4.16 Heidi Crebo-Rediker of the Council on Foreign Relations:“This is one of the biggest ‘own goals’ to US credibility in financial markets that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. You can look at the global financial crisis as being a hit to US credibility in terms of financial markets, but this is different … Covid was an external shock. This comes straight out of the White House.”
4.16 The Amateur
4.15 Comments made to Chuck Grassley, at a town hall in Fort Madison IA, objecting to the extralegal extradition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia: “Due process!” “[Trump] just said, ‘Screw it!'” “Take down the Statue of Liberty!” “Are you gonna bring that guy back, from El Salvador?” “The Supreme Court said to bring him back!” “I’m pissed!” “Get a spine!” “So if I get an order to pay a ticket for $1,200, and I just say, ‘No,’ does that stand up?” “Left wing, right wing, we’re all the same bird!”
4.15 Jerome Powell, speaking in Chicago: “There isn’t a modern experience for how to think about this,”
4.14 Steve Inskeep of NPR, on X: “If I understand this correctly, the US president has launched a trade war against the world, believes he can force the EU and China to meet his terms, is determined to annex Canada and Greenland, but is powerless before the sovereign might of El Salvador. Is that it?”
4.14 Joanna Coles in the Daily Beast: “In a week where most Americans are trying to figure out whether they can retire before 87—given the latest implosion of their 401(k)s—Lauren Sánchez and her sisterhood of the traveling space pants blasted off to explore the vast unknown. For 11 whole minutes. This is not a giant leap for womankind. This is an intergalactic episode of Real Housewives meets The Kardashians Go to The Moon. It’s a quick “getaway” for the billionaire set as six gal pals cosplay astronauts in tight blue Star Trek at their very own CosmicCon.”
4.14 Trump to Salvadoran leader Nayib Bukele, who has called himself “the world’s coolest dictator”: “Homegrown criminals are next. You’re going to need about five more places.”
4.14 James Carville in the Times: “The problem is that smoke and mirrors only work until you screw up so hard that no act of lunacy can pull the American people’s attention elsewhere. And boy, did the president just screw up royally. In what will certainly be recorded as one of the most ignorant acts of political leadership in American history, the president has willfully damaged the global economy with his tariff chaos. Not only was this an act of economic warfare, it has broken the cardinal rule in American politics: Never destabilize the economy. With it, the Trump administration is causing enormous damage to itself — and there can be no more distraction from this naked truth.
4.14 Fight, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
4.13 Ezra Klein in the Times: Delay has become the default setting of American government. The 2021 infrastructure law was supposed to pump hundreds of billions into roads, bridges, rural broadband, electric vehicle chargers. By 2024, few of its projects were finished or installed. That wasn’t because Biden or his team wanted to run for re-election on the backs of news releases rather than ribbon cuttings. But the administration didn’t make the changes necessary to deliver on a time frame the public could feel. Many of Biden’s staff now bitterly regret it.
4.13 The home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was set on fire early Sunday while he and his family were inside. Around 2 AM, the Shapiros were awakened by police banging on their door as they responded to the fire at the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg. The family was safely evacuated with no injuries. Officials extinguished the fire, which they said was in a different part of the residence than Shapiro and his family, but it caused “a significant amount of damage.” The Pennsylvania State Police have described the fire as “an act of arson.”
