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.

Are We About To Go To War With Iran?

 Seems like it. But as Cheryl Rofer notes, it's quite difficult to graft rational decision making onto Trump's governance. I have been struck by how out in the open these military plans are. The movement of massive amounts of airpower to the Middle East has not been subtle. Surprise is not apparently the operative word here.

Maybe he is just trying to bully Iran into some form of concession on...something. It certainly seems like his fundamental demand is that Iran no longer be a sovereign power hostile to the United States. As with so much of Trump's blinkered grasp of the world, he seems mired in the '70s and '80s where Iran is this supreme villain that must be squashed, perhaps by Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone. Iran does have a terrible regime, but as with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, that seems insufficient for embarking on a land war in Asia.

Why?

Is it Epstein Distraction 2,853? Maybe.

I do wonder if Trump is so clearly declining that the creatures around him are basically running wild through the Executive Branch like toddlers jacked up on sugar and, for some reason, Red Bull. That particular cadre of retrograde Republican militarists who just like to explode shit and think it's realpolitik are basically free to do what "common sense foreign policy" says they should do: drop a few million dollars worth of bombs and cruise missiles, which will make the Ayatollah abdicate in fear. I think their inspiration was a Twisted Sister video from 1984.

The Iranian military is mostly a decrepit joke at this point, though they might luck into shooting down an American airplane and that won't be bad at all. A ground invasion? Good lord.

A reminder that Very Savvy Journalists felt that Trump was the "Peace Candidate" in 2016.

UPDATE: Looks like we're effectively at war with Cuba, and I didn't even know it. This has Rubio all over it.

UPDATE II: Given that SCOTUS has just show down his tariff bullshit, I would expect him to channel his rage into missile strikes.

Hunh...

I guess in some places, if the president tries to overthrow democracy, they can toss him in jail. 

I guess in some places, if a well connected insider cavorts with Jeffrey Epstein, they can arrest him.

Well done Britain.

Billionaires Are (Mostly) Sociopaths

 Krugman recaps the rise of the "Centi-Billionaires" who dwarf all human wealth from previous eras. He notes that this era compares unfavorably with the Gilded Age in terms of wealth inequality. That's certainly something. This ties into the Citizens United ruling that unlocked the ability of the super-rich to exerts incredible influence on our elections. Would Trump have won had Musk not bought Twitter and turned it into a Nazi echo chamber? What are we to make of Bezos destroying the Post? The Ellisons destroying CBS?

Krugman notes that this is not solely about making money. The utility of spending all that money is not to make marginal gains. Destroying the Post and CBS is NOT good for their bottom lines. It has to be about the deep howling void in the center of their souls. Compare Bezos or even Gates to their ex-wives, who using their divorce riches to actively work to better the world.

When we look at the depredations of Trump and his cronies, it's not simply about getting more loot. Today, I start teaching authoritarianism in Comparative Government and one of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is (the poorly named) phenomenon of rent seeking. Elites use the government to exploit money and other forms of wealth for their own benefit. The make the government buy jets or house them, like Kristi Noem does. They rake in billions in crypto in return for gutting oversight - creating a potential time bomb in the heart of the economy.

When that happens - when Trump makes the IRS pay him $10 billion to settle a meritless lawsuit - the incentive, in fact the prerogative, is to never give up power. You can afford to leave office, because you will lose access to that money and potentially be prosecuted.

For the billionaires who support Trump, they simply cannot accept democratic control of their fortunes. They are self-identified Uber mensch. The rabble cannot touch them or thwart them. For Trump and his ilk, democratic accountability could lead to a reckoning from his many crimes. 

Can they put this into action and end American democracy? We will know in about seven months.

Yes, Corruption

 Richardson is a far better historian than me, researching and cataloguing events in greater detail. She, too, used her post about yesterday to look at corruption and compare it to the restraint that Washington showed during his presidency. 

Some details:

- Trump has filed a trademark for any airport named after him. Palm Beach Airport is currently in the process of being renamed for him, but he wants Dulles. If that happens, he gets all profits from the merchandise and to license his name. This is basically the bulk of his career before entering politics. Trump is a poor businessman when it comes to  building properties and developing products, but he can slap his name from his tabloid driven celebrity onto any old shit and make a quick buck. 

