'IT'S NOT GOING TO PLAY OUT WELL': Karl Rove Discusses TX Democrats Fleeing to Illinois
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Yahoo
24 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Whitmer told Trump in private that Michigan auto jobs depend on a tariff change of course
WASHINGTON (AP) — Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer met privately in the Oval Office with President Donald Trump to make a case he did not want to hear: the automotive industry he said he wants to save were being hurt by his tariffs. The Democrat came with a slide deck to make her points in a visual presentation. Just getting the meeting last Tuesday with the Republican president was an achievement for someone viewed as a contender for her party's White House nomination in 2028. Whitmer's strategy for dealing with Trump highlights the conundrum for her and other Democratic leaders as they try to protect the interests of their states while voicing their opposition to his agenda. It's a dynamic that Whitmer has navigated much differently from many other Democratic governors. The fact that Whitmer had 'an opening to make direct appeals' in private to Trump was unique in this political moment, said Matt Grossman, a Michigan State University politics professor. It was her third meeting with Trump at the White House since he took office in January. This one, however, was far less public than the time in April when Whitmer was unwittingly part of an impromptu news conference that embarrassed her so much she covered her face with a folder. On Tuesday, she told the president that the economic damage from the tariffs could be severe in Michigan, a state that helped deliver him the White House in 2024. Whitmer also brought up federal support for recovery efforts after an ice storm and sought to delay changes to Medicaid. Trump offered no specific commitments, according to people familiar with the private conversation who were not authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke only on condition of anonymity to describe it. Whitmer is hardly the only one sounding the warning of the potentially damaging consequences, including factory job losses, lower profits and coming price increases, of the import taxes that Trump has said will be the economic salvation for American manufacturing. White House spokesman Kush Desai that no other president 'has taken a greater interest in restoring American auto industry dominance than President Trump." Trade frameworks negotiated by the administration would open up the Japanese, Korean and European markets for vehicles made on assembly lines in Michigan, Desai said. But the outreach Trump has preferred tends to be splashy presentations by tech CEOs. In the Oval Office on Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave the president a customized glass plaque with a gold base as Cook promised $600 billion in investments. Trump claims to have brought in $17 trillion in investment commitments, although none of those numbers has surfaced yet in economic data. Under his series of executive orders and trade frameworks, U.S. automakers face import taxes of 50% on steel and aluminum, 30% on parts from China and a top rate of 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico not covered under an existing 2020 trade agreement. That puts America's automakers and parts suppliers at a disadvantage against German, Japanese and South Korean vehicles that only face a 15% import tax negotiated by Trump last month. On top of that, Trump this past week threatened a 100% tariff on computer chips, which are an integral part of cars and trucks, though he would exclude companies that produce chips domestically from the tax. Whitmer's two earlier meetings with Trump resulted in gains for Michigan. But the tariffs represent a significantly broader request of a president who has imposed them even more aggressively in the face of criticism. Materials in the presentation brought Whitmer to the meeting and obtained by The Associated Press noted how trade with Canada and Mexico has driven $23.2 billion in investment to Michigan since 2020. General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis operate 50 factories across the state, while more than 4,000 facilities support the auto parts supply chain. Altogether, the sector supports nearly 600,000 manufacturing jobs, forming the backbone of Michigan's economy. Whitmer outlined the main points of the materials to Trump and left copies with his team. To Grossman, the Michigan State professor, a key question is whether voters who expected to be helped by tariffs would react if Trump's import taxes failed to deliver the promised economic growth. 'Everyone's aware that Michigan is a critical swing state and the auto industry has outsized influence, not just directly, but symbolically,' Grossman said. AP VoteCast found that Trump won Michigan in 2024 largely because two-thirds of its voters described the economic conditions as being poor or 'not so good.' Roughly 70% of the voters in the state who felt negatively about the economy backed the Republican. The state was essentially split over whether tariffs were a positive, with Trump getting 76% of those voters who viewed them favorably. The heads of General Motors, Ford and Stellantis have repeatedly warned the administration that the tariffs would cut company profits and undermine their global competitiveness. Their efforts have resulted in little more than a temporary, monthlong pause intended to give companies time to adjust. The reprieve did little to blunt the financial fallout. In the second quarter alone, Ford reported $800 million in tariff-related costs, while GM said the import taxes cost it $1.1 billion. Those expenses could make it harder to reinvest in new domestic factories, a goal Trump has championed. 'We expect tariffs to be a net headwind of about $2 billion this year, and we'll continue to monitor the developments closely and engage with policymakers to ensure U.S. autoworkers and customers are not disadvantaged by policy change,' Ford CEO Jim Farley said on his company's earning call. Since Trump returned to the White House, Michigan has lost 7,500 manufacturing jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Smaller suppliers have felt the strain, too. Detroit Axle, a family-run auto parts distributor, has been one of the more vocal companies in Michigan about the impact of the tariffs. The company initially announced it might have to shut down a warehouse and lay off more than 100 workers, but later said it would be able to keep the facility open, at least for now. 'Right now it's a market of who is able to survive, it's not a matter of who can thrive,' said Mike Musheinesh, owner of Detroit Axle. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
24 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump's Firing Of The BLS Commissioner Is An Ongoing Trainwreck And Embarrassment
