Politics & Stuff

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Donald Trump announces tariffs that could raise the price of almost everything you buy

The plan would add staggering taxes to products coming into the US.

https://www.theverge.com/news/642240/trump-tariffs-imports-apple-manufacturing

 

At an event in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, Donald Trump unveiled a new set of planned tariffs that are being described as “short-sighted,” and having “no basis in logic,” and being compared to Great Depression-era policies. Holding a giant poster board blowing in the wind, Trump announced staggering new taxes on products coming into the US from abroad. Among the 60 countries listed, tariff rates ranged anywhere from 10 percent to nearly 50 percent: 34 percent for China, 46 percent for Vietnam, 20 percent for the EU, and 49 percent for Cambodia, among others.

The US is the world’s biggest importer, bringing in trillions of dollars of goods every year. Relatively little is produced in the US, and the eye-watering taxes will impact supply chains across industries: tech products and gadgets, clothing, food, automobiles, and more. Seeing souring relations between the US and China, some companies have worked to diversify supply chains by moving manufacturing to other countries — Apple, for example, was producing billions of dollars worth of iPhones in India last fall to move away from China. Under Trump’s new plan, Indian imports would get slapped with 26 percent tariffs.

The President did not explain how the rates were calculated, but if implemented the steep taxes will like make costs for retailers — and by extension, consumers — skyrocket. The Trump administration has regularly lied about who pays for tariffs, claiming that the exporting nation foots the bill. That’s not how tariffs work, no matter how many times Trump claims otherwise.

The New York Times reports that the figures on the chart include a 10 percent “baseline” tariff, meaning the additional hike on Chinese products is 24 percent, plus 10 percent.

Temu, Shein, and Amazon Haul are about to get wrecked

After the event, Trump also signed an executive order closing the de minimis exemption, a little-known carve out that allows packages valued under $800 to enter the US duty free. Ultra cheap retailers like Shein, Temu, and Amazon Haul use the rule as a loophole to keep prices low, and buyers don’t have to pay any taxes that would otherwise apply to their purchases. By ending the exemption, Trump could destabilize the business model that has hooked Americans looking for a deal on China-reliant online retailers.

The massive taxes on imports are reportedly in addition to existing tariffs the Trump administration has levied on imports. He’s also separately added taxes to vehicles and imports from top US trading partners like Canada and Mexico.

 

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here is the state of play as seen by some of the neoliberal, centrist to conservative, anti-progressive Democrats:

 

Democratic Delusions Aren’t Going Away Anytime Soon

Here’s why.

https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/democratic-delusions-arent-going

The concept that Democrats have delusions about their current situation—that they are in denial about the implications of the 2024 election and other trends—is having a moment. No less a discourse arbiter than the Gray Lady has weighed in on the side that, yes, this is a thing. In an op-ed by the New York Times’ Editorial Board, the paper’s distinguished journalists lament:

In the aftermath of this comprehensive defeat [in the 2024 election], many party leaders have decided that they do not need to make significant changes to their policies or their message. They have instead settled on a convenient explanation for their plight.

That explanation starts with the notion that Democrats were merely the unlucky victims of postpandemic inflation and that their party is more popular than it seems: If Democrats could only communicate better, particularly on social media and podcasts, the party would be fine. “We’ve got the right message,” Ken Martin, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said while campaigning for the job. “What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.

This is indeed delusional. The scale of the delusion is underscored by data just released by David Shor and Blue Rose Research (see also the interviews with Shor by Ezra Klein and Eric Levitz). How anyone can go through these findings and conclude anything other than that Democrats need a radical course correction is beyond me.

In that spirit, the Times’ Editorial Board and Shor do urge Democrats to cast off their delusions and offer some suggestions for such a course correction. I mostly agree with their suggestions—indeed, I’d urge the need for even stronger medicine. But I think it’s important to be clear-eyed about the various factors that will make it all too easy for Democrats to ignore or soft-pedal the need for a decisive reckoning with their “toxic brand.” Their delusions, it is likely, will prove quite difficult to get rid of.

Here's why.

1. The fool’s gold of Democrats’ low turnout advantage. The dirty little secret of Democrats’ current coalition is that it’s extremely well-engineered for low turnout elections. Democrats used to argue that they wanted really high turnout—ideally everyone voting—in elections because high voter participation is a civic good in democratic societies and because they believed that higher turnout would bring in masses of less engaged, pro-Democratic voters (younger, less educated, less affluent, nonwhite) that would benefit them politically.

No more. Now that the Democratic coalition is skewed toward the most educated, most engaged, high information voters, Democrats actually benefit when turnout is low and the voting pool is dominated by their highly engaged voters. Correspondingly, the more voters that show up, the worse it is for the Democrats. As a result, Democrats have become increasingly quiet about their commitment to high turnout and don’t talk much these days about the civic benefits of everyone voting. Maybe it’s not so bad if only the most interested citizens bother to vote!

You can’t blame Democrats from enjoying the electoral benefits of their current coalition. If they have a better chance of winning in relatively low turnout elections, they’ll gladly take it—and crow about their victories. But this presents a problem if Democrats do indeed need to get rid of their delusions and reform their party. Every time Democrats overperform in low turnout electoral contexts, that stiffens the spines of those who are resisting substantial change. Look at special elections X and Y, they’ll say, and how well Democrats did, vastly outrunning the underlying partisan lean of the state or district. There’s no need for big changes—we’re doing great!

