Category: 2025

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – April 4, 2025

The stock market rout continued today. As expected, China announced retaliatory tariffs in response to those President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday. Chinese leaders say they will impose a 34% tariff on all U.S. goods imported into China next Thursday. Apparently, Trump did not think China would respond to his tariffs, and tried to sound as if he was still in control of the situation.

Trump is spending a long weekend in Florida, where he is attending the LIV golf tournament at his Doral club. But at 8:25 this morning, he reposted on his social media channel a video in which the narrator claimed that Trump is crashing the markets on purpose. The video claimed that legendary investor Warren Buffet “just said Trump is making the best economic moves he’s seen in over fifty years.” It went on to explain how “the secret game he’s playing” “could make you rich.” Buffett’s conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway quickly denied Buffett had said any such thing as the video claimed. “All such reports are false,” it said. In March, Buffett called tariffs “an act of war, to some degree.”
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Atlantic: The Conspiracy Theorist Advising Trump

April 3, 2025 – The chaos inside the White House national-security team persists.

For a few months, the Donald Trump White House managed, at least in public, to keep some of the right’s fringiest figures at bay. Until yesterday.

The far-right celebrity Laura Loomer was at the White House on Wednesday. … Trump clearly likes the 31-year-old provocateur, and in Trumpworld, there’s apparently very little anyone can do once the boss takes a shine to someone.

And so Loomer reportedly walked into the Oval Office yesterday with a list of people who should be removed from the National Security Council because of their disloyalty to Trump and the MAGA cause. …

The next day, at least six staff members, including three senior officials, were fired.
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Daily: Complete And Total Incompetence As Trump Slaps Tariffs On Penguins

The Trump White House announced tariffs on the Heard and McDonald Islands. The problem is that no people live there.

Trump’s big “Liberation Day” tariffs event was a disaster. Instead of getting the country excited, Trump revealed that he has come up with an entire delusional fantasy world about tariffs that rewrites American history.

No one is sure how Trump’s White House came up with their list of reciprocal tariffs, but on the final page is the Australian territory of the Heard and McDonald Islands.

The White House Rapid Response X account posted the list of nations that will be getting hit with tariffs, and on the last page are the Herald and McDonald Islands.
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The human population of the islands is zero.

Penguins inhabit the islands.

Donald Trump held a big event in the Rose Garden to slap tariffs on a bunch of Antarctic penguins.
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Bulwark: ‘People Will Die’—RFK Jr. Guts America’s Health Bureaucracy

Stunned experts fear major damage to U.S. health, science, and expertise.

On Tuesday morning, the Department of Health and Human Services informed thousands of employees they were losing their jobs. The notices came by email and, in one sense, they were not a surprise. Last Thursday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the layoffs were imminent, as part of a broader restructuring designed to shrink the department’s total workforce by 25 percent.

But it’s one thing to know those layoffs are coming, quite another to learn about the real people who will no longer have jobs, the real positions that will no longer exist, and the real divisions that will no longer operate as they did before.

The sheer breadth of the cuts is staggering: The layoffs affected agencies that exist to fight deadly pathogens, to protect the nation’s drug supply, to finance and carry out cutting-edge research—along with countless other divisions and offices that touch everything from rural health to early childhood care.
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Steven Beschloss: Trump Broke What Wasn’t Broken

Canada’s Prime Minister says the “old relationship” with America “is over” and “the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner.” The road to repair will be long.

No one voted for Donald Trump to destroy America’s relationship with our good neighbor and top trading partner, Canada, but here we are. The words last week of Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, make clear that the road to repair will only reopen once Trump no longer occupies our White House.

“The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,” Carney said, following a meeting with his cabinet to discuss Canada’s response to Trump’s tariff threats. “It’s clear the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner. It is possible that with comprehensive negotiations, we could reestablish an element of confidence but there will be no going backwards.”

This comes in the wake of not only 25 percent tariffs affecting key industries and goods, but also Trump’s idiotic insistence that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state.
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NPR: Trump executive order seeks to ‘restore’ American history through Smithsonian overhaul

President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday directing Vice President Vance to eliminate “divisive race-centered ideology” from Smithsonian museums, educational and research centers, and the National Zoo.
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Performer and cultural strategist, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, former head of Social Impact at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, said the wording of the executive order is ill-informed.

