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Love in the Time of Hegemonic Suicide

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It started with the willful destruction of USAID.

I start what is sure to be a kaleidoscopic (or some might call disorganized) reflection on the undercurrents of power as Trump attempts to build a new America based on illusion by reminding that the first assault was on USAID. USAID was targeted, among other reasons, because it supported the kind of pro-democracy NGOs that have haunted Viktor Orbán for years, and also because the realities of aid in the field look funny to those pickled in the provincialism of culture war.

But it’s a useful reminder, because the destruction of USAID was both the first great strike against Congress’ power of the purse (because Marco Rubio was refusing to spend on programs Congress had appropriated, including programs with bipartisan support, like PEPFAR), and also the consensual destruction of a great deal of soft power the United States built up going back to the Cold War. Then, during the Cold War, USAID was recognized as a low-cost way to contest another great power and, along the way, to do something good and maybe even create a few new reliable markets for farmers in the heartland. Now, it had become a symbol of a past hegemony that conspiracy theorists, starting with the richest man in the world, had made suspect.

This reflection will focus on how Stephen Miller’s two-faced war on America’s immigrant diversity and Latin America exists in tension with Trump’s attempt to subjugate both the Democrats and China. I’m attempting to capture these intertwined threads to get to a point I’ve raised before. We know what the decline from democracy to authoritarianism looks like. Trump is overtly following Orbán’s path to competitive authoritarianism. But far too few have considered what it means that Trump is pursuing that model while committing hegemonic suicide.

The willful destruction of USAID laid an important foundation for two “negotiations” that are bedeviling Trump’s effort to consolidate power: the trade war Trump picked with China, and a funding fight with Democrats over whether Congress will be Congress anymore.

Art of the Deal guy is conducting a bunch of “negotiations” right now. Many of them involve levying threats, whether threatening to withdraw government funding, launching frivolous lawsuits, imposing draconian tariffs, or even charging people with fabricated crimes, and in response, extorting bribes, like the free work some white shoe law firms decided to give away or payment for the ballroom that will scar the edifice where the East Wing used to be. For most negotiating partners, such threats leave two choices: suing in an attempt to deem the entire extortion attempt unlawful, or attempting to minimize the extracted tribute through flattery.

But for China and the Democrats it is different. The government of China doesn’t do flattery — not of foreigners, anyway. Plus, China has been preparing for this moment since the last time Trump tried it, in his first term, in part by increasing its own capacity, in part by replacing American suppliers with countries China has been wooing with soft power for years.

And while Democrats have been suing and suing and suing, Trump’s ultimate goal for the minority — whose party currently leads most of the net donor states in the US — is nothing less than subjugation. Trump was happier to negotiate with Hamas than negotiate with Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Trump intends to make them, all Democrats, give him the adulation they refuse him.

And so Trump’s negotiating “tactics” for both are similar: a serial ratcheting up of demands, based on the belief that the desired end — subjugation — is the means to win the negotiation. In both cases, this obstinance has instead created vulnerabilities. By pushing China to impose an export control regime not dissimilar to those the US uses, Trump gave China leverage over the Rest of World countries with which China will continue to trade even as Trump shrivels inside his manufactured walls, the countries Trump once wished to peel off from China.

And every time Russ Vought commits another unprecedented Antideficiency Act crime, it proves the Democrats’ point that there can be no negotiations unless that lawlessness ceases.

But when Trump decided that he had to pay military servicemembers, he directly violated congressional statute. It is “by far the most illegal budgetary action he’s taken as POTUS, potentially setting the stage to break everything,” writes Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress. “The mechanism through which Trump is paying the troops is the most blatant large Antideficiency Act (ADA) violation in US history.”

Trump is taking money from an account specifically earmarked for research, development, testing, and evaluation, and spending it on military pay, which is forbidden by both the Constitution and law (the Antideficiency Act carries a jail sentence of up to two years), and something administration officials publicly promised Congress they would not do. Dave Jamieson reports at HuffPost that Trump is planning a similar process to keep paying ICE and CBP law enforcement.

Even in three votes on paying essential workers, Democrats refused to budge for a bill that ceded any more power to Vought (the end vote was the same as cloture for the continuing resolution has been, but two different Democrats — Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock — voting with Republicans instead of Catherine Cortez Masto and Angus King).

Vought becomes a greater liability as he gleefully cuts things cherished by Republicans, too, like the promise of an easier commute into NYC.

Having failed thus far, Trump is going to withhold emergency funding for SNAP starting this week. Either he believes that Democrats have empathy (or courage) that Republicans don’t, or he forgets that poor people across the country rely on government aid. But he believes that starving families will force Democrats to bow.

Donald Trump is destroying not just the village but broad swaths of the country in his bid to humiliate his two adversaries. He is seeking capitulation to his person rather than any benefits for the United States.

Even as the country remains shut down, Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller have become NeoNeoCons.

Trump has reverted to Cold War means, launching a larger covert war based on dubious legal claims, what his buddies call the “Donroe Doctrine,” a name as stupid as the concept.

Mr. Trump’s new directive appears to envision a different approach, focused on U.S. forces directly capturing or killing people involved in the drug trade.

Labeling the cartels as terrorist groups allows the United States “to use other elements of American power, intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, whatever, to target these groups if we have an opportunity to do it,” Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, said on Thursday in an interview with the Catholic news outlet EWTN. “We have to start treating them as armed terrorist organizations, not simply drug dealing organizations.”

The use of Special Forces against alleged drug cartels in other countries rests on the same kind of legal chicanery and nested fabrications that went into Stephen Miller’s unlawful deportation of mostly innocent Venezuelans to Bukele’s concentration camp. And even though the B-1 bombers flying off the coast of Venezuela were readily tracked on commercial apps, Trump explicitly denied them. They’re not hiding, though, that they’re sending the ships that have for decades projected power in the Middle East to take out a two-bit dictator in Venezuela.

But that’s not the only bullshit Trump is selling. For example, Trump’s latest cartel designation — of Cartel de los Soles — is of a cartel that (unlike TdA) may not even exist.

While some of US President Donald Trump’s right-wing led allies in South America — Argentina, Ecuador and Paraguay — have echoed his designation of “Soles” as a terrorist organization, many have doubts such a group even exists.

Venezuela itself, and neighbor Colombia, insist there is no such thing as “Cartel de los Soles.”

Some experts agree, saying there is no evidence of the existence of an organized group with a defined hierarchy that goes by that name.

[snip]

“There is no such thing, so Maduro can hardly be its boss,” Phil Gunson, an analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank, told AFP of the so-called “Cartel de los Soles.”

[snip]

According to the InSight Crime think tank, the name was ironically coined by Venezuelan media in 1993 after two generals were nabbed for drug trafficking. The sun is a symbol on the military uniform epaulettes of generals in the South American country.

“Rather than a hierarchical organization with Maduro directing drug trafficking strategies, the Cartel of the Suns is more accurately described as a system of corruption wherein military and political officials profit by working with drug traffickers,” InSight Crime said on its website.

Yet that is the sketchy basis on which Stephen Miller has authorized the murder of one after another boat full of unidentified, first in the Caribbean and now in the Pacific.

The Administration’s thinking — starting from Stephen Miller’s goal of using dead Latinos as a propaganda stunt– is insanely childish.

Then there are the senior officials who see Venezuela as a means to project a tough-guy, defender-of-the-homeland image. Stephen Miller views the air strikes as an opportunity to paint immigrants as a dangerous menace, according to one of the White House officials. Vice President J. D. Vance, though often inclined toward isolationism, has pushed the necessity of defending U.S. borders. And Hegseth, who prefers to be known as the war secretary, is seeking a means of projecting military strength in a region where Defense Department planners hope to reassert American primacy. Finally, there’s Trump himself, who wants to score a foreign-policy victory amid frustrations over his inability to end the war in Ukraine. One close ally of the president’s told us that he was also drawn to the chance to take decisive action, as he did with June’s Iran bombings. “He can give the order and watch it explode. It’s clear-cut and simple, and no American gets hurt,” that ally told us.

This is not the Dulles brothers playing chess. It’s a bunch of insecure boys overturning the checkers board because the rules assign the same number of pieces to both sides. But they’re toppling the board while wielding very big weapons and sketchy — or no — targeting data.

Indeed, they look like they’re playing, from the failure to destroy a submersible in open water, leaving two very inconvenient survivors, to the shrapnel strike on the Vice President’s security, to the new propaganda corps made up of Russian useful idiots.