You can see this dynamic playing out in the aftermath of last Tuesday’s special elections for a Wisconsin State Supreme Court seat and for filling House seats in Florida’s 1^st and 6^th congressional districts. Democrats did indeed overperform and the kvelling in Democratic circles was immediate and loud, especially about the victory of liberal Susan Crawford in the Wisconsin race by 10 points over her conservative opponent, preserving a 4-3 liberal majority on the court. That’s a good result for Democrats but it’s worth noting that last two Wisconsin State Supreme Court races in 2023 and 2020 were won by the liberal candidates with almost identical margins.

There may be less here than meets the eye. As Nate Cohn remarked on the day these elections were held:

Nothing about today’s results will change that the Democratic Party has major problems, from big-picture messaging and policy questions to its struggles among specific demographic groups, like young men and nonwhite voters.

But even if the results don’t do much about these major problems, it is likely to divert Democrats’ attention from doing anything about them. Indeed, they are likely to focus instead on how their overperformance in Tuesday’s and earlier specials augurs well for their quest to take back the House in 2026.

And that could be a further problem. David Shor pointed out in his interview with Ezra Klein:

If Democrats do nothing, they’ll probably be OK in 2026. All of these voters who get their news from TikTok, who don’t care about politics—voters under 25—just aren’t going to turn out in the midterms.

But if we don’t fix this problem, then four years from now, we could be facing the same trust deficit on all these core issues. And the voters who didn’t turn out in 2026 will come back — but this time, we might be running against a candidate who is a lot less unpopular than Trump. And that could be a real pickle.”

A pickle indeed. This table from Shor illustrates how the dynamic for Democrats changes in a high turnout environment.

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That should concentrate the mind.

2. The comfort food of thermostatic reaction against the GOP. It was predictable that Trump and the GOP would go too far in some respects after he got re-elected. Parties these days do tend to over-read their “mandates” and Trump is, well, Trump and inclined to do things to excess. I think it’s safe to say that he has exceeded expectations in this respect. As a result, the thermostatic reaction is setting in, as voters seek to turn the policy thermostat down to a more comfortable setting.

They are not happy with the antics of Elon Musk, how far the cuts in government have gone and their haphazard nature, the lack of attention to lowering prices and the chaotic pursuit of a tariff regime that may raise prices as well as having other negative economic effects. Voters’ discontent is a boon to the Democrats of course and Democrats do not have to change their party much, if at all, to reap the benefits. This is another factor militating against Democrats’ willingness to jettison their delusions. After all if Trump is so terrible and is royally screwing things up, why go to the big trouble of confronting fundamental problems when simply being not-Trump should allow the party to connect to thermostatic reaction? It’s a tempting—and comfortable—strategy.

3. The siren call of economic determinism. It’s no secret that economic issues loomed large in the last election and that Democrats were disadvantaged by that. It’s fair to say that economic issues will continue to be central to the party’s fate in the future.

But economic issues are not the only issues. Cultural issues are also hugely important to voters’ views of a political party and how likely that party’s actions are to be consistent with their interests and values. It is not the case that economic factors and issues will necessarily determine voters’ political preferences if only the proper approach can be found. Cultural inclinations are not so easily overruled.

But in truth this is what most Democrats seem to believe. They are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues real issues. They are typically viewed as politically motivated distractions or as expressions of something else entirely (i.e., racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, etc.) They are not treated as issues that need to be dealt with on their own terms, with the corresponding need to potentially change party positions to accord with popular, particular working-class, preferences.

I see the hand of economic determinism in much of what Democrats have offered since the 2024 election. Bernie Sanders and AOC think Democrats should talk more about the “billionaire class” and “fighting oligarchy.” Ro Khanna proposes a “New Economic Patriotism” that would emphasize promotion of American manufacturing and hi-tech development across all regions of the country. Chris Murphy thinks the key to a Democratic revival is advocating the breakup of corporate power. Other Democrats suggest a relentless focus on “kitchen-table” issues (ah, what would Democrats do without that fabled kitchen table…). Even the new kid on the block, the “abundance” liberals, who have more interesting ideas, still leave cultural issues completely out of their framework. The general idea across these approaches is that focusing on economic issues will win back the working class and obviate the need to change anything else.

This attempt to magic away the influence of culture has not worked and will not work. To borrow a term from the Marxists, culture is not a part of the “superstructure” which is subservient to the “base.” Culture has a mind and dynamic of its own as Democrats should have learned by now, considering how much it’s hurt the party politically. But the siren call of economic determinism is powerful and remains a key obstacle preventing Democrats from casting off their delusions.

For all these reasons, it seems likely that Democratic delusions and, consequently, their “toxic brand” will be with us for quite some time. Those seeking to reform the party have their work cut out for them.

 

 

New Insights on Why Harris Lost—and Why Democrats Are in Such a Hole

https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/new-insights-on-why-harris-lostand

For those of us who study American politics, it’s always a treat when David Shor pops up to offer his insights on the latest election. Shor is a Democratic data analyst who normally stays behind the scenes. In the last election, he helped run a super PAC backing Kamala Harris presidential campaign. Shor, a self-styled socialist, is known for speaking tough truths to Democrats about the state of their party.