“ To say the Smithsonian Institution has an anti-American agenda is to reveal a complete misunderstanding of what America’s supposed to be,” Joseph said.

Joseph and six other members of his team were laid off earlier this week as part of the Trump administration’s overhaul of the cultural center.
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Stéphane Dalbera: Grace Hopper a.k.a. The Final Boss of Technological Fix Fantasy

The creation of the legendary Rear Admiral Grace Hopper’s COBOL shattered many technological solutionist dreams built on the “just do it” mentality, as it came to be seen as a relic of a bygone era.

It’s undoubtedly the final boss of numerous illusions, with fortunes poured into efforts to defeat it worldwide, yet yielding dismal results.

And now, the inimitable Musk takes center stage, embarking on the audacious mission of migrating one of the U.S. government’s most complex applications in a matter of months.

In the hierarchy of delusional fantasies, this is likely only a notch below the idea of nuking Mars for terraforming.
[Rear Admiral Grace Hopper has largely been “DEI’d” from defense.gov, but there are still a few remaining pages for her.]
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – March 28, 2025

“Another wipeout walloped Wall Street Friday,” Stan Choe of the Associated Press wrote today. The S&P 500 had one of its worst days in two years, dropping 2%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 715 points, losing 1.7% of its value. The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.7%. On Tuesday, news dropped that the administration’s blanket firings and wildly shifting tariff policies have dropped consumer confidence to a low it has not hit since January 2021. Today’s stock market tumble started after the Commerce Department released data showing that consumer prices are rising faster than economists expected.

AIG chief international economist James Knightley said: “We are moving in the wrong direction and the concern is that tariffs threaten higher prices, which means the inflation prints are going to remain hot.” Business leaders like lower interest rates, which reduce borrowing costs and make it cheaper to finance business initiatives, but with rising inflation, the Federal Reserve will be less likely to cut interest rates.
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Tim Kaine: Why I’m forcing a vote on Trump’s Canada tariffs

Trump has created a fake “emergency” to impose tariffs whose cost will be borne by American families.
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President Donald Trump is abusing emergency powers to impose tariffs on Canada that will raise prices for American families and alienate one of our closest allies — so I’m forcing a vote to challenge him.
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The emergency powers Trump is invoking — based on provisions of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act — are intended for use in legitimate emergencies related to foreign threats and adversaries. This law is typically used to place sanctions on bad actors like cartels and dictators, but Trump’s rationale for an “emergency” that justifies billions in taxes on American consumers doesn’t make sense in Canada’s case. He has made spurious claims of a fentanyl crisis at the northern border on par with the drug situation at the southern border, but his numbers don’t add up.
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Fortunately, the National Emergencies Act of 1976 included a provision allowing any senator to force a vote to block emergency powers being abused by the president. I will be pulling that procedural lever to challenge Trump’s Canada tariffs early next week.

I am leading this effort alongside Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) and Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia), and I am glad to be joined by our co-sponsors, Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), Angus King (I-Maine), Chris Coons (D-Delaware) and Rand Paul (R-Kentucky). All 100 members of the chamber — including the 52 other Republicans — will have to make a public choice about whether to side with American families, businesses and farmers or with Trump.
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Thom Hartmann: She Stepped Onto a Sidewalk in Boston — and Vanished Into Trump’s Shadow State

Masked ICE agents are now snatching dissidents off the streets like a scene from Stalin’s Russia. This isn’t speculative fiction. It’s happening right now, in America…

This is how it begins.

Tuesday night, Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk was going out to a restaurant to meet friends when masked federal ICE agents dressed in street clothes seized her off a public sidewalk and disappeared her. Her apparent crime was co-authoring an op-ed critical of Trump and Netanyahu.

Where is she now? At first, nobody knew. As her attorney told The New York Times:

“We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her.”

Then it was revealed last night — as the video of her kidnapping went viral — that she’s been transported to a violent ICE facility in Louisiana. Yeah, that place. Without any legal due process that anybody can identify.
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