Retaliation

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. Trump's tariffs are taking effect -- with predictable results.

Mickey Djuric at POLITICO.

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs will target Republican states and Donald Trump allies.

“Canadians understand that we need to respond to this,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Saturday night. “We need to respond in a way that is appropriate, that is measured but forceful, that meets the moment.”

There are 1,256 items in the first tranche of tariffs that will come into force on Tuesday.

The list includes oranges and fruit from Florida, home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort; household appliances from South Carolina and Ohio, states to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Vice President J.D. Vance; and motorcycles and coffee from southern Pennsylvania, which helped return Trump to the White House.

The full list, which you can read here, contains food and agriculture products, textiles and furniture.

Energy and tech products were not included in the first round of tariffs. A second list will be published in the coming days.

Government officials also said Ottawa is not ruling out other retaliatory measures such as targeting Elon Musk’s companies, or slapping export taxes on Canadian oil.

Tariff Time

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

There's no connection between tariffs and illegal drugs/immigration in real life.

The connection is that Trump's Day 1 emergency declarations on those two subjects unlock powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which he is using as a fig leaf to do tariffs.

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) February 2, 2025

David Lawder at Reuters:

President Donald Trump has pushed into new trade law territory with an emergency sanctions law to justify punishing 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports and an extra 10% duty on Chinese goods to curb fentanyl and illegal immigration into the U.S.

Trade and legal experts said the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) is untested for imposing import tariffs and Trump's action will likely face swift court challenges that could set important precedents.

As widely expected, Trump declared a national emergency under IEEPA on Saturday, citing the "extraordinary threat" from fentanyl and illegal immigration. The law gives the president broad powers to impose economic and financial sanctions in times of crisis, including against Russia over its war in Ukraine.

IEEPA gave Trump, in his second week of his second term in the White House, the fastest path to imposing tariffs, as trade laws he used in his first four years for duties on steel, aluminum and Chinese goods would have required months-long investigations and public consultations.

If a president wanted to foment anti-Americanism among our Canadian neighbors, he could scarcely do better than this post: 

Trump's Week Two

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Adam Goldman, Devlin Barrett, and Glenn Thrush at NYT:

The Trump administration plans to scrutinize thousands of F.B.I. agents involved in Jan. 6 investigations, setting the stage for a possible purge that goes far beyond the bureau’s leaders to target rank-and-file agents, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter.

The proposal came on a day that more than a dozen prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington who had worked on cases involving the Jan. 6 riot were told that they were being terminated.

The moves were a powerful indication that Mr. Trump has few qualms deploying the colossal might of federal law enforcement to punish perceived political enemies, even as his cabinet nominees offered sober assurances they would abide by the rule of law. Forcing out both agents and prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases would amount to a wide-scale assault on the Justice Department.

On Friday, interim leaders at the department instructed the F.B.I. to notify more than a half-dozen high-ranking career officials that they faced termination, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The New York Times

Gavin Bade et al. at WSJ:

The U.S. will impose tariffs on computer chips, pharmaceuticals, steel, aluminum, copper, oil and gas imports as soon as mid-February, President Trump said Friday, opening a new front in his looming second-term trade wars.

“That’ll happen fairly soon,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, adding that he also wants to hike tariffs on the European Union, which has “treated us so horribly,” though he didn’t specify when or how high the duties would be. A representative for the European Union didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The announcement for those sector-based and EU tariffs appeared separate from the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and 10% tariffs on China, which he had said would be implemented Saturday.

The duties previewed by Trump would come on top of existing tariffs on those products, he said, waving away any concern about the levies increasing inflation or snarling global supply chains.

Zack Stanton at Politico Playbook:

Week one: Trump toured wildfire damage in California and visited burned-out homes. It was presidential.

Week two: Asked by reporters whether he would visit the collision site where 67 people died on the Potomac River, Trump responded: “What’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”

Week one: Trump literally embraced California Gov. Gavin Newsom, his longtime political foe, and, as Christopher Cadelago and Melanie Mason wrote, “refrained from his sharp-edged digs and instead pledged to help lead in the recovery effort.”

