Trump the central planner
President Trump may paint China as the enemy, but lately he's been awfully fond of their command-economy playbook.
Why it matters: Trump's extraordinary interventions — which dovetail with what some critics have labeled " MAGA Maoism" — are rattling businesses, consumers and investors, and throwing global markets into turmoil.
The big picture: Trump has already stretched the power of the presidency to remake the government in his image. Now he's trying to do the same with Corporate America.
Trump spooked markets on Friday by threatening Apple with huge financial risk if it doesn't move iPhone manufacturing to the U.S. — later expanding his threat to Samsung and other phone makers.
He has demanded Walmart absorb the cost of his tariffs to avert price hikes for consumers, warning on Truth Social: "I'll be watching."
He's ignored a law that was supposed to ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese parent company did not divest, embracing the app after it proved useful to his 2024 campaign.
He's even told parents to buy fewer cheap toys from China amid the threat of supply chain shortages, saying that "maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls."
Reality check: Politicians routinely use their bully pulpit or pull policy levers to control prices of critical goods.
The difference is that Trump was the one who directly set the price hikes in motion by raising tariffs.
Between the lines: Trump has not been shy about using his presidential authority to control the economy.
In an interview with Time magazine, Trump compared the U.S. market to "the biggest department store in history" and said he would determine the price of entry with tariffs.
"[O]n behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I'll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay."
Yes, but: The White House says the administration is making an effort to help the free market lower prices, as distinct from traditional notions of "price controls."
"Our full suite of supply-side reforms — rapid deregulation, domestic energy production, and tax cuts — along with our America First trade policies have now delivered multiple below-expectation inflation reports, robust jobs reports, trillions in historic investment commitments, and a UK trade agreement that opened up billions of dollars in export opportunities for American producers, with many more custom-tailored trade deals to come," White House spokesman Kush Desai said this week.
Flashback: There's plenty of history of presidents and other top government officials jawboning the market.
Biden urged grocery stories to lower prices and took credit when Target did, albeit in limited fashion.
That was nothing compared to Nixon, who in 1971 froze prices and wages for 90 days to push inflation down. It was "economically ineffective and politically disastrous," Politico wrote last year.
The intrigue: Since Nixon's failed experiment, price controls and other command-like economic moves have been kryptonite to conservatives.
Now the tides have shifted.
Trump and his supporters have argued that Americans should act in the national interest at their own personal and corporate cost.
And if not? Watch out for a not-so-veiled threat on Truth Social, which risks quickly turning into something bigger (as China itself can attest).
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
14 minutes ago
- Yahoo
‘No Kings Day' Exposed: Activist Powerhouses Mobilize Across America
Left-wing agitators have been planning events scheduled for this weekend to promote hate against President Donald Trump with 'No Kings Day,' following violent anti-ICE riots across America. The 'No Kings Day' mobilizations are set for June 14 across the country, as The Dallas Express previously reported. Several of these events are occurring across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and are organized by powerful national groups. The group 50501 is a leading force behind these mobilizations – the latest in a series against Trump, with 'Hands Off' and 'May Day' events earlier this year. As The Dallas Express reported, 50501 previously organized demonstrations across the DFW area. Other groups like Indivisible – an influential left-wing network – are also organizing the demonstrations. Indivisible is known for working with groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, whose 'paramilitary wing' is Antifa. According to The Federalist, Indivisible boosted previous protests like 'Hands Off' with things like 'infrastructure to get the campaign off the ground.' A spokesman for 'No Kings Day' told The Dallas Express that 50501 started anti-Trump events earlier this year, and other groups like Indivisible joined. Last month, Indivisible announced that it and other left-wing groups are helping organize the upcoming events. The 'No Kings' spokesman said he could not limit the 'goal to a singular purpose' because the demonstrations are coming from 'different local organizations in each city.' He said national groups like Indivisible, the American Federation of Teachers, SEIU, and other unions are planning the mobilizations. 'No Kings Day' partners also include the ACLU, Bernie Sanders and his group Our Revolution, Move On of the Tesla Takedown demonstrations, and the anti-Trump protest group Families Over Billionaires – which is supported by a billionaire-funded dark money network. 'People are tired of not feeling like they're being heard in Washington D.C., people are tired of feeling like Congress has abdicated its responsibility to be a check and a balance on the executive branch,' the 'No Kings' spokesman said. The upcoming events fall in the wake of violent anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles and Dallas, as The Dallas Express reported. Gov. Greg Abbott deployed the National Guard across Texas this week to keep order. The Dallas Express asked if organizers expect the 'No Kings' events to 'merge with anti-ICE actors,' and the spokesman said he could not speak to it from a 'global perspective.' 