Freakier Friday

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. His tariffs are hurting the economy.  Predictable and predicted.  Scandals and erratic behavior also continue.

Brian Evans and Pia Singh at CNBC:

The July jobs report showed nonfarm payrolls expanded by 73,000 last month, well beneath the consensus estimate from economists polled by Dow Jones that called for a 100,000 increase to payrolls. Prior months were significantly revised down. June job growth totaled just 14,000, down from 147,000. The May count came down to 19,000 from 125,000, signaling the labor market has been weakening for a while now.
...

Not helping sentiment overnight were Trump’s updated duties ranging from 10% to 41% overnight at the Aug. 1 deadline. Goods that have been transshipped in a bid to avoid the tariffs will face another 40% levy, according to the White House.

Probably most shocking to markets was that for Canada, one of the U.S.′ biggest trading partners, goods imported into the country will now have a 35% levy, up from 25%.

Trump spent every day for 4 years saying that Biden was about to start World War 3 and if he got elected he would end the war in Ukraine and we would have peace with Russia because he has a great relationship with Putin. Here is today’s update on all that. pic.twitter.com/YDCUCgWPpK

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 1, 2025

Ghislaine Maxwell quietly moved to cushy new Texas prison as she pushes for deal to tell-all on Epstein, his associates https://t.co/ldvrFhSVTM pic.twitter.com/W4xceQKtPA

— New York Post (@nypost) August 1, 2025

The Community Note. pic.twitter.com/11B3zQOPLz

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 1, 2025

Kryptonite for Tariff Man

 Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.

Ben Berkowitz, Courtenay Brown at Axios:

A three-judge panel of the Court of International Trade — Reagan, Obama and Trump appointees — ruled that Trump does not have the authority to impose sweeping tariffs under 1970s-era emergency legislation.In fact, the judges said an injunction wasn't enough — they issued a summary judgment invalidating and blocking almost all of Trump's trade levies to date.

Those levies were vast, from a 10% global baseline tariff, to fentanyl-related tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico, to (paused) reciprocal tariffs on dozens of other countries.

They effectively raised U.S. tariff rates to their highest levels since the 1930s, and threatened to cost American households thousands of dollars in higher goods costs.

The big picture: Tens of thousands of containers full of goods enter the United States every day.Whether or even what levies to assess on their contents today, versus yesterday, is a mess that could snarl commerce across the country for days to come.

Follow the money: The levies, while causing huge economic strain, were also generating significant revenue for the government — almost $23 billion so far this month.They were meant to be a cornerstone of the administration's fiscal plans — trade adviser Peter Navarro wrote in an op-ed Wednesday that tariffs would generate up to $3.3 trillion in revenue over the next decade.

Not all the income will disappear, though; tariffs imposed under a different legal authority called Section 232 — including on imports of autos, steel and aluminum — are unaffected by the ruling.

What they're saying: "This really *is* Liberation Day: The court's decision striking down Trump's mass tariffs as unlawful is a tremendous triumph for the rule of law, human freedom, and prosperity, and a deserved rebuke for arbitrary one-man rule over our livelihoods," Walter Olsen, senior fellow at the Cato Institute's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, said of the ruling.

One Big Beautiful Bill Act and Liberation Day, Continued

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.  His reconciliation bill will blow up the debt and his trade policies will blow up the economy.

 The Joint Committee on Taxation looks at "The One Big Beautiful Bill Act."

The Joint Committee staff estimates that enacting these provisions would increase the 
average annual growth rate of real Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”) by 0.03 percentage points, from 1.83 percent in the present-law baseline to 1.86 percent, over the 2025-2034 budget window. The Joint Committee staff estimates that the macroeconomic effects due to this proposal would increase Federal revenues by about $103 billion. Relative to the conventional revenue effect of about -$3,819 billion, the Joint Committee staff estimates that the proposal would have a total revenue effect of about -$3,716 billion over the budget window.