Recently, he emerged with not one but two new interviews—one with Eric Levitz of Vox and the other with Ezra Klein of the New York Times. Shor’s data outfit, Blue Rose Research, has conducted extensive post-election analyses about the 2024 election, and he shared some of their key findings in these interviews, findings that will likely surprise a lot of folks.

Below, I highlight some of the most interesting takeaways from these discussions.

1. Politically disengaged voters are becoming more Republican.

Shor first discusses a startling trend in the form of the following two graphics:

 

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I have two graphs: The first breaks down 2024 support by whether or not you had voted in 2020…What you can see here is that in 2020…people who didn’t vote would have been a little bit more Democratic than the country overall had they voted. But over the next four years, people who didn’t vote shifted from being a somewhat Democratic-leaning group to a group that Trump won by double digits.

The second graph here shows, for every precinct, the percentage of people who voted in 2022 and the change in Democratic vote share from 2020 to 2024. What you can see here is that for the lowest-turnout precincts, Trump increased his vote share by about 6 percent, while in the highest-turnout precincts, Harris actually increased her support.

In other words, voters who are far likelier to regularly participate in elections actually voted more Democratic overall in 2024 relative to 2020, but more irregular voters were likelier to swing toward Trump and were a big driver of his win.

2. Relatedly, higher-turnout elections no longer benefit Democrats.

Not long ago, Democrats argued that if they could just get more people to turn out, they would have greater success in elections. Many pointed to Barack Obama’s two wins as evidence of this. In 2008 and 2012, the Obama campaign’s top-notch turnout operation helped propel him to historic victories, as they successfully brought out many “lower-propensity” voters who would often vote for Democrats—if they actually showed up at a polling place. But in the two intervening midterm elections (2010 and 2014), many of these voters—and even more reliable Democrats—stayed home, leading to historic wins for Republicans.

So the thought in some Democratic circles has been that the higher the turnout, the better their party’s chances. However, Shor outlines how this theory doesn’t appear to have much solid grounding:

When you [use more precise data], you see that roughly 30 percent of the change in Democratic vote share from 2020 to 2024 was changes in who voted—changes in turnout. But the other 70 percent was people changing their mind…There were a lot of Democratic voters who were angry at their party last year. And they were mostly moderate and conservative Democrats angry about the cost of living and other issues. And even though they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Republican, a lot of them stayed home. But basically, their complaints were very similar to those of Biden voters who flipped to Trump.

The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points]. So, I think that a “we need to turn up the temperature and mobilize everyone” strategy would’ve made things worse.

The Blue Rose chart below shows that if only people who had voted in the 2022 midterms—a lower-turnout election in which Democrats did relatively well—had voted last year, Harris would have won the popular vote and also the Electoral College fairly easily. However, if those who stayed home in 2024 had all turned out, Trump likely would have won by an even greater margin than he did, and Democrats would almost certainly be in a deeper hole in the House and Senate.

 

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3. Trump’s win was due in no small part to substantial gains with racial minorities.

According to Shor:

If we look at 2016 to 2024 trends by race and ideology, you see this clear story where white voters really did not shift at all. Kamala Harris did exactly as well as Hillary Clinton did among white conservatives, white liberals, white moderates.

But if you look among Hispanic and Asian voters, you see these enormous double-digit declines. To highlight one example: In 2016, Democrats got 81 percent of Hispanic moderates. Fast-forward to 2024; Democrats got only 57 percent of Hispanic moderates, which is really very similar to the 51 percent that Harris got among white moderates.

…[W]hite people only really started to polarize heavily on ideology in the 1990s. Now, nonwhite voters are starting to polarize on ideology the same way that white voters did.

The swings were a little less clear for black Americans overall, but Blue Rose’s polling before Biden dropped out of the race found that blacks were “poised to swing 7 to 8 percentage points against [the Democrats].” Shor added:

As to whether this is inevitable, I would say that to some degree getting 94 percent of any ethnic group is unsustainable. But I think the losses that we’re seeing among nonwhite voters and immigrants is symptomatic of this broader, ideological polarization that Democrats are suffering from.

Another way of interpreting this data: race is becoming less of a determining factor in how Americans vote, whereas ideology has become a greater predictor.

 

 

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Perhaps even more startling for many Democrats, immigrant voters are becoming more Republican-leaning too. In fact, Trump appeared to narrowly carry immigrant voters last year, and Shor argues that, astoundingly, roughly half of the net votes that Trump received in 2024 likely came from immigrants.

 

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Democrats looking for signs of hope out of this might be able to argue that inflation, which was a unique factor in the 2024 election, scrambled things for voters across a host of demographic lines. But it’s not clear that, moving forward, these voters will be immediately open to voting for Democrats, either—not without hard work.

4. Young voters also appear to have swung heavily toward Trump.

Though Democrats have long assumed the support of younger voters, especially since Obama first came onto the national scene, that support now appears to be far less solid. Some of Shor’s data on this front is nothing short of shocking (emphasis below is mine):

[T]he single biggest predictor of swing from 2020 to 2024 is age. Voters under 30 supported Biden by large margins. But Donald Trump probably narrowly won 18- to 29-year-olds. That isn’t what the exit polls say. But if you look at our survey data, voter file data, and precinct-level data, that’s the picture you get.

And if you look at people under the age of 25, every single group—white, nonwhite, male or female—is considerably more conservative than their millennial counterparts. And it even seems that Donald Trump narrowly won nonwhite 18-year-old men, which is not something that has ever happened in Democratic politics before.