'These are grassroots organizations that people want to amplify their voices by partnering up with other organizations,' the spokesman said. 'I don't think anybody's going to say, 'Don't do that.'' The 'No Kings' spokesman said organizers are working with police and training 'marshals' to keep the mobilizations peaceful. He blamed the violence on 'one-sided escalation.' 'I think at their very nature, they're nonviolent, they're peaceful. But then when you do things like calling the National Guard, it amplifies tensions,' he said. The riots in Los Angeles featured burning vehicles, a siege against the ICE building, and attacks against state and federal police, as The Dallas Express previously reported. The Dallas Express asked the spokesman's thoughts on the riots in Los Angeles 'before the National Guard was there,' where rioters started 'throwing rocks at immigration agents and surrounding the federal building.' 'It's very strange to portray single actors throwing rocks as an entire movement if you're not doing the same thing for masked ICE agents kidnapping people in schools, in hospitals, on the streets,' the spokesman replied. The FBI is currently investigating those with 'monetary connections responsible for the riots,' as The Dallas Express previously reported. Tech tycoon Neville Singham – a Marxist sympathizer who moved to Shanghai – uses 'a global web of nonprofits and shell entities' to push Chinese Communist Party propaganda worldwide. Singham supports the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a communist group that helped organize the Los Angeles riots with a 'history of anti-Israel activism,' as The Dallas Express also reported. The group CHIRLA – Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles – helped organize inflammatory rallies in the city, The Dallas Express reported at the time. Singham's wife, Jodie Evans, is the founder of the left-wing activist group Code Pink, which published an anti-ICE toolkit to resist immigration enforcement. The group advocates for Chinese interests, claiming, 'China is not our enemy.' The anti-Trump 'No Kings Day' events are set to take place in Dallas and Fort Worth, as well as the suburbs Arlington, Burleson, Denton, Euless, Flower Mound, Frisco, McKinney, and Sanger. Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker previously told The Dallas Express she has 'full faith' in police to keep Saturday's demonstrations under control. Both the Fort Worth Police Department and the Dallas Police Department are monitoring the events. The Dallas Express reached out to Indivisible and 50501 but did not hear back in time for publication.
Yahoo
14 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Lawrence O'Donnell Mocks Trump for Backtracking Promise to Deport 15 Million: ‘Slowest and Stupidest President in History'
Lawrence O'Donnell celebrated President Donald Trump walking back his campaign promise to deport 15 million illegal immigrants from the United States. 'The central lie of Donald Trump's deportation campaign promise came apart today,' O'Donnell announced. He pointed to a post Trump made on Truth Social Thursday morning, in which the president noted the concerns of farmers and hotel corporations throughout the country who want to keep their hard-working immigrant employees and wrote, 'We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA.' 'Donald Trump promised to deport every one of those people working on farms. Every one of them. He promised to deport all of them, and then he decided not to deport them today,' the 'Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell' host explained on Thursday night's episode. 'He's not going to deport 15 million people. He's not going to deport a million people. It's over. The mass deportation lie that he never could have done anyway is over. Donald Trump formally, publicly gave up today.' You can watch the full 'Last Word' segment yourself in the video below. In response to a clip of Trump saying that America cannot take away farmers' most hard-working employees, O'Donnell said, 'He was doing it to the farmers!' The MSNBC anchor continued, 'What everyone has been saying for years and years and years in defense of those people who Donald Trump was calling murderers and rapists, everything we've been saying, I guess, has finally sunk in with Donald Trump, the slowest and stupidest president in history.' 'Maybe they don't have what they're supposed to have in legal documentation to be here,' O'Donnell said of the immigrants Trump has been targeting since he retook office in January. 'Donald Trump doesn't care about any of that anymore. The stupidest man in the room finally realizes the Democrats are completely right about this, and always have been.' Unfortunately, O'Donnell noted that Trump's immigration surrender was overshadowed Thursday by California Senator Alex Padilla's forced removal from a press conference with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. 'What Donald Trump said today is not going to make one person in this country feel safer tomorrow,' O'Donnell lamented. 'They won't feel safer because they've all seen what happened to a United States senator today.' 'We are all Alex Padilla tonight,' O'Donnell concluded. 'Any one of us could be the next one on the floor in handcuffs, in the ragingly thuggish, unconstitutional government now run by the stupidest, most dangerous president this country has ever had to endure.' You can watch the full 'The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell' episode in the video above. The post Lawrence O'Donnell Mocks Trump for Backtracking Promise to Deport 15 Million: 'Slowest and Stupidest President in History' | Video appeared first on TheWrap.
