Three Coequal Timelines of Government
Amid all the 100-day reviews of Trump’s term so far, a few people made an important point. In normal times, the legacy of presidential administrations rests on what a President can get passed into law, not what he can do via a flurry of Executive Orders thrown out on near-daily basis during his first hundred days.
Matt Glassmann made the point in this thread and Peter Baker made it at length with a comparison of FDR and Trump.
Unlike Roosevelt and every president who followed, however, Mr. Trump has relied mainly on executive authority rather than trying to pass legislation through Congress. Roosevelt set the standard when he took office in 1933 in the teeth of the Great Depression, pushing through 15 landmark pieces of legislation in those epic 100 days.
Overall, Roosevelt signed 76 bills into law in that period, more than any of his successors, while Mr. Trump has signed just five, the lowest of any president since then. By contrast, Mr. Trump has signed a whopping 142 executive orders, more than three times the 42 that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed in his first 100 days in 2021.
The lack of major legislation is not because Mr. Trump failed but because he has not even bothered to try. Even though his own Republican Party controls both houses of Congress, the president has all but disregarded Capitol Hill so far, other than seeking a giant package of spending and tax cuts that is only just starting to make its way through the House and Senate. Executive orders feed his appetite for instant action, while enacting legislation can involve arduous and time-consuming negotiations.
But the price of instant action could be failure to bring about sustained change. Bills passed by Congress and signed by a president become the law of the land for years if not decades to come, while executive orders can simply be repealed by the next president.
“F.D.R.’s accomplishments were enduring,” said H.W. Brands, a Roosevelt biographer at the University of Texas at Austin. “The Supreme Court overturned some but they were revised and reinstated. Most are with us still. Trump’s accomplishments, so far, can be undone by mere strokes of the pens of his successors.”
At the same time, Mr. Trump has claimed authority to act that his predecessors never imagined they had, setting off an escalating battle with the courts, which as of Monday had ruled at least 123 times to at least temporarily pause actions by the new administration that might be illegal or unconstitutional.
Mr. Trump has issued increasingly menacing threats against judges who dare to block him, and in one case his F.B.I. agents even handcuffed and arrested a county judge accused of obstructing his immigration crackdown.
“These first hundred days have been historic, not because of how much of his agenda he has achieved, but because of how much damage he has done to democratic institutions and state capacity in his effort to wield an unprecedented amount of executive power,” said Nicole Hemmer, director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University.
Roosevelt too expanded executive power, but in the early days at least he did so in tandem with Congress, which empowered him to respond to the crisis afflicting the country. In the process, he designed a domestic architecture that broadened the federal government’s role in society just as he would later fashion a new American-led international system that would last for generations.
There are several reasons why Trump hasn’t relied on Congress. Republicans don’t have the margins in either house to push through the awful things Trump wants to do. In Trump’s preferred model, Congress remains a thoroughly captured rubber stamp for his agenda. And if his larger power grab succeeds, he will win legal sanction for emasculating tools Congress has — the power of the purse and the power to set up boards insulated from politics most of all, but even transparency tools via which Congress can exercise oversight — to affirm their status as a coequal branch.
Though few in Congress seem to understand this, the Executive is making a mad dash to get the Courts to rubber stamp Trump’s gutting of the already-supine Legislative Branch.
But he may not get there in time — particularly not as SCOTUS grows increasingly irked by Trump’s defiance of them.
And while the outcome of this clash is totally uncertain, the timeline of it is coming into focus.
Right now, it looks increasingly likely that Trump’s tariff emergency will pre-empt — and likely dramatically disrupt — both the effort to codify his agenda and his bid to get SCOTUS to neuter Congress entirely.
Congress must pass budget bills to raise the debt ceiling
Thus far, Republicans in Congress have successfully overcome disunity by deferring all the hard questions. In the House, especially, Mike Johnson faces a block of members who know they will lose reelection if Congress makes big Medicaid cuts recognized as such (they’re trying to disguise them with work requirements and other gimmicks) and another block that refuses to pass a bill that doesn’t create the illusion of fiscal austerity that requires huge Medicaid cuts. Given that both blocks include at least eight members, the math is nearly impossible.
This week marks the beginning of the effort to really overcome those disagreements. And already, the timeline is slipping, first to Memorial Day (Johnson’s bid) and now to Fourth of July (Scott Bessent’s new deadline).