The Joint Committee staff also estimates that after the budget window, cumulative  increases in Federal deficits under the proposal will continue to increase Federal debt as a
percentage of GDP relative to the present-law baseline. While the Joint Committee staff
estimates that labor supply will continue to be higher than projected in the baseline, the growth in Federal debt will increasingly crowd out private investment, reducing the capital stock relative to the baseline. The long-run effect on real GDP remains positive at first—primarily over the second decade following enactment—driven by labor supply effects. However, by the third decade, the crowding-out effect dominates, and real GDP falls below baseline projections. As a result, the budgetary feedback from the macroeconomic effects of the proposal diminishes over time.

From CBO:

Tony Romm and Colby Smith at NYT:

One day after House Republicans approved an expensive package of tax cuts that rattled financial markets, President Trump pivoted back to his other signature policy priority, unveiling a battery of tariff threats that further spooked investors and raised the prospects of higher prices on American consumers.

For a president who has fashioned himself as a shrewd steward of the economy, the decision to escalate his global trade war on Friday appeared curious and costly. It capped off a week that saw Mr. Trump ignore repeated warnings that his agenda could worsen the nation’s debt, harm many of his own voters, hurt the finances of low-income families and contribute far less in growth than the White House contends.

The tepid market response to the president’s economic policy approach did little to sway Mr. Trump, who chose on Friday to revive the uncertainty that has kept businesses and consumers on edge. The president threatened 50 percent tariffs on the European Union, and a 25 percent tariff on Apple. Other tech companies, he said, could face the same rate.

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has raced to enact his economic vision, aiming to pair generous tax cuts with sweeping deregulation that he says will expand America’s economy. He has fashioned his steep, worldwide tariffs as a political cudgel that will raise money, encourage more domestic manufacturing and improve U.S. trade relationships.


But for many of his signature policies to succeed, Mr. Trump will have to prove investors wrong, particularly those who lend money to the government by buying its debt.

So far, bond markets are not buying his approach. Where Mr. Trump sees a “golden age" of growth, investors see an agenda that comes with more debt, higher borrowing costs, inflation and an economic slowdown. Investors who once viewed government debt as a relatively risk-free investment are now demanding that the United States pay much more to those who lend America money.

That is on top of businesses, including Walmart, that say they may have to raise prices as a result of the president’s global trade war. The onslaught of policy changes has also left the Federal Reserve frozen in place, unsure as to when the economy will call for lower interest rates in the face of persistent uncertainty. As a result, borrowing costs for mortgages, car loans and credit cards remain onerous for Americans.

One Hundred Days of Chaos

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. 

Lloyd Green at The Guardian:

In nearly 100 days on the job, Donald Trump has outlasted Liz Truss and a fabled head of lettuce. That’s a fact, not an achievement. Like the hapless British prime minister, the 47th president blazes a trail of wreckage. Chaos is his calling card. If, when and how the carnage ends is anyone’s guess.

The US simultaneously wages economic war on its allies and China. Tariffs soar. It’s as if Trump forgot the words “Smoot-Hawley” and “Great Depression”. The president risks higher inflation and a recession for an idealized yesteryear that never quite was. Back on Earth, markets signal potential capital flight and stagflation.

Ben Kamisar and Bridget Bowman at NBC:

There’s a clear trend when it comes to Trump’s approval rating around the 100-day mark: It’s slightly higher than in his first term (in most polling), but it has fallen compared with ratings in recent months, and he’s below where previous presidents were at a similar point after having taken office.

Among adults polled for the new NBC News Stay Tuned Poll powered by SurveyMonkey, 45% approve of Trump’s job performance, compared with 55% who disapprove. The online survey of 19,682 adults was conducted April 11-20 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.2 percentage points.

...

Other recent polls conducted in April, of both adults and registered voters, find Trump at similar levels of approval. (Margins of error on those surveys range from plus or minus 2 to 4 percentage points.) This month’s CNBC All-America Economic Survey (conducted April 9-13 with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points) found his approval at 44% and his disapproval at 51% among American adults, Fox News found him at 44% approval among registered voters and 55% disapproval, and Gallup’s most recent survey of adults this month has him with a 44% approval rating and a 53% disapproval rating.

Trump’s lowest mark in recent polls comes from an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos survey released Sunday, which found him at 39% approval and 55% disapproval among adults last week. And his highest mark of the month came from CBS News/YouGov, which still had him in negative territory, with his approval rating at 47% and his disapproval at 53%. A CBS News/YouGov survey released Sunday had Trump’s approval rating at 45% and his disapproval at 55%.

