Latest news with #PANICAN
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
America's Mad King
Last Monday, Donald Trump, seeking to fortify public support for his massive, across-the-board tariffs, posted: 'The United States has a chance to do something that should have been done DECADES AGO. Don't be Weak! Don't be Stupid! Don't be a PANICAN (A new party based on Weak and Stupid people!).' By Wednesday, Trump had caved. His witless, incoherent, and incompetently executed policies—his administration had imposed tariffs on an Australian territory that is home to no people but to many penguins—created a financial panic that risked devastating the American economy and triggering a global recession. Trillions of dollars of stock-market value evaporated in a matter of days. A man who has spent most of his life, and much of his presidency, gaslighting the public ran into the brick wall of reality. Misinformation, disinformation, bullying, and nasty social-media posts proved ineffective. Stock and bond markets weren't intimidated by the threats of the aging president. Trump fought reality, and reality won. WE'RE FEWER THAN 90 DAYS into Trump's second term; many more collisions between the president and the real world will come. So what can we expect, based on what we've witnessed? [Read: I should have seen this coming] We won't see qualities from Trump that we haven't seen before, but we will see them in a more extreme version. He is more impulsive, more vindictive, and more anarchic than in his first term. 'He's at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore,' a White House official familiar with Trump's thinking told The Washington Post. 'Bad news stories? Doesn't give a f---. He's going to do what he's going to do.' Trump is America's Mad King. Compounding the problem is that the president has surrounded himself with men and women who are utterly loyal to him, unwilling to challenge him, and certainly unable to contain him. (The praise lavished on Trump by the members of his Cabinet during their meetings would make even Kim Jong Un blush.) On top of that, this is an administration filled with third-rate intellects, conspiracy theorists, and misfits. They aren't qualified to manage Oak Hill, Alabama, or Monowi, Nebraska, let alone the federal government. Their combination of maliciousness and incompetence has produced enormous, dangerous, and in some cases lethal disruptions. Some examples: The formula Trump used to calculate his tariffs was not just ill-advised but nonsensical as well. Trump's press secretary said that the tariffs were not a negotiation—until Trump and his secretary of the Treasury said they were. His commerce secretary said there wasn't any chance that the president would back off from his tariffs—until Trump backed off from his tariffs the following week. Last Friday, the administration announced that it would exempt iPhones, computers, and other electronic devices from the tariffs—and on Sunday, Trump announced that this did not count as a tariff exemption. In his mania to purge diversity, equity, and inclusion content, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave orders so vague that the Defense Department flagged photos of the Enola Gay for deletion from all websites and social-media posts. (The B-29 bomber that dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima was named after the pilot's mother, Enola Gay Tibbets. One wit on social media said, 'Enola Gay will henceforth be known as Enola Straight.') Another order by Hegseth led to the removal of Maya Angelou's memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from the U.S. Naval Academy's library but left copies of Adolf Hitler's autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, on the bookshelves. Hegseth, during a February press conference at the NATO headquarters, in Brussels, unilaterally conceded a major Ukrainian negotiating position before anyone had even met with the Russians. Roger Wicker, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that he was 'disturbed' by Hegseth's comments, calling them a 'rookie mistake.' The Mississippi Republican added that everyone knows that 'you don't say before your first meeting what you will agree to and what you won't agree to.' Wicker added, 'I don't know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.' In an appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show, Steve Witkoff, Trump's special envoy and the lead negotiator tasked with ending the war in Ukraine, was not only effusive in his praise of Russia's totalitarian leader, Vladimir Putin, but even repeated Kremlin propaganda that 'the overwhelming majority' of people in four Ukrainian regions that have been occupied and annexed by Russia want to be absorbed by Russia. (During the interview, Witkoff, a wealthy real-estate developer, struggled to remember the names of those Ukrainian regions.) The editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to a Signal group chat that included senior Trump officials who were coordinating an air strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen. In its mass firing of federal workers, the Trump administration dismissed—and then had to rehire—people with highly sensitive jobs in the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is responsible for ensuring the readiness of America's nuclear arsenal. The people who ordered the firings had failed to grasp the nature of those responsibilities. Employees who were working on the federal government's response to the H5N1 avian-flu outbreak, which is decimating poultry flocks and spreading