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent set a new deadline for Republicans’ sweeping domestic policy bill Monday: July 4.
“We’ve got three legs to the President’s economic agenda, trade, tax and deregulation, and we hope that we can have this tax portion done by Fourth of July,” Bessent told reporters at the Capitol after a meeting with congressional leaders and top tax writers.
The deadline pegged to the Independence Day recess — which POLITICO reported over the weekend — comes as Republicans work through significant sticking points to get the party-line megabill through the House by Speaker Mike Johnson’s Memorial Day target.
Bessent’s updated timeline came not long after Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters earlier Monday that the speed of the process would be dictated in part by the need to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. That would constitute a “hard deadline” for lawmakers, he said, since Republicans plan to include debt hike in the bill.
The exact “X-date,” as the federal default deadline is known,” remains in flux, though outside estimates have pegged it to hit sometime over the summer.
So the GOP plans to use all the time between now and whenever the government bumps up against the debt ceiling overcoming these near-intractable disagreements.
Gotcha. So July, for present purposes. May, June, July. Over two full months from now.
A lot can happen.
SCOTUS intervenes in national injunctions and Trump’s firing authority
Meanwhile, challenges to Trump’s executive power grabs are churning through the courts. On April 15, SCOTUS scheduled a highly unusual (in terms of timing and posture) May 15 hearing for first they will formally review, birthright citizenship. But as Steve Vladeck explains, that won’t even get into the guts of the question about birthright citizenship; this is about national injunctions.
The technical but critical point here is that the Trump administration is not formally asking the Supreme Court to get rid of the injunctions altogether (and uphold the policy). It’s asking only for the second type of relief it sought in the courts of appeals – to narrow the three injunctions so that they apply only to the plaintiffs.
This ties into concerns that administrations of both parties have raised about the power of courts to freeze a president’s polices nationwide. By raising that argument in the context of the highly controversial birthright citizenship policy, it is a transparent attempt to get the court to rule for the Trump administration without having to hold that these new limits on birthright citizenship are constitutional.
If the court sides with Trump, the practical effect would be largely the same; if the Supreme Court narrows these three district court injunctions to only the handful of specific, named plaintiffs in the three cases, then the result would be to allow the Trump policy to go into effect against everyone else – albeit without the Supreme Court specifically upholding it.
Of course, non-citizens who would be affected by the policy who are not parties to one of these three cases could bring their own lawsuits challenging it, and would likely succeed in those lawsuits, but their claims would have to be litigated on an individual basis—which would not only take some time, but might be beyond the resources of at least some of those who might be impacted.
SCOTUS has also frozen another consequential pair of cases, the challenges to Trump’s firing of two board members whose tenure was protected by Congress, Gwynne Wilcox on NLRB and Cathy Harris on Merit Systems Protection Board. Two days ago, Vladeck noted that this temporary stay has been on hold for 19 days, the kind of comment Vladeck often makes before something substantial happens.
This legal dispute has consequences not just for workers’ ability to get independent protection that cannot be politicized, but also for the functioning of the Federal Trade Commission and the Fed, including any authority Trump has to fire Jerome Powell. Judge Loren AliKhan has scheduled a hearing in the lawsuit from Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya challenging their own firing from the FTC, one that directly addresses the precedent that SCOTUS might overturn, for May 20. So that issue could be accelerated, or it could wend its way to the court by fall.
The disputes about Trump’s unlawful impoundment and usurpation of Congress’ right to set tariffs — the latter an issue being fought by both Democratic states and groups backed by right wing donors, including Charles Koch and Leonard Leo — will take longer to get to SCOTUS, but we will continue to have confrontations on these issues all summer. Just the other day, former Trump White House Counsel Greg Katsas reversed his earlier position, siding with Obama-appointee Cornelia Pillard to let Amy Berman Jackson continue to review an injunction on Trump’s dismantlement of CFPB.
Instead, as his month on the “special panel” nears its close, Katsas — Trump’s former White House lawyer — joined with Pillard to tell the agency that it had to stop with any RIFs at all until the D.C. Circuit can hear the appeal of the injunction in May.
Of course, this is not some sea-change, and Katsas is likely still to side with the administration on many matters.
But, over the course of the month, a cautionary tale has played out in front of him — and he responded by stepping in to assert the rule of law.