Such buffoonery extends to Miller’s war on Blue cities. For all the untold human damage it has and is causing,  it nevertheless continues to shine in its Butt Cracks and Beer Belly squalor, including in its training dropouts who can’t pass an open book test on the Fourth Amendment.

Like the invasion of Latin America, it feigns root in intelligence, as viewed by the invasion of an entire apartment building on Chicago’s South Shore Drive predicated on the alleged presence of one or at most two Tren de Aragua members, looking just like an apartment invasion John Yoo dreamt up 24 years ago.

[I]n execution, a number of aspects of the raid looks just like what the raid Yoo envisioned two decades ago.

The raid took place in the middle of the night; a warranted search would mandate permissible hours — usually after dawn — when the search could be conducted.

The entire raid was predicated on the presence of (initially) two and in retrospect just a single Tren de Aragua member. But virtually every one was detained while law enforcement searched for active warrants, and 37 people were arrested. With the exception of a few apartments, the entire building was searched, and left in a mess.

[snip]

In other words, this raid looks just like what we would expect if Stephen Miller were applying already-dodgy John Yoo opinions targeting terrorists who really did launch a military style attack on the US, and applied it, instead, against a gang that Miller has lied persistently to turn into something greater than it is.

But mostly, like the make-believe cartel just added to the terrorist list, the predicate for invading Blue cities remains make-believe.

Stephen Miller’s justifications for invading Blue cities is no more based in reality than the latest cartel he invaded on which to hang murderboats and Special Operations invasions.

Miller has fed Trump manufactured propaganda about Oregon. And those on the ground have manufactured false claims. Or, in Oregon, the state informed the Ninth Circuit that a key claim a panel used to overturn Trump appointee Karin Immergut’s injunction on Guard deployment — that much of the Federal Protective Services had had to deploy to Portland, was false: “defendants admitted that 115 FPS officers have never been redeployed to Portland.”

Or in Chicago, the explanation that Greg Bovino contemptuously violated a retraining more with claims of “commercial artillery shell fireworks.” “The statement is a lie,” lawyers for Illinois stated plainly about the claimed use of commercial artillery shell fireworks.

It’s still very much in question whether appellate courts and SCOTUS will permit Trump to invade Blue cities based entirely on propaganda, as Susan Graber asked in her dissent to her colleagues’ decision to allow Trump to invade Oregon (a dissent that noted the vagueness of the now-debunked FPS claim).

We have come to expect a dose of political theater in the political branches, drama designed to rally the base or to rile or intimidate political opponents. We also may expect there a measure of bending—sometimes breaking—the truth. By design of the Founders, the judicial branch stands apart. We rule on facts, not on supposition or conjecture, and certainly not on fabrication or propaganda. I urge my colleagues on this court to act swiftly to vacate the majority’s order before the illegal deployment of troops under false pretenses can occur. Above all, I ask those who are watching this case unfold to retain faith in our judicial system for just a little longer.

Steve Vladeck lays out the play of all three Blue states — California, Oregon, and Illinois — challenging Trump’s invasion. Joyce Vance has a great update on the Ninth. And Chris Geidner catalogs all the innocent Americans whose rights are being trampled along the way, with three attempts to get Justice Kavanaugh to answer for the Kavanaugh stops he blessed.

Trump is engaging in a kind of magical realism in both Latin America and the United States, inventing the most transparent, outlandish bullshit to justify military invasions by incompetent dolts of both other countries and Blue states.

And for all his dickwagging about power, both of those campaigns make the United States far weaker.

But all that’s happening against the background of Trump’s intransigence — his demand that, while he conducts these invasions, both China and the Democrats (and more recently, Canada) simply bow before him.

This is one reason I’m especially fascinated by Trump’s treatment of Argentina, an attempt to support their peso long enough to stave off a debacle for Javier Milei in this weekend’s legislative elections. That part succeeded: Milei’s party won more than enough seats to sustain his veto power.

President Javier Milei scored a decisive political win Sunday, strengthening his position in Argentina’s Congress and securing a lifeline for his audacious free-market revolution backed by President Trump.

With nearly 92% of votes counted, Milei’s Freedom Advances party won almost 41% of the national vote, putting it on track to more than double its representation in Congress. That means his party and allies should secure at least one-third of the seats in both chambers—the critical threshold that allows Milei to preserve his veto power and defend his sweeping decrees.

The result, stronger than most polls had predicted, gives Milei fresh political momentum after months of unrest over deep spending cuts and a grinding recession last year. It also shores up his standing with Washington and the International Monetary Fund, which have tied future financial support to the survival of his austerity experiment. Market analysts expect Argentine bonds and the peso to rally when trading opens Monday, reflecting relief that Milei still has political traction.

But at what expense?

The only conceivable way to spin this bailout as a benefit for the US — other than for Scott Bessent’s hedge fund buddies and a right wing populist, like Trump, tainted by corruption problems — is to imagine that this bailout, the cost of which soon may rise to $40 billion, helps shore up US allies on a continent increasingly cultivated by China.

That is, in the same year Trump willfully destroyed USAID (yearly budget, $30 billion for the entire world), the best explanation for spending up to $40 billion bailing out a failed economic ideology is that same purpose: soft power.

For just one country.

In a nice touch, the folks in Treasury who’ve implemented Bessent’s bailout of his hedgie buddies have been instructed not to take and disseminate pictures of the wreck Trump has made of the East Wing.

“As construction proceeds on the White House grounds, employees should refrain from taking and sharing photographs of the grounds, to include the East Wing, without prior approval from the Office of Public Affairs,” a Treasury official wrote on Monday evening in an email to department employees viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

A Treasury Department spokesman said the email was sent to employees because photos could “potentially reveal sensitive items, including security features or confidential structural details.”

But the tone deaf bailout wasn’t enough. Nor was Argentina’s poaching of US soybean markets in China, the final death blow for the US soybean market this year. But in the last week, Trump has signaled he will turn to Argentine beef imports in an attempt to bring sky-high beef prices down.

In an interview with Fox Business on Thursday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said: “Currently, Americans consume 12 million metric tons of beef. 10 million, we produce in this country. 2 million, we import. Out of 12 million, [the Argentine quota] would be 20,000 every quarter. This is not a massive influx in the millions of tons I think that some have thought of beef from Argentina.”

But Christian Lovell, an Illinois cattle farmer and the senior director of programs at Farm Action, a nonpartisan farm organization, said: “If Trump goes through with what he outlined, I do believe it’s a betrayal of the American rancher. It’s a feeling that you’re selling us out to a foreign competitor.”

On Wednesday, Trump reacted to the backlash from cattle ranchers.

“The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States, including a 50% Tariff on Brazil,” Trump wrote on social media.

“It would be nice if they would understand that, but they also have to get their prices down, because the consumer is a very big factor in my thinking, also!” he added.

In a statement, Colin Woodall, CEO of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a trade association for beef producers, said the organization and its members “cannot stand behind the President while he undercuts the future of family farmers and ranchers by importing Argentinian beef in an attempt to influence prices.”

Trump got what he wanted in Argentina, propping up his chainsaw puppet for the next little while.

But in doing so, he made the US far weaker, making China’s leverage over the US even greater.

Trump’s attempts to extend his power by force — to replace American hegemony with personalized coercion — are and will continue to backfire, diluting the power of that coercion.

No one knows what happens after that.

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Scott Bessent Links Bailout of Argentina to Trump’s Election Interference, Even as Argentina Poaches US Soybean Markets

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The poster child for libertarianism needs some welfare. As voters in Argentina sour on Javier Milei, the government has had to invest to keep the peso pegged to the dollar.

Last month, with his sister embroiled in a corruption scandal, Mr Milei badly lost a legislative election in the province of Buenos Aires. He then suffered a series of stinging legislative losses. Markets panicked, worried that the defeat signalled the end of popular support for Mr Milei’s economic-reform project, and the potential return of spendthrift Peronists. A sharp peso sell-off began.

Since April, when the IMF launched yet another programme in Argentina, the peso has been floating within an exchange-rate band, the limits of which the Argentine government has vowed to defend. By mid-September the peso’s official rate was testing the upper limit of that band, even briefly piercing it on September 17th to reach 1475 to the dollar. Over the following two days the Argentine central bank spent some $1bn of its scarce foreign-currency reserves to defend the currency.

