The Politics Of Trump's War

 It is inevitable that any discussion of the conflict in Iran turn to the impact on Trump and his political fortunes. Especially given the fact that a Democratic Wave in the November elections might be the difference between America surviving as a democracy or not.

Trump's inherent incoherence is going to work against him here. As he tosses out contradictory war aims and negotiating positions, it becomes clear he doesn't have a framework for "winning the war." What's more, Trump made no effort to "sell" the war to the American public. He did not use the State of the Union address to make the case; he only tossed out a few videos on his social media site. He did not engage Congress or the American people in this conflict. It seems that he assumed he would get a quick and clean Venezuelan outcome - neglecting the fact that Venezuela is still a mess.

Americans don't seem pleased with this. YouGov threw out a snap poll (take with a grain of salt) and only 34% of Americans supported the war. In March 2003, 71% of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq, largely because the Bush Administration made a relentless (and flawed and mendacious) case to the American public. Republicans naturally support Trump far more than Democrats, but while 10% of Democrats express any support for the war, only 20% of independents do. Democrats oppose the strikes at 70%, but independents oppose it at 52%. 

Trump never made the case for war, and now he's throwing off bangers like "there will likely be more (casualties) before it ends. That's the way it is." He routinely references Venezuela, "What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario." He thinks he can waltz in and out of a Middle Eastern war, the way he did in the Caribbean, which betrays an unsurprising but woeful level of ignorance.

Meanwhile, Iran's closing the Straits of Hormuz is unlikely to make people think that Trump is laser focused on affordability. It might not crater the economy the way the 1979 Iranian Revolution did, but supply chain disruptions have a way of making themselves felt. One driver of the "Biden" Inflation was the supply chain disruption to world oil and gas markets by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There is no reason to believe that we won't see another oil shock, even if it doesn't tip us into stagflation.

Trump is an idiot. Most of the people around him are idiots. They believe in performing on social media over doing the hard work of crafting policy and long term strategy. "The Venezuelan raid went great, let's do that again. It will make great TV." Except the American people are really not at all ready for this, and they made no effort to prepare them for it.

Trump has no reservoir of good will or public trust to draw on, beyond his diminishing base. He is absolutely incapable of filling the role of selfless war time president. I would be shocked if he met the caskets of fallen soldiers at Dover. What's more, it is precisely his rural voter base that is sick and tired of these wars, because they disproportionately fight them. 

Iran is playing the long game, because it must. It can launch swarms of cheap drones until America's supply of anti-missile weapons is gone. If it resorts to tactics that have served it in the past, one would have to expect terrorist attacks at some point. They merely have to hunker down and endure. 

Trump is talking about a four week war. Venezuela might be instructive here, in that we really haven't changed much about the government of Venezuela, except who sits atop it. But we declared victory and moved on. Maybe we see a bunch more dead people - American, Iranian, Israeli, Qatari, Kuwaiti - we degrade the Iranian military...and then the war just ends. It's pretty clear that Trump has no real plan to make "regime change" happen. 

I would be shocked if Trump benefits from a "rally 'round the flag" effect. 

Why?

 Why attack Iran now? 

That question is really paramount in my mind as I try and discern why we have engaged in yet another war of choice in the Middle East. Richardson runs through some of the possibilities.

The proper time to launch strikes was during the massive civil unrest that led to the Revolutionary Guard gunning down thousands of its own citizens. However, most of our military assets were tied down off the coast of Venezuela. So there was a lag between the optimal time to launch strikes and the ability to do so. (Apparently the strikes were planned for earlier, but they learned that Khamenei was going to be in a meeting, so they moved the strikes to target that meeting.)

The popular theory online is, of course, that this should be named Operation Epstein Fury. It's all just another distraction from the Epstein Files. Perhaps. More likely this could be seen as a way to "project strength" or "dominate the news" in the face of sagging poll numbers and widespread dissatisfaction with Trump's presidency. The operation in Venezuela went so well, why not try it again? Of course the operation in Venezuela did not arrest Trump's declining poll numbers, but whatever.