to humans, were fired. The Department of Agriculture scrambled to reverse the firings. The single biggest line item on the DOGE website claimed a savings of $8 billion from one canceled contract. The actual contract was worth $8 million, much of which had already been spent. The Department of Health and Human Services, which is run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, hired a discredited vaccine skeptic to study whether vaccines cause autism. Amid a measles resurgence in the United States, Kennedy is also making unsupported and misleading claims. ProPublica reported that leaders at the CDC ordered staff not to release its assessment linking the spread to areas where many are unvaccinated. The National Institutes of Health, the global leader in biomedical research, is getting irreparably damaged by dramatic and reckless cuts being made by people who have no knowledge of the agencies they are gutting. Progress in cancer therapies such as cell-based immunotherapy is being threatened. Active clinical trials are being disrupted. Decades of research are being undermined. Also being decimated is PEPFAR, the global AIDS initiative started by President George W. Bush in 2003, which has saved more than 25 million lives; until the Trump era, it enjoyed strong bipartisan support. PEPFAR is estimated to save 1.6 million lives each year. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has issued some waivers for PEPFAR, but they are a mirage. The waivers have done very little to restore funding or provide distribution of medication. One expert told The Dispatch that aid groups that do qualify for waivers have been unable to draw down funds from the USAID payment system. 'A waiver is kind of useless without the ability to have some cash flow,' Chambers Sharpe, who previously worked in the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator at the State Department, told The Dispatch. 'You can't ship a waiver to a clinic as an antiretroviral medicine.' There have been massive disruptions in HIV prevention, testing, and treatment services. Clinics continue to close, and people are beginning to die at an alarming rate. In February, an inspector general wrote that about a half billion dollars in food aid that had already been purchased was at risk of spoilage. That inspector general was fired the next day. In addition, the Trump administration has 'dismissed the few remaining health officials who oversaw care for some of the world's most vulnerable people: more than 500,000 children and more than 600,000 pregnant women with H.I.V. in low-income countries,' Apoorva Mandavilli reported earlier this month in The New York Times. 'Expert teams that managed programs meant to prevent newborns from acquiring H.I.V. from their mothers and to provide treatment for infected children were eliminated last week in the chaotic reorganization of the Health and Human Services Department.' DOGE cut almost $900 million from the Department of Education's effort to collect national statistics and track the progress of American students, eviscerating one of the genuinely valuable things the federal government has done in the area of education. The cuts threaten to leave us in the dark when it comes to determining school effectiveness, where gaps exist, and what works. Many of the projects being canceled were near completion, making the decision even more mind-bogglingly stupid. The Trump administration has acknowledged mistakenly deporting a Maryland man with protected legal status to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador. (Later claims by the White House aide Stephen Miller that the deported man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was lawfully sent to El Salvador were undercut by the facts of the case and court rulings.) The judge presiding over the Abrego Garcia case, Paula Xinis, said on Tuesday that she was weighing contempt proceedings against the Trump administration. Xinis previously ordered the administration to 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia's release from the custody of El Salvador, and the Supreme Court upheld that portion of her order last week. 'To date, what the record shows is that nothing has been done. Nothing,' Xinis said on Tuesday. According to their lawyers, some Venezuelan migrants are being falsely accused of gang membership and deported to that same prison in El Salvador based on their tattoos and high-end urban street wear. 'In one instance, a man who was deported was accused of having a crown tattoo that officials said proved his membership, but his lawyers claimed that the tattoo was in honor of the man's favorite soccer team, Real Madrid,' The New York Times reported. 'Another migrant got a similar crown tattoo, the lawyers said, to commemorate the death of his grandmother.' Yesterday, federal judge James E. Boasberg said that he had found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for violating an order he issued last month directing officials to stop planes of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador. Boasberg said he would begin contempt proceedings, unless the administration found a way to give the men a way to exercise 'their right to challenge their removability through a habeas proceeding,' even if they were to remain in El Salvador while they did so. 