...

A New York Times/Siena College poll released Friday found that half of registered voters said they felt Trump had made the economy worse since he took office, 27% said the economy was about the same, and 21% said he had made it better.

Why Trump Backed Down

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Mike Allen at Axios:

President Trump's boosters hailed his decision to pause tariff increases for countries around the world as a strategic masterstroke, Axios' Marc Caputo reports. But few are buying the spin. Trump buckled under tremendous, mounting-by-the-minute pressure from CEOs ... friends ... GOP senators ... the markets ... and bond prices. Trump himself admits he blinked when "people were getting a little queasy" about the bond market.

Why it matters: Inside the White House, the episode highlighted the competing views and roles of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick as they animated Trump's risky game with trade.

Inside the room: Both men were advising Trump in the Oval Office when he decided to post a message on Truth Social announcing the tariff pause for 90 days while the administration negotiated with as many as 75 countries.The stunning move, which rallied cratering markets globally, was based on three factors, according to three sources familiar with the meeting:Panic: The real credit, "Trump's advisers admit privately, should go to the bond markets," the N.Y. Times reports. "Trump's decision was driven by fear that his tariffs gamble could quickly turn into a financial crisis. And unlike the two previous crashes of the past 20 years — the global financial crisis of 2008 and the pandemic of 2020 — this crisis would have been directly attributable to only one man."

Michael Birnbaum, Natalie Allison, Cat Zakrzewski and Theodoric Meyer at WP:

[From] Tuesday evening to Wednesday afternoon, Trump and his trade advisers spoke to several Republican lawmakers and top foreign leaders who raised concerns about the faltering global markets and the growing concerns of a worldwide recession, urging him to do something.

By late Wednesday afternoon, Trump was saying he had been thinking about switching course “over the last few days.”

The final decision, he said, “probably came together early this morning, fairly early this morning. Just wrote it up. We didn’t have the use of, we didn’t have access to lawyers,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “We wrote it up from our hearts.”

“But this was something certainly we’ve been talking about for a period of time, and we decided to pull the trigger, and we did it today, and we’re happy about it,” he added.

Late Tuesday night — after Sean Hannity’s 9 p.m. show ended on Fox News — Trump had an extensive, roughly hour-long phone call with a group of Republican senators who had appeared on the episode, according to three people with knowledge of the conversation. Some of the senators had expressed concern about the tariffs. That evening, Trump was also watching bond markets, “where people were getting a little queasy,” he said Wednesday.

Before the end of the last commercial break during the Hannity interview, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana) asked the host for “15 seconds to speak directly to the president” on tariffs, Kennedy told The Washington Post, because Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) had told Kennedy that Trump would be watching the show. Kennedy and Graham were among those in the group interview with Hannity, along with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota), and Republican Sens. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Katie Boyd Britt of Alabama, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Ted Cruz of Texas and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma. Some of the senators expressed a desire for Trump to negotiate with other countries coming to the table on tariffs, and several of them spoke to the president after the show ended.

Unforced Errors

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic:

Trump would not be the first president to encounter economic turbulence. But he might become the first one to kill off a healthy economy through an almost universally foreseeable unforced error. The best explanation for why Trump is intent on imposing tariffs is that he genuinely believes they are a source of free money supplied by residents of foreign countries, and nobody can tell him otherwise. (Tariffs are taxes on imports, which economists agree are paid mostly by domestic consumers in the form of higher prices.).

Aaron Blake at WP:

The big storyline coming out of Tuesday’s elections was that Elon Musk’s decision to insert himself into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race looks like a massive unforced error. Republicans not only lost the race by 10 points, but they actually did better in the race that Musk didn’t play or spend heavily in: state schools superintendent.

Musk spent political capital that’s already in short supply for him, and it turned out to be counterproductive, if anything.

This has led to all kinds of speculation about what happens to Musk from here. Politico has even reported that President Donald Trump told his Cabinet that Musk will soon depart his high-profile role, with the White House offering something of a non-denial denial.

But whatever happens next, the writing has been on the wall for some time that the Elon Musk experiment is failing politically. Tuesday’s elections just made it so Republicans could no longer ignore what was in front of their faces.

