Tariff Man Lays an Egg

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  In 2024, the book explains, the Democrats' problems involved reality, not just messaging.  Two years later, Republicans own the reality problems, including the Iran quagmire and the resulting economic pain. Tariffs make things even worse. Indeed, it is hard to think of any president who has indulged in such needless midterm self-sabotage.

You can infer what internal polls are telling candidates by looking at their ads.  These numbers indicate that tariffs are really, really unpopular. From Greg Ip, WSJ:

President Trump once called “tariff” the most beautiful word in the dictionary. He has somehow made it one of the most hated words in politics.

In their midterm ads, Democrats repeatedly bash tariffs. Republicans, by contrast, are largely silent. One exception: Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers who calls to “end this tariff war now,” while gripping a Canadian-brand beer, now caught up in Trump’s trade war.

Flailing

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  In 2024, the book explains, the Democrats' problems involved reality, not just messaging.  Two years later, Republicans own the reality problems, including the Iran quagmire and the resulting economic pain.

Trump keeps making things worse for his party.  In Texas, Georgia, and South Carolina, he supported the nomination of dubious Republican candidates who could lose otherwise winnable races.  In Florida, he is attacking a Republican who faces a tight contest.

He is flailing.

Riley Beggin at WP:

First came a proposal to permit tariff-free beef imports, but that immediately angered America’s farmers and ranchers.

Then came a plan to ban exports of domestic diesel fuel, but that met with pushback from major oil companies.

In between, President Donald Trump pitched the idea of simply cutting $5,000 checks to adult Americans frustrated, polls show, by high food and gas prices — if the GOP maintains control of Congress. But that idea, too, has come under fire, even from some Republican lawmakers concerned about the potential hit to the budget deficit.

With just five weeks until Election Day, the White House has thrown out multiple ideas for combating persistent inflation, which has outpaced wage growth. But experts say it is unclear whether Trump can execute any policy that would placate inflation-weary voters and help the GOP maintain control of Congress.

“These are symptoms of panic in the administration about problems that they have in part created,” said David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution.

Inflation has been running over the Federal Reserve’s target rate since 2021, but an array of Trump policies have fed the problem, economists say. Trump’s decision to join Israel in going to war with Iran has disrupted the global oil supply, leading to elevated energy rates. His tariffs have produced higher prices for some imported goods. And his administration’s immigration crackdown has made low-cost labor harder to find, keeping price pressures on domestic companies high.

Panic Mode

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist. Along with war and inflation, Trump's corruption is bringing down the GOP.  Some lawmakers are starting to act.

Megan Messerly, Alex Gangitano and Myah Ward at POLITICO:

Six weeks until the midterm elections, administration officials are pulling policy levers they otherwise might not to help vulnerable Republicans in key congressional races. They’re weighing a 90-day ban on diesel exports in an effort to drive down energy prices, considering backpedaling on a plan to import foreign beef and giving candidates wiggle room to criticize a war with Iran that President Donald Trump continues to stress was necessary to prevent the country from obtaining nuclear weapons.


Trump, never shy about attacking Republicans who disagree with him, has recently swallowed dissent so long as candidates criticize his policies and not him personally. Some campaigns are even giving the White House a heads up before staking out positions different from the president’s.

“More often times than not, a candidate or an elected official will call the White House and ask how to do it, because they are not interested in going against the president,” said one person familiar with the White House’s thinking, who like others in this story was granted anonymity to describe private conversations.

The White House’s latest posture represents a remarkable change for an administration that in its decisionmaking has often put Trump’s priorities ahead of what would be politically advantageous to Republicans in tight elections. But inside the West Wing, a new reality — informed in part by polling — has taken hold as the administration grapples with far more competitive races than had been expected only a few months ago.

Trump's Self-Sabotage

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  In 2024, the book explains, the Democrats' problems involved reality, not just messaging.  Two years later, Republicans own the reality problems, including the Iran quagmire and the resulting economic pain.

That said, the messaging is pretty bad, too.