'The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,' Boasberg wrote. Allowing political leaders to defy court judgments would make 'a solemn mockery' of 'the constitution itself.' This kind of malicious incompetence is evident in almost everything Trump and those in his administration touch. You can be sure, too, that there are many more similar acts of ineptitude we don't yet know about. And Trump still has more than 1,350 days to go. THE SECOND TRUMP PRESIDENCY, more even than the first, will be defined by Trump's authoritarian desires and his ineptitude. It might be that the latter impedes the former; ruthless efficiency can help in the dismantling of democratic institutions, but having an administration filled with freaks and fools can impede that effort and catalyze public disaffection and even resistance. We're already seeing that reflected in a handful of election results, in mass protests across the country, in focus groups and public-opinion polls, and in the University of Michigan's Consumer Sentiment Index, which provides a snapshot of the U.S. economy's health. Early this month, we learned that index had hit its second-lowest reading since 1952, dragged down by fears of higher prices and unemployment. Expectations for inflation hit the highest level in 44 years. But here's the danger: Vindictive narcissists like Trump hold grudges and harbor resentments, blame everything on someone else, and weaponize information. They have a mean, even sadistic, side, belittling others to feel better about themselves and using, abusing, and discarding people. [Read: How American can avoid becoming Russia] Empathy is, to them, an alien quality. When they begin to feel like the walls are closing in; when their external validation, sense of superiority, and grandiosity are threatened; when they experience setbacks or humiliating public failures, they can approach what is known as 'narcissistic collapse.' This can lead to intense feelings of rage and acts of aggression, to agitation, and to increased impulsivity and distortions of reality. So as the second Trump administration careens from one failure to another, as unhappiness with the president rises, as events and reality refuse to bend to his will, he will become darker and crueler and more unstable. His advisers, all of whom are afraid to stand up to him, will enable him. And the MAGA movement, more cult-like than ever, more walled off from reality than ever, will stay with him until the end. Leaders who have been worse—more ruthless and more skilled than Trump—have been stopped, and few nations have been blessed by a system of government as wise and resilient as what our Founders created. Many of our institutions are stronger than those in most other nations. So Trump is hardly invincible, and many millions of Americans will not give up without a fight. My hope and expectation is that they will prevail, that America will prevail, but it will come at quite a cost. It didn't have to be this way. There are 77,302,580 co-authors of this catastrophe. They have left a crimson stain on this Republic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
17-04-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
America's Mad King
Last Monday, Donald Trump, seeking to fortify public support for his massive, across-the-board tariffs, posted: 'The United States has a chance to do something that should have been done DECADES AGO. Don't be Weak! Don't be Stupid! Don't be a PANICAN (A new party based on Weak and Stupid people!).' By Wednesday, Trump had caved. His witless, incoherent, and incompetently executed policies—his administration had imposed tariffs on an Australian territory that is home to no people but to many penguins —created a financial panic that risked devastating the American economy and triggering a global recession. Trillions of dollars of stock-market value evaporated in a matter of days. A man who has spent most of his life, and much of his presidency, gaslighting the public ran into the brick wall of reality. Misinformation, disinformation, bullying, and nasty social-media posts proved ineffective. Stock and bond markets weren't intimidated by the threats of the aging president. Trump fought reality, and reality won. WE'RE FEWER THAN 90 DAYS into Trump's second term; many more collisions between the president and the real world will come. So what can we expect, based on what we've witnessed? We won't see qualities from Trump that we haven't seen before, but we will see them in a more extreme version. He is more impulsive, more vindictive, and more anarchic than in his first term. 'He's at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore,' a White House official familiar with Trump's thinking told The Washington Post. 'Bad news stories? Doesn't give a f---. He's going to do what he's going to do.' Trump is America's Mad King. Compounding the problem is that the president has surrounded himself with men and women who are utterly loyal to him, unwilling to challenge him, and certainly unable to contain him. (The praise lavished on Trump by the members of his Cabinet during their meetings would make even Kim Jong Un blush.) On top of that, this is an administration filled with third-rate intellects, conspiracy theorists, and misfits. They aren't qualified to manage Oak Hill, Alabama, or Monowi, Nebraska, let alone the federal government. Their combination of maliciousness and incompetence has produced enormous, dangerous, and in some cases lethal disruptions. Some examples: The formula Trump used to calculate his tariffs was not just ill-advised but nonsensical as well. Trump's press secretary said that the tariffs were not a negotiation—until Trump and his secretary of the Treasury said they were. His commerce secretary said there wasn't any chance that the president would back off from his tariffs—until Trump