The Trump Slump

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. His irrational trade policies are crashing the stock market.

Aaron Blake at WP:

A new CNN poll released Wednesday is the latest survey to suggest that Trump’s chaotic presidency — most notably his government cuts and his unpredictable tariffs gambit — has squandered whatever goodwill and mandate he walked into office with.

The top line is that Trump’s approval on the economy is worse than it’s ever been. Americans disapprove of his handling of it by 56 percent to 44 percent. CNN’s polling through Trump’s two terms had never before found a majority disapproving of Trump on the economy.

The network’s new survey is the second poll this month, along with one from Reuters-Ipsos, to show Trump hitting a new low on the economy, which was his most consistently positive major issue during his first term.

The CNN poll also suggests there’s one main culprit: his tariffs. Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of them by an even wider margin, 61-39.

Why Stock Market Crashes Are Politically Relevant

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.  His irrational trade policies are crashing the stock market.

Gallup, May 24, 2023:

Gallup finds 61% of Americans reporting that they own stock, based on its April Economy and Personal Finance survey. This is up from the 56% measured in 2021 and 55% measured in 2020, and is the highest it has been since 2008.

Stock ownership averaged 62% between 2001 and 2008 -- but it fell after the 2007-2009 recession and remained at a reduced level until this year.

 

The Trump Crash?

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Sam Goldfarb at WSJ:

Wall Street is having another growth scare.

Investors entered 2025 optimistic that an already strong U.S. economy could get an extra boost from an administration pushing market-friendly tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. Instead, trade tensions and signs of slowing growth have driven major indexes lower in recent weeks.

The declines accelerated this week as Trump imposed 25% tariffs on the U.S.’s major trading partners—forcing investors to rethink how serious he is about pursuing a broadly protectionist agenda.

Losses have been particularly acute in sectors that investors view as sensitive to a slowdown, such as banks and smaller companies. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite has fallen 7.5% since mid-February. Oil prices have slipped. Havens including gold and U.S. Treasurys, meanwhile, have rallied.

“I think a lot of people were just assuming that tariffs was just a bluff, and now there’s more uncertainty around that,” said Keith Lerner, co-chief investment officer at Truist Advisory Services.

The moves show investors struggling to gauge if the conditions underpinning two straight years of near-25% stock gains have deteriorated significantly. While few analysts thought stocks could do quite that well this year, most still thought that they could keep marching higher.

 

Trump Blinks, Xi Doesn't

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

CNN:

 

Beijing announced a broad package of economic measures targeting the United States on Tuesday, hitting back after US President Donald Trump imposed 10% tariffs on Chinese imports.

The fresh duties, announced by China’s Ministry of Finance, levy a 15% tax on certain types of coal and liquefied natural gas and a 10% tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery, large-displacement cars and pickup trucks. The measures take effect on February 10.

The Ministry of Commerce and China’s customs administration also announced new export controls effective immediately on more than two dozen metal products and related technologies. Those include tungsten, a critical mineral typically used in industrial and defense applications, as well as tellurium, which can be used to make solar cells.

Trump paused tariffs against Canada and Mexico.  WSJ is unimpressed:

But there’s much less to this tariff truce than meets the eye. Mr. Trump won an announcement of help at the border, though what the Mexican troops will actually do to fight the cartels trafficking drugs isn’t clear. Drug enforcement is a hardy perennial in U.S.-Mexican relations, and Mexico has promised help before, notably during the presidencies of Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto.

As for immigration, Ms. Sheinbaum has already essentially agreed to cooperate on restoring the Remain in Mexico policy for migrants who reach the Mexico-U.S. border. Illegal border crossings have also been falling fast as Mr. Trump has sent a signal that illegal migrants won’t be allowed to stay in the U.S.

Later Monday, Mr. Trump paused his tariffs against Canada as well after a phone call with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Canada is also deploying more law enforcement to the U.S. border and will appoint a “Fentanyl Czar,” among other enforcement promises.

If the North American leaders need to cheer about a minor deal so they all claim victory, that’s better for everyone. The need is especially important for Mr. Trump given how much he has boasted that his tariffs are a fool-proof diplomatic weapon against friend or foe. Mr. Trump can’t afford to look like the guy who lost. Ms. Sheinbaum in particular seems to recognize this, and so far she’s playing her Trump cards with skill.

