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Outside The Beltway | The Reporters

Different Forms of Trump Apologist Copium

by | Apr 9, 2025 | Outside The Beltway

Ahead of another terrible day for international trading markets (and a “Black Monday” for US Markets) and the dollar’s value, there had been some hope that President Trump might reverse course on his tariffs. Or at the very least, some vocal supporters suggested that he tap the brakes (more on that below). However, at this moment, all the signals he is sending suggest it’s full steam ahead. This morning he posted the following to his Truth Social account:

Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION, and the long time abused USA is bringing in Billions of Dollars a week from the abusing countries on Tariffs that are already in place. This is despite the fact that the biggest abuser of them all, China, whose markets are crashing, just raised its Tariffs by 34%, on top of its long term ridiculously high Tariffs (Plus!), not acknowledging my warning for abusing countries not to retaliate. They’ve made enough, for decades, taking advantage of the Good OL’ USA! Our past “leaders” are to blame for allowing this, and so much else, to happen to our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Donald Trump Truth Social 04/07/25 06:49 AM [source ]

Unless he blinks, which seems increasingly unlikely, we’re in for another wild ride today. So, I wanted to survey how Trump apologists are coping with this news. Like most human experiences, there’s a range of reactions.

Cope 1: The Full Circle

People often suggest that when you go far enough to one side, you end up on the other. Paid Russian stooge Tim Pool is an excellent example of this. The “dissolusioned liberal” has been a popular voice on the Alt Right for quite a while. His take: the President has done us a service by doing what the Left could not:

Personal wealth accumulation appears to now be “bad” on the Right. Weird that simultaneously the Trump administration is pushing for upper bracket tax cuts on individual wealth.

Cope 2. The 180

For those not ready to go full Pool, there’s the idea that it’s time to deal with temporary inconvenience to reach a bright future. Also, there’s a hint of “personal wealth accumulation is bad” in this too:

What makes this a 180 is that folks like Johnson spent the last few years complaining about the loss of… wait for it… money through inflation under the Biden administration. See this example of a post from Johnson from just a few months ago:

Or even further back where he was using high prices to… sell gold:

BTW, it’s now estimated that if all the tariffs stay at the promised rates they will lower a middle-income household’s family’s post-tax income any where from $1,700 to $3,800 a year (most likely more if they need to buy a major household appliance or car).

Ben Dreyfuss sums up the conflict at the heart of all 180’s really well in this x/eet:

Or, for my fellow ADHD travellers, here’s that in meme version:

Cope 3. The “Cmon”

As we have seen in comments here at OTB and other places, some folks are trying to use Bidenisms to not address criticsm:

’nuff said.

Cope 4. The Hedge

In this case, you acknowledge that things could go wrong (though defining “wrong” in the most extreme way possible) while hoping things go right. This allows you to say “I never said this WOULD work. I said it COULD work! And at least he did something….” See this x/eet from a noted racist and sexist err… I mean nativist galaxy brain.

Cope 5. The “I’ve lost control of my monster but maybe I can talk it down”

It’s pretty self-explanatory, and it’s something to watch its sub-phases play out across a range of x/eets and steps. In this case, we’ll go to one of Trump’s biggest fans from the world of finance (and in particular investments), Bill Ackman.

Step 1 is reasoning (Friday afternoon):

One would have to imagine that President @realDonaldTrump ’s phone has been ringing off the hook. The practical reality is that there is insufficient time for him to make deals before the tariffs are scheduled to take effect.

I would therefore not be surprised to wake up Monday with an announcement from the President that he was postponing the implementation of the tariffs to give him time to make deals. President Trump has gotten the world’s and our trading partners’ attention and elevated the importance of resolving an unfair tariff regime that has harmed American workers and decimated our industrial base over many decades.

This is a critically important issue that needs to be resolved, and we finally have a president committed to getting this done. The problem, however, can’t be resolved in days, so why wouldn’t a pause make sense to give the president time to properly resolve this critical issue and to allow companies large and small the time to prepare for changes in their supply chains?