backed off from his tariffs the following week. Last Friday, the administration announced that it would exempt iPhones, computers, and other electronic devices from the tariffs—and on Sunday, Trump announced that this did not count as a tariff exemption. In his mania to purge diversity, equity, and inclusion content, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave orders so vague that the Defense Department flagged photos of the Enola Gay for deletion from all websites and social-media posts. (The B-29 bomber that dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima was named after the pilot's mother, Enola Gay Tibbets. One wit on social media said, 'Enola Gay will henceforth be known as Enola Straight.') Another order by Hegseth led to the removal of Maya Angelou's memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from the U.S. Naval Academy's library but left copies of Adolf Hitler's autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, on the bookshelves. Hegseth, during a February press conference at the NATO headquarters, in Brussels, unilaterally conceded a major Ukrainian negotiating position before anyone had even met with the Russians. Roger Wicker, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that he was 'disturbed' by Hegseth's comments, calling them a 'rookie mistake.' The Mississippi Republican added that everyone knows that 'you don't say before your first meeting what you will agree to and what you won't agree to.' Wicker added, 'I don't know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.' In an appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show, Steve Witkoff, Trump's special envoy and the lead negotiator tasked with ending the war in Ukraine, was not only effusive in his praise of Russia's totalitarian leader, Vladimir Putin, but even repeated Kremlin propaganda that 'the overwhelming majority' of people in four Ukrainian regions that have been occupied and annexed by Russia want to be absorbed by Russia. (During the interview, Witkoff, a wealthy real-estate developer, struggled to remember the names of those Ukrainian regions.) The editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to a Signal group chat that included senior Trump officials who were coordinating an air strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen. In its mass firing of federal workers, the Trump administration dismissed—and then had to rehire—people with highly sensitive jobs in the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is responsible for ensuring the readiness of America's nuclear arsenal. The people who ordered the firings had failed to grasp the nature of those responsibilities. Employees who were working on the federal government's response to the H5N1 avian-flu outbreak, which is decimating poultry flocks and spreading to humans, were fired. The Department of Agriculture scrambled to reverse the firings. The single biggest line item on the DOGE website claimed a savings of $8 billion from one canceled contract. The actual contract was worth $8 million, much of which had already been spent. The Department of Health and Human Services, which is run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, hired a discredited vaccine skeptic to study whether vaccines cause autism. Amid a measles resurgence in the United States, Kennedy is also making unsupported and misleading claims. ProPublica reported that leaders at the CDC ordered staff not to release its assessment linking the spread to areas where many are unvaccinated. The National Institutes of Health, the global leader in biomedical research, is getting irreparably damaged by dramatic and reckless cuts being made by people who have no knowledge of the agencies they are gutting. Progress in cancer therapies such as cell-based immunotherapy is being threatened. Active clinical trials are being disrupted. Decades of research are being undermined. Also being decimated is PEPFAR, the global AIDS initiative started by President George W. Bush in 2003, which has saved more than 25 million lives; until the Trump era, it enjoyed strong bipartisan support. PEPFAR is estimated to save 1.6 million lives each year. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has issued some waivers for PEPFAR, but they are a mirage. The waivers have done very little to restore funding or provide distribution of medication. One expert told The Dispatch that aid groups that do qualify for waivers have been unable to draw down funds from the USAID payment system. 'A waiver is kind of useless without the ability to have some cash flow,' Chambers Sharpe, who previously worked in the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator at the State Department, told The Dispatch. 'You can't ship a waiver to a clinic as an antiretroviral medicine.' There have been massive disruptions in HIV prevention, testing, and treatment services. Clinics continue to close, and people are beginning to die at an alarming rate. In February, an inspector general wrote that about a half billion dollars in food aid that had already been purchased was at risk of spoilage. That inspector general was fired the next day. In addition, the Trump administration has 'dismissed the few remaining health officials who oversaw care for some of the world's most vulnerable people: more than 500,000 children and more than 600,000 pregnant women with H.I.V. in low-income countries,' Apoorva Mandavilli reported earlier this month in The New York Times. 