Timothy Snyder suggests that this could be part of the overall corruption of the Trump Administration, in particular their cozy relations with the Gulf States. This feels less like a corrupt quid pro quo ("Attack Iran and we will give you billions in crypto.") and more the corruption of shared values. Trump and his minions love the rich emirs of the Gulf, and they could imbibe their perspectives just by constant contact.

It is the opinion of this humble blog that Donald Trump is a profoundly stupid person. He has the vocabulary of a third grader, fer chrissake. Intelligence can take many forms, and Trump's feral ability to attack and lie is kind of intelligence. What he is clearly incapable of doing is looking ten steps ahead. There is a reason no American president has taken this step, despite almost 50 years of hostile relations between the US and Iran. We have no idea what will come next. Trump doesn't care. Venezuela is currently struggling through a humanitarian crisis. Same with Cuba. Trump doesn't care. Iran might collapse into a failed state, like Libya. Trump doesn't care.

Maybe everything works out. Maybe the Iranian army and elements of the Revolutionary Guard switch sides and drive the hardliners from power. Maybe we kill enough hardliners to facilitate that happening. Maybe Iran doesn't degenerate into civil war and chaos, but becomes a vibrant democracy. It's not totally impossible. What IS clear is that we have no plans or ability to shape that particular outcome.

Special Military Operation

 The seemingly inevitable attacks on Iran began a few hours ago. The two ideas need to be held together in everyone's mind. The first is that the Iranian regime is incredibly malevolent. The second is that air strikes are not going to topple the regime. 

Is there a realistic endgame for these strikes? Almost certainly not. 

Are we at war with Iran? Not technically, because Congress has been excluded from this decision. Only Congress can declare war.

Why are we doing this? This feels like the Trump Administration's incessant efforts to "create content" and "project strength" rather than any overarching strategic goal.

Would it improve the world if the Iran had a new government? Absolutely. There is no evidence that this will topple the regime. Air power can't do that.

Can't a global military power enforce it's will militarily on a weaker power? History suggests not. 

Are the adults in charge? Absolutely not. Epic Fury? We are governed by middle schoolers.

Is this a distraction from the Epstein Files? Maybe, but more likely it's a distraction from the various setbacks that Trump has been dealt recently. Military action is usually a way to restore presidential authority. This seems unlikely to do that.

This Is (No Longer) CNN

 The news that Netflix is dropping its bid for Warner Brothers Discovery paving the way for odious oligarchs in the Ellison family to acquire the parent company of CNN has real implications for the future of media independence. It's another example of the dynamic whereby Bezos bought the Washington Post, ran it competently for a spell and then burned its reputation to ashes and peed on those ashes. Except this looks like it will be more like the lightning fast collapse of CBS. 

Yes, this is how guys like Orban consolidated power. However, Krugman is right that authoritarianism often derives its legitimacy from addressing economic (or other) crises. Hell, my students are writing an essay on that very topic as I type this. 

I'm skeptical that Trump and Ellison can stamp out all media criticism. We can see what they are doing at CBS, but we also have to note that this is destroying CBS' ratings.

My gut tells me that these efforts to create a "state media" will only succeed in part and in the short run. People are sadly uncurious about the world. If they are curious, they might actually inform themselves and they can still do that. Hell, the Wall Street Journal is still out there committing journalism.

My wife watches CNN in the evening when she cooks. I cannot stomach it now, and I once considered Jake Tapper a friend. It's just insipid pablum. Making it Fox Lite isn't going to improve the quality.

Finally, Trump and Trumpism is not forever. Going back to the previous post, Democrats need to play hardball with whatever levers they can pull. States should file anti-trust suits against this particular merger. Slow it down, gum it up. Fight back.

While losing won't be great, as long as pro-democracy forces can find a way to maintain some news independence, it won't necessarily be fatal. 

