Signs of the Time
Only 1,378 days to go...
“Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism:
The right to criticize.
The right to hold unpopular beliefs.
The right to protest.
The right of independent thought.”
~ Margaret Chase Smith
A friend of mine sent me pictures of some of the signs she took on April 5th in Raleigh, NC. Adding to some of the other ones I have…
To my North Carolina readers, please contact your state representatives to OPPOSE House Bill 825. The bill is titled "Election improvements" and sponsored by Rep. Brian Echevarria and six other House members. I strongly oppose the bill's arbitrary and blanket ban on ranked choice voting, along with other provisions that seem aimed at making voting more difficult.Some good news: Trump’s poll numbers continue to drop.
An Economist-YouGov poll (done between April 5 and April 8) shows Trump’s approval rating falling to 43 percent from 48 percent two weeks ago, with a stunning 80 percent of Americans expecting the tariffs to raise prices for things they buy.
Since inauguration day, Trump has lost 29 points among voters aged 18-29, 14 points among 30-44, and 8 points among 65+.
A Navigator poll (done between April 3 and April 7) shows Trump’s economic approval at its worst ever, with 58 percent of Americans holding an unfavorable view of tariffs, compared to only 30 percent favorable. Overall, Trump has a 44 percent approval versus 53 percent disapproval.
Quinnipiac’s latest poll (done April 3 to April 7), shows that 72 percent voters think Trump’s tariffs will hurt the economy in the short-term, including 77 percent of independents and 44 percent of Republicans - Overall, Trump has a 41 percent approval and 53 percent disapproval.
After last week’s tariff announcement, Trump’s economic approval has dropped precipitously, now tied for his worst ever in Navigator tracking since 2018. His overall job approval rating has also declined. The broad tariffs last week brought this feeling to a boiling point, with 58% of Americans saying Trump's policies are contributing to high costs and 72% saying they are contributing to volatility in the stock market. Most Americans' exposure to the stock market is through retirement accounts, where nearly 50% of Americans have long-term savings. This sentiment is shared by a majority of Americans across party lines – including 60 percent of Independents and 62 percent of Republicans.
Thought for the day in honor of his birthday…
“I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
~ Thomas Jefferson
Must Read Article:
The last century, of course, has seen the Senate’s disgraceful abdication of their core constitutional role, with successive presidents crossing successive lines. But Trump — instinctually sensing the vacuum, and unencumbered by any understanding or knowledge of the Constitution — has dialed it to 11. He has effectively become an elected monarch, and is seen and worshipped as such by his people, his courtiers, and his advisers who know never to contradict a single thing the king says.
Trump’s second term can therefore be seen, I think, as the negation of the American idea. America is about the dispersal of power. Trump is about its intense concentration. America is about legal authority. Trump is about raw power. America was founded on a faith in reason. Trump embraces his own instinct alone. America is designed for a wide diversity of opinion. Trump governs solely for those who agree with him. America was designed to banish the corrupting trappings of monarchy. Trump is larding up the Oval Office with golden trinkets, planning a massive military parade to salute him, and his House allies have bills to replace Franklin for Trump on the $100 bill and carve him into Mount Rushmore.
Quote of the day:
“From Monday morning until early afternoon Wednesday, when President Psycho jacked tariffs on China up to the absurd level of 125 percent and simultaneously dropped the rest of world to 10 percent for a “90 day PAUSE” (as he put it in an Truth Social post), I was seriously entertaining the possibility that the global economy could be teetering on the verge of a repeat of 2008, 2020, or something even more catastrophic… this time the crisis would be caused entirely by the actions of the president of the United States.”
~ Damon Linker
What I’m reading today…
Trump Is Stupid, Erratic and Weak
It's the uncertainty, stupid
Like many other observers, I’ve been arguing that uncertainty about Trump’s policies is as big a drag on the economy as the policies themselves.
Who Needs Free Trade When You Can Raise Your Own Chickens?
A strange thing is happening on the right. A powerful and influential faction of the Republican Party wants goods to be more expensive, economic growth to be constrained and men and women back in factories — whether the rest of us want this or not.
In fact, you cannot understand President Trump’s attack on global trade (and trade with China in particular) without understanding this faction of the New Right. Traditionalist, patriarchal Christians, populist economists and postliberal academics are engineering a Republican break with free trade and free markets that’s deliberately intended to remake the American economy — and American culture — from the ground up.