'Expert teams that managed programs meant to prevent newborns from acquiring H.I.V. from their mothers and to provide treatment for infected children were eliminated last week in the chaotic reorganization of the Health and Human Services Department.' DOGE cut almost $900 million from the Department of Education's effort to collect national statistics and track the progress of American students, eviscerating one of the genuinely valuable things the federal government has done in the area of education. The cuts threaten to leave us in the dark when it comes to determining school effectiveness, where gaps exist, and what works. Many of the projects being canceled were near completion, making the decision even more mind-bogglingly stupid. The Trump administration has acknowledged mistakenly deporting a Maryland man with protected legal status to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador. (Later claims by the White House aide Stephen Miller that the deported man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was lawfully sent to El Salvador were undercut by the facts of the case and court rulings.) The judge presiding over the Abrego Garcia case, Paula Xinis, said on Tuesday that she was weighing contempt proceedings against the Trump administration. Xinis previously ordered the administration to 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia's release from the custody of El Salvador, and the Supreme Court upheld that portion of her order last week. 'To date, what the record shows is that nothing has been done. Nothing,' Xinis said on Tuesday. According to their lawyers, some Venezuelan migrants are being falsely accused of gang membership and deported to that same prison in El Salvador based on their tattoos and high-end urban street wear. 'In one instance, a man who was deported was accused of having a crown tattoo that officials said proved his membership, but his lawyers claimed that the tattoo was in honor of the man's favorite soccer team, Real Madrid,' The New York Times reported. 'Another migrant got a similar crown tattoo, the lawyers said, to commemorate the death of his grandmother.' Yesterday, federal judge James E. Boasberg said that he had found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for violating an order he issued last month directing officials to stop planes of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador. Boasberg said he would begin contempt proceedings, unless the administration found a way to give the men a way to exercise 'their right to challenge their removability through a habeas proceeding,' even if they were to remain in El Salvador while they did so. 'The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,' Boasberg wrote. Allowing political leaders to defy court judgments would make 'a solemn mockery' of 'the constitution itself.' This kind of malicious incompetence is evident in almost everything Trump and those in his administration touch. You can be sure, too, that there are many more similar acts of ineptitude we don't yet know about. And Trump still has more than 1,350 days to go. THE SECOND TRUMP PRESIDENCY, more even than the first, will be defined by Trump's authoritarian desires and his ineptitude. It might be that the latter impedes the former; ruthless efficiency can help in the dismantling of democratic institutions, but having an administration filled with freaks and fools can impede that effort and catalyze public disaffection and even resistance. We're already seeing that reflected in a handful of election results, in mass protests across the country, in focus groups and public-opinion polls, and in the University of Michigan's Consumer Sentiment Index, which provides a snapshot of the U.S. economy's health. Early this month, we learned that index had hit its second-lowest reading since 1952, dragged down by fears of higher prices and unemployment. Expectations for inflation hit the highest level in 44 years. But here's the danger: Vindictive narcissists like Trump hold grudges and harbor resentments, blame everything on someone else, and weaponize information. They have a mean, even sadistic, side, belittling others to feel better about themselves and using, abusing, and discarding people. Empathy is, to them, an alien quality. When they begin to feel like the walls are closing in; when their external validation, sense of superiority, and grandiosity are threatened; when they experience setbacks or humiliating public failures, they can approach what is known as ' narcissistic collapse.' This can lead to intense feelings of rage and acts of aggression, to agitation, and to increased impulsivity and distortions of reality. So as the second Trump administration careens from one failure to another, as unhappiness with the president rises, as events and reality refuse to bend to his will, he will become darker and crueler and more unstable. His advisers, all of whom are afraid to stand up to him, will enable him. And the MAGA movement, more cult-like than ever, more walled off from reality than ever, will stay with him until the end. Leaders who have been worse—more ruthless and more skilled than Trump—have been stopped, and few nations have been blessed by a system of government as wise and resilient as what our Founders created. Many of our institutions are stronger than those in most other nations. So Trump is hardly invincible, and many millions of Americans will not give up without a fight. My hope and expectation is that they will prevail, that America will prevail, but it will come at quite a cost. It didn't have to be this way. There are 77,302,580 co-authors of this catastrophe. They have left a crimson stain on this Republic.