- The Trump Crime Family has made somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 billion because of his presidency. Much of this comes from crypto-laundered bribes, but it also comes from crap like Trump sneakers, bibles and those stupid fucking hats. Because everything is a lie with this asshole, Trump's mouthpieces like to blabber about how he is only putting hard working Americans' needs above his own. This is bullshit, and, yes, that should be the message for Democrats. Everything else works off of that.

- Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion and sycophantic weasel Scott Bessent will almost certainly cut him a check. If this happens, this has to be the biggest story of the year, even bigger than Minneapolis, and - yes - even bigger than someone's elderly mother being kidnapped. A president who loots the treasury for his own enrichment is so far from any other presidential scandal that we have ever had as to beggar the imagination. Even if - as I predict - he "settles" for $2-3 billion and thus claims he saved billions, this is clear graft. This is a scandal the likes of which are usually reserved for Gilded Age hacks like the Whiskey Ring. Never - and I do mean never - has corruption on this scale reached the Oval Office.

The "Epstein Class" of billionaires is as popular as syphilis right now. Hang that around Trump's neck. Billions for him, no health care for you. Billions for him, no housing for you.

Corruption

 When the Whigs - both American and English - talked about corruption, what they meant was not necessarily outright bribery or quid pro quo relationships, but rather the overall rot at the heart of monarchical politics. I think that's why "corruption" in this archaic sense is really so apt to describe Trump's maladministration. 

When you look at something as facially absurd as actively blocking green energy, you have to balance the supreme idiocy of Cleek's Law (oppose whatever Democrats support) but also the naked financial relationship between hydrocarbon extraction industries and the Republican Party. There is absolutely zero reason to support coal, except to enrich coal mine owners. Solar, wind and battery technology are cheaper and more sustainable, and the lies Trump tells about it are just another example of the rot of corruption in our government.

To be clear, it's not just Trump. If you look at the fall of Marco Rubio or JD Vance from bog standard asshole Republicans to Trumpist creatures actively destroying America's place in the world, you can trace this to Josh Marshall's Authoritarian International. Whether it's the techno-libertarian/post-liberalism of a Peter Thiel or the petrostate autocrats of the Persian Gulf or the cultural revanchists of the post-Soviet world, you are talking about a fundamental corruption and rot at the heart of everything. All of this, by the way, was made possible by the corruption of the Supreme Court and decisions like Rufo and Citizen's United.

Trump is flamboyantly corrupt in so many ways, but when you look at the naked enrichment and entitlement of people like Kristi Noem, it's pretty apparent that Trump is not just the largest practitioner of corruption, but the vessel through which others enrich themselves. 

When a culture becomes corrupt enough, it seems foolish to be honest. 

One of the largest problems Democrats have is trying to focus on one outrage, because Trump commits so many. You can't message against the farrago of horseshit coming from the GOP. As we enter the celebration of our 250 years of independence, we should look to revivify the old Whiggish language of corruption.

It fits to a tee. 

Tariffs

 Krugman has a long, wonky post about why the impact of Trump's tariffs on prices is only about a 1% increase in overall prices. If you want to dig into the weeds of that, be my guest.

Prices rose 2.4% last month (if we believe the government data, which in this case we probably should). Absent tariffs, prices would - presumably - have risen by 1.4%. If I'm right - and I very much might not be - I think that there are two possible impacts of tariffs.

The first is that 2.4% is still on the high side. That makes it unlikely that we will see dramatic interest rate cuts. Inflation is not galloping ahead, but it's not quelled either and people are still upset about prices.

The second is that if prices might hypothetically have only risen by 1.4% without the tariffs, then we might be seeing a slacking in consumer demand. While the economic data are generally positive, consumer sentiment is in the toilet. That might just be the overall unpopularity of Trump. I do believe that people will complain about "the economy" when they are really just unhappy overall. 