However, once Democrats do have control of the government again, there must be a thorough attack on oligarchic control of the media.

Vibes v Policy

 In his mailbag, Yglesias goes off on the idea that Democrats need to moderate their policy positions in order to win the Senate seats in places like Iowa, Texas, Florida or Alaska. This is because Yglesias is locked into the idea that voters select candidates based on ideology and, especially, policy.

Coincidentally, Morris comes out today with just the opposite conclusion - based not on his priors but on a poll he ran. I'll let him summarize his findings:

In our February poll, we asked voters whether each of 10 adjectives describes the Democratic and Republican parties. Each person was asked to rank how well each word — such as “extreme”, “elitist”, “tough”, and “weak” — described both parties on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 indicating the word described the party very well.

The Republican Party’s defining traits in voters’ minds are extreme (60% agree), elitist (57%), tough, (56%) and cruel (51%). The percentage of Americans agreeing with descriptions of positive traits is comparatively smaller: just 41% say the party is competent, 41% say principled, and only 31% — less than a third — say the GOP can be considered empathetic.

The average American sees Democrats in a much different light. The top descriptors of the party are empathetic (54%) and principled (49%). Comparatively few people think of it as “tough” (31%), and nearly half the country calls the Democrats weak (48%) and ineffective (47%). Democrats’ competence rating is 46% — five points higher than the GOP’s — but it’s the weakness and ineffectiveness labels that dominate voters’ impressions and national discourse about the party.

This manifests, I think, in two ways.

The first is the fact that Democrats have for a while now been associated with more feminine values and have run two female candidates for president. Trump won both of those elections, despite the fact that I would rank Hillary Clinton's mental and emotional toughness leagues higher than Trump's. Still, I remain convinced that Trump would not have beaten Joe Biden in 2016 for instance. Or really any male Democrat. Trump benefits from gendered perceptions of "toughness", even though he's the whiniest, most petulant person to hold the office.

The second is that there is an entire online discourse about Democrats not being tough. The algorithm probably boosts this, but Democrats are always "caving" or "losing" in ways that are both real and imaginary. The fall shutdown, for instance, was a "loss", in that Dems weren't able to save health insurance. They DID however amplify the issue of healthcare affordability, which is now a very favorable issue for Dems. Is that a loss or a win? 

The reason why Gavin Newsom or even JB Pritzker is popular is because they fight back. The reason Schumer isn't, is because he does appear to have the same fight in him. 

Right now there is a partial DHS shutdown over ICE. Democrats are "fighting" but the reality of shutdowns is that they rarely work to extort policy concessions. In fact, they got rolled when the Big Beautiful Bill basically funded ICE and DHS in perpetuity. Will they be able to win some concession? Maybe. Possibly. What they are asking for is popular. The structural levers that they have are not strong enough, though, to force through what they want to do.

This, to me, is a massive example of the role of gender on our politics. I think it Maureen Dowd or someone like her who talked about Democrats being the Mommy Party and Republicans being the Daddy Party. Crude, but if you look at the polling, there's some real accuracy there.

Look at the performative masculinity of Pete Hegseth or RFK posting their workout videos or Kash Patel chugging beers with the US Men's Hockey team. Hell, look at the grotesque "Mar A Lago Face" phenomenon whereby women butcher their faces with plastic surgery to reinforce gender stereotypes.

Morris' conclusion is that Democrats don't need to moderate on certain issues, so much as they need to "get tough" with the understanding that there is no magic dial that you can turn to make voters see you as tougher.  My cynical take is that means someone like Graham Platner is a better bet to win in November's Maine Senate race than Janet Mills. I think Mills makes the better Senator, and she is frankly "New England Tough" but Platner has a gravelly voice and voters are kinda stupid.

When we talk about "toughness" we are talking about vibes, not policy. Yglesias may sit there in his DC townhouse and parse white papers, but voters don't. Hispanic and Black men didn't shift to Trump because they believed he wouldn't tax their tips or even that he would save America from trans athletes. They did it because he's a "tough business man" who will lift them up from the precarious edges of poverty.