Again, we’ll have consequential decisions (and even more important ones on habeas corpus) over the next several months, but with the possible exception of the firing authority, the substantive issues will take some time to get to SCOTUS.
Trump’s tariff emergency will hit before Congress passes a budget
Now throw Trump’s self-inflicted tariff disaster into the mix.
The shit is going to start hitting the tariff-inflated fan in the next few weeks. We’re beginning to see spikes in certain items (including toilet plunger parts). We’re beginning to see increasingly large layoffs tied to the expect drop in shipping. In the coming weeks, we expect to see expanding shortages.
Unless something dramatic changes, the US will experience a COVID-like crisis without the COVID, and with no appetite or excuse to start throwing money at people to stave off further crisis.
For all the claims of fecklessness, Senate Democrats will force Republicans to tie themselves to this shitshow for a second time later this week. John Thune invited Jamieson Greer to the first Senate lunch after Senators heard from their constituents what a disaster this is; it’s unclear whether he has placated their concerns.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune warned Republicans during the lunch against helping the Democrats pass the resolution, just weeks after four GOP senators crossed the aisle to pass a resolution disapproving of Trump’s tariffs on Canada.
“This is a messaging vote for the Democrats. And it’s important to — especially now with the administration on the cusp of getting some deals on trade with other countries — that our folks hang together, give them the space to do that,” Thune said of his message to his conference in a brief post-lunch interview.
The majority leader also launched a staunch defense of Trump’s trade strategy in the face of poor polling and economic turmoil over it, insisting the president’s “policy decisions are the right ones.”
Some Republicans remain uneasy about the tariffs, as they’ve watched Trump’s favorability ratings and consumer sentiment dip to the same level as the Covid-19 pandemic.
“There were a lot of questions,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who said he didn’t want to use the word “concerns” because it would be taken out of context. Kennedy said he expected to hear about a deal in the next few weeks — and wasn’t expecting the administration to announce all of its deals at once.
That reassured Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who said senators advised Greer to roll out deals as they happen, not to wait for when the 90-day pause ends July 9.
“Roll them out as they come along, don’t try to, you know, save them all up for the Fourth of July,” Cramer said. “Because people are anxious about it. They want to see the results.”
Trump has succeeded in winning near-unanimous support from Congress and on the issue of Congressional efforts to revoke his claimed emergency, he has already, repeatedly, issued a veto threat (meaning the effort is, in theory, futile). But the only way Republicans can convince themselves this trade war will not be a catastrophic disaster is by believing Administration hype that a deal, any deal, contours of a deal, a framework of a deal, sketches of deals — something they’ve been saying non-stop for 20 days now — will come any day now.
I mean, sure, maybe Trump will get a deal and convince people who can’t buy fans and toilet plungers — to say nothing about small businesses who will be filing for bankruptcy and farmers watching their crops go to waste — that his tariffs aren’t a disaster. Maybe he will make a humiliating reversal on tariffs, one of the few things in which Trump actually believes. Maybe that will happen. Republican members of Congress, in particular, have a near-infinite ability to allow themselves to buy rank bullshit and that may well happen here.
Or, maybe, the economy will be in meltdown by May, June, July, when the Administration needs near-total unity from Congressional Republicans to codify Trump’s policies into law.
How’s that going to work out?
I don’t know what will happen with any of this. No one does. Trump has succeeded in conning his way out of enormous problems before. The right wingers on SCOTUS are bound to help Trump in many, but not all, ways in months ahead. And Republicans in Congress have used every opportunity they could find this year to hand away their own power. Alternately, as I noted yesterday, malignant narcissists rarely respond well when they suffer a grave humiliation of the type that Trump may be headed towards.
What I am certain of, though, is that the wavering unanimity we’re seeing as everyone rubbernecks at the car crash of Trump’s trade policy may dissolve if Trump continues to willfully destroy the US economy.
Update: Just as I was posting this, CBO announced that GDP fell 0.3% in the first quarter.
Update: I was trying to remember the name of this YouTube, which Amicus12 noted in comments. So now I’m posting the most recent post on What Is Going on with Shipping.
That last timeline — the tariff emergency — is the one that worries Trump the most, given his reaction to an Amazon vendor including a line on the bill for the cost of the tariffs on their products. He screamed “politicization!” and got Bezos to bend the knee and get it removed.
He’s worried, and with good reason.