The only thing buttressing Trump from hitting the Crazification Factor of 27% approval is that the floor has not fallen out of the economy. My guess is that it was going to happen at some point this year, but maybe it won't. Maybe the US economy is just too resilient to be knocked off course by these corrupt idiots. 

I Hate My Job, I Love My Job

 Working at a small independent school has been my life's work. I am not a perfect teacher or coach, but I care deeply - very deeply - about my student's growth.

Increasingly, though, it has become apparent that I no longer work for a small, community-based institution where we all labor, laugh and struggle together. 

I work for a corporation.

This makes believe in the mission of the school so much harder when I am not longer treated as a respected teacher with the independence to act on my own expertise and experience. As if things couldn't get any worse, yesterday we had a consultant firm come in and tell us that we will be instituting a radical new schedule next year. As he himself admitted, this will be very disruptive and we will struggle for at least one year, more likely two, to adapt to this new schedule.

The time we have with our students is precious and all most of us really want is the tools to teach them as well as we can. The Covid year of 2020-21 was so hard not simply because it was hard, but because we couldn't teach well. We knew we weren't teaching well, and it was soul crushing. Now, we are going to voluntarily teach poorly for a year or two to institute a new schedule that the consultant firm basically implements wherever they go. There really is no solid evidence that it's better, but they get paid to "disrupt" the "paradigm."

My wife and I are a few years from being able to retire. I would have liked to make it to 30 years here, but if I had the money, I would retire now. To paraphrase a political expression: I didn't leave the school, the school left me.

The Damage Done

 The sheer amount of damage that Trump and Republicans are doing to the world is tough to keep track of. Certainly, millions of people - many of them children - are going to die because they killed USAID. Other outrages - putting his name on the Kennedy Center - are easily fixed. Reversing his budgets are done in 2029 (presuming we still have a democracy by then). He is increasingly toxic, and as Minnesota demonstrated, when the people stand against him, he loses.

There are two areas that were especially galling yesterday. 

Trump basically went all in in dragging the power grid back to 1947. By repealing every single piece of constraint on emitting greenhouse gases, he is paving the way for massive amounts of pollution. The question, though, is really whether companies will actively move backwards on this. Yes, the massive open coal pits of Wyoming will continue to feed the data centers being built there. However, some tech companies are more eager to build small scale nuclear plants, because they have to know that once Trump is gone, coal will no longer be viable. It's not viable now, due to cost, not "woke."

Why is he doing this? To pwn the libs? In return for payoffs from hydrocarbon companies? However, if you're Ford or GM, do you really want to fall behind the rest of the world as they spring towards more hybrids and EVs? 

We also have the baffling (but not baffling) decision to simply not review the efficacy of mRNA flu vaccines. This is RFK, Jr's war on vaccines that everyone with half a brain saw coming. The US already takes longer than Europe to approve new drugs and treatments. Now, we have a really promising new form of vaccine and it's being killed to placate the roughly 20% of Americans who are skeptical of vaccines, a 20% that resides overwhelmingly now in the Republican Party.

Europe will no doubt plow ahead with medical advances, but the US is ceding that ground and it has been the US that has usually been at the forefront of medical breakthroughs, which is really the only possible defense for our expensive health care system. Our medical care costs too much in order to fund medical research and treatments. Now, we are destroying that, too. 

All of this is just an inconceivably stupid catering to unbelievably stupid people. 

Providing Democrats win in November, businesses will have to evaluate what the end of Trump and Trumpism might mean for them. I can't imagine the executive that will greenlight a coal burning power plant, knowing that it will never be profitable and won't even come online before Trump is out of office. Hopefully, medical research will simply relocate overseas so that science can progress during our sojourn in the America where race science is more popular with the government than actual science. 

So much awfulness everywhere you look. 

Global Oligarchy

 Josh Marshall has been running a series of posts on what he's calling the global oligarchy or the Authoritarian International. Here and here. 

Normally, I would dismiss this as somewhat conspiratorial, but at the same time, I do think he's on to something. He ties it, interestingly, to the various petrostates of the Middle East rather than Russia, though Russia is also emblematic of its politics. Basically, the new Axis of Evil is the oil states of the Gulf, Silicon Valley anti-democrats and hedge fund billionaires. 

