permanent resident of the United States. When his wife showed officers documents proving that status, the lawyer said, an officer said they were revoking his green card instead. He is apparently being held in Louisiana.
The revocation of a green card is very rare. The Associated Press noted that the Department of Homeland Security can begin the process of deportation for lawful permanent residents who are connected to alleged criminal activity. But Khalil hasn’t been charged with a crime. Nik Popli of Time magazine notes that a green card holder can be deported for supporting terrorist groups, but in that case the government must have material evidence. A Homeland Security spokesperson did not offer any such evidence, saying simply that Khalil’s arrest was “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism” and that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.”
That is, the Trump administration has arrested and detained a legal resident for expressing an opinion that Trump officials don’t like, likely using Khalil to launch this extraordinary attack on the First Amendment because they don’t expect Americans to care deeply about his fate. Once the principle is established that the government can arrest and jail protesters, though, officials will use it to silence opposition broadly. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump posted just after noon. “We know there are more students at Columbia who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”
Representative Greg Casar (D-TX) posted: “This is illegal, and it endangers the rights of all Americans. In this country, people must be free to express their views—left or right, popular or unpopular—without being detained or punished by the government.” On this basic principle, Americans across the political spectrum appear to agree. Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter was one of those who stepped back from the idea of arrests and deportations of those expressing opinions. “There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport,” she posted, “but, unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the first amendment?”
Today, U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman ordered that Khalil “shall not be removed from the United States unless and until the Court orders otherwise,” and ordered a hearing on Wednesday.
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Notes:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/remarks/2025/03/press-gaggle-by-president-trump/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/business/stock-markets-asia-trump.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/06/trump-recession-tariffs-layoffs/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/us/politics/transcript-trump-speech-congress.html
Public NoticeMAGA's Big Lie budgetRead morea day ago · 391 likes · 10 comments · Noah Berlatsky
The BulwarkDonald Trump Is DelusionalAMONG THE REALITY-BASED COMMUNITY—those of us who acknowledge Donald Trump’s prodigious history of false statements—there’s a longstanding debate. Some think Trump knows better and is simply lying. Others think he’s sincerely delusional…Read morea month ago · 1609 likes · Will Saletan
Breaking the NewsThree Alarming ‘Tells’ from Trump's Latest Speech.Supportive crowd reaction during Donald Trump’s Congressional address on Tuesday night. (Photo Tom Brenner / Washington Post via Getty Images…Read more4 days ago · 157 likes · 56 comments · James FallowsDonald J. Trump, Truth Social post, March 10, 2025, 6:14 p.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, March 10, 2025, 8:55 p.m.
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/3/10/columbia_university_mahmoud_khalil
https://apnews.com/article/columbia-university-mahmoud-khalil-ice-6964107d218dba43eb995d6dbbe528b1
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.638260/gov.uscourts.nysd.638260.9.0.pdf
https://time.com/7266683/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-green-card/
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