The risk of not doing so is that the massive increase in uncertainty drives the economy into a recession, potentially a severe one. One thing is for sure. Monday will be one of the more interesting days in our country’s economic history. [source]

This features a great mix of both praise (that the president is tackling an important issue) and reasoning (the timeline is too soon). Who set those timelines, Bill?

Step 2 is pleading mixed with praise and hedging (Sunday Afternoon):

The country is 100% behind the president on fixing a global system of tariffs that has disadvantaged the country. But, business is a confidence game and confidence depends on trust.

President @realDonaldTrump has elevated the tariff issue to the most important geopolitical issue in the world, and he has gotten everyone’s attention. So far, so good.

And yes, other nations have taken advantage of the U.S. by protecting their home industries at the expense of millions of our jobs and economic growth in our country.

But, by placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital.

The president has an opportunity to call a 90-day time out, negotiate and resolve unfair asymmetric tariff deals, and induce trillions of dollars of new investment in our country.

If, on the other hand, on April 9th we launch economic nuclear war on every country in the world, business investment will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocket books, and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate.

What CEO and what board of directors will be comfortable making large, long-term, economic commitments in our country in the middle of an economic nuclear war?

I don’t know of one who will do so.

When markets crash, new investment stops, consumers stop spending money, and businesses have no choice but to curtail investment and fire workers.

And it is not just the big companies that will suffer. Small and medium size businesses and entrepreneurs will experience much greater pain. Almost no business can pass through an overnight massive increase in costs to their customers. And that’s true even if they have no debt, and, unfortunately, there is a massive amount of leverage in the system.

Business is a confidence game. The president is losing the confidence of business leaders around the globe. The consequences for our country and the millions of our citizens who have supported the president — in particular low-income consumers who are already under a huge amount of economic stress — are going to be severely negative. This is not what we voted for.

The President has an opportunity on Monday to call a time out and have the time to execute on fixing an unfair tariff system.

Alternatively, we are heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down. May cooler heads prevail. [source ]

He’s suddenly realizing that despite his praise (we’re 100% behind you Mr Trump) he doesn’t have control over this particular monster.

Stage 3: Find someone to blame (Sunday Night).

Remember Trump cannot fail, he can only be failed. So this has to be someone else’s fault.

Stage 4: Get a call from the White House (Monday morning).

It was unfair of me to lash out at @howardlutnick . I don’t think he is pursuing his self interest. I am sure he is doing the best he can for the country while representing the President as Commerce Secretary. It is not an easy job and we don’t know how the sausage was made.

I am just frustrated watching what I believe to be a major policy error occur after our country and the president have been making huge economic progress that is now at risk due to the tariffs.

I would love to be proven wrong and watch this approach to tariffs and/or their resolution be enormously beneficial to our country and the global economy. [source ]

Again, ’nuff said on this one.

Stage 5: Sad acceptance while emphasizing that Trump cannot fail, he can only be failed (Monday morning).

The formula used by the administration to calculate tariffs made other nations’ tariffs appear four times larger than they actually are.

President @realDonaldTrump is not an economist and therefore relies on his advisors to do these calculations so he can determine policy.

The global economy is being taken down because of bad math.

This short piece by @AEI explains it succinctly. A must read. https://www.aei.org/economics/president-trumps-tariff-formula-makes-no-economic-sense-its-also-based-on-an-error/

The President’s advisors need to acknowledge their error before April 9th and make a course correction before the President makes a big mistake based on bad math. [source ]

As with the first term, it’s always the advisors who are at fault, not the guy that hired them. Funny how that works.

Cope 6: The dip until things get better

Not buy the dip mind you–just ghost your online presence. There’s the subtle way–see for example Elon Musk’s lack of engagement on this topic other than starting a flame war with Peter Navaro. Or just fully disappear like our own resident apologists. Let me be clear that I’m not asking them to post defenses (because we know they already don’t have any).

I realized that some folks hope they’ve given up. Based on previous history, I just can’t believe that. I expect that when things turn around, they will be back to pwn us libs. Here’s hoping they at least have the good grace to adopt new names to claim they never supported Trump or the tariffs and how things would have been economically worse under Harris.