Yahoo
14 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Graffiti at night. Cleanup in the morning. The night-and-day difference of L.A. protests
On Wednesday morning, the 18-year-old drove an hour from her home in Ontario to downtown Los Angeles to protest ongoing federal immigration raids and President Trump's deployment of the military to the city. Gryphon Woodson, a new high school graduate, grabbed a pair of goggles and a black bandanna to cover her face. It was her first-ever protest. And after watching videos of chaos in the streets all week, she figured she would be joining throngs of passionate demonstrators. But she arrived too early. As she stood outside the graffiti-covered Federal Building on Los Angeles Street around 11 a.m., the downtown streets were clear. Clusters of police officers stood at ease around courthouses and City Hall, drinking coffee and Red Bull, chatting with dog walkers, scrolling on their phones. "I thought there were gonna be more people here," Woodson said. "I thought people were going to be out, you know, during the day." By 6:30 p.m., it was a different scene entirely. Los Angeles police officers on horseback charged toward hundreds of people who had marched from Pershing Square to the graffiti-marred City Hall, knocking some protesters to the ground as officers on foot fired rubber bullets into the crowd. "It's very disruptive to day-to-day life — the raids, the protest. Everything is destroyed!" said Saul Barnes, a 22-year-old whose family owns a nearby hotel, as he jogged away from a police officer on horseback wielding a baton. "Who the hell wants to work in a state like this?" Calm in the morning. Rowdy at night. That was the routine in downtown Los Angeles this week after Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deployed the National Guard and active-duty Marines to the city amid scattered protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. Both police and protesters have said the difference between night and day has been palpable in the city's already quiet downtown, which has struggled with historically high rates of office vacancy since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The intense but isolated chaos has mostly been in and around the Civic Center, which includes City Hall, the LAPD headquarters and multiple courthouses and federal buildings. The area is a few blocks within a city that's just over 500 square miles. There, protesters have burned driverless Waymo vehicles, hurled rocks and bottles at police and National Guard members, and shut down the 101 Freeway. Businesses have been burglarized; windows, smashed. The phrases "F— ICE," "F— LAPD" and "F— Trump" have been spray-painted onto scores of buildings, including City Hall, a 1928 Art Deco landmark. A city-ordered 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. downtown curfew that began Tuesday — along with many protesters' calls for nonviolence — appeared to quell some of the late-night violence and property damage. Trump this week called the nation's second-largest city "a trash heap" that needed rescuing from so-called foreign invaders and rioters. He wrote on Truth Social that "if our troops didn't go into Los Angeles, it would be burning to the ground right now, just like so much of their housing burned to the ground" in the January fires that devastated Pacific Palisades and Altadena. But if the president were to visit the city center during the day, he might be a little bored. On Wednesday morning, a veteran LAPD officer sitting outside City Hall said the days have been mostly calm — and the protest schedule predictable. The officer, who said he was not authorized to speak on behalf of the department, said crowds trickled in around 1 p.m. each day. If they were taking part in an organized protest — the Service Employees International Union rally that drew thousands to Gloria Molina Grand Park on Monday or a march led by faith leaders Tuesday — they were peaceful, if boisterous. In the late afternoon and at night, he said, "the ones that are here to agitate" show up. Many are teenagers. Sitting next to him, smoking a cigar, a 53-year-old LAPD officer described the late-night protesters as "the Mad Max crowd: people with mini bikes, people with masks, rocks, bottles, fireworks." The officer, a Latino who was born at L.A. County-USC hospital and raised in East L.A., said with a sigh that he loved his home city, and "we have nothing to do with ICE; we have nothing to do with the raids, but we're here because of the disorder." On Wednesday afternoon, Reginald Wheeler, a 62-year-old homeless services worker, said he had been attending protests all week after his work day ended around 3 p.m. and staying until things got rowdy. He referenced the 1984 hip-hop song "Freaks Come Out at Night" by Whodini and said "that's the vibe" when the sun goes down. "The more peaceful protesters tend to leave," he said. "They've got dinner to cook." Edward Maguire, a criminologist at Arizona State University, said that's "a common dynamic" during times of major protest, with "criminal offenders" taking advantage of the commotion — and, often, the nighttime darkness — to wreak havoc near the sites of more ideologically-motivated demonstrations. The provocations in Los Angeles appear to have been made worse by the presence of uniformed soldiers, Maguire said, because "people have a strong drive to reject this idea of troops in the street, particularly in an instance like this where it's clearly not warranted." Calvin Morrill, a professor of law and sociology at UC Berkeley, said most modern protests are nonviolent and highly organized by activists, labor unions and community organizations. "Under