The bank does not have sufficient foreign reserves to keep up this level of spending for long. Drafting in the dollar-bazooka of the US Treasury should give Argentina the firepower to stabilise the peso, if needed.

And so Milei asked and Scott Bessent agreed to bail out the so-called libertarian.

NerdReich captured the significance Javier Milei’s financial woes best:

The political ideology known as libertarianism died yesterday in Argentina at the age of thirteen.

While it had been around for quite a bit longer, its basic concepts never progressed beyond the early stages of adolescent brain development. Libertarianism—which asserted that society would be better off with minimal government, laws, and taxes—succumbed after chainsaw-wielding Argentine President Javier Milei asked the United States for a massive economic bailout due to his catastrophic leadership.

Milei, a werewolf-clown hybrid in a suit who once hired a spirit medium to communicate with his dead dog, swept into office promising a libertarian-inflected miracle in Argentina. In an early preview of Elon Musk’s DOGE, he slashed government and social spending. Earlier this year, an essay published on the website of the libertarian Cato Institute mocked his critics as doomsayers who “warned that the profane self-described libertarian—who looks more like a still-touring ’80s rockabilly singer than the classically trained economist he actually is—would inflict on Argentina’s already-beleaguered economy ‘deep recession,’ ‘devastation,’ ‘economic collapse,’ and all sorts of other economic horribles.”

But the critics were correct. Instead of miracles, the self-described “anarcho capitalist” has delivered shocking disaster: collapsing institutions, chronic inflation, and the awkward realization that screeching about free markets doesn’t put bread on the shelves.

When Bessent first offered to bailout Milei, Elizabeth Warren asked the obvious question: Has Bessent decided “Argentina” — that is Milei — is a systematically important US ally because Milei, who faces a legislative election next month, is buddies with Trump?

I am writing to request information on President Trump’s plans to bail out Argentina’s financial markets and foreign investors using America’s resources. At a time when Americans are struggling to afford groceries, rent, credit card bills, and other debt payments – and with the Administration gutting funds that make health care affordable for tens of millions of people here at home – it is deeply troubling that the President intends to use significant emergency funds to inflate the value of a foreign government’s currency and bolster its financial markets. President Trump’s close personal relationship with President Milei, and the timing of this bailout ahead of a critical October 26 midterm election in Argentina, raise serious concerns that the purpose of this bailout is personal and political – and comes at the expense of the American people.

Argentina’s financial markets are currently experiencing significant turmoil. Foreign investors appear to have lost confidence in the country’s outlook due to ongoing corruption scandals and waning public support for Milei’s regime.

[snip]

I understand why President Milei, careening from crisis to crisis and unable to effectively manage the Argentinian economy, wants the American people to finance a bailout. I do not understand why it is in the interest of the United States to provide one, nor how one would be designed to ensure the best outcomes for the Argentinian people, instead of hedge fund investors.

Bessent and the White House responded with contemptuous tweets, one attacking Massachusetts. None of them denied Warren’s premise, though: Even as Republicans are taking healthcare away from Americans, Trump is spending money on a buddy overseas.

Indeed, Bessent’s long tweet laying out how he was going to bailout Argentina confirmed the tie (incorporating the Trump tweet endorsing Milei); he even promised investments in Argentina if Milei’s party wins the election.

Yesterday, @POTUS and I spoke extensively with President @JMilei and his senior team in New York. As President Trump has stated, we stand ready to do what is needed to support Argentina and the Argentine people.

Under President Milei, Argentina has taken important strides toward stabilization. He has achieved impressive fiscal consolidation and a broad liberalization of prices and restrictive regulations, laying the foundation for Argentina’s historic return to prosperity.
The @USTreasury stands ready to purchase Argentina’s USD bonds and will do so as conditions warrant. We are also prepared to deliver significant stand-by credit via the Exchange Stabilization Fund, and we have been in active discussions with President Milei’s team to do so.

The Treasury is currently in negotiations with Argentine officials for a $20 billion swap line with the Central Bank. We are working in close coordination with the Argentine government to prevent excessive volatility.

In addition, the United States stands ready to purchase secondary or primary government debt and we are working with the Argentine government to end the tax holiday for commodity producers converting foreign exchange.

Argentina has the tools to defeat speculators, including those who seek to destabilize Argentina’s markets for political objectives. I have also been in touch with numerous US companies who intend to make substantial foreign direct investments in Argentina multiple sectors in the event of a positive election outcome.

The Trump Administration is resolute in our support for allies of the United States, and President Trump has given President Milei a rare endorsement of a foreign official, showing his confidence in his government’s economic plans and the geopolitical strategic importance of the relationship between the United States and Argentina. Immediately after the election, we will start working with the Argentine government on its principal repayments.

I will be watching developments closely, and the Treasury remains fully prepared to do what is necessary. [my emphasis]

This is not a systematic risk in Latin America. Brazil, which Trump has been targeting, is doing just fine. Rather, the risk is that the failing policies of a populist will risk the larger populist project.

Even as Bessent was risking US money on Trump’s basket case buddy, China was buying up Argentine soybeans, which were made more competitive when the state eliminated an export tax.

Chinese buyers booked at least 10 cargoes of Argentine soybeans after Buenos Aires scrapped grain export taxes, three traders said on Tuesday, dealing another setback to U.S. farmers already shut out of their top market and hit by low prices.

Argentina’s temporary tax move boosts the competitiveness of its soybeans, prompting traders to secure cargoes for fourth-quarter inventories in China, a period usually dominated by U.S. shipments but now clouded by Washington’s trade war with Beijing.

The Panamax-sized shipments of 65,000 metric tons each are scheduled for November, with CNF (cost and freight) prices quoted at a premium of $2.15-$2.30 per bushel to the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) November soybean contract , two traders with direct knowledge of the matter said.
One of the traders said Chinese buyers had booked 15 cargoes.

The deals are a fresh blow for U.S. farmers, who are missing out on billions of dollars of soybean sales to China halfway through their prime marketing season as unresolved trade talks freeze exports and rival South American suppliers led by Brazil step in to fill the gap, traders and analysts have said.

“Every time China turns to South America instead of the U.S., soybean farmers and our farm families here at home lose out,” said Caleb Ragland, a farmer from Magnolia, Kentucky, and president of the American Soybean Association.

“Without a trade deal that removes retaliatory tariffs, farmers like me are left watching key opportunities slip away.”

American soybean farmers have been devastated this year, as China leverages soybean sales in response to Trump’s trade war. To make things worse, a recent NYT story talking about how dire things have gotten for North Dakota farmers revealed that Bessent has still not divested from the rental farm property he owns in the state.

For the first time in the history of their 76-year-old operation, their biggest customer — China — had stopped buying soybeans. Their 2,300-acre soybean farm is projected to lose $400,000 in 2025. Soybeans that would normally be harvested and exported to Asia are now set to pile up in large steel bins.

Since President Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese goods in February, Beijing has retaliated by halting all purchases of American soybeans.

That decision has had devastating repercussions for farmers in North Dakota, which exported more than 70 percent of its soybeans to China before Trump unveiled the new tariffs this year. Unless China agrees to restart its purchases as part of a trade deal, farmers that depend on the Chinese market will be facing steep losses that could fuel farm bankruptcies and farm foreclosures around the United States.

[snip]

The Treasury Secretary owns thousands of acres of North Dakota farmland, worth up to $25 million. The properties grow soybeans and corn in a state that exports most of its agricultural products to China. The investments have earned Mr. Bessent as much as $1 million in rental income annually, according to his financial disclosure filings.

But the fortunes of Mr. Bessent, a multimillionaire former hedge fund manager, are not nearly as exposed to China’s whims as are those of the family farmers struggling to figure out how to sell their soybeans and keep their finances from falling apart.

To farmers in North Dakota, the forces of high interest rates, high input costs and falling prices are reminiscent of the 1980s farm crisis, which hobbled U.S. agriculture for nearly a decade and hollowed out much of rural America.

“The stress level is much higher now than it was then,” Jordan Gackle, 44, said in an interview. “If we keep this going for very long, then we are going to see the kind of foreclosures that were happening.”

Bessent is literally risk taxpayer money to keep the guy poaching the Chinese markets of American farmers in office. And if farmers start to go under, he’ll just continue to consolidate his holdings in the Midwest.