They don’t want to negotiate better trade deals. They want to reverse the globalization of the American economy. They want the 1950s back.
Trump Tariffs Bring Business to DC
If President Donald Trump’s goal was to stimulate the economy of Washington, D.C., or to maximize the number of CEOs, lobbyists, and foreign leaders who come begging for his favor, he could hardly have done better than creating a massive tariff regime…
By imposing tariffs and threatening to increase them, Trump has forced major corporations to hire his friends, who are also his fundraisers.
In the first quarter of 2025, 162 new lobbying registrations were filed that listed trade or tariffs among their concerns. That’s more than twice as much as last year and a 48% increase over former President Joe Biden’s first year.
(This year’s first quarter number — 162 new trade-related lobbying filings — is still growing, as firms have 45 days to file a registration, and the first quarter just ended March 31.)
The party of deficit-busting is about to blow a multi-trillion dollar hole in federal revenues—and paper it over with a budgetary gimmick.
Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs and the barmy calculations the administration used to devise them aren’t the only deeply fishy math the Republican party is indulging this week. As they stumble toward a budget bill, GOP lawmakers are also working to renew the tax cuts package from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. As originally passed, those cuts were temporary—a necessity to make the budgetary math add up at the time. But because current law plans for them to expire, renewing them would (per traditional accounting rules) blow a brand new hole in the federal budget, spiking deficits by hundreds of billions of dollars a year. This will all come at a time when Republicans are trying to posture as though they’re finally ready to get serious—no fooling this time—about the debt. So how do Republicans hope to surmount this messaging hurdle? By lying, mostly. The current budget framework, approved by the Senate last week and by the House on Wednesday, takes an approach to assessing its impact on the deficit you might charitably call novel. Rather than scoring the framework on a “current law” baseline—as in, recognizing that the tax cuts are legally set to expire and being honest about the cost of renewing them in the budget framework—Republicans are using a “current policy” baseline: assessing the budget framework in contrast with tax levels as they stand today.
Chicago Cinco de Mayo Parade canceled due to concerns about ICE raids
Chicago's annual Cinco de Mayo Parade in the Little Village neighborhood will not take place in 2025. Organizers said Thursday that the Trump administration's immigration policies are to blame for the cancellation. The Cermak Road Chamber of Commerce said the Mexican community in Chicago is worried about raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
I have many reactions to President Trump’s largely caving on his harebrained plan to tariff the world, but overall, one reaction just keeps coming back to me: If you hire clowns, you should expect a circus. And my fellow Americans, we have hired a group of clowns.
Think of what Trump; his chief knucklehead, Howard Lutnick (the commerce secretary); his assistant chief knucklehead, Scott Bessent (the Treasury secretary); and his deputy assistant chief knucklehead, Peter Navarro (the top trade adviser), have told us repeatedly for the past weeks: Trump won’t back off on these tariffs because — take your choice — he needs them to keep fentanyl from killing our kids, he needs them to raise revenue to pay for future tax cuts, and he needs them to pressure the world to buy more stuff from us. And he couldn’t care less what his rich pals on Wall Street say about their stock market losses.
…But instead of making it the whole industrial world against China, Trump made it America against the whole industrial world and China.
The ‘Signalgate’ Group Chat May Be Evidence of a U.S. War Crime
Of more enduring concern, however, and largely lost in the ensuing controversy is what the Signal group chat revealed in terms of the Trump administration’s operational plans themselves: a strike on a civilian apartment building that reportedly killed 53 civilians in an effort to kill a single military commander, in a conflict of arguably little genuine military or political significance to U.S. national interests.
The strike itself, the reasoning behind it and the way in which senior Trump administration officials cheered as civilians died at best damages U.S. moral standing. But according to Amnesty International, the conversations that were laid bare in the Signal group chat also suggest the strike itself and the reasoning behind it may have violated the laws of armed conflict.
As Trump alienates allies with US tariffs, China is poised to exploit the gaps
As President Donald Trump tries to turn his global trade war into a one-on-one showdown with China, he is finding that he has alienated some key U.S. partners who could boost America’s position in a fight between the world’s largest and second-largest economies.
For more than a decade, American leaders, including Trump, have tried to reorient U.S. economic policy, security strategy and alliances to confront China’s rise. Yet nearly three months into his second term, Trump’s “America First” tariffs and budget cutbacks may have provided Beijing its clearest opening yet to escape years of U.S. pressure.