In the budget and debt ceiling battles he can shift blame to Congress. In the battles with the courts, he can blame activist liberal judges (even those he appointed). With the tariffs, though, he knows it is all on him.
I was in one of my local Asian markets recently — actually several of them. I was looking for a bottle of our favorite soy sauce, and finally found it in the fifth shop. This brand isn’t just our favorite, but loved by lots of folks. In store after store, I found the shelves where it should be, and they were empty. Finally, in store #5, I found one of the last bottles, and as I headed toward the checkout, I noticed other empty slots on other shelves.
The tariffs are starting to take hold, and Trump knows that there is no one on whom he can deflect the blame for empty shelves and higher prices. Here in metro KC, a local furniture store announced it is going out of business, because they can’t afford the tariffs:
There’s no blaming Congress for this. No blaming the leftwing lamestream media. No blaming activist Democrat judges. No blaming immigrants, legal or otherwise. No blaming woke feminists. No blaming antisemitic protesters.
No blaming anyone but Trump, and he knows it — and it scares him to death.
And that’s why I think the congressional negotiations, in particular, may look very different than Hill wonks think.
If Congress needs to blame Trump for this — and more importantly, need to find a way to limit the damage — by the end of May, which is probably the most likely outcome right now, then that budget won’t look anything like it does. Hill leadership might not even,
We actually don’t want anybody but Trump to pull back the tariffs. Because the damage has already been done and the actual effects are in the future (remember that GDP decline was for the quarter before Liberation Day). This would shift the blame for this mess off of Trump where it belongs.
The tariffs are slow to take hold, and will be equally slow (at best) to unwind if they are cancelled. Part of this is tied to the supply chain transit delays, as well as the presumption by Convict-1 / Krasnov that our erstwhile partners will be equally willing to cancel their reciprocal tariffs (I think the PRC, for one, is not).
The other item relevant to this post is the revenue generated by these tariffs seem to be wildly inflated (it remains to be seen from financials later) with Convict-1 / Krasnov even claiming it will replace income taxes. However, if the tariff revenue doesn’t materialize the X-date will lurch forward significantly. I think this administration will crash through the debt limit before the Fourth of July’s recess. Remember that the DOGE savings are also being exposed as risible if not actually being net costs.
The next useful question is ‘will we hear about the debt limit breach’? I can see Convict-1 / Krasnov continuing to spend wildly while hiding the actual debt incurred and the reporting will therefore become something of a state secret, like other bad news like measles or COVID data.
I’m on the mailing list for a clothing company. You order it, they bundle the orders and send them to a supplier who makes them. The supplier can’t afford to pay the tariffs on the small lots they deal with, so they’re folding NOW. This is just in the last three weeks…and it’s only going to get worse.
I have a side job doing writing for (tabletop) games, and this is an industry that is already getting destroyed. One issue is how much of the industry runs on Crowdfunding — so sales are made and paid in advance, and *then* the manufacturing happens. You may have heard about Cephalofair games (maker s of Gloomhaven/Frosthaven) which finished up production on their latest game ~3 weeks ago, and so they have $1.2M in finished inventory sitting in containers in China. They can’t raise prices because these have already been sold, but they also can’t afford to ship them to the customers.
That’s just one example — I personally have 4 different Kickstarters that are sitting in this position. In one of them, the company was just shut down (Flat River Group shutting down Greater Than Games, makers of Sentinels of the Multiverse). The Chinese factories are being as helpful as they can — I know one case where they are being provided 5 months of warehousing at no cost — but if things are not changed this is an extinction-level event for the industry. Anecdotally I’m hearing 50% of game makers will go bankrupt or halt production without changes.
This doesn’t even address the actual uncertainty around — for TTRPG companies there isn’t consistent treatment over whether what they are making are books (which have low or no tariffs) or games (which are now at the 145% rate). The only way to find out for sure is to ship the product through and see what they are charged, because it depends on the individual judgment of the customs agents.
1st qtr gdp numbers even worse than expected, -0.3% vs. a +2.4% for 4th qtr. Jamie Dimon is saying a recession is probably the least bad outcome for our economy. Not surprisingly trump’s saying it’s Biden’s fault.
And the data was officially released in FRED just now – over three hours late. More evidence that this administration can’t even handle routine tasks. Or maybe it’s only when they make the boss look bad?
Back in January, Trump was claiming credit for the good economy (because line go up) even while Biden was still president. Now he says its Biden’s fault.