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump on Thursday had a special guest in the Oval Office on Thursday: the right-wing economist Stephen Moore, who came bearing charts purportedly depicting bogus job numbers during Joe Biden's presidency. It was the latest White House effort to justify Trump's firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over a bad jobs report last Friday. But it very quickly unraveled. 'I was telling the president that he did the right thing in calling for a new head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because this shows that over the last two years of the Biden administration, the BLS overestimated job creation by 1.5 million jobs,' Moore said. Moore's chart showed angry red bars representing downward revisions to job numbers under Biden. In the lower-left corner, it indicated the source: the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In other words, Moore was using BLS numbers as an argument against the BLS, which doesn't make a lot of sense, especially considering it was a downward revision to numbers from May and June that led Trump to fire BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer for her supposed political manipulation and incompetence. How could downward revisions released during Biden's presidency have been part of a plot to hurt Trump? And if this year's revisions are suspect, why should we trust revisions from prior years, the most substantial of which were produced under McEntarfer's leadership? 'The White House is trying to bend reality to fit President Trump's preferences for economic data. Any economic data that is positive is true and the same report is fake when it produces results he doesn't like,' Jessica Reidl, an economist with the conservative Manhattan Institute, told HuffPost. 'There's no rhyme or reason.' The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Moore's use of one set of BLS numbers to discredit another. Trump's outburst over a bad jobs report is the second-term equivalent of his furious insistence in 2017 that more than a million people attended his inauguration: It's lying about numbers in an obvious way, but with a much more authoritarian outcome. Economists in academia and the private sector of all political persuasions have praised McEntarfer and the work of the BLS in general. They've patiently explained that the monthly jobs numbers are assembled by hundreds of professionals, from a survey of more than 100,000 businesses, and that the initial estimates are always revised in subsequent months as more survey responses come in. Cooking the books would require an elaborate conspiracy among career economists who've done their jobs the same way under Republican and Democratic presidents for decades. 'The process of obtaining the numbers is decentralized by design to avoid opportunities for interference. The BLS uses the same proven, transparent, reliable process to produce estimates every month. Every month, BLS revises the prior two months' employment estimates to reflect slower-arriving, more-accurate information,' a group of statisticians — including two former BLS commissioners, one of which was a Trump appointee in his first term — said in a joint statement. 'This rationale for firing Dr. McEntarfer is without merit and undermines the credibility of federal economic statistics that are a cornerstone of intelligent economic decision-making by businesses, families, and policymakers,' the group said. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett has been the face of the White House's after-the-fact strategy to trash McEntarfer's work. Pressed for evidence of manipulation on NBC's 'Meet the Press' Sunday, he said there has been a pattern of increasingly large revisions, possibly due to fewer businesses responding to surveys since the coronavirus pandemic. Expressed as a percentage of the change in overall employment level, however, the revisions have gotten smaller over the years, not larger, according to an analysis by the head of the Yale Budget Lab. It's good to remember that the monthly jobs numbers derive from surveys designed to estimate changes in thousands to an overall number of more than 150 million. Even the largest revisions reflect an adjustment of less than 1%. NBC's Kristen Welker pressed Hassett on whether there was evidence the most recent revisions were somehow wrong. 'If you look at the number itself, it is the evidence,' Hassett said. (Really!) Asked for evidence about the alleged pattern of statistical malfeasance in another interview this week on Fox News, Hassett pointed to a 'surprisingly positive' gross domestic product report right before the 2012 presidential election, when he was working as an advisor to the Mitt Romney campaign. 'I had previously briefed Mitt Romney's campaign that I thought they were probably going to have a number that looked like a recession, and then in fact they got a really big beautiful number right before the election,' Hassett said. Funny thing: GDP numbers are produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, an agency in the Commerce Department, not the BLS, an agency in the Labor Department. So Hassett is not helping his case against the BLS by complaining about an entirely different agency. And, as a former associate director of the BEA noted in response to Hassett's claim, the advance estimate for third-quarter GDP in October 2012 came in at 2%, which only modestly beat expectations. The number was later revised up to 3.1%. Reidl, the Manhattan Institute economist, also served as an economic advisor to the 2012 Romney campaign. Without commenting on Hassett specifically, she lamented the discourse. 'It has been disappointing to see policy experts that I've known for a long time and respected say things that they have to know are misrepresentations,' Reidl said. Given the decentralized data collection that goes into the monthly employment situation reports, it's not clear how installing a lackey on top of BLS could immediately affect the data. But there are other levers Trump can pull if he's not happy with his economic feedback. He has mused about firing Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, for instance, over his refusal to slash interest rates, and a stooge at the central bank could wield immense power over the global economy. 'I find it scary how routine it has become when the White House does this many unwise things every week. Each one of them gets forgotten about by the end of the week. But I fear that each one of these is a prelude to something bigger and worse,' Reidl said.
Fox News
27 minutes ago
- Fox News
Sanctuary city leaders defy ICE detainers, face backlash from DHS
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin joins 'Fox & Friends' to discuss how sanctuary city leaders are refusing to honor ICE detainers.