Buzz Feed
12-04-2025
- Politics
- Buzz Feed
Here Are 16 Dystopian And Sometimes Utterly Bizarre Things Donald Trump Did This Week
A week under the Trump administration can feel like a month. Oftentimes, it seems like every single day comes with a barrage of headlines, and it's hard to keep up without endlessly doomscrolling. So, to save your thumbs and your minds, I've compiled a list of wild things Donald Trump has done this week. Enjoy (or not)! 1. Sunday, April 6: As the stock market plummeted following Trump's tariff announcements, a reporter asked him whether there was "a threshold" of pain in the stock market that he was unwilling to tolerate. His response? "I think your question is so stupid." Me: Is there a 'Trump put?' Trump: 'I think your question is so stupid. I don't want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.' — annmarie hordern (@annmarie) April 7, 2025 Fox News / Twitter: @annmarie 4. Monday, April 7: Shifting away from the tariffs — for a moment — Trump bragged to reporters about a golf tournament he competed in. "I won. It's good to win. You heard I won, right? Did you hear I won? ... I won... I have a very low handicap." HuffPost estimates that Trump's golf trips have cost US taxpayers upwards of $26 million so far. We're less than three months into his second term. Trump: "I have a very low handicap." — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2025 CNN / Twitter: @atrupar The United States has a chance to do something that should have been done DECADES AGO. Don't be Weak! Don't be Stupid! Don't be a PANICAN (A new party based on Weak and Stupid people!). Be Strong, Courageous, and Patient, and GREATNESS will be the result! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 7, 2025 Twitter: @realDonaldTrump 6. Monday, April 7: After winning the 2024 World Series, the Dodgers were welcome in the White House... where Trump weirdly fawned over their arms amid a bunch of bumbling. "When you ran out the healthy arms, you ran out of really healthy— they had great arms but they ran out. It's called sports. It's called baseball in particular and pitchers I guess you could say," he said. Trump: When you ran out the healthy arms, you ran out of really healthy— they had great arms but they ran out. It's called sports. It's called baseball in particular and pitchers I guess you could say, really particular — Acyn (@Acyn) April 7, 2025 C-SPAN / Twitter: @Acyn 7. Monday, April 7: A photo comparison of Trump and former President Joe Biden's Oval Offices went viral because Trump has apparently redecorated the room with A LOT of gold. This picture from the White House really shows how many gold accents have been added to the Oval Office. This is how it looked last year: — Michelle L. Price (@michellelprice) April 7, 2025 Twitter: @michellelprice / 8. Tuesday, April 8: Likewise, people couldn't help but notice another mini renovation made in the main entry hall at the Department of Justice. During former administrations, portraits of the president, vice president, and attorney general hung on the wall. Now? It's just Trump. View before and after photos here. 9. Tuesday, April 8: Annnnnnnd we're back to tariffs. Unfortunately. Earlier this week, Trump seemed to block out all of the resentment spreading online amid his global trade war and claimed other countries "are calling us up, kissing my ass," he said during the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). "They are dying to make a deal. 'Please, please, sir, make a deal. I'll do anything. I'll do anything, sir." Trump: 'I'm telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are dying to make a deal. 'Please, please, Sir, make a deal. I'll do anything. I'll do anything, sir.' — Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) April 9, 2025 RSBN / Twitter: @RpsAgainstTrump 10. Tuesday, April 8: During the NRCC, Trump was speaking on midterms when he made this bold claim: "I really think we're helped a lot by the tariff situation going on... It's going to be legendary. Legendary in a positive way." Sure!!! — Martina Navratilova (@Martina) April 8, 2025 RSBN / Twitter: @Martina 11. Tuesday, April 8: In an extremely odd move that reeks — in my opinion — of possible last-minute decision-making, Trump announced that he planned on implementing tariffs on pharmaceuticals. (Spoiler Alert: He later announced a 90-day pause on tariffs. So I guess this is up in the air for now.) Regardless, in a Gallup survey, about one-third of aging Americans expressed concern over being able to afford prescription drugs. This was pre-tariffs, in 2024. 13. Wednesday, April 9: 90 day pause + 125% on china Then, at 12:18 p.m. on that same day, he announced the authorization of a 90-day pause on tariffs — except for with regards to China, which got a tariff raise to 125%. DO NOT RETALIATE AND YOU WILL BE REWARDED — The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 9, 2025 Twitter: @WhiteHouse 15. Wednesday, April 9: Speaking on the US's relationship with China and Biden's role in this relationship, Trump hypothetically asked, "How do you get to be president and you're stupid?" This quote unleashed a fury of jokes from people who claim to ask themselves this same question every day. We've been wondering this since 2016 Donald. — SJI2783 (@sji2783) April 9, 2025 Fox News / Twitter: @sji2783 16. And finally, Thursday, April 10: During a now-heavily-criticized cabinet meeting, Trump made several claims that experts have since shot back at. One claim was that the US "took in hundreds of billions of dollars from China" via tariffs, which fact-checking reporter Daniel Dale debunked. 'As many of our colleagues keep pointing out, because we have to, all that revenue was paid by US importers,' Dale said on CNN. 'And we know from study after study and just from talking to people in this country, most of those costs were passed on to US consumers.' WELP! Let us know your thoughts on these events and whether you'd like to see more about Trump's administration as a whole in our next edition. See ya next week!