This is a big fucking deal. Even as Trump prepares to shut down government, even as American consumers face skyrocketing healthcare premium costs, Bessent is instead busy propping up a right winger likewise stripping benefits from his constituents.

Update: Paul Krugman has a lot to say — none of it good — about this bailout.

But although in this case America is offering aid rather than taking it away, our new Argentina policy is part of the same Trumpian agenda.

It’s true that the plan to aid Argentina looks quite a lot like Bill Clinton’s bailout of Mexico during that nation’s financial crisis of 1994-5. But we had a compelling interest in helping Mexico, which is our neighbor and one of our most important trading partners. We had just signed a free trade agreement with Mexico, and were also trying to bolster Mexico’s transition from one-party rule to genuine democracy.

Argentina, in contrast, is not systemically important to the United States. Argentina is a miniscule player in terms of US interests. The U.S. accounts for only about 1/8th of Argentina’s imports, less than its imports from the European Union and much less than its imports from China.

It’s definitely a lot less important, both strategically and economically, than Brazil, whose economy is more than three times as big as Argentina’s. Yet Trump has completely alienated Brazil, imposing 50 percent tariffs on the nation for daring to try and convict a former president who attempted to overturn his electoral defeat. Always indulging his personal grudges, Trump has imposed sanctions on the judge who oversaw Jair Bolsonaro’s prosecution — and on his wife. It obviously doesn’t matter to him that both the tariffs against Brazil and the personal sanctions are surely illegal. Trump’s behavior has had a devastating effect on America’s interests, driving Brazil into China’s arms.

But remember that, in Trump’s world, America’s interests don’t count. Only his interests count. And Javier Milei, Argentina’s president, has been an important poster child for right-wing economics.

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Scott Bessent Fact Checks Donald Trump’s Lies about Tariffs

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In the wake of Trump’s batshit post from the other day, Politico reports that John Sauer has predictably asked SCOTUS to move quickly in accepting the tariff case for review.

In support of Sauer’s request for SCOTUS to consider the appeal immediately, Sauer included a declaration from Scott Bessent.

In it, Bessent confesses that Trump’s past claims that he had made trade deals were false. What Trump claimed in “fact sheets” were “deals” are in fact just “frameworks,” and Bessent is still working on negotiating “towards binding agreements.”

5. As of the date of this declaration, the United States has announced frameworks with Japan, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea, and the European Union. These frameworks set the parameters for continued negotiation regarding binding, final terms of agreements with these foreign trading partners. The President has found that these frameworks align these foreign trading partners with the national security and economic interests of the United States and help address the trade deficit.

6. In addition to the frameworks already reached, and which continue to be negotiated towards binding agreements, the United States is actively negotiating with many other countries to reach ways forward to address the emergencies declared by the President.

And whereas Trump claimed the deals contribute to agreements to invest $15 trillion in the US, Bessent only laid out “about” $2.35 trillion, covering both purchases and investments, that actually derive from these frameworks that aren’t deals.

9. The frameworks for trade agreements already in place contain additional provisions ‘whereby the trade partners agree to significant purchases from and/or investments in the UnitedStates (e.g., the European Union agreed to $750 billion in energy purchases and $600 billion in investment, and Japan and South Korea collectively agreed to about 1 trillion). These agreed upon frameworks total in the multiple trillions of dollars. The longer the delay in a ruling, the greater these commitments will become. If these agreed upon frameworks were unwound and the investments and purchases had to be repaid, the economic consequences would be catastrophic.

In short, Scott Bessent just confessed that Trump has been lying in his claims about tariffs.

That should undermine the entire claimed emergency in the first place. Trump’s own Treasury Secretary has made it clear Trump is lying about tariffs. There’s no reason SCOTUS should accord claims in his underlying Executive Orders any presumption of regularity.

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In Batshit Rant Trump Seems to Beg John Roberts to Rule before Full Brunt of His Tariffs Hits

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A few weeks ago, when we were waiting for the Circuit Court of Appeals to issue its ruling on a challenge to Trump’s tariffs, I did this video providing my prediction for the way that Trump hoped to get the Supreme Court to uphold his claimed unilateral authority to impose tariffs.

On Friday, the court issued its ruling.

Seven judges joined in a per curiam opinion basically ruling that IEEPA, the basis Trump used to impose the tariffs in question, did not authorize the fentanyl-related and trade deficit tariffs in question. Three of those judges — a Poppy Bush, an Obama, and a Biden appointee — joined in a concurring opinion written by another Biden appointee, Tiffany Cunningham, which held that IEEPA doesn’t permit the President to impose any tariffs. And three judges — two George W appointees and an Obama appointee — joined in Obama appointee Richard Taranto’s dissent arguing that IEEPA did give the President authority enough to impose the tariffs before the court (the remainder of the judges on the per curiam were a Clinton appointee and two Obama ones).

While the court remanded the case to the Court of International Trade to adjust to SCOTUS’ recent rulings against universal injunctions (meaning CIT would have to certify a class of importers who qualify for relief), it basically froze its ruling entirely until October 14 to give both parties a chance to appeal.

The Clerk is directed to withhold issuance of the mandate through October 14, 2025, during which the parties may file a petition for a writ of certiorari in the Supreme Court. If, within that period, any party notifies the Clerk in writing that it has filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, the Clerk is directed to withhold issuance of the mandate pending (1) the Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari or (2) a judgment of the Supreme Court if certiorari is granted. While the issuance of the mandate is withheld, the United States Court of International Trade shall take no further action in this case.

Now, as Scott Bessent made clear in that video, the plan from the Administration was always to delay a SCOTUS hearing until October so that by the time it ruled in January, the country would become so reliant on tariffs that SCOTUS would uphold the tariffs even if it recognized they were unlawful.

Since Friday, Trump has been engaged in his typical ranting, first repeating claims already made that if he lost the ability to arbitrarily destroy the US economy it would, “destroy the United States of America.” Then, Trump moved onto his bullshit invocation of partisanship, claiming that “a Radical Left group of judges didn’t care” that if he couldn’t bring in the “TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS” he falsely claimed he had brought in, then, “our Country would be completely destroyed.”

But then today Trump added an additional ploy: urgency.

Lying this time that his tariffs were bringing in $15 trillion of investments, Trump wailed that “TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!!!” because if  “a Radical Left Court” were allowed to terminate his tariffs, than the US would become the “Third World Nation” Trump is intent on making it.

Not only is this tweet financial fraud on a massive scale — none of the deals involve any enforceable investments, much less on a scale that keeps doubling with each passing day.

But it makes no postural sense. The tariffs will remain in place until at least October, just like Bessent wanted, unless the plaintiffs find a basis to appeal. And even then, it would be Trump’s far right SCOTUS making the decision, not the mixed group of appointees at the Circuit Court of Appeals.

The biggest reason to think the “TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!!!” is that Congress is coming back and will have to pass a budget to deal with the destruction wreaked by Trump’s Big Ugly Bill if it understands that these tariffs are illusory, even while the tariffs themselves will continue to destroy small and even larger businesses.

Or perhaps more importantly, Congress is coming back with further evidence that Trump’s policies are deeply unpopular. Trump may feel the need to stave off the kind of rebellion we have yet to see from the captive right wing majorities on the Hill.

Whatever the reason, it represents a tactical flip-flop from the strategy Bessent laid out just weeks ago.

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Trump Confesses He Will Bankrupt the Country Unless SCOTUS Lets Him Break the Law

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It’s my opinion that Solicitor General John Sauer succeeds because of the political pressure he brings to bear on Justices.

That was my immediate impression upon listening to the hearing in Trump v. US. Sauer was arguing a clearly unconstitutional stance, adopting arguments (in a case where Trump nearly got his Vice President killed) that the President could order SEAL Team 6 to kill his adversaries, and (having not reviewed the actual evidence) the right wing judges accepted his premise that this prosecution truly represented a case of meanie Democrats treating Trump badly under the law.

And based on that, the right wing justices wrote an opinion that gave themselves a preemptive veto over whether a former President could be prosecuted, effectively preventing meanie Democrats from upholding the law.