This week, Trump doubled down on China, raising duties on its imports to a staggering 145%, even as he eased off his planned tariffs on much of the world’s goods for 90 days in the face of a stock market meltdown. But the whipsaw of economic threats on American allies and partners has already taken a toll, beyond just upending global trade.
Trump’s Budget ‘Heist’ Is Robin Hood for Billionaires
This week, the GOP-led House voted 216-214 to pass a budget framework that will make $4 billion in sweeping cuts to federal programs, such as Medicaid and SNAP benefits, to fund President Donald Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires—all while adding $5.7 trillion to the government deficit.
“That doesn’t seem like a recipe for balancing a budget to me. Republicans who seem to lose their fiscal conservatism when a Republican is in office.”
90% of ‘Worst of the Worst’ Migrants Sent to Mega Prison Had No U.S. Criminal Record
Just a handful of the 238 migrants deported by the Trump administration to a mega prison in El Salvador actually have a criminal record, U.S. court records show—despite the White House’s insistence that they were dangerous criminals. President Donald Trump described the deportees—most of them Venezuelans—as a “bad group, when you look at the crimes they’ve committed.” But for 228 of them, there was no available information showing they committed any serious crimes in the U.S.. The migrants were deported without due process after Trump on March 15 invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—a rarely used wartime law—alleging an “invasion” by members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.
Egg prices rise to record high despite White House optimism
Egg prices rose to a record high in March of $6.23 per dozen despite optimism from the White House last month.
The price for a dozen grade A large eggs jumped from February’s $5.90 to $6.23, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). It was $4.95 per dozen in January.
White House asks for more time to review Rep. Chuck Edwards’ FEMA recommendations
Trump has called for the elimination of FEMA, as has U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who also serves on the task force. FEMA is part of Homeland Security. Representatives Virginia Foxx and Tim Moore, Republicans who represent portions of North Carolina, are also on the task force.
Asheville breweries' beer production costs rise ahead of global tariffs
For local breweries, the tariffs add to the financial toll of other recent events, such as Tropical Storm Helene, the COVID-19 pandemic and inflation. Tariffs could spike the price of aluminum and other packaging materials, ingredients and building supplies, impacting breweries and trickling down to customers. “Tariffs impact pricing for everything we buy,” said Adam Charnack, co-founder of Hi-Wire Brewing. “They’re concerning. It’s making it harder to be a small brewery.”
White House adviser Alina Habba said that military veterans affected by the DOGE-led layoffs of federal workers may not be "fit to have a job at this moment."..
Emily Erroa, an Army veteran who was fired from the Department of Energy last month alongside other employees who did not yet have full civil service protections, called Habba’s statement “ridiculous.”
With Trump’s tariffs, not only will the cost of gadgets rise, the cost of fixing them will, too
The latest tariffs on China, which went into effect just after midnight on April 9 and have been raised since, won’t just increase the price of new computers, smartphones and other gadgets imported into the U.S. They’re also expected to significantly raise the cost of many of the parts, like hard drives, batteries and graphics cards, needed to repair them.
Tariff Uncertainty Is Freezing M&A and Dealmaking. It May Not Thaw for a While
Many founders and investors expected 2025 to be a good year for both mergers and acquisitions and IPOs. But things haven’t worked out quite like they planned. The number of companies pausing their plans for an initial public offering continues to grow, and startups thinking about an M&A exit are unlikely to find an environment that is any more welcoming.
Tesla Halts Orders in China on U.S. Imported Models
Tesla has stopped accepting new orders in China for two car models that it imports from a factory in the United States, after the Chinese government imposed steep tariffs on American imports.
On Friday, Tesla’s website in China removed the “order” button from the Model S sedan and Model X sport utility vehicle. Customers still have the option of buying one of those models, produced at its Fremont, Calif., factory, if the company has existing inventory.
Tesla did not explain why customers could no longer order those models, but the change came a day after China raised its import tariffs on U.S. goods to match the level of President Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs at the time.
Trump Isn’t the First President to Blow Up the Trading System
The story of Nixon’s New Economic Policy is a cautionary tale for the Trump administration—if it’s inclined to learn from history. President Trump, like Nixon, has bet his legacy on an economic policy the experts deride. By playing to the working-class constituencies that brought him to office, Trump, like Nixon, has divided the GOP old guard and conservative movement. He’s repulsed U.S. allies at the same time he tries, like Nixon, to drive a wedge between Russia and China.
What I am watching…
What I read every day…