Washington Post
11-04-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
Trump's tariffs will open up the graft floodgates
It was the flip-flop hailed around the world. After insisting that he would not budge on his tariffs and branding anyone who urged him to do so as a 'PANICAN (A new party based on Weak and Stupid people!),' President Donald Trump reversed course and paused his massive reciprocal tariffs for 90 days (except on China) while he negotiates deals with other countries. But sighs of relief might be premature. For one, America's tariffs are still at a 100-plus year high by one measure, according to the Yale Budget Lab, which will cost Americans dearly. Even more important, these tariff negotiations will inevitably result in a cascade of corruption. The American economy is being transformed from the leading free market in the world to the leading example of crony capitalism. A market economy functions best when there are limited constraints placed on it, but especially when those constraints are clear, fair and applicable to all. The more complicated the taxes, rules and regulations, the greater the inefficiency — as studies show in country after country, from India to Nigeria to Morocco. But more significant, the greater the complexity, the greater the corruption. With tariffs come tariff waivers, often granted by the hundreds to specific industries, companies, even products. In 2018 and 2019, the Trump administration announced an assortment of tariffs, including 25 percent on steel, and also a program of waivers; they got around 500,000 applications. This week, when asked how he would determine these exemptions, Trump replied, 'instinctively.' Studies show that politicians' instincts usually favor their contributors, which then encourages pervasive corruption. It was true with tariffs for much of American history until President Franklin D. Roosevelt changed the system, and over time — in Paul Krugman's words — 'tariff policy went from being famously dirty to remarkably clean.' It's getting dirtier fast. A detailed academic study of the tariffs in Trump's first term found that 'companies that made substantial investments in political connections to Republicans prior to and during the beginning of the Trump administration were more likely to secure exemptions for products otherwise subject to tariffs. Conversely, companies that made contributions to Democratic politicians had decreased odds of tariff exemption approval.' That study looked at more than 7,000 applications for exemptions from tariffs on China in the first term and found that just a $4,000 donation to Democratic candidates reduced the companies' chances of being granted an exemption to less than 1 in 10. As Timothy Carney from the conservative think tank AEI notes, 'Trump's first election created a trade lobbying boom' — from 921 lobbying clients with lobbyists working on trade to an apex of 1,419 by 2019. With the highest tariffs in the industrialized world, the American bazaar is now open. Countries and companies will descend on Washington to cut deals and gain carve-outs, exemptions and special terms. In the past few weeks, Vietnam has announced a flurry of measures designed to mollify the Trump administration and get a good trade deal. Among them: approval for Elon Musk's Starlink to operate in the country and a plan to expedite a Trump Organization project. In fact, there are at least 19 Trump-branded real estate projects around the world that will be under development while he is president, and possibly many others in the works. Trump launched his own social media company and his own meme coin; other countries surely see this all as an invitation to invest — and to influence American foreign and economic policy. It has been deeply dispiriting to watch some of America's legendary capitalists — canonical figures from Wall Street — endorse a dealmaking process by which the American free market is going to be pockmarked with tariffs, taxes, rules, exemptions and carve-outs. It is worth recalling Milton Friedman's repeated admonition: 'You can get any leading businessman to give you an eloquent speech on the virtues of a free market. But when it comes to their own business, they want to go down to Washington and get a special tariff to protect their business. They want a special tax deduction. They want a tax subsidy.' The India I grew up in was a country riddled with tariffs, high barriers designed to protect the country's domestic industry and shield it from what was regarded as unfair foreign competition. It produced stagnation, poverty and lots of corruption, thoroughly politicizing the economy. No business of any size in India could survive without a good relationship with the government. When I got to America, I was thrilled to see that most businesses went about their work with little care as to who was in the White House. But now I watch tech pioneers give interviews slavishly extolling Trump's genius and Wall Street titans race to post North Korea-style congratulations to the president for his brilliance in rescuing the economy from his own actions, and I wonder, what country am I living in?