That’s what I think happened with SCOTUS’ abuse of the emergency docket to both overturn nationwide stays and to rubber stamp unconstitutional deportion practices. With their first ruling on April 7 in JGG, SCOTUS sent a mild rebuke to Stephen Miller’s bid to deport wide swaths of Venezuelans to a concentration camp under the Alien Enemies Act based on their tattoos: the ACLU couldn’t get a nationwide injunction against the practice under the Administrative Procedures Act, but each detainee could get a habeas review. Based on that precedent, the Trump Administration got their biggest slapdown of the term in AARP, where Justices intervened on Easter Saturday to make the government turn around buses rushing to deport more men under the Alien Enemies Act. In between the two, SCOTUS ruled that the government should describe what steps it had taken to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia after deporting him illegally.

None of these were good rulings, holding that Miller’s dragnet was wildly illegal. Rather, they were mild rebukes to Miller and tactical rebukes to courts. But then Sauer was confirmed on April 3 (before these rulings but after they were appealed) and Miller and Trump’s propaganda campaign wailing about nationwide injunctions and judicial coups ratcheted up. And against a background of SCOTUS rubber stamping any and all termination orders — with the single exception of the Fed Chair — SCOTUS engaged in exceedingly outrageous action in DVD, serially overriding a District Court’s effort to, one, enforce his orders and, two, prevent the government from deporting men to regimes like South Sudan pending a constitutional review. All this was done with tactical orders building off SCOTUS’ fondness for allowing the President to fire whoever he wants (except the Fed Chair), which itself was used as precedent to allow Trump to override due process for deportees until the courts could consider the legal niceties of it all.

Steve Vladeck is, of course, the source to read on the law of Emergency Docket. The law sucks. But I argue that the law sucks because SCOTUS is not responding to the law. They’re responding to Miller’s shrieks, John Sauer’s neat packaging up of those shrieks, and how both mirror in the Fox News bubble most if not all of these right wing Justices pickle in.

Which is what Trump is planning on in VOS Selections, the tariff case in which both right and left are trying to overturn Trump’s arbitrary illegal trade war. As I keep noting, this case is unique among all challenges to Trump’s unlawful power grabs, because conservative legal luminaries and NGOs like CATO, AEI, and the Chamber of Commerce have joined Democratic states in opposing the power grab. If SCOTUS will ever start reining Trump it, it is likely to be this case.

Back on May 28, the Court of International Trade ruled for the plaintiffs (along with small businesses like wine importer VOS Selections, a bunch of Democratic states), finding that IEEPA, the emergency authority Trump had invoked to impose or threaten tariffs, didn’t give him that authority.

After the hearing but before the court issued its ruling, DOJ submitted a bunch of declarations from Trump’s top officials (which because of the timing were never tested) claiming that if they lost the stick of IEEPA, it would lead other countries to stop negotiating on trade deals. Then, after the ruling, DOJ asked for a stay, relying on the argument in those declarations. The motion for a stay said that the plaintiffs — again, the lead plaintiff is a wine importer — would not be harmed by the period of uncertainty as this got litigated because if plaintiffs won, the government would simply pay them back.

For any plaintiff who is an importer, even if a stay is entered and we do not prevail on appeal, plaintiffs will assuredly receive payment on their refund with interest. “[T]here is virtually no risk” to any importer that they “would not be made whole” should they prevail on appeal. See Sunpreme Inc. v. United States, 2017 WL 65421, at *5 (Ct. Int’l Trade Jan. 5, 2017). The most “harm” that could incur would be a delay in collecting on deposits. This harm is, by definition, not irreparable. See Hughes Network Sys., Inc. v. InterDigital Commc’ns Corp., 17 F.3d 691, 694 (4th Cir. 1994). Plaintiffs will not lose their entitlement to refund, plus interest, if the judgment is stayed, and they are guaranteed payment by defendants should the Court’s decision be upheld.

Immediately after the CIT order, DOJ asked the Circuit Court of Appeals for a stay, playing really hard on how without a stay Trump wouldn’t have a stick with which to negotiate his trade war.

As members of the President’s Cabinet have attested, the CIT’s order would irreparably harm the economic and national security of the United States. The Secretary of Commerce explained that the injunction “would undermine the United States-United Kingdom trade deal that was negotiated in reliance on the President’s emergency tariff authority,” plus the recent “China trade agreement,” and “would jeopardize the dozens of similar arrangements with foreign-trading partners that” are being negotiated. A76. “Each of these negotiations,” the declaration explained, “is premised on the credible threat of enforcement of the IEEPA tariffs,” and the injunction could compromise that threat, so that “foreign counterparts will have reduced incentives to reach meaningful agreements[].” Id. That could “leave the American people exposed to predatory economic practices by foreign actors[] and threaten national security.”

Again, the government assured the court that plaintiffs — and everyone else who had paid illegal tariffs — would get paid back: “the government will issue refunds to plaintiffs, including any postjudgment interest that accrues.”

The small business importers responded by describing all the reconstitution of markets that would happen during the appeal, but also describing the problem with permitting the President to continue to use illegal leverage during a period of a stay.

The President has legitimate means of conducting foreign policy; imposing illegal tariffs is not one of them. The President cannot act illegally as a matter of policy convenience, be ordered to stop, and then plead prior reliance on his illegal acts. If Defendants’ arguments were adopted, an injunction barring virtually any illegal action could be stayed by virtue of claiming that the illegality might create useful leverage: If the President illegally detained innocent people without due process, he could argue for a stay of an injunction against that action on the ground that detention could be useful leverage against the innocent detainees or their families, and thereby advance some claimed U.S. foreign policy or national security interests.

On June 10, the Circuit Court of Appeals granted that stay without engaging in the relative harm to either side, instead pointing to Wilcox, one of two SCOTUS shadow docket rulings about the President’s authority to fire people which has since undermined stays generally.

Days before the hearing, Trump rushed out a bunch of things called trade “deals,” which were not written down and about which both sides continue to argue. That includes a “deal” with the EU, Pakistan, and Korea. And on July 31, having not made the 90 deals supposedly leveraged with the stay, Trump simply set new tariffs, Liberation Day Two Point Oh.

On July 31 (the same day as those new tariffs), the full Circuit Court of Appeals heard the appeal. I actually think the judges were far more split than others did (those judges more favorable to the government spoke up later in the hearing), but it was really hard for me to judge given that most judges on the Circuit participated. This is like a mini-Supreme Court ruling before the big one. Still, the conventional wisdom is, I think, that the Circuit will rule against Trump.

Even before that, though, Trump started working the refs.

Even before the hearing, he claimed that America was dead a year ago but was getting rich off tariffs.

A week after the hearing, boasting that the tariffs-not-deals would go into effect that night, Trump said only a “radical left” court could stop him.

Days later he lied about how much money tariffs were bringing in (here’s the reality), and claimed that if a “radical left court” ruled against him, it — not the tariffs — would cause a Great Depression.

Yesterday, he lied that “consumers aren’t even paying these tariffs” (they’re paying about a fifth of them), then lashed out at a Goldman economist who said that would soon change.

Then John Sauer got into the batshittery.

Monday, about the same number of days after the Circuit Court hearing as it was when DOJ submitted the declarations demanding leverage to negotiate deals they ultimately never negotiated, this letter was submitted under Sauer’s name (but not on DOJ stationery). It cited the July 27 EU deal, announced before the Circuit Court hearing, as well as others announced still earlier than that, as an additional authority (which is normally a new Court ruling that might impact a pending one). Most of it derives directly from Trump’s Truth Social bullshit (marked in brackets below), including the President’s claims that America was a shithole country a year ago and that if a court overturns the tariffs, it (and not the underlying illegal actions) will cause a Great Depression. But it presents these in such a way that neither DOJ’s lawyers nor Trump himself can be held accountable to the court for the obvious lies.

[The President believes that our country would not be able to pay back the trillions of dollars that other countries have already committed to pay, which could lead to financial ruin.] Other tariff authorities that the President could potentially use are short-term, not nearly as powerful, and would render America captive to the abuses that it has endured from far more aggressive countries.

There is no substitute for the tariffs and deals that President Trump has made. [One year ago, the United States was a dead country, and now, because of the trillions of dollars being paid by countries that have so badly abused us, America is a strong, financially viable, and respected country again.] If the United States were forced to pay back the trillions of dollars committed to us, America could go from strength to failure the moment such an incorrect decision took effect.

These deals for trillions of dollars have been reached, and other countries have committed to pay massive sums of money. [If the United States were forced to unwind these historic agreements, the President believes that a forced dissolution of the agreements could lead to a 1929-style result. In such a scenario, people would be forced from their homes, millions of jobs would be eliminated, hard-working Americans would lose their savings, and even Social Security and Medicare could be threatened. In short, the economic consequences would be ruinous, instead of unprecedented success.]