Aaron Blake at CNN on Trump's self-sabotage:

Polling in recent months has shown:

• 67% of Americans said he doesn’t carefully consider important decisions.
• 71% said he’s not “even-tempered.”
• And more than 7 in 10 adults and registered voters said he doesn’t even have a plan for the Iran war, according to both Fox News and CNN polling.

And in the runup to the 2026 midterm elections, he’s doing very little to disabuse people of these notions.

Trump’s offer of $5,000 to every adult US citizen if Republicans keep their House and Senate majorities is certainly a quid pro quo. Registered voters say 66%-18% that it’s “inappropriate.”

His joke-y threat Wednesday to withhold disaster aid from North Carolina if it elects a Democratic senator is also eyebrow-raising. Trump said he was kidding, but his track record makes clear his administration has discriminated against blue states on such things. And it’s a pretty unfunny thing to even joke about.

His tale ahead of the 9/11 anniversary about firefighters carrying him away amid fears of a building collapse was unconfirmed and misleading at best, as CNN’s Daniel Dale wrote. And to the extent the story is embellished, it sounds a lot like the president stealing valor.

Trump also claimed this week that the 2024 assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania, was “a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election” — an explosive claim, if there were any truth to it. But there remains no evidence that any Democrats were involved and he didn’t provide any more detail. Indeed, attempted assassin Thomas Crooks was a registered Republican. And even the same day as Trump’s comments, FBI Director Kash Patel testified that there was “no evidence” that Crooks “was literally even speaking to any other human being other than his parents.”

Trump repeatedly threatened to halt large portions of US foreign trade — including with all countries with whom the US has a trade deficit — if the Federal Reserve doesn’t lower interest rates. “If we stop trading with every country that we have a deficit with, which is most of them, and which would be very easy to do, we’d make at least $1.5 trillion a year,” Trump claimed Wednesday in North Carolina. That logic makes no sense.

By Friday, Trump suddenly announced he was “banning” CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House “effective immediately,” catching even some of his own staff off guard. A CNN reporter was denied access to White House grounds Saturday morning and her press pass was seized. A reporter for Politico and a reporter and photographer for MS NOW were also denied access.

Trump's Errors Threaten GOP Senate Seats

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

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

The beef issue is a classic concentrated-losers/diffuse-gainers situation.  The GOP was in a similar bind in 1986 with oil prices.

Coming soon to a Democratic attack ad near you:

TRUMP: “We'll by Argentinian beef.”

Reporters:' What about the US farmers who are suffering?'

Trump: “Argentina is fighting for its life. Do you understand me? They’re dying.”

He says this as 77 American cattle producers are going out of business in the US per day.…

— ThePatrioticBlonde™🇺🇸 (@ImBreckWorsham) August 23, 2026

Trump has restarted a trade war with Canada.  Bad economics, bad politics.

David Frum at The Atlantic:

More than 30 percent of Ohio’s exports go to Canada, and almost 40 percent of Michigan’s. Both states will this year elect a U.S. senator and fill open governor’s seats. Not only is Trump putting at risk his party’s position in purple Michigan, but suddenly the races in beet-red Ohio look in jeopardy too. These states may turn control of the Senate—and Trump’s chances of facing meaningful accountability next year for his law-breaking and corruption.

Trump’s theory of his trade war, like his theory of his Iran war, is that the bigger bully always wins. Size counts for a lot, but not for everything.

As Trump has declared over and over again, his ultimate goal in this trade war is to add Canada as a 51st state. Why? To make the United States look bigger on the map. For that goal, which excites ultra-MAGA crackpots, Trump is hazarding not only America’s most important trading relationships but very possibly every other political equity he holds, including avoiding investigations and accountability by a Democratic House and Senate after January 2027

Why This President Owns This Economy

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Economist Justin Wolfers:

For nine out of the last 10 presidencies, if you’d said, “How much should we blame the president for what’s going on with the economy right now?” I would have said that the president is just one factor among many.

That’s what I would have said nine out of 10 times. This is the 10th time.