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Opinion - Trump's tariff gaslighting has a name: It's DARVO
Since announcing a slew of tariffs last week, President Trump has thrown the stock market into chaos and ignited fears of a recession. Now, instead of taking responsibility, he is gaslighting the public, insisting that the market's plunge is neither serious nor his fault. When asked about the impact of his tariffs, Trump largely brushes off concerns. Over the weekend, he claimed the tariffs have made the U.S. 'much stronger' and touted an 'economic revolution.' Downplaying and denying economic consequences, Trump continues to sing the praises of his wide-reaching tariffs. The president has also been on the attack. Taking to social media, Trump called anyone worried about economic volatility a 'PANICAN,' a term he defined as 'A new party based on Weak and Stupid people!' According to the president, the problem isn't the tariffs — it's the people who are upset about them. And, in usual Trump fashion, he also made sure to attack former U.S. presidents ('Our past 'leaders' are to blame for allowing this,' he wrote on social media) and snapped at a reporter who asked about the stock market's steep decline. Going after U.S. trading partners, the president has also repeatedly claimed other countries are 'abusing' the U.S. via their trade policies. He even made the provocative claim that the U.S. has been 'looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far' to justify his tariffs. This isn't just bluster, Trump is employing a psychological strategy called DARVO: Deny, attack and reverse victim and offender. DARVO is used to dodge accountability by shifting blame, silencing critics and reframing oneself as victim. This is the strategy Trump and his team have been using for years to distort reality. We are psychology researchers who first named and now study DARVO. Our research reveals that DARVO is a common manipulation tactic that distorts how people view wrongdoing. In the case of Trump's tariffs, the president has accused both critics and U.S. trading partners of bearing all fault and argued that the U.S. is the real victim. Each component of this tactic layers manipulation with confusion, making it harder to perceive reality accurately. Denial is the foundation of deceit. It urges people to dismiss clear evidence, creating an alternative reality that some will inevitably accept. Attacks on credibility go further by discrediting victims and critics, effectively exploiting the human tendency to doubt or even blame those who speak out. Finally, reversing victim and offender distorts reality entirely. In this part of DARVO, the wrongdoer is cast as the true victim while the actual victims are portrayed as aggressors. This role reversal doesn't just muddy the waters, it fosters apathy. When people see a tangled, contradictory narrative, people may retreat into uncertainty: 'I guess we'll never know who's to blame.' Trump has used this playbook before, as when he blamed Ukraine for Russia's invasion, discredited women who had accused him of sexual assault and deflected blame during 'Signalgate.' Because DARVO has been a central strategy in Trump's political playbook for years, it has undoubtedly contributed to distorted perceptions of what is true and what is 'fake news.' When leaders like Trump weaponize DARVO, the public becomes more disengaged and confused. But DARVO can also be defanged. Our research indicates that being informed about DARVO can reduce its persuasive effects. In other words, people who can spot DARVO are less likely to fall for it. Much like how vaccines protect against diseases, having knowledge about DARVO inoculates against its effects. Recognizing DARVO in action is therefore the first step to resisting its influence. The next step is refusing to let it rewrite reality. Trump's attempts to deflect responsibility and blame for the results of his tariffs are not just political maneuvers. They are calculated efforts to distract and confuse you. By exposing DARVO for what it is, we can ensure that his gaslighting does not win out over the truth. Sarah Harsey, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University-Cascades. Jennifer J. Freyd, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology retired from the University of Oregon and founder and president of the Center for Institutional Courage. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