He added:

There’s also this enormous amount of gender polarization. If you look at the gender gap—just what fraction of the vote Kamala Harris got versus what fraction of the vote Donald Trump got among men and women—for voters over the age of 30, there was about a 10 percent gender gap between men and women. And that’s, roughly speaking, where it’s been in American politics for most of the last 20 years.

But if you look at voters under the age of 25, the gender gap has doubled in size. And if you look at 18-year-olds specifically, 18-year-old men were 23 percentage points more likely to vote for Donald Trump than 18-year-old women.

 

This graphic, courtesy of Blue Rose, shows that the gender gap between men and women of the millennial generation and older is fairly narrow: roughly 5–10 points. But among Gen Z, it’s ballooned to 20 points or more.

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Shor offers a couple of theories for why America’s youngest voters have shifted toward the Republicans:

Yair Ghitza has an incredible paper that shows that people have formative political years. And you can predict a lot of how conservative someone will be from how popular the incumbent president was when they were teenagers or when they were in their 20s. And so I think that’s definitely true and it’s definitely part of the story. But I think that there’s more to the story than that.

If you look at the millennials, the millennials were more left-wing in a bunch of countries—Canada, the UK, and Europe. I think that there’s a story you can tell: Baby boomers were an incredibly left-wing generation in most places in the world. And millennials were their kids.

But Gen X was really quite a bit more conservative than the Boomers in most countries. And there’s a lot of theories you can make about that—response to the oil shocks, stagflation, neoliberalism. But whatever the reason, Gen X came out more conservative. So I think that part of the story is simply that the current crop of young people had Gen X parents.

We are now far removed from the idea that “demographics are destiny” for the Democrats. There does not appear to be some rising demographic majority, as many left-leaning organizations I’ve worked with in the past believed, of young people, racial minorities, and others who will deliver Democrats sustained electoral success for the foreseeable future. At this point, the party can’t really afford to take any group of voters for granted.

5. Democrats currently face a brutal “issue” landscape.

One way that parties try to win elections is by running on issues they think will mobilize voters to their side. Specifically, they often try to take advantage of issues where voters trust them more than the other party. Unfortunately for Democrats, the number of issues on which voters both currently trust them over Republicans and prioritize those issues in their vote choice is staggeringly small. Their best issue, on which they enjoy a smaller advantage than they have historically, is healthcare. Voters also trust Democrats more than Republicans on climate change/the environment and abortion, but they simply don’t prioritize those issues over others at the ballot box.

Voters’ top issues? Exactly what virtually every pre-election poll foretold: inflation, the cost of living, and the economy more broadly. On all three, Republicans are trusted to a far greater degree. They also have an advantage on several other key issues, including taxes, crime, immigration, and border security.

 

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This runs counter to the arguments of some of Democrats’ more progressive critics, who said that for Democrats to have electoral success, they needed to boost engagement with young, a group they argued cared primarily about the environment, student debt, and the Israel-Hamas war. But as the above chart demonstrates, these issues rarely factor into most voters’ decisions when they cast a ballot (especially student loans). Moreover, pre-election polling showed that all three of these issues were at the bottom of young people’s list of priorities.

For Democrats to make a comeback in the years ahead, they need to eat into Republicans’ advantage on the issues voters care most about. As I’ve written elsewhere, they should have ample opportunities to fight Trump and the Republicans on inflation and the economy.

And indeed, Shor’s data shows that Trump’s popularity has begun waning, and that Democrats should have some opportunities to pick fights with him on several of those aforementioned issues.

Trump’s approval rating has dropped since he took office. His ratings on his handling of the economy, which historically was a strong suit for him, have dropped the most, and his handling of cost of living has also gone down by quite a bit. And Elon Musk has become much more unpopular and is now the most unpopular member of his administration by a good deal. Trump and Elon have really spent the first part of their term diving into the biggest weaknesses of the Republican Party—namely, they’re trying to pass tax cuts for billionaires, they’re cutting essential services and causing chaos for regular people left and right, while trying to slash social safety net programs. It’s Paul Ryan-ism on steroids.

As for specific policies Democrats could fight him on, Shor’s data points to Trump’s tax cuts and tariffs as well as threats from DOGE to entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

 

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6. Democrats must contend with the fact that America is a center-right country.

This is something I have written about extensively elsewhere. Shor explains:

Fundamentally, 40 percent of the country identifies as conservative. Roughly 40 percent is moderate, 20 percent is liberal, though it depends exactly how you ask it. Sometimes it’s 25 percent liberal. But the reality is that, to the extent that Democrats try to polarize the electorate on self-described ideology, this is just something that plays into the hands of Republicans.

This doesn’t, however, mean that only 20 percent of the country supports the liberal view on all issues. In fact:

If you look at moderates—and especially nonwhite moderates—a bunch of them hold very progressive views on a variety of economic and social issues. A very large fraction of Trump voters identify as pro-choice. We’ve seen populist economic messaging do very well in our testing with voters of all kinds.

But Shor offers some key warnings for Democrats, and specifically for their more liberal-leaning voters:

I think that there are also some big cultural divides between highly educated people who live in cities and everybody else. And to the extent that we make the cultural signifiers of these highly educated people the face and the brand of our party, that is going to make everyone else turn against us.