AI Freakout Of The Day

 Yglesias does one of his spicyhot contrarian takes about AI. Basically - because everything in his mind is about YIMBY v NIMBY - the backlash to AI is really about data centers. No one wants some behemoth gobbling up their electricity and fresh water to plop down in their neighborhood. 

There is certainly backlash to data centers. To simply dismiss other concerns because some data suggests people are conflicted is typical Yglesias bullshit. 

The fundamental reason to be pessimistic about AI is the general pessimism about social media and also the specific concerns about originality. We now have 20 years of internet penetration into most aspects of our lives. It can be benign. It can be beneficial. It can also be terrible in ways that human cognition hasn't compensated for. We know that tech companies goose our amygdala to keep us engaged. Are we going to add the tremendous capabilities of AI to the existing algorithmic world we live in? 

We are suspicious of tech even as we utilize it more and more. It's not a clear case of "AI is bad" or "AI is awesome." I don't like the way AI short circuits creativity and smooths over the struggle of actual learning and discovery. As a teacher, it scares me what will happen to this generation, because I've seen what social media has done to their older siblings. I still like using AI search features. It's pretty convenient.

We also have to accommodate the very real possibility that AI is massively over-hyped but simultaneously accommodate the very real possibility that it could wreck devastation on sectors of the economy. The speed at which this is happening is, in and of itself, scary.

Humans don't really like uncertainty. AI both promises and threatens changes on a scale that has people freaking out. The idea that there isn't a backlash is overdetermined from Yglesias' pre-existing obsessions. 

UPDATE: This seems pretty fucking awful. If you are an educator, that would seem to be a really bright red line.

Unitary Politics

 Krugman wonders why people are so sour on the economy when it's "meh" as opposed to "bad." It's the whole "Vibes" thing again, in some ways. However, I think Marshall's point that all politics is unitary is important. Prices ARE a problem for many people. There AREN'T a lot of job openings. It's not 2008-9, but things are kind of shitty.

However, I think the whole "Focus on affordability" tactic espoused by political strategists misses this point of unitary politics. As Morris notes, people aren't thrilled with ICE and deportations. Americans aren't monsters and generally like their immigrant neighbors. Yeah, MAGA is gonna MAGA, but most people aren't thrilled with what they are seeing out of Minneapolis and elsewhere. They aren't thrilled by the destruction of the East Wing.

What happens is you combine general attitudes about corruption or incompetence or cruelty with a soft economy and you get general backlash. I might be most outraged by the attacks on liberal democracy or the Russophilic foreign policy, but that will also show up as being upset about the economy. Biden faced this, too.

Aside from both Biden and Trump facing this conglomerated unease, they both struggled to turn the narrative around. Biden is a bad speaker, and he has gotten worse as he got older. He is not senile,  but he cannot command the bully pulpit. Trump is a bad speaker, and he has gotten worse as he has gotten older. With Trump, it is the raging narcissism that cannot allow defeat or retreat, that locks him into rhetorical boxes. I mean there were some naïfs saying that he could use the SOTU to bring the country together. C'mon!

Trump threw red meat to MAGA and the GOP last night. Polls that say people were happy with the speech only demonstrate that most people didn't watch, only partisans who were favorably disposed to him in the first place. His lies about prices are not going to change perceptions about him. 

Democracy works, not because it's efficient (it's not), but because it can correct course - or you lose the next election. Trump's continual doubling down on unpopular actions hopefully holds the seeds of his destruction.  

Epstein And Indiscriminate Allegations

 Martin Longman writes about the allegations against Trump that we know of in the Epstein Files that have actually been released. 