Trump succeeds in getting Canada to appoint a Fentanyl Czar. As students of the War on Drugs will know, once you name a Czar to tackle illegal drugs, the black markets just disappear, as if by magic. The U.S. named our first drug Czar in 1930 and ever since we've had no illegal… https://t.co/2kG3b36LVo

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) February 4, 2025

Retaliation

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. Trump's tariffs are taking effect -- with predictable results.

Mickey Djuric at POLITICO.

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs will target Republican states and Donald Trump allies.

“Canadians understand that we need to respond to this,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Saturday night. “We need to respond in a way that is appropriate, that is measured but forceful, that meets the moment.”

There are 1,256 items in the first tranche of tariffs that will come into force on Tuesday.

The list includes oranges and fruit from Florida, home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort; household appliances from South Carolina and Ohio, states to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Vice President J.D. Vance; and motorcycles and coffee from southern Pennsylvania, which helped return Trump to the White House.

The full list, which you can read here, contains food and agriculture products, textiles and furniture.

Energy and tech products were not included in the first round of tariffs. A second list will be published in the coming days.

Government officials also said Ottawa is not ruling out other retaliatory measures such as targeting Elon Musk’s companies, or slapping export taxes on Canadian oil.

Tariff Time

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

There's no connection between tariffs and illegal drugs/immigration in real life.

The connection is that Trump's Day 1 emergency declarations on those two subjects unlock powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which he is using as a fig leaf to do tariffs.

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) February 2, 2025

David Lawder at Reuters:

President Donald Trump has pushed into new trade law territory with an emergency sanctions law to justify punishing 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports and an extra 10% duty on Chinese goods to curb fentanyl and illegal immigration into the U.S.

Trade and legal experts said the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) is untested for imposing import tariffs and Trump's action will likely face swift court challenges that could set important precedents.

As widely expected, Trump declared a national emergency under IEEPA on Saturday, citing the "extraordinary threat" from fentanyl and illegal immigration. The law gives the president broad powers to impose economic and financial sanctions in times of crisis, including against Russia over its war in Ukraine.

IEEPA gave Trump, in his second week of his second term in the White House, the fastest path to imposing tariffs, as trade laws he used in his first four years for duties on steel, aluminum and Chinese goods would have required months-long investigations and public consultations.

If a president wanted to foment anti-Americanism among our Canadian neighbors, he could scarcely do better than this post: 

Trump's Week Two

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Adam Goldman, Devlin Barrett, and Glenn Thrush at NYT:

The Trump administration plans to scrutinize thousands of F.B.I. agents involved in Jan. 6 investigations, setting the stage for a possible purge that goes far beyond the bureau’s leaders to target rank-and-file agents, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter.

The proposal came on a day that more than a dozen prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington who had worked on cases involving the Jan. 6 riot were told that they were being terminated.

The moves were a powerful indication that Mr. Trump has few qualms deploying the colossal might of federal law enforcement to punish perceived political enemies, even as his cabinet nominees offered sober assurances they would abide by the rule of law. Forcing out both agents and prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases would amount to a wide-scale assault on the Justice Department.

On Friday, interim leaders at the department instructed the F.B.I. to notify more than a half-dozen high-ranking career officials that they faced termination, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The New York Times

Gavin Bade et al. at WSJ:

The U.S. will impose tariffs on computer chips, pharmaceuticals, steel, aluminum, copper, oil and gas imports as soon as mid-February, President Trump said Friday, opening a new front in his looming second-term trade wars.

“That’ll happen fairly soon,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, adding that he also wants to hike tariffs on the European Union, which has “treated us so horribly,” though he didn’t specify when or how high the duties would be. A representative for the European Union didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The announcement for those sector-based and EU tariffs appeared separate from the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and 10% tariffs on China, which he had said would be implemented Saturday.

The duties previewed by Trump would come on top of existing tariffs on those products, he said, waving away any concern about the levies increasing inflation or snarling global supply chains.