Just about the only claim from anyone but Trump is that, “There is no substitute for the tariffs and deals that President Trump has mad,” which was made in the underlying declarations (and so is not a new authority either).

This is Presidential social media tantrum, presented as legal authority.

The small business plaintiffs responded by noting that the government already said this, therefore it doesn’t count as a new authority, reiterating the harm of any stay, and debunking the claim — the only one that comes from DOJ lawyers — that there is “no substitute” for illegal tariffs, such as going to Congress.

If the Court is inclined to consider the substance of the letter, there is no basis for its declaration that there is “no substitute” for “the tariffs and deals that President Trump has made.” Even without IEEPA, the President can obtain ex ante authority to enter into trade agreements, see 19 U.S.C. § 4202(a), or submit agreements for congressional approval, including via fast-track procedures, as prior presidents have done, see 19 U.S.C. § 4501 (implementing the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement).

Scott Bessent gave up the game the other day with Larry Kudlow (around 13:00). When Kudlow, who predictably allowed Bessent to spin a bunch of other bullshit unchallenged, suggested that if the Circuit Court rules against the government, then Trump has other ways of putting together the magical pony economic plan that Bessent had laid out in the interview.

Kudlow: If the tariff court wins on appeal, you’ve got other ways to put this trade and tariff policy together?

Bessent: Larry, good framing here would be if the tariff court rules against us, we will immediately — it will immediately be enjoined, so the tariffs will likely continue. Then it will go to the Supreme Court in October, then we would expect a ruling in January. But I tell you, Larry, the amount of money that’s coming in here, I think the more deals we’ve done, the more money coming in, it gets harder and harder for SCOTUS to rule against us.

As noted, this question — are there other legal ways to do this? — is the only one in Sauer’s letter that doesn’t derive directly from a Trump Truth Social post.

Bessent dodged the question and instead said that if the tariffs are ruled illegal, then they will just draw things out — just like Sauer did with Trump’s criminal case — until the cost of overturning the tariffs would be too big an ask for SCOTUS.

That is, they’re not even claiming any of this is legal.

They’re just boasting that if they can claim the US is paying its bills through inflated claims of tariff revenues, then the Roberts Court won’t dare uphold the law, for fear of being held accountable for the financial ruin Trump is rushing us towards.

And, as batshit as that Sauer letter is, they might well be right.

Update: I’ve annotated the letter.

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How Trump Plans to Dodge Accountability Again

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Like many insecure white men, Donald J. Trump is a master at dodging all personal accountability for his own actions. There are the serial bankruptcies, sure. He has blamed “his predecessors” for things that happened between 2017 and 2021 (indeed, Scott Bessent just blamed Democrats for blowing out the deficit in 2020). But the real measure of his mastery at dodging accountability is how, through a combination of denial and distraction, Trump never paid a price for the excess deaths and delayed recovery from Hurricane Maria in 2018.

 

 

A similar catastrophe in Hurricane Katrina response probably did more to sink George W. Bush’s legacy than the Iraq War.

But Trump managed to simply deprive Puerto Rico of disaster support and still flip heavily Puerto Rican districts in last year’s election.

Understanding and preempting Trump’s attempts to dodge accountability for his failed policies may be crucial to reversing his authoritarian power grab. After all, already his policies have killed thousands overseas and endangered business, big and small. But the scale of catastrophe he will exacerbate or even cause, whether in economic crash or pandemic or terrorism or cybersecurity failures or things less obvious, could do grave lasting damage to the US. We can say that with great confidence now, but that only matters if we can hold him accountable for all the foreseeable catastrophes his policies will cause.

If he is held accountable, we might generate broad opposition to him, even among some MAGAts; if he scapegoats others, catastrophe will only provide a way to consolidate power.

Which is why the panicked response to the Texas flood that devastated a girl’s summer camp matters.

It’s not yet clear how the vacancies Trump demanded exacerbated flood response, but key positions, including those that might have warned of the flood, are vacant.

The National Weather Service’s San Angelo office, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by Friday’s flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster and meteorologist in charge, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents Weather Service workers.

The Weather Service’s nearby San Antonio office, which covers other areas hit by the floods, also had significant vacancies, including a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer, Mr. Fahy said. Staff members in those positions are meant to work with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn local residents and help them evacuate.

That office’s warning coordination meteorologist left on April 30, after taking the early retirement package the Trump administration used to reduce the number of federal employees, according to a person with knowledge of his departure.

Some of the openings may predate the current Trump administration. But at both offices, the vacancy rate is roughly double what it was when Mr. Trump returned to the White House in January, according to Mr. Fahy.

John Sokich, who until January was director of congressional affairs for the National Weather Service, said those unfilled positions made it harder to coordinate with local officials because each Weather Service office works as a team. “Reduced staffing puts that in jeopardy,” he said.

Both Speaker Mike and — more controversially — the White House have suggested prayer is the only available recourse. “May God wrap his loving arms around all those in Texas,” because Trump stripped Texas of emergency response services before a climate disaster rolled through.

Scott Bessent (fresh off blaming Democrats for blowing up the deficit while Trump was in charge) lashed out at Larry Summers for tying the Big Ugly bill to response failures in Texas, declaring that holding a white man like himself accountable is “toxic” and “cruel.”

He has turned a human tragedy into a political cudgel. Such remarks are feckless and deeply offensive.

Professor Summers should immediately issue a public apology for his toxic language.

I hope the nonprofit and for-profit institutions with which he is affiliated will join me in this call.

If he is unwilling or unable to acknowledge the cruelty of his remarks, they should consider Harvard’s example and make his unacceptable rhetoric grounds for dismissal.

Trump himself, when asked whether his assault on FEMA had a role in delayed warnings in Texas, both claimed that this was unforeseeable but also deferred discussion of FEMA because “they’re busy working” (and, of course, Trump instantly made an emergency declaration whereas he has delayed for even larger tragedies in states that oppose him).

I got a bit of criticism on social media for suggesting we need a tag for Trump disasters — Trump Murder Flood, Trump Murder Hack, Trump Murder Disease — so as to make it harder for him to dodge accountability (and to demonstrate their commonality in policy failures). Plus, there’s the larger question of accountability for refusing to combat or prepare for climate change, the real culprit in Texas.

But amid tepid insider analysis about whether Democrats can hang the Big Ugly bill on right wingers in the mid-terms, if we make it that far, the accountability for the impacts of Trump’s policy failures is a far more important issue.

Trump’s policies have and will get people killed. Will we find a way to hold him accountable.

This time?

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Trump’s Trade War with China Risks Sending Production To China

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I may be alone in this opinion, but Scott Bessent’s response to Bret Baier’s question about how trade negotiations with China are going looked like a hostage video.

Bessent’s description that talks with China were “a bit stalled” has gotten a lot of attention, but not his robotic cadence and stuttering, a real shift from his fluid flow of bullshit before that, leading up to his hint of a call with Party … Chair … Xi.

Bessent: I, I, I would say that they are … uh, a bit stalled. I believe that we will be having more talks with them. Uh, in the next few weeks. And I believe we may at some point have a call between uh the President and Party. Chair. Xi.

Baier: So stalled. There was a time when the President thought that that was moving forward pretty significantly.

Bessent: I, uh, again I, I think that given, given the magnitude of the talks, given the complexity, that it, this is going to require both. leaders. to. weigh. in. uh with each other. They have a very good relationship and I am confident that. the. Chinese. will come to the table when President Trump makes his preferences known.

The interview was on Thursday. It was the day before Trump’s Truth Social post where he made false claims about how the interim deal with China came about before then claiming that China had violated that deal (this screen cap reflects my normal five hour time difference).

A series of stories in WSJ explain what really happened in advance of that (IMO) stammering hostage video from Scott Bessent.

A piece on Friday — written the same day as Trump’s post and explaining Bessent’s comment about a stall (but not mentioning his stammer) — described that Trump’s accusation pertained to China’s slow-walking of export licenses for rare earth metals, which China attributed to retaliation for what the US claims was a restatement of export controls put on chip technology under Biden.

A trade truce between the U.S. and China is at risk of falling apart, as China’s slow-walking on rare-earth exports fuels U.S. recriminations that China is reneging on the deal.