And:

It’s not just that the New York Times readers are more liberal than the overall population—that’s definitely true. It’s that they’re more liberal than they were four years ago—even though the country went the other way.

The country’s center-right tilt has also made it especially difficult for Democrats to have sustained success in the U.S. Senate, the body of Congress that, among other things, is responsible for confirming presidential appointments to the Supreme Court. Even in 2018 and 2020, two great years for Democrats, they struggled to make gains in the upper chamber, and following 2024, they are now under majority status by three seats (or four if you take into account the fact that Republicans have the tie-breaking vote). Worse still, the path toward regaining the majority looks difficult.

Shor outlines what voters seem to want from Democrats moving forward: moderating on the culture war while speaking to people’s economic pain and desire to improve their material conditions. Blue Rose’s polling routinely found that inflation was the top issue, and also showed that voters who were frustrated about the economy were overwhelmingly looking for a “shock to the system.” Given that Harris was seen as the candidate defending the system and Trump was the one rebelling against it, it’s not hard to see how America delivered the outcome it did.

 

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Shor believes Democrats must speak directly to Americans’ economic discontent to have a chance in swing or even red states where they’ll need to be competitive to win back the Senate—and make gains in other downballot offices—anytime soon.

7. Ideology matters—and voters perceived Democrats as too liberal.

Flowing from some points above, this chart is worth highlighting:

 

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Since at least 2016—and likely stemming back to Obama’s campaigns as well—the presidential candidate whom voters perceived to be ideologically closer to the median voter has won every time. Last year, it was Trump.

Many Democrats will surely protest this characterization of Trump, but it’s important to consider that there is a difference between being reactionary and being ideologically conservative. Trump—at least the candidate—eschewed Republican orthodoxy on everything from gay marriage to abortion to entitlement programs, which clearly gave some swing voters an opening to support him. His willingness to use and abuse the levers of government to his own benefit is anathema to principled conservatism.

The takeaway here builds on the above idea that Democrats would likely benefit from moderating on cultural-war issues, especially if they want to be competitive at the national level in a center-right country.

Editor’s note: A version of this piece first appeared in the author’s personal Substack.

 

 

[Fulham Broadway 17,305]

3 hours ago, Fernando said:

Yes that is why I generally don't agree with these tariffs. 

And the market know it as well hence why the big reversal today. 

Like I said before the fear is a recession where many people will suffer....on the plus side it should kill the housing market as nothing was bringing that down, but historically a recession kills the housing market. 

Shares are dropping this morning (25k off my portfolio) and its like we said each country scrabbling to do their own grubby deal with Washington. That will backfire in most cases. If every country united and demanded 50% tariffs off the US it would end. 😜

[Fulham Broadway 17,305]

Meanwhile Israel continues to kill 150-200 every day.

17 230 children have seen both parents shredded, blown up or shot. I wonder if they will seek revenge when they get older......

[Vesper 30,090]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/opinion/democrats-strategy-2024.html

Last year’s election was close, despite President Trump’s hyperbolic claims about his margin of victory. Still, the Democratic Party clearly lost — and not only the presidential race. It also lost control of the Senate and failed to recapture the House of Representatives. Of the 11 governor’s races held last year, Democrats won three. In state legislature races, they won fewer than 45 percent of the seats.

In the aftermath of this comprehensive defeat, many party leaders have decided that they do not need to make significant changes to their policies or their message. They have instead settled on a convenient explanation for their plight.

That explanation starts with the notion that Democrats were merely the unlucky victims of postpandemic inflation and that their party is more popular than it seems: If Democrats could only communicate better, particularly on social media and podcasts, the party would be fine. “We’ve got the right message,” Ken Martin, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said while campaigning for the job. “What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.”

A key part of this argument involves voter turnout. Party leaders claim that most Americans still prefer Democrats but that voter apathy allowed Mr. Trump to win. According to this logic, Democrats do not need to worry about winning back Trump voters and should instead try to animate the country’s natural liberal majority. “I don’t think we’re going to win over those 77 million that voted for Donald Trump,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the party’s 2024 vice-presidential nominee, said this month. “I’m concerned with the 90 million who stayed home.” It was an unfortunate echo of Hillary Clinton saying that millions of Trump voters were “deplorables” and “irredeemable.”

As comforting as these explanations may feel to Democrats, they are a form of denial that will make it harder for the Democratic Party to win future elections.

Even many conservatives and Republicans should be concerned about the Democratic denial. The country needs two healthy political parties. It especially needs a healthy Democratic Party, given Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party and his draconian behavior. Restraining him — and any successors who continue his policies — depends on Democrats’ taking an honest look at their problems.

The part of the Democratic story that contains the most truth is inflation. Prices surged during Covid’s supply-chain disruptions, and incumbent parties around the world have suffered. Whether on the political right or left, ruling parties lost power in the United States, Brazil, Britain, Germany and Italy.

But some incumbent parties managed to win re-election, including in Denmark, France, India, Japan, Mexico and Spain. A healthier Democratic Party could have joined them last year. The Democrats, after all, were running against a Republican whose favorability rating rarely exceeded 45 percent. Most voters did not like Mr. Trump. They did prefer him to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Polls make clear that inflation was not the only reason. Voters also trusted Republicans more than Democrats on immigration, crime, government spending, global trade and foreign policy. Among the few exceptions were abortion and health care. As the headline of a recent Times news article summarized, “Support for Trump’s Policies Exceeds Support for Trump.” Only 27 percent of Americans now have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. It is the party’s lowest approval rating in decades.