There’s literally no question about the cause of the current oil price spike. It is that we decided to go to war in Iran on an open-ended, ill-defined mission, and we’re not quite sure what to do. The Iranians took over the Strait of Hormuz, and now the global economy is substantially fractured and global energy markets are in disarray. There’s no question about what caused that. We know that because we actually saw things get a little bit better in June during the ceasefire, but those happy days are behind us.

There’s also no question that tariffs are a complete own goal. They’ve led to higher prices paid by Americans. And that, I think, explains why, if you look at the United States compared to our peers in the G7—think of these as other economies that are kind of like, if the U.S. economy had mates, this is who they’d be—comparable large industrialized economies, the United States right now has higher inflation than any of them. We’re number one, but it’s not one of those good number ones.

And let me just add: it really does hurt my heart because we know how not to screw things up. Any economics textbook, anyone who’s taken introductory economics, would know that there are large economic costs to going to war. They would know that starting a global trade war in a chaotic and incoherent fashion is all downside and no upside.

Trumpism's Three Pillars Collapse

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments -- now including a war in the Middle East.

Ian Ward at Politico:

The three issues that stood as the unshakable pillars of Trumpism have all at once become political millstones around his neck.

Start with immigration. In line with his 2016 campaign promises, Trump has indeed swept away whatever remained of the GOP’s pro-immigrant past, replacing it with a new nativist orthodoxy that seeks not merely to stem the tide of mass migration but to reverse the demographic changes of the past half-century.

But following the pushback to ICE’s aggressive immigration raids in Minneapolis and elsewhere, the administration is confronting the political risks of that new orthodoxy: Recent polls suggest that nearly half of all Americans — including 1-in-5 voters who backed Trump in 2024 — think his mass deportations campaigns are “too aggressive.” In response, the White House has reportedly urged congressional Republicans to soften their hardline rhetoric on mass deportations, warning them that it could cost the GOP key voting blocs in the 2026 midterms.

The situation doesn’t look much better on trade. As with immigration, Trump’s successful campaign to get the GOP on board with trade protectionism has come with a significant political cost: over 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s tariffs, according to some recent polls, and even Republican voters are split about the upsides of his trade war. Even worse for the administration is the slew of recent polling suggesting that a majority of voters blame Trump’s tariffs for raising the cost of living — a significant political liability in an election year where “affordability” remains a top concern for voters.

On foreign policy, Trump’s military moves abroad remain broadly popular with self-identified “MAGA” Republicans. But there are signs that his forays into foreign interventionism —  including the ongoing war with Iran — are unpopular with the critical independent and swing voters who pushed Trump over the top in 2024. Inside the White House, Trump’s senior advisers appear increasingly anxious that those numbers could get even worse if the war continues to push up gas and energy prices.

That said, foreign policy poses the most vexing question of the political downsides of Trump’s fidelity (or lack thereof) to pure and uncut “Trumpism.” Unlike on trade or immigration, where the blowback has been prompted by Trump’s fulfillment of an original campaign promise, there’s a case to be made that the president is courting political disaster by betraying Trumpism’s original promise on foreign policy — to prioritize American interests by keeping America out of foreign wars.

A crack in the MAGA wall:

 

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this… pic.twitter.com/prtu86DpEr

— Joe Kent (@joekent16jan19) March 17, 2026

Bad Week for Trump Economic Policy

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments. 

Jeff Cox at CNBC:

U.S. growth slowed more than expected near the end of 2025 as the government shutdown impacted consumer spending, while a key inflation metric showed high prices are still a factor for the economy, according to data released Friday.

Gross domestic produce rose at an annualized rate of just 1.4%, according to the Commerce Department, well below the Dow Jones estimate for a 2.5% gain.

For the full year in 2025, the U.S. economy grew at a 2.2% pace, down from the 2.8% increase in 2024.

At the same time, inflation held firm in December, according to the gauge most closely watched by Fed officials.

The core personal consumption expenditures price index, which excludes food and energy, rose 3% in December, according to a separate release. That matched the consensus forecast but kept the pivotal inflation measure well above the Fed’s 2% target.

 Tara Suter and Sylvan Lane at The Hill:

President Trump on Wednesday touted the decline in U.S. trade deficit ahead of official data showing a small reduction in the country’s overall balance of trade.