I have the vague feeling we’ve seen this playbook from him before.
Dems need to make sure everyone knows that Biden handed over to Trump a perfectly good economy, and Trump single-handedly trashed it. All the economic pain they’re about to experience is on Trump.
The election results in Canada have given folks in DC — both at the WH and the Capitol — a glimpse of how these tariff wars will play out.
SPOILER ALERT: Other countries don’t seem to want to play Trump’s games.
Canada electing a former central banker as their new prime minister is a big statement. Carney’s comments, post-election, are an even bigger one. From the transcript of his election night remarks:
Again, Carney is a former central banker. He is not cowed by Trump’s bluster, because he knows how international commerce actually works, which gives him huge leverage over Trump.
And, as he said, he’s a former hockey player. You could sum up his comments with two words: elbows up.
Carney is also one of the strongest voices on the social and financial costs of climate chaos, and has been publicly for over a decade. That such views are held by a person who’s been central banker in two countries! is a wonder. Here’s a snip from a speech at Lloyds of London 10 years ago, from Bill McKibben:
“Climate change is the Tragedy of the Horizon. We don’t need an army of actuaries to tell us that the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors – imposing a cost on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentive to fix.
That means beyond: – the business cycle; – the political cycle; and – the horizon of technocratic authorities, like central banks, who are bound by their mandates.
The horizon for monetary policy extends out to 2-3 years. For financial stability it is a bit longer, but typically only to the outer boundaries of the credit cycle – about a decade.
In other words, once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.”
Some of us understand that the climate chaos accelerated by the leader is the most pressing issue facing all of civilization, and as a pioneer of offshore wind energy, i know first hand the immediate damage his POS politics are doing.
We’ll have to wait to judge Carney, but his background might make him one of the world’s truly important politicians.
Agree. It’s just insane the way he came to power but could be unbelievably auspicious.
Trmp elected Carney. It is the most effective example of the Streisand Effect I’ve ever seen. Trmp even pinned the Streisand Effect meter to the red line with a pronouncement on the day of the election. Astonishing.
All of which means a major, boots-on-the-ground military event by sometime this summer.
The only question is whether it will be Panama (easiest), Mexico, Canada, Greenland, or within the U.S.
Maybe. Or maybe he won’t have the capacity.
Zero people know what is going to happen. None.
But lots of people know bits and pieces of what is going to happen.
The poor will be hit harder than the rich.
Children and the elderly will be hit harder than the middle-aged.
BIPOC folks will be hit harder than the white folks.
Workers will be hit harder than owners and investors (despite all the whining about their stock market losses).
Unemployed and underemployed folks will be hit harder than workers.
We may not know exactly *how* these things will play out, but we absolutely know who will get hurt the worst.
Us dirty hippies have been saying what was going to happen. Saying no one knows what is going to happen is being rather dismissive of folks who have been proven to have known exactly what was going to happen.
Honestly it is rather simple. Just listen to what Republicans say they are going to do.
Given the predictable trajectory of the economy (as noted above), the debt limit, the refusal of Convict-1 / Krasnov to admit any error and the need for a suitable flag-waving (or tail-wagging) distraction to feel like a warrior, I’m thinking a military intervention is a likely possibility. Add to that Whiskey Pete’s frat boy masculinity and the motivations for an idiotic blustery intervention are in place. This is a feral administration not known for planning consequences. Putin and Xi will be delighted as well, since that gives them more scope in their plans if we’re stuck somewhere. I hope I’m wrong about this, but if it does happen the front line troops will be the ones paying the price so Convict-1 / Krasnov can feel like a tough guy.
As a side note, did anyone else get the feeling that if your drinking word was ‘Biden’ for last night’s interview fiasco you’d kill a case of beer? Maybe it was just me.
Another excellent piece, especially laying out the likely rubber-meeting-the-road moments in the upcoming two to three months. The crux is of course Congress becoming less supine.
But also looming is the question of whether the overall institutional rot in the legislative branch may run too deep, in both parties.
In their ‘mad dash’ to cement the ongoing regime change, Trump and those around him are certainly taking every advantage of this sorry state of play in Congress. But the latter has been the result of a longstanding deep decay — a weirdly under-reported 25 year mix of normalized grift alongside an erasure of awareness that it is the institutional boiler room functions of the legislature rather than its membership antics that is the essential constitutional ingredient. Another output of this recipe in recent years has been an increasing loss of actual substantive expertise – ironically so, given the huge growth in Depends-wearers clinging to office.