Zack Stanton at Politico Playbook:

Week one: Trump toured wildfire damage in California and visited burned-out homes. It was presidential.

Week two: Asked by reporters whether he would visit the collision site where 67 people died on the Potomac River, Trump responded: “What’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”

Week one: Trump literally embraced California Gov. Gavin Newsom, his longtime political foe, and, as Christopher Cadelago and Melanie Mason wrote, “refrained from his sharp-edged digs and instead pledged to help lead in the recovery effort.”

Week two: Trump foisted blame for the DCA crash onto Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (“He’s just got a good line of bullshit,” Trump said at his presser) and DEI policies.

Put succinctly: “In the wake of this week’s midair collision near Washington, Mr. Trump was more than happy to jump to conclusions and pull the country apart rather than together,” NYT’s Peter Baker writes this morning.

A quick reality check: The initial FAA report says that air traffic control staffing responsibilities at Reagan were “not normal” and that one person was doing two jobs, NYT’s Sydney Ember and Emily Steel report. … ABC News notes there isn’t any affirmative action in the hiring of air traffic controllers. … The disability hiring policies that Trump criticized were actually maintained and used by his own first administration, WaPo’s Glenn Kessler writes. … The executive action Trump signed yesterday to unwind diversity programs at the Department of Transportation and the FAA came even though, as Bloomberg’s Akayla Gardner reports, there is “no evidence that diversity initiatives led to the crash, nor is there evidence that such practices result in poor operational outcomes.”

It wasn’t just his handling of the tragedy at DCA that marked the change. The other big story this week, Trump-wise, was the brouhaha over the now-blocked federal spending freeze. It lacked White House vetting. It galvanized Democratic opposition. It caused the Trump administration to walk it back — and then walk back the walkback. It amounts to a quick shift for the White House “from inaugural euphoria to the realities of governing,” WSJ’s Natalie Andrews and Meridith McGraw write this morning

Dishonest Inaugural

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

Glenn Kessler fact-checks Trump's inaugural address.  Two examples:

“The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices.”

Trump is leaving out the biggest factor for the 9 percent inflation in June 2022, the highest level in 40 years: the covid pandemic.

Inflation initially spiked because of pandemic-related shocks — increased consumer demand as the pandemic eased and an inability to meet this demand because of supply chain problems, as companies reduced production when consumers hunkered down during the pandemic. Indeed, inflation rose around the world — with many peer countries doing worse than the United States — because of pandemic-related shocks that rippled across the globe. Inflation in December was 2.9 percent.

...

“Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”

Trump is flat wrong to claim that tariffs are paid by a foreign country. Economists agree that tariffs — essentially a tax on domestic consumption — are paid by importers, such as U.S. companies, which in turn pass on most or all of the costs to consumers or producers who may use imported materials in their products. As a matter of demand and supply elasticities, overseas producers will pay part of the tax if there are fewer goods sold to the United States. Domestic producers in effect get a subsidy because they can raise their prices to the level imposed on importers. There is little debate over the fact that consumer prices will rise in response to tariffs.

The International Decline of the Progressive Left

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.   Our next book continues the analysis into 2024.

 

Bertrand Benoit, David Luhnow and Vipal Monga at WSJ:

This past year showed that the progressive politics that dominated most industrialized countries over the past two decades or more is shifting to the right, fueled by working-class anxieties over the economy and immigration, and growing fatigue with issues from climate change to identity politics.

The return of Donald Trump to the White House is the most dramatic and important example—but it is far from the only one.

Across Europe, where economic growth has largely stalled, conservatives and populist right-wing parties are making unprecedented gains. Three-quarters of governments in the European Union are either led by a right-of-center party or are ruled by a coalition that includes at least one.

The shift is set to continue. Canada appears poised to kick out a deeply unpopular progressive prime minister and Germany is expected to dump its center-left government. Polls show the top two parties in Germany represent the center-right and the far-right.

...

In country after country, many working-class voters—especially those outside the biggest cities—are signaling the same thing: They mistrust the establishment—from academics to bankers to traditional politicians—and feel these elites are out of touch and don’t care about people like them.

Years of increased migration and trade, coupled with low economic growth, have led to a backlash and a rise in nationalism, where people want more of a sense of control, political analysts say. The rise of social media has exacerbated divisions and led to an upsurge in antiestablishment parties.