Cope 7: Hear what you want to hear and disregard the rest (h/t to Paul Simon)

The final cope is best exemplified by the X/tter account Thomas Sowell Quotes, @ThomasSowell. The account announces: I’m not Thomas Sowell, but I share his quotes and key topics in news & politics. There is you’ll note a major key topic in news and politics at the moment: the tariffs. So of course he’ll go to a noted conservative academic for their thoughts… right?

Oh… huh. It’s not like Thomas Sowell has publicly discussed Trump’s current tariff plans in the last few days, right?

Weird… Browsing the feed, I see recent quotes from Sowell on race- and gender-based issues, not to mention why we all should be anti-union, but somehow, nothing about tariffs (or other economic topics). It’s weird how that works.

Whelp, that’s all we have for Trump apologists. As far as the rest of us, beyond sadness, at the moment our best copium is Black Humor, hence this post and one last X/eet from Stock Broker Eddy Elfenbein:

Stay safe out there y’all!

Update: I also need to acknowledge Trump’s own strategy for coping–negging his supporters. He posted this 30 minutes into the market crash:

Also, I’m sure everyone will be relieved to know that during this market crash, he has his eyes on the prize:

EXCITING!!!

Also those hopes of moderation that caused a momentary rally? Nope. Not happening:

(Yes, I will write about how a blue check social media post just caused a dead cat bounce… eventually).

May the Pod Be With You!

by | Apr 9, 2025 | Outside The Beltway

Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars…Steven and Tom re-visit the very, very first Star Wars movie. When it landed in the summer of 1977, it had an asteroid side impact on our brains, popular culture, and moviemaking. Come with us to the mall theater on opening day! Hear all the great things that practically knocked us out of your seats on that first showing! Listen to us talk about what it was like to see our friends and family follow under its spell! Gasp at how many times we saw it, and why, not to mention people who saw it even more! Cringe at the TV specials! Suit up in your home-made Han Solo costume!

Star Wars was the first epic success of geek culture in our lifetimes, even bigger than the Batman TV show and other topics we’ve covered.  Journey back with us to the late Seventies to hear how this culture-defining movie changed our young geek lives…And how it conquered the world!

Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of culture. We were geeks before it was chic!

For feedback, contact so**************@gm***.com. You can also find us on Facebook , Reddit , and Bluesky . And if you like what you hear, please tell a friend. Also, reviews on your podcast platform of choice are always appreciated.

The Backlash Has Begun

by | Apr 8, 2025 | NPR, Outside The Beltway, Reuters, The Atlantic

April 5, 2025 - Rally in downtown Boston, Massachusetts to express outrage at President Trump, his policies and his minions.
“Pro-Democracy Rally in Boston MA” by Paul W. Locke is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

NPR (“Nationwide ‘Hands Off!’ protests erupt against Trump and Musk“):

Demonstrators gathered across the country on Saturday, many animated by differing issues, but united in opposition to the Trump administration with the single message: “Hands off!”

Organizers said more than 1,300 “Hands Off!” rallies of varying sizes took place on Saturday.

Since President Trump took office in January, various protests have taken place against his administration’s plans and policies — from the mass firing of federal workers to immigration raids to the involvement of billionaire Elon Musk in the federal government.

Saturday’s protests appeared to be the most widespread to date of Trump’s second term.

“There are so many issues,” said Kelley Laird from Rockville, Md., who attended a rally in Washington, D.C., on Saturday. “They’re coming after education, coming after health care, coming after the arts, coming after the press.”

In Boston, protesters gathered to push back against the federal cuts on research and against the arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University doctoral student who was arrested by federal agents in plain clothes, as member station WBUR reported.

In Sylva, N.C., over 300 people came together to oppose cuts to national parks, education and veteran services, according to BPR News. And in Portland, Ore., several thousand people rallied against what they describe as an “illegal, billionaire power grab” by Trump and Musk, OPB reported.

In D.C., thousands filled the grass near the Washington Monument, holding up signs supporting reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, Social Security, veterans benefits, and opposing tariffs.