The Hill these days is so very much like the latter days of the Breshnev era.
So we shall see.
The CEO of the Port of Long Beach said that LA and Long Beach expect an over 40% reduction in traffic next week. https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/la-county-ports-expect-roughly-40-drop-in-traffic-as-trumps-tariffs-continue/
And we are also seeing less container freight on those vessels that do arrive. Sal Mercogliano, who produces “What’s Going on With Shipping,” has very good material on YouTube covering this. He explains that the LA and Long Beach port complex currently handles about forty percent of all the container freight coming into the United States. We are looking at big reductions in imports and this will be felt all throughout the economy.
One other point to mention, from EW’s recent post on Trump’s failed negotiations is that when Trump refers to deals, he instead means unilateral offers. While this is semantic cover for the faithful, it is not likely to fix the problems that the tariffs will generate with the real economy.
Thanks. I was trying to remember the name of that YouTube, which I’ve added to the post.
Which late may-june well start seeing shortages, empty shelves and panic buying.
Too funny, what a coincidence – I have been looking for live cams located in ports of Long Beach this morning.
LA has two, per https://www.portoflosangeles.org/news/livestream
Yes, thanks, PJ, I know that, I had multiple feeds from both San Pedro and Wilmington.
There is supposed to be one in Long Beach, run by ABC.
https://www.webcamgalore.com/webcam/USA/Long-Beach-California/6071.html
Terminal Island is mostly Port of L.A. (We had so much fun trying to locate the gas lines there. Some of the streets on the maps…don’t exist. I was resorting to matching stuff like rail lines and manhole covers to aerial photos.)
I’ve been a bit addicted to marinetracking.com since 2021, when the Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal.
This table from Kos lays it out:
https://cdn.prod.dailykos.com/images/1427568/large/USportChinatrade2024chartJasonMiller-2.png
(in https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/29/2319604/-Tariffs-We-don-t-need-no-stinking-tariffs )
30 million tons go through LA/Long Beach, just from China, in a normal year. (It’s easier to reach from China than the East Coast ports.)
In Bremen, Germany’s 2nd largest Port after Hamburg, we have already seen a drop of 14% just in autos being shipped alone.
Two questions:
(1) How are the domestic sales in Germany? Given the way Tesla’s market share has cratered in Germany, *someone* has to be making up the difference?
(2) Is that decline in shipping partly due to Tesla trying to ship cars from their gigafactory that they can’t sell in Germany, but no one wants them anywhere else?
Peterr, i can’t answer that. the 14% statistic comes from Bremen’s logistics company BLG, which primarily ships from the large Mercedes factory here to ports around the world. (other autos as well; all from the city-state’s port at Bremerhaven.)
What’s specifically happening with Tesla here i can’t say, other than the crater you mentioned.
As to question (1), a news of April 3, 2025 on German statista (machine translation):
That means Tesla cars account for only 0.88 percent of all new cars in Germany in March, 2025.
This almost answers question (2) as well. BLG ships about 1.5 million cars through Bremerhaven annually; 30 percent of this trade segment is with the US. BLG has published its numbers for 2024 only recently, hence it’s too soon for having reliable figures on the consequences of Trump’s tariff game. I’ve read in a German newspaper though that people are reckoning with a decline of BLG’s Bremerhaven trade with the US from 30 percent to 15 percent.
P.S. for Verrückte Pferd: Thank you for your original comment bringing up the Bremerhaven issue. I didn’t have the answers at hand but had become curious myself, so I did some research.
Correction here: “SCOTUS grows increasingly irked by Trump’s defiance of him.”
Shouldn’t that be “them”?
OT sort of…
I wish some journalist with the right skills and a bunch of free time, could do some digging into the gov’t compliance with court orders. The idea being, to produce a table showing significant court orders against the gov’t during these first 100 days, what steps the gov’t is known to have taken to comply, and whatever is known about the actual state of compliance. (i.e. if they were ordered to resume spending congressionally-appropriated funds on a certain program, did that actually happen? Is the aid actually reaching the intended recipients? Or has it effectively remained frozen despite the court order). I guess the JustSecurity litigation tracker would be a good place to start.