4.12 Niall Ferguson: “Here is what is actually happening: The American empire that came into existence after the failed autarky and isolationism of the 1930s is being broken up after 80 years. Despite Trump’s imperial impulses—wanting to annex Greenland, calling for Canada to become the 51st state—he is engaged right now in a kind of wild decolonization project. Like the post-1945 British Labour governments, he wants to shelter domestic manufacturing and the working class behind tariffs while reducing overseas commitments. But the net result will be both economically damaging and geopolitically weakening. Americans will come to miss globalism and policing the world. They will belatedly realize that there is no portal through which the United States can return to the 1950s, much less the 1900s. And the principal beneficiary . . . will not be Russia, but China. Call it Project Manchuria. Trump has repeatedly promised to make the United States a “manufacturing powerhouse” to avoid being permanently overtaken by its Asian competitors. (In the 1980s it was Japan; now it’s China.) According to the president, friends even more than foes have been “taking our jobs, taking our wealth.” His solution is to impose tariffs on all U.S. trading partners. . . . In reality, however, applying policies that were appropriate more than a century ago, when the U.S. enjoyed all kinds of advantages as a location for manufacturing, will cause something worse than turbulence. With his assault on “globalism,” Trump stands as much chance of success as a British prime minister who proposed to reassemble the empire, or a German chancellor who attempted to restore the Hohenzollerns to the throne. Time’s arrow does not fly backward.”
4.12 AOC at a rally in Los Angeles: “[Trump is] the “logical, inevitable conclusion of an American political system dominated by corporate and dark money . . . . This movement is not about partisan labels or purity tests. It’s about class solidarity.”
4.12 Bill Kristol on X: It’s striking how much Trumpists hate what’s made the United States great: immigration, trade, medical and scientific research, the rule of law, an enlightened patriotism, a willingness and ability to correct past injustices. At the end of the day, Trumpism is Third Worldism.
4.11 Holman W. Jenkins Jr. in The Wall Street Journal: “A future Trump impeachment seemed all but guaranteed by last Wednesday morning. It seems only slightly less likely now. It may even be desirable to restore America’s standing with creditors and trade partners. . . .No consensus or even significant coalition exists for trying to force into existence a new American ‘golden age’ with tariffs, which anyway is like asking a chicken to give birth to a lioness. He invented this mission out of his own confused intuition. . . Nobody in Mr. Trump’s orbit actually shares his belief in the magical efficacy of tariffs because it makes sense only in a world that doesn’t exist, where other countries don’t retaliate. The founders never anticipated today’s instantly responsive trillion-dollar financial markets. And yet these markets neatly adumbrate the founders’ scheme of checks and balances, also known as feedback. Mr. Trump, still sane enough to appreciate what’s good for Mr. Trump, listened this week to their feedback.”
4.10 Karishma Vaswani on Bloomberg, on the tariff war between Washington and Beijing: “In America’s escalating trade war with China, it won’t be Beijing that blinks first. President Xi Jinping can withstand way more economic and political pain than US President Donald Trump. To avoid further geopolitical and economic fallout, they need to dial down the rhetoric and the reciprocal tariffs … Both leaders are playing to their domestic audiences and want to look tough. But this is one of the ugliest splits the global economy has ever seen, and for now, the rest of us are just collateral damage.”
4.9 Reihan Salam and Charles Fain Lehman in The Atlantic: “In 2024 Trump made major gains in large, immigrant-rich urban counties, where service-sector employment is dominant. These new, urban Trump voters were chiefly motivated by the cost of living and the ideological excesses of the cultural left, not dreams of restoring the Rust Belt to its former glory. That explains Trump’s unexpected success among young, nonwhite, and immigrant voters—he may even have won that last group outright. Why did these previously stalwart Democrats break for Trump? Because they are all upwardly mobile groups, for whom pocket-book issues are central. More than progressive pandering, they want the opportunity to participate in the American dream—and Trump seemed to promise that. Unfortunately, their faith is being tested. For decades, the Republican Party differentiated itself by its commitment to ambitious and enterprising workers of every social class. But over the past 10 years, a new class-war conservatism has come to the fore, arguing that “financialization” and corporate greed have hollowed out the American middle class. Drawing on leftist critiques of “late capitalism,” class-war conservatives have embraced a politics of scarcity and resentment, attempting to pit Rust Belt voters against those who have benefited most from the modernized, technologized American economy. Class-war conservatives rely on a romanticized vision of America’s economic past. They long for a return to mass manufacturing employment. Yet working-class America has transitioned from manufacturing to service-sector employment for a reason: The jobs are, in general, of far higher quality. Being a nursing assistant or a maintenance worker can be just as challenging and meaningful as working in a 1950s coal mine, only the work is far less likely to leave you profoundly disabled. Today’s manufacturing jobs are safer, more stimulating, more productive, and more remunerative than their mid-century equivalents. Yes, there are fewer of them, as the least safe, least stimulating, least productive, and least remunerative jobs have been either automated or offshored. We can certainly try to bring the lowest-paid, most physically demanding jobs home, perhaps by rolling back domestic labor standards or imposing a new “robot tax” to deter labor-saving automation. But don’t be surprised if those jobs become a magnet for low-skill immigrants.”