Laird and her neighbors said they formed a group chat after Trump took office this year. They use the group chat, named “Sisters of the resistance,” to coordinate attending protests together and offer support.

“We need to form community to bolster each other up because we have to be in this for the long run,” said Emily Peck, who started the group chat.

Many attendees who spoke to NPR said they felt compelled to show up, because new concerns keep emerging.

“This  is first time that I am trying to regularly participate,” said Patty Kim, a retired federal worker, who attended the D.C. rally with her husband. “I felt so frustrated and paralyzed by the bunch of things that are going on that undermine human rights and humanity in this country that I love, that I had to do something.”

Mother Jones‘ Tim Murphy writes, “You Can Stop Asking Where the Mass Opposition Is. It’s Everywhere.”

It is a cliche to begin a story about a rally with a quote from a funny sign, but one small piece of floppy brown cardboard floating down 40th Street in Manhattan on Saturday seemed to capture the mood of this weekend’s “Hands Off” protests against President Donald Trump: “Where do I start?”

You could meet a dozen people and hear at least a dozen different existential threats. Hands off Social Security. Hands off public health grants. Hands off student visas. Hands off women. Hands off trans people. Hands off our tax dollars. Hands off Greenland. Hands off books. Hands off 401ks. Hands off immigrants. Hands off Mahmoud Khalil. Hands off grocery prices. Hands off unions. I even talked to a woman clutching a sign that said “Hands off Libby”—the popular e-reader for public library systems which is now in jeopardy thanks to massive cuts to the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.

This barrage of grievances offered a snapshot of the new Trump administration’s multi-front war on modernity. But it also got at something essential about the current anti-Trump movement. People weren’t taking action just to protest what the president and his movement represented, but because of visceral fear—real fear—of what he had already done, and that once impossible things were now very much possible. People had lived through a Trump administration before. They were taking to the streets now, in part, because they had not lived through this.

[…]

I spent a lot of time at anti-Trump demonstrations eight years ago, and the aesthetics now are, in a lot of ways, pretty similar to what they were back then. Saturday’s rallies were organized, in part, by Indivisible, the ur-Resistance group of the first Trump administration that grew from a Google Doc  into a nationwide network. Cardboard signs displayed straight-from-social media nicknames (Cheeto, Muskrat, etc.) and droll complaints (“I’ve seen better cabinets at Ikea”). Attendees leaned white and boomer. I even saw a few pussy hats.

But if the crowd was similar, marchers I spoke with were responding to a threat they considered considerably more dangerous than the first time around. Trump 1.0 was chaotic and mean and ultimately quite destructive, but it was also—in hindsight—a shell of what it could have been. The administration was filled with a lot of weird guys with short attention spans. “Infrastructure week” became a punchline because it never really happened. But this time around, protestors were stunned by the speed of Trump and Musk’s demolition.

The Atlantic‘s Elaine Godfrey is more muted in “The Cardboard-Carrying Opposition Arrives.”

The opposition arrived in a flurry of painted cardboard.

Until this week, the 11th of Donald Trump’s second presidency, the resistance has not exactly been uppercase R. Any show of dissent by Democratic leadership has been virtually nonexistent, and protests against Trump’s policies have been small and sporadic. Citizen frustration with the new administration has registered nationally as little more than a distant rumble.

Today’s “Hands Off” protest, organized by a coalition of left-wing groups, was an attempt to raise the volume.

[…]

In interviews with some of those gathered today on the National Mall, demonstrators told me that they were under no illusion that Trump or Elon Musk would be much swayed by their anger or creative signage. The point, they said, was to show the rest of America that the opposition exists—and is widespread. “This is not for them,” Gina King, a retired teacher from New York City, told me. “This is for us.”

Her colleague Gal Beckerman declares, “Protest in Trump 2.0 Looks Different.” Writing before the event, he observed:

Today, a coalition of liberal groups under the banner “Hands Off!” is planning hundreds of such actions around the country. This is the kind of activity that has led members of Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, which tracks acts of civil dissent, to conclude  recently that the resistance is “alive and well,” with protests “far more numerous and frequent than skeptics might suggest.” 