The part of that Democratic story that contains the least truth is voter turnout. Nonvoters appear to have favored Mr. Trump by an even wider margin than voters, as Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, has reported. David Shor, the bracingly honest Democratic data scientist, put it well: “We’re now at a point where the more people vote, the better Republicans do.”

The good news for Democrats is that winning over nonvoters and Trump voters is not in conflict. People who do not vote have many of the same concerns as voters who flipped to Mr. Trump. Nonvoters are disproportionately working class, young, Asian, Black, Latino or foreign-born, and each of these groups shifted away from Democrats. When Democrats call for ignoring the country’s 77 million Trump voters, they are writing off a diverse group of Americans, many of whom voted Democratic before.

We recognize that the Democratic Party is in a difficult position. It must compete with a Republican Party that shows an alarming hostility to American democracy. And we urge Democrats to continue speaking out against Mr. Trump’s authoritarian behavior — his bullying of military leaders, judges, law firms, universities and the media; his disdain for Congress; his attempts to chill speech through deportation; his tolerance for incompetent cabinet secretaries who endanger American troops. Whatever polls say about the political wisdom of such criticism, Democratic silence on these issues would only encourage timidity from other parts of society.

It is the rest of the Democratic strategy that requires more rigorous and less wishful reflection. To regain voters’ trust, Democrats should take at least three steps.

First, they should admit that their party mishandled Mr. Biden’s age. Leading Democrats insisted that he had mental acuity for a second term when most Americans believed otherwise. Party leaders even attempted to shout down anybody who raised concerns, before reversing course and pushing Mr. Biden out of the race. Already, many voters believe that Democrats refuse to admit uncomfortable truths on some subjects, including crime, illegal immigration, inflation and Covid lockdowns. Mr. Biden’s age became a glaring example. Acknowledging as much may be backward looking, but it would send an important signal.

Second, Democrats should recognize that the party moved too far left on social issues after Barack Obama left office in 2017. The old video clips of Ms. Harris that the Trump campaign gleefully replayed last year — on decriminalizing the border and government-funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners — highlighted the problem. Yes, she tried to abandon these stances before the election, but she never spoke forthrightly to voters and acknowledged she had changed her position.

Even today, the party remains too focused on personal identity and on Americans’ differences — by race, gender, sexuality and religion — rather than our shared values. On these issues, progressives sometimes adopt a scolding, censorious posture. It is worth emphasizing that this posture has alienated growing numbers of Asian, Black and Latino voters. Democrats who won last year in places where Mr. Trump also won, such as Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, adopted a more moderate tone. They were hawkish about border security and law enforcement, criticizing their own party. They did not make the common Democratic mistake of trying to talk about only economic policy and refusing to engage with Americans’ concerns on difficult social issues.

Third, the party has to offer new ideas. When Democrats emerged from the wilderness in the past, they often did so with fresh ideas. They updated the proud Democratic tradition of improving life for all Americans. Bill Clinton remade the party in the early 1990s and spoke of “putting people first.” In 2008, Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton and John Edwards offered exciting plans to improve health care, reduce inequality and slow climate change. These candidates provided intellectual leadership.

Ms. Harris failed to do so in last year’s campaign, and few Democrats are doing so today. Where is the Democrat with bold plans to cut living costs? Or fight the ills of social media? Or help aimless boys who are struggling in school? Where is the governor who does more than talk about an abundance agenda and actually cuts regulations to help America build? New ideas should come from both the party’s progressives and its centrists. The most successful American politicians, like Mr. Obama and Ronald Reagan, deftly mix boldness and moderation. One benefit of being out of power is that it offers time to develop ideas and see which resonate. It is not a time to say, “We’ve got the right message.”

Even without reforming themselves, Democrats may fare well in elections over the next two years. Opposition parties usually thrive in midterms. The longer-term picture is less sanguine. The next Republican leader may be more disciplined than Mr. Trump. And both the Senate and the Electoral College look challenging for Democrats. Of the seven states whose population has grown the most since 2020, the Democratic Party won none in last year’s presidential election.

Defeat has a long history of inspiring honest reflection in politics. In this time of frustration and anxiety for Democrats, they should give it a try.

[Vesper 30,090]

Trump’s Tariff Fantasy

His projection of a U.S. manufacturing boom behind tariff walls leaves out retaliation by other countries and a trade war.

https://prospect.org/economy/2025-04-02-trumps-tariff-fantasy/

 

President Trump’s Rose Garden speech this afternoon was masterful. Except that the connection between the policies he unveiled and their likely impact was entirely delusional. This is Trump’s political magic. It’s too easy for his supporters to forget that he dwells in a universe of his own invention.

He described in great detail how the U.S. has lost factory jobs, how the trade deficit with the rest of the world has kept increasing, how free trade has not served America. He had a contingent of autoworkers from the UAW cheering him on. And he promised a restoration of American manufacturing pre-eminence.

“This is Liberation Day,” he declared. “This will be remembered as the day American industry was revived.” First, Trump followed through on his threat to impose tariffs of 25 percent on all imported cars. Second, he imposed what he termed reciprocal tariffs, with a different formula for every country. He literally took on the entire world.