In a Wednesday night post on Truth Social, the president claimed credit for reducing the trade deficit — the difference between the value of U.S. imports and exports — through tariffs he imposed last year.

Trump claimed to have cut the trade deficit by 78 percent in the Truth Social post, which came less than 12 hours before the U.S. Census Bureau released the official figures.

“THE UNITED STATES TRADE DEFICIT HAS BEEN REDUCED BY 78% BECAUSE OF THE TARIFFS BEING CHARGED TO OTHER COMPANIES AND COUNTRIES,” the president claimed.

But the Census Bureau data released Thursday showed the trade deficit falling by only 0.2 percent in 2025, from $903.5 billion in 2024 to $901.5 billion last year.

David J. Lynch and Rachel Siegel at WP

The U.S. merchandise trade deficit hit a record $1.2 trillion last year, despite President Donald Trump’s promise to eliminate it by imposing the highest tariffs in eight decades on foreign-made products.

Thursday’s Commerce Department report represents the first full-year assessment of the president’s ambitious reordering of global trade. The persistence of the deficit in the face of steep new taxes on imports from China, the European Union and scores of other nations reflects the limits of Trump’s preferred policy tool, economists said.

 

A Day of Setbacks for Trump

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.   But there are some green shoots, too.

 Olivia M. Bridges and Valerie Yurk at Roll Call:

Three House Republicans helped thwart a White House push to block lawmakers from moving to terminate President Donald Trump’s emergency tariffs until July 31, by which time the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the duties’ legality.

The 214-217 vote Tuesday evening to reject a rule that would bar use of a fast-track disapproval resolution for the tariffs came after House leaders delayed a floor vote scheduled for early afternoon while they tried to pressure Republicans to switch votes.

After the rule’s defeat, which GOP leaders expected after their whip effort fell short, the Rules Committee met again to report out a revised rule minus the tariff provision.

That would allow several unrelated bills to come to the floor this week if adopted, but also opens the door to an onslaught of Democratic tariff disapproval resolutions — starting as soon as Wednesday with an attempt to overturn Trump’s tariffs levied on Canadian goods.

GOP Reps. Kevin Kiley of California, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Don Bacon of Nebraska, who declared their opposition early, remained firm and voted against the rule, joining all Democrats.

Perry Stein and Salvador Rizzo at WP:

A federal grand jury in D.C. refused the Justice Department’s attempts to indict six Democratic lawmakers over their comments to military service members — the latest rebuke of the Trump administration’s push to prosecute the president’s foes, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Federal prosecutors last year launched an investigation into the lawmakers — all of whom served in the military or with intelligence agencies — after they released a short video advising current military members to reject “illegal orders.”

The lawmakers include Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain and astronaut from Arizona, and Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst from Michigan, both of whom sit on the Senate Armed Services Committee. They have criticized the administration’s attempts to deploy the National Guard to cities run by Democratic officials and conduct strikes on alleged drug traffickers’ boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.

It is exceedingly rare for grand juries to reject indictments, in part because prosecutors only need to convince a majority of grand jurors that there is a probable cause that a crime was committed — a relatively low threshold. But the Justice Department’s campaign to target President Donald Trump’s perceived adversaries has repeatedly been rebuffed by grand juries and judges, including in its efforts to prosecute former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D).

Jeremy Roebuck and Patrick Marley at WP:

The FBI relied heavily on previously debunked claims of widespread election irregularities in Georgia as it persuaded a federal judge last month to sign off on plans to seize 2020 voting records from the state’s most populous county, court documents unsealed Tuesday show.

In a pair of Jan. 28 search warrant affidavits, authorities said they were seeking evidence that would determine whether “deficiencies” in the vote tabulation in Fulton County, home to Atlanta, were the result of intentional wrongdoing that could constitute a crime.

But many of the issues they cited — including claims of duplicate ballots and missing ballot images — have been previously explained by county officials as the types of routine errors that frequently occur, are typically corrected in the moment, and are not significant enough to sway the outcome of an election. Independent reviews have backed up that conclusion.

 

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.