mtutiger

Ottawa, Illinois... Was not able to attend personally, but impressive given the population base

Credit to AP

The companion piece to the Grassley-Cantwell action.... makes sense coming from Bacon (Omaha + suburbs are quintessential swing territory, Nebraska is a huge ag state)

To be fair to Shawn Fain, given that none of us new what these tariffs were until Trump ambled out there and held up that board, do we even know how the UAW felt about these tariffs? The policy is disastrous enough, and certainly people didn't consider the word case scenarios enough... but still, nobody knew what the **** he was going to do going into it either.

The stuff like Nintendo delaying pre-orders of the Switch 2 kinda matters here.... this stuff breaks through to everybody.

So is the skyrocketing inflation and stock market crash still on Biden's bloody hands or can we put some pressure of the Trump admin yet?

Seriously, good luck with this message...

A blind squirrel might just find a nut on this one lol

One of those things that won't go unnoticed by the general public.

If Sarah Langs did economic commentary, there'd be a lot of "WEEEEEEE"ing this week

Another John Burn-Murdoch graphic... A couple of takeaways: 1.) Immigration is basically the thread holding the enterprise together at the moment 2.) Not every Trump voter is a "red hat"...

Another way of looking at this: there was a carveout for O&G in these tariffs which people are pointing to as an example of Trump protecting a friendly constituency from the impacts of these tariffs. The problem? Oil prices, like just about everything outside of beer and cigarettes, are cratering at the moment. Oil companies require both capital for expanding operations (which they aren't going to do with a barrel of oil under $60 regardless) and operating expenses (for maintaining existing infrastructure). Capital and operating expenses are for things like steel and parts which, because of these boneheaded tariffs, are all way more expensive than they were prior to yesterday. The end result is that even this sector, which ostensibly is being shielded more than others from the impact of these tariffs by the administration, will pull back and will suffer along with all the rest.... there's no being "made whole" out of any of these actions.

Seems like he's taking ownership of the crash and outcome to me

Nobody wants to talk about it, but given that we talked about it endlessly with Biden, we should be talking about it with Trump as well: he's getting older. He's never been a particularly intellectually curious or, frankly, mentally stable person, but the base case is to assume that all of these traits are going to be enhanced as he ages and as he begins to slow down mentally (which, people avoid it, but is very likely happening). It reminds me a lot of my late grandmother.... it literally took her driving the wrong way down a four-lane divided highway until she got the keys taken away and ended up in assisted living. Trump is the POTUS version of this right now.... and absent the GOP finding their balls (I will be calling my rep's DC office and yelling today), I don't see him losing the keys anytime soon.

I'm just now seeing this clip from yesterday, but this is up there in the pantheon of stupid defenses of bad policy decisions.

We Have Never Been More Respected

This was always the problem with the GP's logic on saying "well, he was fine in 2019, it'll be OK this time too".... the Esper, Cohn, Mnuchin, Mattis, Pompeo types are all gone. The inmates were gonna run the asylum, and he advertised it continually.

Clearly.... kinda wish people were thinking along these lines prior to yesterday instead of assuming that he wasn't intending on doing the thing that he campaigned over and over on during last year's POTUS election.

To the above point

Not necessarily directly related, but in a better world, this action would cause a little soul searching about the wisdom of, over time, the legislative and judicial branches ceding and endowing this much power in the Executive on trade. Regardless of whether Trump sticks with the tariffs or not, the uncertainty will always be there going forward as other countries price in the fact that trade could potentially whipsaw on the whims of just one person

It's important to keep in mind as well that Trump (and people like Navarro underneath him) have simultaneously treated tariffs as both punitive measures to punish other countries as well as a reliable revenue stream to fund their priorities (ie. extending the Trump tax cuts). It's incoherent as hell - tariffs are usually applied in order to influence consumer decisions and what they choose to buy which, taken to it's end logic, will reduce how much people choose to buy and over time will reduce the amount of revenue that the tariffs will take in. Sorry, there is absolutely zero reason to trust this administration knows what the hell its doing here.

If the first few months of this administration have taught us anything, it's that the rest of the world is a lot more willing to tell us to pound sand than Trump's administration (or supporters) believed. Just a toxic combination of arrogance and delusion