[…]

What this suggests, at best, is a different model of protest movement: highly decentralized, moving at a snail’s pace, more a slog than a resistance. “Something is happening,” the journalist Ali Velshi wrote  on MSNBC last week, “a different kind of movement building right now, one that has had steady and sustained momentum.” In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last emphasized  the strategic advantage of a movement that makes its way from the hinterlands toward Washington.

It is different, but is it better? Is a single protest of 100,000 people equal to 1,000 actions with 100 people at each? I posed this zen koan of a question to Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard professor and Consortium co-director who coined  the idea that if any protest movement drew 3.5 percent of a country’s population, it could achieve its goals. (That would equal nearly 12 million people in the United States today.) Does it matter how you get to this figure, all at once or bit by bit? “We don’t really know,” Chenoweth told me, “and conceivably either path produces momentum.”

So far into Trump 2.0, though, the path of decentralized slowness has had a paradoxical effect: It’s giving activists lots to do but is leaving a much larger population of dissenters without an expressive outlet. What makes a disaffected Gen Zer or a busy Millennial parent drop what they are doing and head into the streets is very different from what motivates hard-core protesters to pick up their cymbals. That much larger group needs to feel both the safety and the collective impact that comes with a mass march. “Power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse,” the philosopher Hannah Arendt  wrote in The Human Condition. Most people join protests to express that power, not to emphasize their marginality. And it is precisely this type of action that, in the face of one barrier after another, feels more difficult than it ever did.

Trump’s first term was punctuated by a series of monster gatherings: the Women’s March that greeted his inauguration (estimated  at as many as 4.6 million people all over the country), the March for Our Lives following the 2018 Parkland shooting (1.2 million ), and—dwarfing all previous American protest movements—the Black Lives Matter  demonstrations after the killing of George Floyd (anywhere from 15 million to 26 million people, according to polls  taken at the time). The Women’s March was highly organized and concentrated, while the protests in June 2020 were largely spontaneous and spread out. But what made all of these significant was the measure by which protest has long been judged: the overwhelming numbers of people who took part.

The BLM protests certainly seemed impactful at the time, drawing sustained attention to longstanding problems. Yet, here we are years later and we’re almost certainly in a much darker place in American race relations than we were the day before George Floyd’s murder.

On Day 1 of his new term, President Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing .” The next day, he signed another “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity .” A few days later, yet another “Restoring America’s Fighting Force ,” that targeted, among other things, DEI programs in the Defense Department. He fired the second Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because, obviously, he was a “DEI hire.” He was, after all, Black. QED.

That people are outraged about this and other outrages is all well and good. But I tend to be skeptical of movements that are organized against things rather than for them.

Right now, these protests are easy to dismiss. One imagines 99% of them supported Kamala Harris in the last election and, indeed, have never supported a Republican President. Trump certainly doessn’t care what they think. Ditto most Congressional Republicans and Republican-appointed judges.

We may be close to a tipping point, though. There are strong hints that DOGE is going to start hitting programs popular with Trump voters, including Social Security and Medicare. And the tariffs sure look like they’re about the wreck the economy and put a lot of folks to work. Which will really put a strain on their ability to buy eggs.

It has not yet materialized, though. Looking at the latest polls that provide breakdowns, Republicans still overwhelmingly support Trump’s actions.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted March 31-April 2 shows 70% saying we’re on the Right Track overall, with 49% strongly approving of his job performance and 35% somewhat approving. Still, only 47% think we’re on the right track on cost of living and only 48% on inflation. Those are the only issues where his approval numbers aren’t really high among self-identified Republicans—and even there, the bulk on non-supporters are in the Don’t Know rather Wrong Track camp.

The Economist/YouGov poll (March 30-April 1) is harder to read, since it does the breakdowns the other way: showing which percentage of the responses come from the party rather than vice versa. Still, it’s clear that Republicans overwhelming support the direction in which things are going.

More weirdly, Trump is actually considerably more popular with the country now than he was at any point in his first term.