The only thing Trump left out is that every one of these nations is planning to retaliate. The result will be an entirely gratuitous trade war, in which the U.S. has no allies.

In theory, if the rest of the world rolled over for these massive U.S. tariffs, that might produce a domestic manufacturing boom. But there will be retaliatory tariffs against American exports, and consumers everywhere will end up paying higher prices, creating a needless recession.

Trump brought out Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to hold a large chart, as a kind of human prop. The chart showed the reciprocal tariffs country by country. The tariffs are based on a rough calculation of tariffs and non-tariff barriers, which just happens to come out at about half in nearly all cases. Trump termed this “a discounted reciprocal tariff” because, he said, “the U.S. is kind.”

For example, on China, where the combination of tariffs and non-tariff barriers is calculated at the equivalent of 67 percent, the U.S. levies a reciprocal tariff of 34 percent. In the EU, where actual tariffs are only slightly higher than ours, the total tariff equivalent is supposedly 39 percent so the reciprocal tariff is 20 percent. And so on, country by country. India will be socked with tariffs of 26 percent; Taiwan, 32 percent, etc. The lowest tariffs, for countries with few barriers, such as the U.K. and Brazil, will be 10 percent.

In theory, if we start with higher tariffs, reciprocal reductions and the dismantling of non-tariff barriers could be negotiated, to bring tariff levels back down everywhere. This was the painstaking multilateral process during the era of GATT. Trump is proposing to do it, bilaterally, country by country.

But that give-and-take involves intricate bargaining about complex details, a process that takes years, while Trump’s depressive medicine takes effect at midnight tonight. And Trump has other fish to fry with many of these countries, which further complicates the process of trade deal-making.

Trump went so far out on a limb in making these tariffs the signature achievement of his presidency that it is hard to imagine him selectively relenting, as he has done on past ad hoc tariff threats. Trump’s speech included the usual whoppers and invented pieces of history. My personal favorite was his contention that the Great Depression occurred because the U.S. let tariff levels get too low.

The man lives in his own fantasy world, but reality will soon intrude. As a harbinger of things to come, stock futures collapsed on Trump’s announcement.

[Fernando 6,585]

1 hour ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Shares are dropping this morning (25k off my portfolio) and its like we said each country scrabbling to do their own grubby deal with Washington. That will backfire in most cases. If every country united and demanded 50% tariffs off the US it would end. 😜

Republicans back Trump for the conservative approach but many will turn on him when he tanks the economy. 

He could get shot again. I will not be surprised if it's a Republican that does it. 

Lunacy from Trump with all these tariffs. 

[Fulham Broadway 17,305]

Just now, Fernando said:

Republicans back Trump for the conservative approach but many will turn on him when he tanks the economy. 

He could get shot again. I will not be surprised if it's a Republican that does it. 

Lunacy from Trump with all these tariffs. 

Think you are right. Republicans will not like it.

Though it seems the Trump administration had thought of that...Howard Lutnick, the US Commerce Secretary and former CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, has been instrumental in shaping Donald Trump’s tariff strategy.  He will be the fall guy.... but it also will tarnish Trump in the longer term

[Vesper 30,090]

Royal Mail takeover deal by Czech billionaire to be finalised this month

Daniel Křetínský clears final regulatory hurdles for £3.6bn takeover of Royal Mail parent company

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/03/royal-mail-takeover-deal-czech-billionaire-finalised-daniel-kretinsky

The £3.6bn takeover of Royal Mail’s parent company will be completed this month, nearly a year after it was first agreed, as the Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský cleared the final regulatory hurdles standing in the way.

International Distribution Services (IDS), the owner of the 508-year-old Royal Mail, said on Thursday the deal “may become or be declared unconditional” by 30 April, after a delay due to issues in Romania.

The most pressing issue, UK government approval, was clinched in December after a state review of national security laws.

However, Křetínský’s company had warned in March that the deal might not be finalised until the second quarter of this year due to regulatory issues relating to foreign direct investment in Romania.

But in a triumph for the billionaire known as the “Czech sphinx”, Křetínský’s EP Group confirmed on Thursday that “all of the regulatory and anti-trust conditions in relation to the offer were satisfied”.

The deal will mean Royal Mail will be controlled by an overseas owner for the first time in its history, which can be traced as far back as 1516 under Henry VIII.

The takeover comes with a number of conditions from the UK government, including that it will retain a “golden share” in IDS, which means any changes to Royal Mail’s ownership, tax residency or headquarters will need its approval. The UK owns golden shares in companies that are regarded as crucial to its security, including the weapons manufacturers BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce.

The takeover had been called in for a review in August on national security grounds, because Royal Mail’s letter delivery still plays a crucial – albeit diminishing – role in the country’s communications infrastructure.

The Royal Mail brand will also be protected for as long as EP owns the company.

EP Group has also agreed to retain the universal service obligation, which guarantees a first-class postal service to anywhere in the UK for a fixed price six days a week, while Křetínský is in control. IDS has suggested second-class post could be reduced to every other weekday.

The government has blocked Royal Mail from making dividend payouts, or other similar payments to its owners, unless the company meets financial targets and has improved its postal delivery performance.

Dividends and asset sales will also be blocked if they put the universal service at risk.

Royal Mail is the latest British asset to be snapped up by Křetínský, who already owns 27% of West Ham United football club and 10% of the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain. He also holds stakes in several retailers including the US department store Macy’s, the trainer retailer Foot Locker, and the German retailer turned wholesaler Metro.

