Trump has blustered himself into a corner

What happens when you are confronted by an enemy and you fire all the weapons in your arsenal at it but after using up all your ammunition, you still fail to stop it and it keeps coming at you? Your only option then is to run like hell in the opposite direction. This is what Trump is learning.

Trump is finding this out the hard way as we can see from his reversals on tariffs, something that is comical to watch if it were not causing serious gyrations in the world economy. To his ignorant brain, the problem with the US economy was that it was running a global trade deficit in terms of goods. (It is running a global trade surplus in terms of services but since that is not something tangible, he does not seem to care as much about it.) He wants the US to have a global trade surplus on goods and thinks that the way to do that is to hugely raise tariffs on imports, making imports more expensive and thus reducing the local demand. He also wants to raise government revenue so that he can provide a tax cut for the wealthy, the desirability of which has long been an article of faith for Republicans, but which is in stark contradiction to their professed goal of cutting the deficit since their tax cuts would cause the deficits to skyrocket.

One can see how Trump would think that he could solve both problems with one stroke, by massively raising tariffs on imports. This would result in imports getting reduced while also raising revenues for the government, never mind that those two results work against each other since reduced imports would also mean reduced revenues. No doubt he thought that even if imports came down, the extra tariffs would still increase revenues. Of course there is the problem, known to anyone with even the mildest grasp of trade, that tariffs are paid by the importer and passed on to the consumer so any rise in revenues is effectively a tax increase on US consumers. Trump tried to bluff his way out of that by falsely claiming that the exporting countries would be paying the tariffs, something that even he, as ignorant as he is, could not possibly believe but thinks that the rubes will buy it.
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Jesus, not patriotism, has become the last refuge of the scoundrel

Russell Brand is a British media personality who started out as a standup comedian before branching out into other fields. In 2023, an investigation by various British media outlets revealed a pattern of abusive behavior dating back to 2006. The reports resulted in more women coming forward with new allegations of a disgusting nature.

Brand has denied all of the allegations and promoted conspiracy theories regarding them. He has since been charged with multiple counts of rape, oral rape, indecent assault, and sexual assault, and is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on 2 May 2025 for his first hearing. In addition, on 7 April 2025, news outlets reported Brand to be the subject of a civil action case filed in New York state, accusing him of sexual assault whilst intoxicated, during filming of Arthur in 2010.

While he once used to espouse progressive causes, around 2021 or so his views shifted and he became more involved with American rightwing causes. Since the allegations of abuse have become public, he now claims to have found Jesus and was publicly baptized in the river Thames, and now claims that he is a victim of a conspiracy. He has become MAGA-adjacent and of course they have embraced him.
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Supreme Court says Trump must return man illegally sent to El Salvador

I posted three days ago about how Trump faced his first major test before the US Supreme Court about the extent of his powers in a case involving a man who was sent illegally to a prison in El Salvador.

The Supreme Court issued a ruling today that Trump’s action has to be reversed.

The US supreme court upheld on Thursday a judge’s order requiring Donald Trump’s administration to facilitate the return to the United States of a Salvadoran man who the government has acknowledged was deported in error to El Salvador.

US district judge Paula Xinis last week issued an order that the administration “facilitate and effectuate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, in response to a lawsuit filed by the man and his family challenging the legality of his deportation.

The supreme court, in an unsigned decision, said that the judge’s order “properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador”.
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Beware of ‘free’ offers

All of us are inundated with offers of a free trial period for some goods or services. The sellers of those products, from drugs to magazine subscriptions, know that it helps to get people hooked on their product and that there is no better way to get people addicted than to offer it free for a short period.

This also happens at the governmental level and Renee Dudley of ProPublica reports that major companies like Microsoft and Elon Musk’s Starlink are using this tactic in order to get the US government dependent on them so that they cannot escape giving them long-term contracts.

A few weeks ago, my colleague Doris Burke sent me a story from The New York Times that gave us both deja vu.

The piece reported that Starlink, the satellite internet provider operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, had, in the words of Trump administration officials, “donated” internet service to improve wireless connectivity and cell reception at the White House.

The donation puzzled some former officials quoted in the story. But it immediately struck us as the potential Trump-era iteration of a tried-and-true business maneuver we’d spent months reporting on last year. In that investigation, we focused on deals between Microsoft and the Biden administration. At the heart of the arrangements was something that most consumers intuitively understand: “Free” offers usually have a catch.
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The fall in bond prices, not stocks, may have caused Trump to cave on tariffs

Why did Trump, after insisting that the tariffs were here to say and rejecting any pause on their implementation, cave this morning and reverse himself, pausing them for 90 days? This caused the stock markets to shoot up today.

I said in an earlier post that my belief that Trump only cared about the stock market was proven wrong by the huge tariffs he imposed on pretty much every country, since he had to have known that such a move would tank the markets. Of course, it is always possible that he had the absurd idea that since he was imposing tariffs on goods imported to the US, the US stock market would remain stable and even rise while only those of other countries would fall. In a global economy, that would have been unrealistic since stocks tend to rise and fall together but we have to remember that we are dealing with an idiot and anything is possible when it comes to speculating about his thinking.