The Abrego Garcia v. Noem case is their most blatant defiance of a court order that I’m aware of, but I have a vague impression they are failing to comply to various degrees with a bunch of other orders too, but I’ve found it hard to stay aware of them after they fall out of the news cycle.
ABC had a story about 2 weeks ago saying he was defying 6 court orders, most immigration related. That day he defied Trump appointee Trevor McFadden’s order on AP.
In most cases, he is being cute about his defiance, requiring some effort to hold him in contempt. Sometimes exceedingly so (by having DOD do something DHS is enjoined from doing).
But the buses in NDTX did turn around when SCOTUS issued an order.
Thanks!
I see the ABC News article you referred to, by Peter Charalambous on April 15… that was two weeks ago, so its probably more than 6 by now.
6 times the Trump administration has clashed with opponents over court orders
Made worse by Trump’s on camera interview in which he embraces his ability to get Mr. Garcia back but disclaims any intention to do so. Judge Xinis’s stay order on discovery as to contempt ends today, April 30, at 5 p.m. Trump is now openly defying the Supreme Court.
Bingo. He’s gone from “I am powerless to do that,” to “I can easily do it but fuck that.” I’m at a loss to explain how that isn’t on every non-captured front page and lead blog post in the country.
On a similar vein, I’m at a loss to explain why the proposal Bukele made a week ago, to use the supposed TdA prisoners as actual hostages in exchange for El Salvadoran prisoners held by Maduro, most whom would likely be his compadres.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/el-salvador-proposes-sending-us-deported-venezuelans-venezuela-2025-04-20
Even if he isn’t intending to release Maduro’s prisoners in a swap for the American deportees, the move still either puts the lie to them being in league with Maduro — or if they are in league with him, it defeats exactly the “problem” that Trump claims he’s trying to resolve, to wit: the “Maduro-TdA Terror Nexus,” by repatriating the alleged malign foreign agents, via middleman Bukele, with their bosses/benefactors, to do more state-sponsored terror, again “supposedly.” The least incriminating thing it says about Trump is that Bukele has played him, along with the US Constitution, for a clueless chump.
WTF?
I notice that Judge Xinis has issued a Revised Scheduling Order regarding expedited discovery today, before the 5:00 PM expiry of the stay.
ABC News has a story up now claiming that Rubio has been in touch with Bukele about Abrego Garcia, although Rubio won’t confirm or deny it.
The ABC News story also contains this quote from one of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers:
Related: I’ve been wondering for some time now if anyone is tracking and compiling a list of offenses committed by Trump that would probably be cause for impeachment. It would be a handy resource to have at hand when the wind shifts.
Trump’s tariff problem has three dimensions. First, econ 101 is all you need to understand that trade always creates more wealth for both parties. Sure, there are fair politics reasons for tariffs (and unfair ones), but they always come at a cost. Tariffs on the scale Trump has instituted will increase costs significantly.
Second, the sudden economic dislocations Trump has brought will lead to unemployment and product shortages. He seems to delight in the chaos. One could make these changes over time and maybe reduce the economic trauma. Somewhat. Trump revels in this economic trauma, and it is going to hurt average Americans.
Finally, Trump believes in a strategy of lowering the value of the dollar to make America product more competitive internationally. This is stupid, there are lots of downsides that would take pages to lay out. The biggest problem is how much of a devaluation would it take to make America competitive in the low end metal bashing manufacturing Trump wants us to be involved in? I would love to see a serious economic analysis of this, but something like a -30% decline in the value of the dollar is what Trump needs. That’s massive, and would hurt the reserve status of the dollar. “It’s a controlled explosion, what could go wrong?”
Title for this chapter in future history books:
“Predatory Capitalism Captures and Eats Itself.”
I don’t have a pro-capitalist POV, but it seems to me that a good counter-messaging theme might be “If you think capitalism is good for society, then you need to oppose the folks trying to destroy it.”
Alternatively:
“Get a clue, GOP: feudalism is not capitalism, except in the sickest of minds.”
Reminds me of the powerplant demolition in Bakersfield (Aug 2013), where they miscalculated and debris flew past their “safe limit” and hit someone.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/spectator-loses-leg-after-controlled-implosion-california-power-plant-police-flna6C10838057
Or this “controlled detonation” in 2021 executed poorly by the Los Angeles PD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vg-BGtxeok
You need more than Econ 101 to know that trade does not always benefit both sides. It often enriches one side and impoverishes the other.