“It’s a broad shift that goes across countries,” said Ruy Teixeira, a lifelong Democrat who now works for the center-right American Enterprise Institute think tank. “Working-class people are just pissed off—about immigration, about all the culture war stuff, and the relatively poor economic performance that has shaped the working-class experience in the 21st century.”

Post-Election 2024: What's a President-Elect to Do?

The General Services Administration Runs the Transition:

• GSA continues to provide office space and support services to the President-elect and Vice President-elect, with support continuing up to 60 days after inauguration
• A classified summary regarding national security is given to the president-elect as soon as possible after the election
• Training and orientation activities commence for prospective presidential appointees (typically funded by Congress for the fiscal year in which the transition falls)
• 30 days before the expiration of the term, GSA begins support to outgoing president and vice president, with support continuing for seven months total.

Personnel:

• The Plum Book
• RFK
• Project 2025 database
• "You won't work in this town again."
• Schedule F

Policy: Unilateral Power

• Tariffs
• Deportation
• Pardons
• Prosecutions
• Ukraine
• NATO

Policy: Congressional Action

Trump Interview and a NATO Kicker

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  The 2024 race has begun.  Biden is calling Trump a threat to democracy.

 Former President Donald Trump sat down for a wide-ranging interview with TIME at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., on April 12, and a follow-up conversation by phone on April 27.

You would use the military inland as well as at the border?

Trump: I don't think I'd have to do that. I think the National Guard would be able to do that. If they weren't able to, then I’d use the military. You know, we have a different situation. We have millions of people now that we didn't have two years ago.

Sir, the Posse Comitatus Act says that you can't deploy the U.S. military against civilians. Would you override that?

Trump: Well, these aren’t civilians. These are people that aren't legally in our country. This is an invasion of our country. An invasion like probably no country has ever seen before. They're coming in by the millions. I believe we have 15 million now. And I think you'll have 20 million by the time this ends. And that's bigger than almost every state.

...

Let’s shift to the economy, sir. You have floated a 10% tariff on all imports, and a more than 60% tariff on Chinese imports. Can I just ask you now: Is that your plan?

Trump: It may be more than that. It may be a derivative of that. A derivative of that. But it will be somebody—look when they come in and they steal our jobs, and they steal our wealth, they steal our country.

When you say more than that, though: You mean maybe more than 10% on all imports?

Trump: More than 10%, yeah. I call it a ring around the country. We have a ring around the country.

...

Mr. President, in our last conversation you said you weren't worried about political violence in connection with the November election. You said, “I think we're going to win and there won't be violence.” What if you don't win, sir?

Trump: Well, I do think we're gonna win. We're way ahead. I don't think they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time, which were horrible. Absolutely horrible. So many, so many different things they did, which were in total violation of what was supposed to be happening. And you know that and everybody knows that. We can recite them, go down a list that would be an arm’s long. But I don't think we're going to have that. I think we're going to win. And if we don't win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election. I don't believe they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time. I don't think they'll be able to get away with it. And if that's the case, we're gonna win in record-setting fashion.

Trump claims that when he was president, he told the leader of a NATO ally that he wouldn't defend them from Russia unless they "paid up." In other words, he encouraged Russian aggression. pic.twitter.com/wgDFQoPxgq

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 1, 2024

Trump Rhetoric

 Our books have discussed Trump's low character, which was on display yesterday in Ohio.  Marisa Iati at WP:

Former president Donald Trump ratcheted up his dehumanizing rhetoric against immigrants Saturday by saying that some who are accused of crimes are “not people.”

“I don’t know if you call them people,” he said at a rally near Dayton, Ohio. “In some cases they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.”

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, was in Ohio to stump for Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, who is in a tight three-way race for the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. Moreno, a businessman, is facing Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state Sen. Matt Dolan in Tuesday’s primary.

...
Later in the rally, Trump warned it will be a “bloodbath for the country” if he is not elected. The comment came as he was promising to hike tariffs on foreign-made cars, and it was not clear exactly what Trump was referring to with his admonition.

“Now we’re going to put a 100 percent tariff on every single car that comes across [the] line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those guys — if I get elected,” he said. “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole. That’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”
...