4.9 Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic: The pause is only temporary; if Trump does not relent, he might still cause a financial meltdown. Trump has also destroyed a lot of trust—just the possibility of future tariffs may cause enough uncertainty to hurt businesses and investors. This would be the ultimate stress test of people’s otherwise unshakable devotion to the president—a final gantlet for this MAGA delusion.
4.9 On Truth Social, Trump hikes tariffs on Chinese imports to 125 %, up from 104 %. Meanwhile, tariffs on more than 75 other countries would fall to 10 % for 90 days. , rather than higher rates announced a week ago. In response, the Dow adds 2,900 points, or nearly 8%; the S&P 500 soars almost 9.5%, its best day since 2008; and the Nasdaq rises more than 12%marks had its second-best day ever, rising more than 12%. “I guess they say it was the biggest day in financial history,” says Trump. Later, in an apparent hot-mic moment, he told a fawning senator that the market was up almost seven percentage points. “Nobody’s ever heard of it. It’s gonna be a record.”
4.6 Xochitl Gonzalez in The Atlantic: “America has the equivalent of a class apartheid. Our systems—of education, credentialing, hiring, housing, and electing officials—are dominated and managed by members of a “comfort class.” These are people who were born into lives of financial stability. They graduate from college with little to no debt, which enables them to advance in influential but relatively low-wage fields—academia, media, government, or policy work. Many of them rarely interact or engage in a meaningful way with people living in different socioeconomic strata than their own. And their disconnect from the lives of the majority has expanded to such a chasm that their perspective—and authority—may no longer be relevant. Take, for instance, those lawmakers desperately workshopping messages to working-class folks: More than half of congressional representatives are millionaires. In academia, universities are steered by college presidents—many of whom are paid millions of dollars a year—and governed by boards of trustees made up largely of multimillionaires, corporate CEOs, and multimillionaire corporate CEOs. (I know because I serve on one of these boards.) Once, a working-class college dropout like Jimmy Breslin could stumble into a newsroom and go on to win the Pulitzer Prize; today, there’s a vanishingly small chance he’d make it past security. A 2018 survey of elite newsrooms found that 65 percent of summer interns had attended top-tier colleges. College attainment is more than a matter of educational status; it is also a marker of class comfort. Seventy percent of people who have at least one parent with a bachelor’s degree also have a bachelor’s degree themselves. These graduates out-earn and hold more wealth than their first-generation college peers. At elite schools, about one in seven students comes from a family in the top 1 percent of earners. Graduates of elite colleges comprise the majority of what a study in Nature labeled “extraordinary achievers”: elected officials, Fortune 500 CEOs, Forbes’s “most powerful,” and best-selling authors.What we have is a compounded problem, in which people with generational wealth pull the levers on a society that they don’t understand. Whether corporate policies or social welfare or college financial aid, nearly every aspect of society has been designed by people unfamiliar with not only the experience of living in poverty but the experience of living paycheck to paycheck—a circumstance that, Bank of America data shows, a quarter of Americans know well.”
4.6 Alex Ovechkin scores his 895th career goal, passing Wayne Gretzky for sole ownership of the record.