The basic thread holding them together is the desire to escape democratic accountability, which is at the heart of democracy: the powerful must answer to the people. 

There have been a host of articles this week about the coming apocalypse in white collar jobs from AI. Some of these are coming from people working in AI who are seeing how efficient and fast it is becoming, especially at coding. There is a school of thought that this is all hype to elevate their stock price, but if it's even a little true, I think we need to see AI as part of this Authoritarian International (yes, also AI). The purpose of AI might be to change the world, but the practical impact will be to divorce knowledge skills from scarcity and therefore disempower the broad swath of middle and upper middle class workers. 

If you own a company, why not employ an AI bot rather than three humans? Why not maximize your profits this way? Why answer to the bothersome people that work for you, when you can have a compliant digital workforce? 

Democracies will, at some point, have to address AI and its potential deprivation of livelihoods among important constituencies. If you can destroy democracy, you can prevent that from happening. 

Bondi Beeyotch

 Pam Bondi's performance yesterday was...woof. Performance is the right word for it, as it was calculated to appeal to the gelatinous rage mass in the Oval Office and him alone. It was more than "combative", it was unhinged.

Kevin Kruse put it best:

So, to wrap up today's insanity: President Trump, who is deeply implicated in a pedophilia scandal involving his best friend, the sex trafficker, sent Attorney General Bondi -- who only has that job because Trump's first choice was also implicated in a separate pedophilia scandal -- to the House to stonewall releasing the full files about the president's pedophile friend, relying there on the friendly support of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, who was himself implicated in the coverup of a *third* sexual abuse scandal at a college.

And as others noted, Bondi also helped cover up Epstein's crimes as Florida AG!

Corruption

 Yglesias looks at the kind of bizarre way that Americans look at public corruption. The whole thing is bizarre, as it usually is when you ask Americans about policies and specifics. For instance, 86% of respondents say that public officials who take cash in return for votes is corrupt. That means 14% are either unsure or think that's not corrupt.

Anyway.

Some of the things that people think are corrupt really aren't. If you get speaking fees for a group that has any political agenda (which is most groups), 62% think that's corruption. If a politician votes with "social elites" over constituents, 78% think that's corruption. In other words, if a politician votes for climate legislation that his constituents disagree with, then - rather than being just a policy disagreement - respondents see that as corruption.

All of this is to say, that this is why Donald Trump's unprecedented corruption seems to sail under the radar. Sure, there are things like his demolition of the East Wing that have landed in public opinion, but overall, people seem inured to Trump's really unprecedented corruption. Yglesias says it's the most corrupt in decades, but I think it has to be considered the most corrupt of all time. Certainly no president has engaged in such naked corruption. Grant and Harding had men around them who were corrupt, but they engaged in very little themselves. Trump is engaging in the outright sale of his office.

Because Americans think "all politicians are corrupt" - and they think that because they define corruption so loosely - then Trump is able to get away with unprecedented corruption because "they all do it."

We see this in the fact that Trump basically won in 2024 by carrying low-information voters. This tends to show up in the fact that they just weren't aware of things like "tariffs lead to higher prices" or "deportations won't increase jobs." It also shows up in things like being surprised that Trump would pursue vendettas against his enemies - something he admitted to on the campaign trail. Low information voters tend to blame the president for higher prices, even if - like Biden - it's not particularly his fault. They are less upset with inflation than with nominal prices. Because prices aren't coming down (which would actually be bad), they think it's corruption. In this case, it's incompetence and malevolence. 

Morris gives us this graph:

Trump won in 2024 in large part because ~one-quarter of the electorate wasn’t paying enough attention to his promises to know much about what he’d do as president. Now that they are seeing the results — especially on prices — they are just as anti-Trump as voters who spend all day consuming political news.

The corruption thing is part and parcel of the striking ignorance of the American voter.  Evidence seems unimportant, because evidence cannot contradict certain dearly held positions, and we are cooked because of it.