He makes a good point that these allegations or even simply contact between Epstein and other elites - broadly defined - tend to erode our judicial system's requirements of the presumption of innocence. Some of the people being dragged or fired seem to have been in Epstein's orbit in some manner and that alone is enough to cost them a job. The arrests in Britain actually deal with sharing classified information with Epstein, not his more lurid crimes. Andrew Windsor-Mountbatten almost certainly raped minors. He's apparently a world class scumbag.

That's the thing, though. One of the legacies of #MeToo was that men who treat women badly, tend to treat WOMEN badly. If they sexually harass one woman, they harass multiple women. Few men rape ONE woman. The crime of rape is not fundamentally about lust but about power and violence. 

Donald Trump's presence in one specific incident - the Bitten Penis, if you will - represents that power and violence. So does the Access Hollywood tape. So does the E. Jean Carroll case. So does the testimony of Stormy Daniels, where she acquiesced to sex rather than risk violence. So does the allegation of abuse by Ivanka Trump. 

Sometimes, women invent accusations of sexual assault. That happens. Rarely...never to my knowledge...do multiple women invent accusations about the same man. Deshaun Watson was a sex pest, harassing masseuses with great regularity. It wasn't just a one time misunderstanding. We have ample, ample evidence that Trump sees women as sexual hosts not romantic partners. 

We keep waiting for some final smoking gun to be discovered that definitively links Trump to raping someone. I don't think we are ever really going to have that moment of clarity. I would also argue that we don't need it. It is precisely the multitude of credible - if not always proven - allegations against him that should allow us to pass judgment on this fucking monster.  

The Coming Lunacy

 Tonight. Hair Furor will deliver what is sure to be a bizarro rant, where he cycles through the accumulated grievances of his rally screeds. Ostensibly the Constitutionally mandated State of the Union address, I would wager it will feel more like one of his Truth Social rants. 

Richardson runs down what a catastrophic few days this have been for Trump. As he weakens, his old threats seem less daunting. Foreign powers are increasingly turning away from the US; the tariff lunacy injects even more uncertainty into the US and global economy; Trump's popularity is close to the lowest that it's ever been (around January 6th). Malignant narcissist that he is, these accumulating wounds eat at him and make an unhinged performance tonight even more likely.

For what few "adults" are left in the room: do they pump him up with amphetamines to give him the energy he needs or sedate him so that he doesn't come off as a crazed lunatic? These are the questions American government officials are asking themselves.

Toxic America

 I heard an argument that as bad as everything seems to be right now, it's not as bad as the 2000s. The logic - and it's sound - is that 9/11 was so traumatic we don't even talk about the anthrax scare. We fought two somewhat pointless wars. We had the 2008 financial crisis. 

Yeah, that's a lot.

There does seem to be an accelerating toxicity to America though. Part of it is just the relentless stupidity of the people in charge. Dubya Bush was pretty thick, but these idiots are just spectacularly dumb. Kash Patel chugging beers with the men's hockey team...I mean what are we doing here?

Something else caught my eye that I think is emblematic of how awful things are. 

HBO released A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, with the last episode airing last night. It's great. It masterfully moves tonally from incredibly funny to moving to tragically sad. It's "small" compared to Game of Thrones, but that's the point. Anyway, the penultimate episode was amazing and was briefly ranked on IMDB as one of the best episodes of TV...ever. OK, it probably wasn't THAT good, but who freaking cares?

Apparently fans of Breaking Bad care, because they began to review bomb IMDB to drive down the rating for that episode to preserve "Ozymandias", an ep of Breaking Bad, as the top episode of all time. When last night's show came out, Breaking Bad fans mobbed IMDB to drive down the score before the episode had concluded. 

This is all very, very silly, stupid and petty. However, it does demonstrate something about America in 2026. I would posit that the rise of the internet has created this, both by democratizing taste and elevating hostility. Democratizing taste isn't terrible, but we've seen fanbases basically revolt because the story artists are telling wasn't the story they wanted to be told. That isn't the point of storytelling. What happens is a relentless whining about the end of Lost or Game of Thrones or The Sopranos or Seinfeld. It's the dynamic of "Your Favorite Band Sucks, Actually" but amplified across a dozen online platforms.