Indeed, he’s only just finally moved back underwater—a condition he was in all but the first couple of days of his first administration. Like it or not, Joe Biden was considerably less popular much of his term.

Again, though, an economic collapse and/or targeting of popular middle class entitlements could change all of this in a heartbeat. Whether that will finally be enough to get Congressional Republicans to stand up to him is another question altogether.

Monday’s Forum

by | Apr 8, 2025 | Outside The Beltway

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Sunday’s Forum

by | Apr 8, 2025 | Outside The Beltway

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3,900.28 Points in Two Days

by | Apr 8, 2025 | Outside The Beltway, Politico, The Daily Beast

I honestly am not obsessed with the DJIA, nor do I think it is some magical indicator of the health of the economy. But, it’s not nothing, either. I keep bringing it up because it is an obvious indicator of Trump’s tariff policies. It matters not just to highly invested members of the business class, but also to a lot of otherwise “regular” people who have investments for things like retirement or to educate their kids.

It’s not for nothing that we think about the market crash of 1929 as a key indicator for the start of the Great Depression. We know the market tumbled as a result of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession of earlier in this century. Precipitous stock market declines get names like Black Monday.

The thing about all of those previous events is that they were the culmination of any number of external factors, not because of a very specific, very conscious policy. Moreover, it is a policy choice that anyone with an ounce of understanding could have seen coming.

Further, this situation is one in which I truly do blame Congressional Democrats for not specifically curtailing the president’s tariff powers in the 2021-2022 period. While I get a little frustrated by blaming the Democrats for the very bad acts of a Republican president and Congress, I think that if you know an arsonist might be coming to your house for a visit that it is advisable to make sure the matches and accelerants are safely stowed and not feel accessible.

I will add to this assigning of blame that the current Congress, controlled by the allegedly pro-business Republicans, should be telling themselves that their president has gone too far and that it is time to take his toys away.

We aren’t currently experiencing any result of the business cycle, the broader global economy failing, a pandemic, or paying the price for some culmination of bad decisions. We are suffering this situation because of a man who thinks that tariff “is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary” and that the model of American greatness is to be found in the late 19th century.

The whole situation is painfully stupid.

It is not good history.

It is not good politics.

It is not good economics.

It is blindingly, excruciatingly stupid.

And the sycophants around him are all onboard. For example, via the Daily Beast, JD Vance Says He’s ‘Feeling Good’ About Market Mayhem: ‘It Could Be Worse’ .

“We’re feeling good. Look, I frankly thought in some ways it could be worse in the markets because this is a big transition,” Vance said on Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt Tonight Thursday. 

“You saw the president said earlier today, it’s like a patient who was very sick . We did the operation, and now it’s time to make the patient better. And that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Vance added.

He was referencing a Truth Social post from President Trump that said the economy is in a post-surgery phase, and metaphorical convalescence will lead to a more healthy outcome down the line. 

“THE OPERATION IS OVER! THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING. THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” Trump wrote on his social media platform.

It strikes me that Elon Musk, who has more money than he could ever spend, had a sad and got mad because Tim Walz made fun of his stock dipping. But is it okay if millions of run-of-the-mill people see their retirement account evaporate? Is it okay if tens of thousands lose their jobs in the coming recession that is being created by choice?

And then there is this lunacy.

First, I suspect that most companies are going to wait to make massive investments. They don’t know what is coming next. There is this thing called “uncertainty.” Perhaps you have heard of it? One suspects a lot of people and companies and calculating (or hoping) that either this is a short-term bluff, or that someone will intervene. At a bare minimum, a lot of investors will try and ride this out until the next administration. It isn’t like the day after “Liberation Day,” companies started making plans to break ground on new plants.

Second, even if they all start today, it is going to take a hell of a lot longer to restore manufacturing to the US than two years. This is especially true given that some numbskull just made construction materials more expensive. (A reminder that tariffs will make domestic products more expensive as well, not to mention all of this could spark general inflation).

Third, the rest of the world remains part of global economy and doing business out there may be more agreeable to many companies than expending the funds needed to do business just here inside the Trump Tariff bubble.