So why did he impose the tariffs in the first place?
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Who benefits from Trump’s abrupt reversals of policy?

When last Wednesday Trump announced his huge set of tariffs on every country, the stock markets tanked globally on Thursday and Friday. Then on Monday and Tuesday, Trump insisted that the tariffs were here to stay and that there would be no pause in them going into effect but the markets rallied somewhat because, as is often the case after a big sell off, some investors swoop in to buy stocks that they think are now available at bargain prices.

Then today, Trump abruptly announced what he had said he definitely would not do and that is issue a 90-day pause in the implementation of the tariffs, though it was not clear whether it meant all the tariffs or just some, since he also announced that tariffs on China would increase to 125% after they said that they would impose tariffs of 84% on US goods in retaliation to the earlier US tariffs. But despite that ambiguity in exactly what the pause meant, the stock market surged upwards today.

Which raises the obvious question: Who in addition to Trump would have known about these policy actions and reversals? Because whoever knew could make a killing on the stock market.
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Eggflation

One of the curious things is how the price of eggs has become the go-to proxy for the level of inflation in the country. This is due to Trump who during the presidential campaign kept talking about the price of eggs (and bacon) as being extremely high and blaming Joe Biden for it and promising that he would bring prices down on day one of his presidency. Of course, that was rubbish, like pretty much everything he says. Short of imposing direct price controls on specific items, the government has little sway over their prices. Trump has conveniently stopped talking about the price of eggs and indeed of inflation altogether which remains at the levels before he took office. He now says that it may take some time to get inflation down. Well, duh.
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Trump’s ‘act first and fight the courts’ policy faces first major test

[UPDATE: Chief justice John Roberts has lifted the midnight deadline today and asked lawyers to present written arguments by 5:00pm tomorrow (Tuesday).

The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily paused a court-imposed midnight deadline to return to the US a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, agreeing to a request from President Donald Trump that will give the justices more time to consider the case.

Chief Justice John Roberts granted the “administrative stay,” a move that will extend the deadline until the court hands down a more fulsome decision in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was deported on March 15.

]

It is clear that Trump thinks that the president can do anything they want, the laws and norms of democracy be damned. He takes any action that he likes and then fights any challenges vigorously in the courts. He has been sued many times and lost in the lower courts but refuses to reverse the action, instead taking it to the next level of the Appeals Courts. So far, none of these cases have made it to the Supreme Court. The key question is what he will do if even that body, so friendly to him, rules against him.

Today we are going to see what happens in the case of a Kilmar Abrego Garcia who was deported to El Salvador and is being held there in a maximum security prison.

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Trump plays dominance games with the world economy

In discussing Trump’s presidency, I though that one of the few things that he cared about, other than his own business interests, was the stock market. It looks like I was wrong. His imposition of drastic tariffs on pretty much all countries have tanked stock markets worldwide and led to fears of a recession. Even he must have known that this would happen and yet he went ahead anyway, raising the question: Why?

One answer is that he thinks that the tariffs will raise enormous amounts of new revenue, enough to pay for the tax cuts for the rich. Of course, since the costs of the tariffs will be borne by the importers of goods who will pass it on to consumers in the form of higher prices, this is just another typical reverse Robin Hood plan by Republicans, taking from the poor and giving to the rich, a policy much favored by the oligarchy. The higher costs paid by most people will be more than what they will receive in the form of small tax cuts, but that inconvenient fact will be omitted while Trump brags about the tax cuts.

But I have to think that there is more at play here, that the tariffs are really a power play. A clue to what might be going on can be seen in some comments he made.
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Why is RFK Jr going to this funeral?

A second child has died in Texas, reportedly due to measles.

The US health and human services department confirmed the death to NBC late Saturday, though the agency insisted exactly why the child died remained under investigation. On Sunday, the New York Times reported that the eight-year-old girl had died from “measles pulmonary failure” early Thursday at a hospital in Lubbock, Texas, citing records obtained by the outlet.

It marked the second time a child with measles – which is easily preventable through vaccination – had died since 26 February. The first was a six-year-old girl – also hospitalized in Lubbock – whose parents had not had her vaccinated.

NBC and Axios reported that the Trump administration health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, was expected to attend the funeral of the second child, with the service scheduled for Sunday.

If the cause of death is still under investigation by the department of HHS, the department run by antivaxxer RFK Jr. , why is he going to the funeral? To urge people to vaccinate their children? That seems unlikely given his past. What it suggests that he and the HHS know that she did die of measles and that he is trying to shield himself from the fallout of yet another needless death caused by his promotion of anti-vaccine propaganda.

I hope the mourners give him a piece of their mind, though if the parents of the dead child are vaccine deniers, they may not want to acknowledge their complicity in this senseless tragedy. The family belongs to the same Mennonite religious community to which the first child belonged. The parents of the first child stand by their decision not to vaccinate.

There is no convincing people when their beliefs are a combination of religious dogmatism and anti-science ignorance, even when it leads to a horrendous personal tragedy. When that dangerous combination is supported by high government officials like RFK Jr., then we are in real trouble.