In the end it sucks the joy out of life. It makes the incessant howling of the self-centered the medium of cultural discourse. What's more, AI is coming to force this everywhere. Didn't like the ending of Game of Thrones? You can burn 5 gigawatts and a rainforest's water supply for AI to make you an ending that suits your taste. It will suck for everyone but you, but congrats, you have made a soulless piece of crap to soothe your raging id.

I love the fact that last night I could quickly find an answer to the question "Should you feed your dog leftover pesto?" (The answer is no.) The internet can be a great facilitator of knowledge - once you know how to use it and once you are aware of its limits. The churn of social media, the imperative of the algorithm that prioritizes "engagement" is absolutely toxic, and it has its roots in the Oughts and the chatrooms. It's now everywhere and it sucks. 

Putin's Own Goal

 We are four years into Putin's invasion of Ukraine that was supposed to be days or weeks to completion. The stoutness and adaptability of Ukrainian defenders has held a much larger army, population and economy at bay. Even as Trump has essentially ended aid to Ukraine, Europe has stepped up. This suggests that the longest impact of Trump's childish and short-sighted foreign policy will be the creation of a stronger, more independent Europe. As long as we eventually return to our liberal democratic roots, that's fine. Europe SHOULD stand up.

From Putin's point of view, a unified Europe is a disaster. He could count on Trump and Xi to more or less tolerate whatever he wanted to do, but Europe - especially Eastern Europe - has no illusions about what this fucker wants to do. What's more, the Ukrainian War has demonstrated that the future of warfare is not how much you can bench press, but your ability to leverage technical know-how and financial resources to create robot armies and air forces. The future of warfare is changing in Ukraine, and the US withdrawal from that conflict means we aren't going to be able to learn as quickly or as deeply as we should.

Meanwhile, Russia seems incapable of learning. They continue to demonstrate a lack of creativity, relying on the idea of brute force and brutalizing their troops. It was long assumed that a "frozen conflict" would disadvantage Ukraine, but the way the war has become a drone war seems to benefit Ukraine, who can use their drones to enforce a frontline that Russia can't exploit with their superior numbers.

The impact of this war on the Russian economy is murky, but it is doubtful that it's good. Russia has gotten around many of the sanctions, but not all - and its economy was no great shakes to begin with. 

It is, of course, sad to realize that a President Harris would have likely given more weapons to Ukraine and allowed them, perhaps, to roll back Russian forces. Maybe there is no victory for Ukraine that returns its stolen land. But there can be no question that this conflict has been a disaster for Russia.

Trump's Own Goal

 In the face of the Supreme Court actually upholding the Constitution, Trump had doubled and now tripled down on his tariffs. As Elliott Morris notes, this is deeply unpopular. Despite the economic illiteracy of the median voter who helped re-elect him, people ARE capable of learning. With tariffs front and central in the news since April, people have learned that tariffs are, in fact, inflationary. If they are unhappy about prices (they are) then tariffs piss them off. By a margin of 19 points, people don't like tariffs. The only issues he polls worse on are government funding and health care and prices/inflation. All of this overlaps.

Defying the Supreme Court - even if technically he's using a different statute - is also unpopular. Even 82% of Republicans say he should obey Supreme Court rulings. SCOTUS offered Trump and off-ramp from his tariffs, which were already unpopular. Instead of taking it, he's attacking the Courts and being a whiny, petulant pissant. Only 23% of Americans disapprove of the striking of those tariffs, which is below the floor I projected for Trump. 

As Krugman relates, Trump is turning the laws on their heads - laws designed to reduce barriers to trade - to justify "shit he wants to do because he's the boss." It is always helpful to remember that Trump spent his whole career running a business with about ten employees, because he was doing shady shit and wanted no obstacles to his actions. He had no Board to answer to. The President is supposed to answer to the other branches and to the American people. Trump's latest tantrum shows he's not learned the basic civics lessons we teach middle schoolers. 