Beyond the weird fantasies and the William McKinley fan fic, I am beyond astounded at how they came up with these tariffs.

Via The Verge: Trump’s new tariff math looks a lot like ChatGPT’s.

Economist James Surowiecki  quickly reverse-engineered a possible explanation for the tariff pricing. He found you could recreate each of the White House’s numbers by simply taking a given country’s trade deficit with the US and dividing it by their total exports to the US. Halve that number, and you get a ready-to-use “discounted reciprocal tariff.” The White House objected to this claim and published the formula  it says that it used, but as Politico points out , the formula looks like a dressed-up version of Surowiecki’s method.

[…]

A number  of X  users  have realized that if you ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Grok for an “easy” way to solve trade deficits and put the US on “an even playing field”, they’ll give you a version of this “deficit divided by exports” formula with remarkable consistency. The Vergetested this with the phrasing used in those posts, as well as a question based more closely on the government’s language, asking chatbots for “an easy way for the US to calculate tariffs that should be imposed on other countries to balance bilateral trade deficits between the US and each of its trading partners, with the goal of driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.” All four platforms gave us the same fundamental suggestion.

And yes, Kush Desai is the deputy White House Press Secretary, and I can find no reason to assume that the X account quoted isn’t real. I say that one because what he is admitting is so mind-bogglingly stupid that my first reaction was to assume it was a parody account.

To reference again Kingdaddy’s post from the other day, this smacks of Elon Musk and his techbro obsession with AI. But I am also reminded of another tech term I learned decades ago: GIGO .

See also, Futurism: Trump Tariffs Show Signs of Being Written by AI.

“Confirmed, ChatGPT…” Journal of Public Economics editor Wojtek Kopczuk tweeted . “Exactly what the dumbest kid in the class would do, without edits.”

We are being governed by fools and idiots. That is not a partisan assessment. That is as hard a political science observation as I have made in my entire career.

And, by the way, speaking of the Great Depression.

A reminder that probably the single biggest reason that Trump won was the economy and the simplistic (indeed, foolish) hope of many voters that he could bring down prices to their pre-COVID levels.

And by the way, if this had happend in the first couple of months of the Harris administration Trump and the rest of the right would be screaming bloody murder. That may be a hackneyed, cliched observation at this point, but it is true nevertheless.

Strong Jobs Report For March*

by | Apr 8, 2025 | NPR, Outside The Beltway

Amid the continued global market downturn (particularly US markets and dollar downturns ), supporters of the President got some good news. After two months of lower month-to-month job growth, initial reporting for March shows an increase in the number of new jobs. From NPR :

U.S. employers added 228,000 jobs in March. That’s about twice the number added the previous month, when revised figures show employers added 111,000 jobs. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2% from 4.1% in February, as 232,000 people joined or rejoined the workforce. [Source ]

Given how much Trump apologists are sharing this news, it’s great to know that we can once again trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s amazing how easily that faith comes when someone they like is in the White House.

As someone who has trusted those numbers (and their revisions) across both parties, job growth now and in the past is, of course, good news. Here’s to hoping that if revisions happen, they will only revise up. Only time will tell.

All that said, it sure seems like a lot of Trump supporters and the President himself are making a lot of causation/correlation errors in their interpretation of this news:

Granted, “IT’S ALREADY WORKING” can be interpreted in many ways (I look forward to our Trump whispers explanations). But coupled with “HANG TOUGH” (i.e., don’t panic over the last 48 hours), it sure seems like part of the “IT’s” that is “ALREADY” (as in right now) “WORKING” are the Tariffs that dropped two days ago.

Unless you are willing to advance the theory that companies started to hire in March based on market-crushing tariffs that would be implemented on the second day of the following month, this really feels like a correlation error.

Then again, I guess only time will tell. One good thing about the Trump tariffs is that the President had the presence of mind to start them on the second day of April. That means, except for April 1st, this month’s jobs report will almost exclusively include data from what happens after the tariffs were announced.

I’m wondering if any of our readers want to bet that the April jobs report will show the same level of growth as this month.