Immigration is shaping up to be an explosive issue in the presidential campaign. Trump and President Biden staged dueling visits to Texas border towns last month, castigating each other for a recent surge in illegal immigration.

Trump said the influx of migrants was “a Joe Biden invasion.” Biden blamed Trump for the death of a $20 billion bipartisan bill to increase detention capacity and hire thousands of Border Patrol officers.

Trump’s comments Saturday represent an escalation of his long-harsh language on the topic. Since beginning his 2016 campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” Trump has made inflammatory attacks on migrants a theme of all of his campaigns. He accused immigrants in October of “poisoning the blood of our country” — a remark some likened to the “contamination of the blood” concept that Adolf Hitler laid out in “Mein Kampf.” Trump has rejected that comparison and has continued to use similar language.

 Trump has been referring to nonwhite people as "animals" for a very long time.

Trump began attacking DeSantis again right after DeSantis signed legislation to allow the release of grand jury documents in the Epstein case. https://t.co/LQ04FSD9M1

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) March 16, 2024

Trump Support is Not Just "Symbolic Racism"

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.

In explaining Trump support, Ruy Teixeira writes, scholars "went looking for racism—and they found it ...researchers’ priors and political beliefs were heavily influencing both their analytical approach and their interpretation of results."

And there is an even deeper problem with the conventional view. Start with a fact that was glossed over or ignored by most studies: trends in so-called racial resentment went in the “wrong” direction between the 2012 and 2016 election. That is, fewer whites had high levels of racial resentment in 2016 than 2012. This make racial resentment an odd candidate to explain the shift of white voters toward Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

Political scientists Justin Grimmer and William Marble investigated this conundrum intensively by looking directly at whether an indicator like racial resentment really could explain, or account for, the shift of millions of white votes toward Trump. The studies that gave pride of place to racial resentment as an explanation for Trump’s victory did no such accounting; they simply showed a stronger relationship between this variable and Republican voting in 2016 and thought they’d provided a complete explanation.

They had not. When you look at the actual population of voters and how racial resentment was distributed in 2016, as Grimmer and Marble did, it turns out that the racial resentment explanation simply does not fit what really happened in terms of voter shifts. A rigorous accounting of vote shifts toward Trump shows instead that they were primarily among whites, especially low education whites, with moderate views on race and immigration, not whites with high levels of racial resentment. In fact, Trump actually netted fewer votes among whites with high levels of racial resentment than Mitt Romney did in 2012.
...
So much for the racial resentment explanation of Trump’s victory. Not only is racial resentment a misnamed variable that does not mean what people think it means, it literally cannot account for the actual shifts that occurred in the 2016 election. Clearly a much more complex explanation for Trump’s victory was—or should have been—in order, integrating negative views on immigration, trade and liberal elites with a sense of unfairness rooted in just world belief. That would have helped Democrats understand why voters in Trump-shifting counties, whose ways of life were being torn asunder by economic and social change, were so attracted to Trump’s appeals.

Summing Up Trump's Takeover of the GOP

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections. It also discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

 Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei at Axios:

• House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney, a Trump critic, is expected to get booted from leadership next week for saying Trump's claims of an illegitimate Biden victory are lies and destructive.
• Trumpian voting restrictions like Georgia's are now being debated in Texas, Florida, Arizona, Iowa and other states.
• The Trump positions on trade and immigration — both of which broke with Bush-era orthodoxy — are now the Republican positions.
• The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 violence have gone mostly silent, and in at least one case turned on Cheney.
• The entire House GOP leadership will soon be full-throated Trumpers.
• House Rs expect Trump-backed candidates to crush his critics in contested primaries.
• State-level Republican leaders are often as — or more — Trumpian than national leaders, and in many cases will control redistricting.

Trump senior adviser Jason Miller tells Axios Trump rallies are likely to "start as soon as late spring or early summer."

• Miller said Trump "has already begun to vet and endorse candidates for 2022, with an eye toward electing not just Republican candidates, but America First Republican candidates."
• "His endorsement lifts candidates above the pack and often clears the primary field," Miller said. "The general election endorsement provides access to 'Trump voters' not normally accessible to Republicans."