4.30 Lawrence H. Summers, in conversation with Bill Kristol: “The issue is becoming, in a meta sense, confidence in the United States. When people go in and out of being confident in you, that is alarming. It’s the kind of thing that in a developing country, you’d ask yourself whether they’re going to have to have an IMF program within a few months. We’re too big for an IMF program, but we’re at risk of a major kind of a financial incident.”
4.30 Trump: “You know, somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are going to be open. Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.” New York PostHeadline : `Skimp on the Barbie.’
4.29 Ed Van Impe dies at 84.
4.29 Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, in an email quoted in the Times: “Trump is a coward who has convinced the world he is brave. Trump has carefully cultivated a personal myth of strength, yet his career is marked by a consistent pattern of loss and acquiescence. He has filed for bankruptcy six times and has lost lawsuits across all levels of government. What remains underappreciated is his tendency to capitulate when forced. Although he routinely lies and cheats, he ultimately complies when compliance becomes unavoidable. Even as he publicly refused to concede the 2020 presidential election, his staff was quietly packing his belongings at the White House.”
4.29 Tali Mendelberg, a political scientist at Princeton, in an email quoted in the Times: “It’s futile to predict specifically what Trump would do. Unpredictability is one of his characteristics. He uses it to cow subordinates and wring concessions from adversaries. The fact that these questions even come to mind is one way he exercises power over people. That said, a consistent pattern of past actions helps predict future behavior. Trump has gotten away with violating rules all his adult life. He did not incur lasting damage from his attempted insurrection on Jan. 6; despite what his own party leaders called impeachable offenses, he won a second term (and then pardoned even his violent followers, with minimal fallout). His statements suggest he believes he overcame persecution and disrespect and is once again a “winner.” He is now aggressively pushing the limits of the law in nearly every conceivable way. It is difficult to see why he would slink into humility or go quietly into defeat. He has never done so before. He fights with every means at his disposal. If he should feel that he is losing power and respect, there is no reason to expect he will self-restrain.”
4.29 A new Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll shows that at least one-quarter of Republican-leaning voters say Trump is “going too far.’ 26 percent agree that Trump has “gone beyond his authority as president”; 27 percent say his administration “does not respect the rule of law”; 34 percent say Trump is “going too far” in “trying to expand the power of the presidency.”
4.28 In an extraordinary comeback that was fueled in part by Trump’s tariff policies and attacks on Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals won a federal election. Said Carney at a victory: “President Trump is trying to break us so America can own us.” Friend Mark Benning: “The two things — besides his family and his wife, obviously — that he loves are Canada and hockey.”
4.28 Five Democratic senators condemned the Trump administration’s attacks on Harvard, arguing that the White House was using antisemitism as a “guise” to undermine universities. Chuck Shumer: “We sent him a very strong letter. . .asking eight very strong questions.”
4.26 Shedur Sanders is selected in the fifth round of the NFL by the Cleveland Browns. Touted as a potential number one pick, he is the 144th player chosen. Mel Kiper Jr. on ESPN: “The NFL has been CLUELESS evaluating quarterbacks!”
4.25 Scott Galloway: “The first CEO who forcefully and publicly resists Trump could reap significant benefits, both reputationally and commercially. . . .The first large American company to go out on a limb and do this successfully will attract huge amounts of goodwill from consumers, manufacturers, and partners at home and abroad. This is Nike, Walmart or Apple’s prize to lose. But it could be captured by other leaders, including Satya Nadella at Microsoft or Marc Benioff at Salesforce — their iconic brands are built on American values. They shouldn’t wait. The advantage will erode sharply for the second and third CEOs who follow. The risk has been overstated. The Trump army is divided, and it’s got more bark than bite, snapping at every dog in the park. Does anybody take him or his threats seriously any more?
4.25 The New York Times: According to a poll from The New York Times and Siena College, Trump is approaching the 100-day mark of his second term with historically low levels of support and growing questions from voters about his use of power to advance his agenda, His approval rating is 42 percent, low for a president who just took office, and he shows early signs of erosion on a signature strength: the economy. Trump’s base of Republican support remains resilient and solidly behind him. But he faces united opposition from Democratic voters and skepticism from independent ones. Perhaps the most notable finding is that voters see Trump as overreaching Over and over, voters said he had “gone too far.” 54 percent said he had “gone too far” — twice as many as said he had been “about right.” Voters also applied that label on several policies that he has tried to sell, including tariffs, immigration enforcement and cuts to the federal work force. Majorities of voters agreed that Mr. Trump had gone too far on all three issues. And overall, more voters said he was “exceeding his powers” than those who thought he was simply exercising presidential authority. The poll showed that far more voters believed the words “scary” and “chaotic” captured the early stages of the second Trump presidency than those who thought “exciting” did.
4.25 Heather Cox Richardson, recounting an exchange between Trump and an interviewer from Time: “[T]he Time interviewer asked him: “Mr. President, you were showing us the new paintings you have behind us. You put all these new portraits. One of them includes John Adams [who] said we’re a government ruled by laws, not by men. Do you agree with that?” Trump replied: “John Adams said that? Where was the painting?” When the interviewer pointed out the portrait, Trump said: “We’re a government ruled by laws, not by men? Well, I think we’re a government ruled by law, but you know, somebody has to administer the law. So therefore men, certainly, men and women, certainly play a role in it. I wouldn’t agree with it 100%. We are a government where men are involved in the process of law, and ideally, you’re going to have honest men like me.”
4.24 Trump on social media: “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing/ Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying. Lets get the Peace Deal DONE!”