Getting the pact together in Geneva earlier this month hinged on Beijing’s concession on the critical minerals, according to people familiar with the matter.

The people say the U.S. trade negotiators presented their Chinese counterpart, Vice Premier He Lifeng, with a demand that Beijing resume rare-earth exports. In return, the U.S. would agree to a 90-day tariff truce. He agreed to the demand in the final hours of marathon discussions with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, the people said.

In the resulting deal, both sides suspended most of the tariffs they had imposed on each other—drawing cheers from global investors and businesses.

Since Geneva, however, Beijing has continued to slow-walk approvals for export licenses for rare earths and other elements needed to make cars, chips and other products.

[snip]

For He, Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s economic gatekeeper, the willingness to comply with China’s rare-earth pledges faltered after the U.S. Commerce Department on May 12 issued a warning against the use of Huawei Technologies’s Ascend artificial-intelligence chips “anywhere in the world,” the people said.

Beijing viewed the warning as renewed U.S. aggression, and complained about it to Washington.

That same day, WSJ published a story describing that the US no longer has the tech advantage over China that might make this hardball work.

The U.S. has tried almost everything to win the tech race against China—across areas as varied as AI, energy, autonomous vehicles, drones and EVs. So far, none of it has worked.

China’s EVs are cheaper and by many measures better than America’s. The country dominates in consumer drones. Autonomous vehicles have rolled out on the streets of Wuhan and Beijing at a pace that Waymo and Tesla have yet to match. China produces the lion’s share of the world’s solar panels and batteries. And while the U.S. and its allies maintain a narrow lead in advanced microchips and AI, the gap appears to be closing faster than ever.

On Monday, a story about Vice Premier He Lifeng’s hardnosed negotiating approach described that he was the one slow-walking licenses.

In its deepening face-off with the Trump administration, Beijing’s trade negotiator has given a preview of Xi Jinping’s chief objective for this trade war: It won’t be like last time.

In Geneva in mid-May, Vice Premier He Lifeng extracted a 90-day trade truce from a Trump team that had until then declined to pause a tariff blitz on China the way it had for other countries. The deal calmed the nerves of investors and markets around the world.

Now, after both sides have complained that the other wasn’t upholding the terms of the deal, that trade truce is teetering, once again jolting global investors and businesses.

At the center of the storm is He, Xi’s economic gatekeeper, who has made clear China’s strategy in this trade war is nothing like the approach it had in Trump’s first term.

During the Geneva talks, He had removed a final sticking point by agreeing to U.S. demands that China resume rare-earth exports. Yet since then He has dug in his heels, slow-walking approvals of licenses to export the minerals critical in the manufacturing of modern cars and other products.

Beijing blames the U.S. for the breakdown, saying a warning against the use of certain artificial-intelligence chips from China’s Huawei Technologies was a renewal of U.S. aggression, and complained to Washington that it undermined the trade deal. It also took offense at the U.S. plan to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students.

The U.S. said the Huawei warning was a restatement of a previous policy. Trump has expressed hopes to talk to Xi directly to break the impasse. A call could happen as early as this week, the White House said.

And a piece today describes what may have caused Bessent’s stammer. Auto companies are considering moving some production to China to get around the rare earth backlog.

Four major automakers are racing to find workarounds to China’s stranglehold on rare-earth magnets, which they fear could force them to shut down some car production within weeks.

Several traditional and electric-vehicle makers—and their suppliers—are considering shifting some auto-parts manufacturing to China to avoid looming factory shutdowns, people familiar with the situation said.

Ideas under review include producing electric motors in Chinese factories or shipping made-in-America motors to China to have magnets installed. Moving production to China as a way to get around the export controls on rare-earth magnets could work because the restrictions only cover magnets, not finished parts, the people said.

If automakers end up shifting some production to China, it would amount to a remarkable outcome from a trade war initiated by President Trump with the intention of bringing manufacturing back to the U.S.

“If you want to export a magnet [from China] they won’t let you do that. If you can demonstrate that the magnet is in a motor in China, you can do that,” said a supply-chain manager at one of the carmakers.

China in April began requiring companies to apply for permission to export magnets made with rare-earth metals, including dysprosium and terbium. The country controls roughly 90% of the world’s supply of these elements, which help magnets to operate at high temperatures. Much of the world’s modern technology, from smartphones to F-35 jet fighters, rely on these magnets.

In the auto industry, rare-earths are what allow electric-vehicle motors to function at high speed. They are also used in less exotic, though no less critical, functions from windshield wipers and headlights.

Aside from describing how Ford shut down an Explorer line for a week, WSJ doesn’t mention which four auto companies were considering this move. But in a few places, it focuses on the specific vulnerability for electric cars: they need the magnets for engines to work at high speed, and older engines that don’t rely on them are more expensive.

A key part of a NYT profile on recriminations Elon Musk is facing at Tesla for his neglect over the last four months focuses on supply chain vulnerabilities.

During the visit, Mr. Musk asked about the impact of Mr. Trump’s tariffs on Tesla and was briefed on the effects and the company’s supply chain vulnerabilities, two people familiar with the meeting said. The timing of his question raised concerns from some attendees, since Mr. Trump had begun announcing tariffs two months earlier in February.

Days after Mr. Musk’s visit, Tesla reported that its vehicle sales fell 13 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, as profit plunged to its lowest level in four years. New tariffs on imported auto parts have added to the financial pressures facing the company.

Now, Bessent and Elon had the highest profile spat involving any of Trump’s cabinet members. Bessent likely doesn’t care, exclusively, about a hit to Elon’s business (though Elon’s petulance and self-regulation problems may explain why he’d lash out if Trump’s tariffs are killing the primary source of his wealth).

This is a far larger issue for Bessent. The issue that he’s got a weak hand. The issue that if this negotiation doesn’t work, it’ll crash the global economy, with the US in the lead. The issue that rather than isolating China, the Trump administration has found non-stop ways to make China stronger. The issue that if Bessent fails, far worse economic advisors, like Peter Navarro, will have the upper hand with Trump.

In the middle of all this, Whiskey Pete Hegseth, who didn’t know what ASEAN was at his confirmation hearing, flew to Singapore and dick-wagged about defending Taiwan, eliciting yet another backlash from China.

On Saturday Hegseth said China was “credibly preparing to potentially use military force to alter the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific”, and was rehearsing for “the real deal” of invading Taiwan.

“There’s no reason to sugar coat it. The threat China poses is real, and it could be imminent,” the US defence secretary said in a keynote address at the Shangri-la Dialogue defence forum, calling for Asian countries to increase defence spending.

On Sunday, China’s ministry of foreign affairs condemned his words, which it said were “filled with provocations and intended to sow division”.

“Hegseth deliberately ignored the call for peace and development by countries in the region, and instead touted the cold war mentality for bloc confrontation, vilified China with defamatory allegations, and falsely called China a ‘threat’,” it said.

“The remarks were filled with provocations and intended to sow division. China deplores and firmly opposes them and has protested strongly to the US.”

The statement also pushed back at Hegseth’s claim that China was trying to become a “hegemonic power” in the region.

“No country in the world deserves to be called a hegemonic power other than the US itself, who is also the primary factor undermining the peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific,” it said.

Overnight, Trump is wailing about China again, complaining that Xi is “VERY TOUGH, AND EXTREMELY HARD TO MAKE A DEAL WITH!!!”

Which sounds like Trump is laying the groundwork to capitulate further to China.

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Jamieson Greer Says Trump’s Trade Deficit Emergency Wasn’t as Serious an Emergency “as Maybe Thought”

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Against the background of empty ports, stalled shipping traffic, and impending business failures, Trump has capitulated on his trade embargo with China. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer will announce an even bigger rollback of tariffs than the 80 or 50% tariffs Trump floated last week, to 30% (which is the 10% tariffs imposed worldwide, plus the 20% that purports to be a punishment for China’s role in providing precursors for fentanyl).

The U.S. and China agreed to slash punishingly high tariffs on each other’s goods, a major thaw in trade relations that resets the tone between the world’s two largest economies from outright conflict to constructive engagement.

After weekend talks in Geneva:

  • President Trump’s “reciprocal” tariff on China will fall to 10% from 125%.
  • A separate 20% tariff the president imposed over what he described as China’s role in the fentanyl trade will remain.
  • Beijing will cut its retaliatory levies on U.S. goods to 10% from 125%.
  • The U.S. said the reductions would last for 90 days while the two sides begin further talks.