A sane politician - someone who was practiced in winning small bore elections - would retreat. Trump has run in three elections that basically functioned as "beauty pageants" based on vibes and latent misogyny and a poor grasp of the actual stakes by many voters. He responded to his only electoral defeat by trying to overturn democracy in America. He is incapable of understanding that he's lost and will continue to lose on this issue.

Government By Toddler

 Trump has now upped the general tariff rate to 15% from 10% and the maximum that he can without immediate Congressional approval. 

The first round of Liberation Day tariffs were almost immediately exposed as a grift and a strongman tactic. He levied high tariffs, affected companies came to him and bent the knee, contributed to his ballroom, gave him solid gold iPhones. He then relented like a magnanimous potentate. It was corrupt, it was the sort of self-dealing that typifies everything this shallow man does.

When SCOTUS (barely) reaffirmed the Constitutional prerogatives of Congress (even if they are too supine to do it themselves), Trump reacted like the whining petulant pissant that he is at the deepest core of his personality. His rambling press conference would have embarrassed any previous holder of the office of Chief Magistrate.

The reason for reinstalling tariffs at all are...not great. They can accomplish nothing, because they will sunset in 150 days. No one is onshoring a factory because of this tariff.

Instead, it only suggest one of two things. 

The first is that he is deeply committed to tariffs and transferring the tax base from income and capital gains taxes that impact the wealthy. He wants to replace them with an excise tax on imports that will affect the average American far more profoundly than they will affect the rich.

The second is that this is a tantrum. Denied his Big Beautiful Tariffs, he's just going to demand that he get MORE tariffs. Are they unpopular? FUCK YOU, I WANT MY TARIFFS. Frankly, it's the emotional logic of a domestic abuser. "Why did you make me hit you?"

It's like Veruca Salt is president.

Corruption Again

 The unraveling of Liberation Day has been replaced by blanket tariffs. These likely expire in 150 days. There is no justification for them beyond we need the revenue, because we refuse to tax actual wealth. A regressive excise tax on imports brings in some money on the backs of consumers - not the Epstein Class.

Meanwhile, we have another example of the corruption at the heart of everything this administration does. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick "handed over" control of his firm Cantor Fitzgerald to his twenty-something son. Cantor Fitzgerald then went around buying the rights to tariff refunds at pennies on the dollar. 

Basically, Firm A is being squeezed by tariffs, but should - I dunno - the Supreme Court rule those tariffs unconstitutional simply because they are, then firms might get refunds of the money that they paid in illegal tariffs. 

Might.

And that's where Cantor Fitzgerald comes. They will buy Firm A's future refund for money NOW versus the potential refund they might get later. In fact, the SCOTUS' decision to let this play out for months after oral argument probably really helped Cantor buy more potential refunds.

(Cantor denies that they are doing this, but lies don't matter anymore.)

Much of this, by the way, is legal. The degree to which Cantor Fitzgerald might have had access to inside information is unknown. Still, you have Trump's insane presser yesterday talking about how essential tariffs are, and Lutnick was right beside him, potentially raking in millions by betting against them.

SCOTUS Kills The Tariffs

 A transparently easy decision, but still three fucking idiots want to make Trump king.

For the moment, three Republican judges still put fealty to Wall Street over fealty to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Yay?

UPDATE: I do find it grimly hilarious that the two most wretched jurists overly the last century were appointed - not by Trump - but by Bush 41 and Bush 43.

UPDATE II: Krugman makes an astute point: while Trump has now just blasted out a 10% tariff under "Section 122", it's global and expires in 150 days, unless Congress approves it. So, many have noted that this puts Congressional Republicans in a bind right before the midterms.

What Krugman notes is that Trump's entire foreign policy was using these bullshit "emergencies" to declare trade wars unless the other side backed down. It was also how he has been shaking down business leaders, by carving out exemptions for them. All of that is no longer available to him.