4.24 Jessica Riedl in The Atlantic: “Since 2008, trillion-dollar budget deficits have pushed the debt to 100 percent of the economy—approaching World War II levels. The dangerous combination of rising debt and interest rates have driven annual interest costs up from $352 billion in 2021 to nearly $1 trillion this year. During that time, interest costs have surpassed Medicaid, defense, and finally, Medicare to become the most expensive federal budget item after Social Security—which itself will be surpassed in perhaps 15 years. Simply continuing today’s tax and spending policies will escalate the federal debt to 241 percent of the economy over the next three decades. And if interest rates rise even one percentage point above the government’s long-term projections, which they easily could, the debt would reach 295 percent of GDP. Interest on the debt would then consume four-fifths of all annual federal revenues. Debt at that scale would force Washington to borrow an enormous share of the economy’s savings—leaving less money available to families and entrepreneurs for home, auto, and business loans. This lack of savings available for investment would choke economic growth and push up interest rates. As a result, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that this debt surge would shave up to one-third off the long-term growth of family incomes. Few developed nations have run their debt levels past 150 percent of GDP in the postwar era. The main outlier is Japan, which currently has a 260 percent debt ratio: Even with a high savings rate to finance its government’s debt, Japan’s economy has suffered three consecutive “lost decades.” The United States might own the world’s reserve currency, but other nations’ demand for dollars cannot finance a debt of this magnitude.”
4.23 Investor Ken Griffin: “[T]he trade war, which has devolved into a nonsensical place. . . .[W]e’re spending time thinking about supply chains. . . .[W]e’re moving too quickly, too haphazardly, and we’re breaking a lot of glass in trying to solve some very real problems.”
4.22 Jonathan Chiat in The Atlantic: “Time after time, however, the traditional conservatives have accepted Trump’s authoritarianism and corruption because he stays loyal to them on their key issues. The path of least resistance for maintaining the coalition is to give each faction what it cares about most: Traditional conservatives get low taxes for the rich (and decreased business regulation), while natcons get a free hand to wield state power against their enemies. This authoritarian-libertarian synthesis might seem ungainly, but it coheres perfectly from the standpoint of those on the right who see progressive taxation and the welfare state as the most sinister threats to liberty. This dynamic is on display in a recent essay by National Review’s Dan McLaughlin attempting to define the American idea. The values he cites include requiring everybody “to abide by the outcomes of the political system” but also “free markets and the right and responsibility of every individual to live off the fruits of his or her own labor and improve his or her own lot in life.” He does not place one above the other, and you can see the tension between the two: What happens if the outcome of the political system is a government that wants to tax rich people? Is the American value to respect the outcome, or ensure that right-wing economic values get to win anyway? McLaughin’s answer is unclear. “The gravest threat to these values,” he writes, “continues to be progressivism and its dissemination through our schools, Hollywood, and the media.” Most anti-government conservatives have reasoned their way into accepting Trump as, at minimum, the lesser of two evils. Likewise, Randy Barnett, a right-leaning libertarian law professor at Georgetown, posted on X a few days ago a list of “bullets we dodged” by avoiding a Democratic-run government that, he believes, would abolish the filibuster, establish single-payer health care, and fulfill other liberal goals. The president might be claiming the power to whisk any person he chooses to a Central American Gulag without due process, but at least he isn’t doing something as horrific as Medicare for All. The alliance between the more libertarian faction of the GOP and the natcons has been tested, but not shattered, by Trump’s trade war. Abandoning party doctrine on the sacrosanct issue of taxes would completely sever the bond holding them together. A handful of the president’s allies might float the idea, but you can bet your last dollar it won’t happen.”
4.22 Tesla’s net income fell 71% the first quarter from a year earlier
4.22 The market rallies at the administration blinks on tariff, though details are vague.
4.21 Peter Tuchman, known as the “Einstein of Wall Street ,” quoted in New York Magazine, stating that Trump has lost trust among the financial world. “It’s like, if we’re going out and I cheat on you, we may get back together, but are you ever gonna really trust me again? Fuck no. Absolutely not, because it’ll always be that voice in the back of your head, what they’re capable of. Now we know what he’s capable of.”
4.21 After Trump fulminates against Jerome Powell, stock prices plummet. Scott Bessent tells Goldman Sachs that the tariffs are “unsustainable.” The CEOs of three of the nation’s biggest retailers — Walmart, Target and Home Depot — privately warn Trump that his tariff and trade policy could disrupt supply chains, raise prices and empty shelves. According to Axios, “The big box CEOs flat out told him [Trump] the prices are steady right now, but they will go up. . . .[H]e was told that shelves will be empty” in as little as two weeks.”
4.21 After a full day celebrating Easter, Pope Francis dies at 88.
4.20 Pride and Prejudice
4.20 Karishma Vaswani on Bloomberg, on Taiwan’s vulnerability: “The People’s Liberation Army is now the world’s largest maritime fighting force and continues to modernize. Video footage of new barges 
suggests it may have the capacity to land troops and heavy equipment on Taiwan’s shores. Prosecutions for espionage, particularly among military personnel, have soared in Taiwan. And Beijing is using AI-created disinformation campaigns to divide Taiwanese society and target undersea communications cables.”
4.19 Protesting in Saratoga Springs.
4.19 With an extraordinary middle-of-the-night emergency order, the Supreme Court directed the Trump administration “not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees” from the US until further action from the Court. Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., dissented.
4.18 Dana Milbank in the Washington Post: “We have been through ruinous periods before, but never when the president was the one actively and knowingly causing the ruin. ”
4.17 Lisa Murkowski: “We are all afraid. I am oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice. Retaliation is real, and that’s not right,”
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 US 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 US 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.