Meanwhile, Křetínský’s EP Group, Royal Mail’s new owner, primarily runs coal, gas and power generation operations.

[Fulham Broadway 17,305]

Seems backlash is starting....While Trump celebrated his so-called "Liberation Day” at the White House this week, the real victory happened hundreds of miles away in Wisconsin.

Voters defied Elon Musk’s $20 million influx of cash, rejected deceptive campaign tactics, and elected Judge Susan Crawford. The state seems to have turned on Trump, swinging to the left across the board.

[Vesper 30,090]

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/will-careless-stupidity-kill-the

America created the modern world trading system. The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by FDR in 1934. The growth in international trade under that system had some negative aspects but was on balance very good for America and the world. It was, in fact, one of our greatest policy achievements.

Yesterday Donald Trump burned it all down. Here’s what just happened to the average U.S. tariff rate:

The tariffs Trump announced were higher than almost anyone expected. This is a much bigger shock to the economy than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, especially when you bear in mind that international trade is about three times as important now as it was then.

The size of the tariffs, however, wasn’t the only shocking thing about the Rose Garden announcement. Arguably what we learned about how the Trump team arrived at those tariff rates — the sheer malignant stupidity of the whole thing — was even worse.

You might be tempted to dismiss complaints about the policy process as elitist snobbery. But credibility is a crucial part of policymaking. Businesses can’t plan if they have no idea what to expect next. Foreign governments won’t make policies that help America if they don’t expect us to respond rationally.

So what do we know about how the Trumpists arrived at their tariff plan? Trump claimed that the tariff rates imposed on different countries reflected their policies, but James Surowiecki soon noted that the tariffs applied to each country appeared to be derived from a crude formula based on the U.S. trade deficit with that country. Trump officials denied this, while at the same time the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a note confirming Surowiecki’s guess. Here’s their explanation:

 

Ignore the Greek letters, which cancel each other out. This says that the assumed level of a country’s protectionism is equal to its trade surplus with America divided by its exports to America.

Trump also set minimum tariffs of 10 percent on everyone, which means among other things imposing tariffs on uninhabited islands.

There’s so much wrong with this approach that it’s hard to know where to start. But one easy thing to point out is that the Trump calculation only considers trade in goods, while ignoring trade in services. This is a big omission. Notably, the European Union runs a substantial surplus with us if you only look at trade in goods — but this is largely offset by an EU deficit in services trade:

So if Trump’s people had plugged all trade with the EU, not just trade in physical goods, into their formula they would have concluded that Europe is hardly protectionist at all.

Where is this stuff coming from? One of these days we’ll probably get the full story, but it looks to me like something thrown together by a junior staffer with only a couple of hours’ notice. That USTR note, in particular, reads like something written by a student who hasn’t done the reading and is trying to bullshit their way through an exam.

But it may be even worse than that. The Trump formula is apparently what you get if you ask ChatGPT and other AI models to make tariff policy:

In my post immediately following the Trump announcement I speculated that Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids might be responsible for those tariff numbers. That now looks like a distinct possibility.

Who makes policy this way? The key point is that Trump isn’t really trying to accomplish economic goals. This should all be seen as a dominance display, intended to shock and awe people and make them grovel, rather than policy in the normal sense.

Again, I’m not being snobbish here. When the fate of the world economy is on the line, the malignant stupidity of the policy process is arguably as important as the policies themselves. How can anyone, whether they’re businesspeople or foreign governments, trust anything coming out of an administration that behaves like this?

Next thing you’ll be telling me that Trump’s people are planning military actions over insecure channels and accidentally sharing those plans with journalists. Oh, wait.

I’d like to imagine that Trump will admit that he messed up, cancel the whole thing, and start over. But he won’t, because that would spoil the dominance display. Ignorant irresponsibility is part of the message.

MUSICAL CODA

 

 

[Fulham Broadway 17,305]

Must be a lot of voters regret now

[Fernando 6,585]

3 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Must be a lot of voters regret now

Probably. 

But I wish I could ask him a question. What is the plan for housing?

Why no one ask this? Trump is a mogul in real estate, surely he must have some plan. 

Unless his plan is to take us to recession so housing becomes cheap? 

[Fulham Broadway 17,305]

8 minutes ago, Fernando said:

Probably. 

But I wish I could ask him a question. What is the plan for housing?

Why no one ask this? Trump is a mogul in real estate, surely he must have some plan. 

Unless his plan is to take us to recession so housing becomes cheap? 

It will be more privatization, imo, - high end of the market is all theyre interested in. They dont give a flying fuck about 'ordinary struggling people' trying to start out on the housing ladder. Theyve already privatised Fanny mae and Freddie Mac who were federal and reponsiblefor 3/4 of sll mortgages. So basiclally houses will become more expensive

[Fernando 6,585]

10 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

It will be more privatization, imo, - high end of the market is all theyre interested in. They dont give a flying fuck about 'ordinary struggling people' trying to start out on the housing ladder. Theyve already privatised Fanny mae and Freddie Mac who were federal and reponsiblefor 3/4 of sll mortgages. So basiclally houses will become more expensive

Interesting I saw this old video from Trump. In it he discussed how many countries are ripping us of like Japan. 

It seems like he always wanted to have some kind of plan like all these tariffs. Insane.