The agreement lowered tariffs levels more than Wall Street expected and came after just two days of talks.

In announcing this “deal,” Greer offered up thin excuses for capitulating within hours.

It’s important to understand how quickly we were able to come to an agreement, which reflects that perhaps the differences were not so large as maybe thought. That said, there was a lot of groundwork that went into these these two days.

Just remember why we’re here in the first place is the United States has a massive $1.2 trillion trade deficit. So the President declared a national emergency, and imposed tariffs. We’re confident that the deal we struck with our Chinese partners will help us to resolve — work toward resolving that national emergency.

“Perhaps the differences were not so large as maybe thought” — thought by whom, Greer doesn’t say. But Greer does note that the President was the guy who declared those differences that were not so large as maybe thought to be an emergency.

Trump thought it was an emergency. Now Greer says it wasn’t, as it turns out.

Once it became clear that Trump had caused a far bigger emergency by declaring one, it took just hours to rethink the claimed emergency.

The focus on the emergency may cause the Administration headaches going forward (which may be why Greer attempted to offer an excuse).

That claimed emergency is the basis via which Trump usurped Congress’ authority to set tariffs.

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), section 604 of the Trade Act of 1974, as amended (19 U.S.C. 2483), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, find that underlying conditions, including a lack of reciprocity in our bilateral trade relationships, disparate tariff rates and non-tariff barriers, and U.S. trading partners’ economic policies that suppress domestic wages and consumption, as indicated by large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits, constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States. That threat has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States in the domestic economic policies of key trading partners and structural imbalances in the global trading system. I hereby declare a national emergency with respect to this threat.

A series of lawsuits challenging Trump’s tariffs — in this case, one brought by a wine importer, VOS Selections, and other small businesses, supported by right wing funders, in which Greer is a named defendant — have argued the trade deficit is not an emergency. [docket]

The President has no authority under IEEPA to issue the tariffs. IEEPA does not even mention tariffs. No other President has asserted this authority. IEEPA was passed to limit the President’s emergency powers. If Congress wanted to grant the President the authority to issue tariffs in IEEPA, it could have, as it has done so elsewhere. But when Congress does give the President tariff authority, it does so subject to strict statutory limits.

Legitimate use of IEEPA is limited to cases of emergencies where there is an “unusual and extraordinary threat.” But the national emergency the President has declared—the existence of bilateral trade deficits with some countries—is not an emergency, nor is it unusual or extraordinary. The United States has had some amount of trade deficit in goods for most of the last century, while having the most economic success of any country in history.

Moreover, the power claimed by the President here is extreme: he claims the power to unilaterally impose infinite tariffs of his choosing on any country he chooses—even countries with which we run a trade surplus. Any grant of such authority by Congress to the President should qualify as a major question subject to the strictest judicial scrutiny—which this claim of authority under IEEPA cannot survive.

The government, in response, has argued that it — like other Executive authorities — is not subject to court review.

More to the point, courts have consistently held that the President’s emergency declarations under the National Emergencies Act, and the adequacy of his policy choices addressing those emergencies under IEEPA, are unreviewable. “Although presidential declarations of emergencies . . . have been at issue in many cases, no court has ever reviewed the merits of such a declaration.” Ctr. for Biological Diversity v. Trump, 453 F. Supp. 3d 11, 31 (D.D.C. 2020) (emphasis in original). And the Federal Circuit has recognized that an inquiry to “examine the President’s motives and justifications for declaring a national emergency” under IEEPA “would likely present a nonjusticiable political question.” Chang v. United States, 859 F.2d 893, 896 n.3 (Fed. Cir. 1988); see, e.g., Yoshida, 526 F.2d at 579 (“courts will not normally review the essentially political questions surrounding the declaration or continuance of a national emergency”); United States v. Shih, 73 F.4th 1077, 1092 (9th Cir. 2023) (refusing to review declaration of emergency under IEEPA); In re 650 Fifth Ave. & Related Props., 777 F. Supp. 2d 529, 575 n.16 (S.D.N.Y. 2011) (concluding that whether the government of Iran’s actions and policies constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States” was an unreviewable judgment “reserved to the executive branch”); Beacon Products Corp. v. Reagan, 633 F. Supp. 1191, 1194-95 (D. Mass. 1986) (concluding that whether Nicaragua posed sufficient threat to trigger the President’s IEEPA power to impose an embargo on the country was a nonjusticiable political question).

Reviewing the legitimacy of the underlying emergency—a foreign-affairs and nationalsecurity matter constitutionally and statutorily committed to the President—would require “the court to assess the wisdom of the President’s judgment concerning the nature and extent of that threat, a matter not susceptible to judicially manageable standards.” Beacon Products, 63 F. Supp. at 1195. Thus, the President’s “motives, his reasoning, his finding of facts requiring the action, and his judgment, are immune from judicial scrutiny.” Florsheim, 744 F.2d at 796; see United States v. George S. Bush & Co., 310 U.S. 371, 380 (1940) (“For the judiciary to probe the reasoning which underlies this Proclamation would amount to a clear invasion of the legislative and executive domains.”).

Normally, such an argument would carry a lot of sway with courts.

But in a parallel invocation of Presidential authority, judges already are pointing to Trump’s fickleness as evidence that his justifications for exercising Executive authority are bullshit. In her opinion granting Perkins Coie summary judgement against Trump’s attack on the law firm, Beryl Howell noted that the only thing that happened between the time Trump claimed Paul, Weiss lawyers could not be trusted with security clearances and when he decided they could be was their agreement to provide $40 million in pro bono legal services. [docket]

Second, and tellingly, the Paul, Weiss EO contained a virtually identical security clearance review provision to the one at issue in this case. Compare EO 14230 § 2, 90 Fed. Reg. at 11781, with Paul, Weiss EO § 2, 90 Fed. Reg. at 13039. As discussed, see supra Part III.B.1(b), the Paul, Weiss EO was revoked only seven days after its issuance when President Trump reached a “deal” with that firm. See generally Paul, Weiss Revocation Order, 90 Fed. Reg. 13685. While the Paul, Weiss Revocation Order summarized that firm’s agreement to, inter alia, “adopt[] a policy of political neutrality with respect to client selection and attorney hiring; tak[e] on a wide range of pro bono matters representing the full political spectrum; commit[] to merit-based hiring, promotion, and retention . . .; dedicat[e] the equivalent of $40 million in pro bono legal services during [President Trump’s] term in office . . .; and other similar initiatives,” none of these agreedupon policy or practice changes appear to explain or address how any national security concerns sufficient to warrant the Paul, Weiss EO could have changed so rapidly. Id. § 1, 90 Fed. Reg. at 13685. The speed of the reversal and the rationale provided in the Paul, Weiss Revocation Order, which focused only on agreements to advance policy initiatives of the Trump Administration, see id., further support the conclusion that national security considerations are not a plausible explanation for Section 2.

As Roger Parloff noted, Paul Clement made a similar point in arguing that the EO against Wilmer Hale must be overturned (I’m fairly certain he has made this more general observation about how the Paul, Weiss flipflop made the retaliatory EOs more vulnerable).

I think it’s crystal clear, he proceeds, that it’s all tied together. Section 1 explains what motivated all the sections.

What happened with the law firm of Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison adds further support for viewing the order as a whole, he argues. Paul Weiss faced the same operative provisions in an executive order issued on March 14. But on March 21, a later executive order repealed the whole thing. It didn’t keep, say, the security clearances or restrictions on government buildings while rescinding other sections.

Clement thinks that’s particularly telling with respect to the security clearances, he says. When you look to the agreement Paul, Weiss made with the president, there wasn’t anything specific mentioned about national security or the national interest or anything else. It was mostly about providing $40 million in pro bono services that were more to the president’s liking.

This trade deficit emergency Trump declared remains the claimed basis for the 10% tariffs still levied against China and most other countries in the world (as a wine importer, tariffs on those other countries, not China — Austria, Italy, Greece, Lebanon, Morocco, Spain, France, Portugal, Mexico, Argentina, Germany, Croatia, Hungary, and South Africa — are the ones that pose a problem for VOS Selections).

And now his Trade Representative has gone on TV to proclaim that maybe what was claimed to be an emergency was “not so large as maybe thought.”

I look forward to plaintiffs invoking Greer’s admission going forward.

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Three Coequal Timelines of Government

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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.

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