normal circumstances in most democratic countries, when police perceive protests to be potentially more violent, more of a threat, they will escalate as well, and there's a dance between policing and protest," Morrill said. "But that's not what's happening in Los Angeles. ... This is a spectacle that is constructed by the federal administration to dramatize the threat, the fear, for people who aren't local Angelenos, who are very far from the actual place. It's dramatized for media consumption." Although Trump has portrayed the entire city as a lawless place — where federal agents have been "attacked by an out of control mob of agitators, troublemakers, and/or insurrectionists," he wrote on Truth Social — the literal night-and-day differences have played out all week. Early Monday evening, after a few hundred people ignored dispersal orders near the Federal Building, police — firing less-lethal munitions and tossing flash-bang grenades — pushed protesters into Little Tokyo, where businesses and the Japanese American National Museum were heavily vandalized. Daylight Tuesday brought a starkly different scene: volunteers scrubbing graffiti from the exterior of the museum, which highlights the painful lessons of Japanese Americans' mass incarceration during World War II. After seeing images of the vandalism on her social media feeds, Kimiko Carpenter, a West L.A. mom and hospice volunteer, stopped at Anawalt Lumber to buy $50 worth of rags, gloves, scraping brushes and canisters of graffiti remover. She drove downtown and rolled up her sleeves. Wiping sweat off her brow with the elbow of her white button-down shirt, Carpenter said she had no official affiliation with the museum but was half Japanese and had volunteered there years ago as a teenager. Working to remove the spray paint scrawled across the windows felt like a tangible thing she could do for a few hours before she had to pick up her young children from school. Shortly before the curfew went into effect Tuesday night, hundreds of people led by a coalition of faith leaders marched from Grand Park to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building on Los Angeles Street, stepping in front of another, more contentious protest group. As the faith leaders arrived and asked their group to take a knee and pray on the building's steps, Department of Homeland Security officers trained pepper-ball guns on clergy members, and National Guard members tensed their riot shields. 'We see that you are putting on your masks; you don't need them,' Rev. Eddie Anderson, pastor of McCarty Memorial Christian Church and a leader with LA Voice, said to the officers and guardsmen. 'The people have gathered together to remind you there is a higher power. To remind you that in Los Angeles everybody is free, and no human is illegal.' When the clock struck 8 p.m., the religious group left. A few dozen people remained. Someone threw a glass bottle at officers from a nearby pedestrian bridge. Officers on horseback wove chaotically through traffic, knocking a protester to the ground. Within 30 minutes, the familiar sounds of LAPD less-lethal munition launchers and screaming demonstrators filled downtown again. The next morning, Woodson showed up to the quiet Federal Building, where she and a handful of other young women were outnumbered by journalists. "My plan today was to make as much noise as possible," she said. "Trump likes to try to suppress our voices. ICE wants to suppress our voices. LAPD wants to suppress our voices. I'll be damned — I refuse. As a Black person in the United States, I'm not gonna have my voice suppressed anymore.' Around 11:20 a.m. Wednesday, five camouflaged National Guard members lined up on the building's front steps, standing behind clear riot shields. At the sight of them, Woodson tied her bandanna around her face and started marching back and forth, screaming: "Immigrants are not the problem! Immigrants are never the problem!" Marching quietly behind her, a Mexican flag draped over her shoulders, was 19-year-old Michelle Hernandez, a daughter of Mexican immigrants who lives in East L.A. and had been worried about family members and friends during the ICE raids. She spoke softly but said she wanted "to be a voice for those who cannot speak." She said it hurt to see Latino police officers and federal agents involved in the immigration crackdown and that it was "very heartbreaking seeing your own people betray you." As the young women marched, several Latino maintenance workers snaked a power hose across the Federal Building steps, paying no mind to the heavily-armed National Guard soldiers as they sprayed away graffiti. One worker, a 67-year-old from East L.A., said he was glad to see the soldiers outside the building where he had been employed for the last 20 years because he figured the vandalism would have been worse without them. George Dutton, a UCLA professor who teaches Southeast Asian history, stood by himself in front of the Federal Building steps, holding up a sign that read: "It's Called the Constitution You F—" as the young women walked back and forth behind him. Dutton, who was taking a break from grading final exams, was not surprised at the quiet. 'It speaks to the various paradoxes around this — it's a movement that ebbs and flows,' he said. 'I see soldiers carrying guns and wearing fatigues, so maybe they're trying to create the idea that this is a war zone," he added. "And if you did a tight shot on one of these National Guardsmen, you might actually cast that impression. But if you pull back, you get the big picture and you realize that, no, it's literally manufactured.' Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