It depends, for example, on commodity prices and the labor conditions under which goods are made or extracted. Belgium’s King Leopold, later, his govt, still later private corporations that kept the Congo a failed state were not known for paying market value for rubber or copper. The British empire behaved similarly.
Trump’s inability to contemplate transitions attests to his pathological impatience, his desire for chaos, and his demand to implement these changes before anyone can stop him. That’s the dominance display of a weak man, not a planned transition to a new state of affairs.
Trump’s administration may include those who desire a lower value for the dollar, to achieve some economic policy goal. I think that’s a bridge too far for Trump’s intellect and lack of patience.
O/t but the televised meeting of Trump’s Cabinet is absolutely revolting. Just a sea of incompetent middle aged white dude-brahs congrafulating each other on 100 days of setting fire to the Constitution.
It is a shame Bezos folded as that type of in-your-face proof of the cost of the Trump tariffs getting hammered in with each order made is precisely the re-enforcement needed to wake the 40% of always Trumpers and start to break his stranglehold on that clique.
It may be a shame, but it is no surprise.
https://anntelnaes.substack.com/p/with-gratitude
Yes. I allowed myself a brief moment of hope but I got over it.
I’m already seeing massive increases in price from Amazon. (Don’t be a hater that I’m still using Amazon. Living in a rural area with the closest big box stores an hour away and unable to drive due to my disability, Amazon has been a real gift in my situation and it will take time to create alternatives so I can walk away from Amazon sooner than later.)
I keep a number of products in my “save for later” section of my shopping cart to keep tabs on the fluctuation of prices and availability of certain goods even if I’ve bought them before.
An example of their crazy, whiplash wild pricing- Amazon carries a very effective product that kills scaly leg mites on chickens that is hard to find even on livestock and veterinary sites, and is often on back order at Amazon.
I ordered a bottle on March 3rd for 30 bucks. Monday it had gone up to 43 and some change. I was flabbergasted. Today, the new price is 34.95. This is a necessary item for my flock’s health and I’m beholden to purchase it again soon to complete the treatment.
I don’t know if I should buy it again now after seeing that ridiculous price hike Monday, or wait and watch till I need it again in about two weeks.
I know I’m not the only person experiencing this problem. It’s stuff like this that’s cratering consumer confidence and I don’t see it getting better anytime soon.
On a slightly different note, I really wish groups that are organizing actions across states to protest this administration would have planned a May Day walk out, buy nothing day or better yet a national work strike to protest Trump’s devastating tariff policy.
“The shit is going to start hitting the tariff-inflated fan in the next few weeks.”
Read that and immediately thought of Claes Oldenburg’s “giant soft fan” sculpture:
https://www.artforum.com/columns/charles-ray-on-claes-oldenburg-252095/
When I first saw that piece, I laughed and laughed. Now, I laugh again but it is much more mordant and just an interlude before getting back to work to stop this continuing slide deeper into criminal stupidity.
Cheery headline at The Economist: “America may be just weeks away from a mighty economic shock”
I read that and I was like, well maybe it’ll work out like Y2K did.
Except I know bc my father told me in 1981 that people worked for years in advance to mitigate that problem.
Here, we’ve got children in charge.
Yup, reckless and callous children.
(The article was narrowly focused on shipping data).
My sister is a small business owner. She, like a lot of business people, is trying to figure out what to order now for the holiday season. Her suppliers are not likely going to order much from China, preferring to exhaust their current (un tariff’d ) stock. They are warning that they will, naturally, pass-on any tariffs on future orders. So, my sister is looking at doing the same thing, exhausting her own stock while very selectively ordering new stock. Of course, shoppers, wary of the uncertainty and having the tariffs passed onto them, are also making careful choices. Maybe not buying from my sister. Maybe forcing her to close her business.
There are, or shortly will be, many examples like this. This is grass-roots economics.
I’m trying to keep a small design services firm afloat, and all this uncertainty is wreaking havoc with our client base.
Not exactly how I envisioned a glide path to retirement…
The de minus import exemption to the US expires tomorrow, May 2nd. Going to be interesting to see what happens when the 2 million packages a day Shein and Temu ship to US have to be processed, to say nothing of the increased cost. So, not only are Walmart shelves going to be empty, but that 50 buck dress is now going be over hundred and could take several more days to arrive.