Week two: Trump foisted blame for the DCA crash onto Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (“He’s just got a good line of bullshit,” Trump said at his presser) and DEI policies.

Put succinctly: “In the wake of this week’s midair collision near Washington, Mr. Trump was more than happy to jump to conclusions and pull the country apart rather than together,” NYT’s Peter Baker writes this morning.

A quick reality check: The initial FAA report says that air traffic control staffing responsibilities at Reagan were “not normal” and that one person was doing two jobs, NYT’s Sydney Ember and Emily Steel report. … ABC News notes there isn’t any affirmative action in the hiring of air traffic controllers. … The disability hiring policies that Trump criticized were actually maintained and used by his own first administration, WaPo’s Glenn Kessler writes. … The executive action Trump signed yesterday to unwind diversity programs at the Department of Transportation and the FAA came even though, as Bloomberg’s Akayla Gardner reports, there is “no evidence that diversity initiatives led to the crash, nor is there evidence that such practices result in poor operational outcomes.”

It wasn’t just his handling of the tragedy at DCA that marked the change. The other big story this week, Trump-wise, was the brouhaha over the now-blocked federal spending freeze. It lacked White House vetting. It galvanized Democratic opposition. It caused the Trump administration to walk it back — and then walk back the walkback. It amounts to a quick shift for the White House “from inaugural euphoria to the realities of governing,” WSJ’s Natalie Andrews and Meridith McGraw write this morning

DSCC to Play in Primaries

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

Stephen Neukam and Hans Nicholst Axios:

New Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chair Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has been privately indicating she's prepared to intervene in contested primaries.

Why it matters: Senate Democrats want to avoid the GOP's Obama-era pain of watching preferred candidates lose primaries to unelectable newcomers.Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) know their ability to claw their way back to the majority starts with candidates who are built for the general election.

The top target: Getting the right candidates in three of the most competitive races of the 2026 cycle — Maine, North Carolina and now Michigan.

Zoom in: At a private DSCC fundraiser on Wednesday night, Gillibrand told donors that Roy Cooper, the former North Carolina governor, would be a "formidable candidate," according to people familiar with the matter.Cooper has yet to decide whether to run, but he's clearly indicated he's considering it and used his farewell address to say, "I am not done."

A big announcement from Cooper would help offset fears of losing other seats — especially if Gov. Brian Kemp (R-Ga.) decides to challenge Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.).

Democrats were stunned by Sen. Gary Peters' (D-Mich.) surprise announcement he won't seek a third term, opening a primary they thought would be closed.

Amateur Hour 2025

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.   The second Trump administration is off to an uneven start.

Jonathan Swan and Zolan Kanno-Youngs at NYT:

The explosive Trump administration order that froze trillions of dollars of federal grants and loans this week was published without vetting by key officials in the White House, according to three people with knowledge of what happened.

The order was drafted inside the Office of Management and Budget by the agency’s general counsel, Mark Paoletta, two of the people said. And it was released without being shown to the White House staff secretary, Will Scharf, or to Mr. Trump’s top policy adviser, Stephen Miller.

The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions.

The White House rescinded the directive on Wednesday after legal challenges and widespread condemnation and confusion, including the interruption of the Medicaid system, which provides health care to millions of low-income Americans. President Trump was angered by the media coverage of the order and its aftershocks, according to a person who spoke to him.

During a bill signing at the White House on Wednesday, Mr. Trump cast blame on the media for the confusion. “We are merely looking at parts of the big bureaucracy where there has been tremendous waste and fraud and abuse,” he said.

Absolutely bush league and childish.

It’s like listening to a child figure out what happened.

Let grown adults work it out first Mr. President then you can send your opinion https://t.co/JwqEot9DW7

— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) January 30, 2025

The Best People

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

Lauren Weber and Caitlin Gilbert:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s nominee for the nation’s top health post, has repeatedly disparaged vaccines, falsely linked them to autism and argued that White and Black people should have separate vaccination schedules, according to a Washington Post review of his public statements from recent years.

In at least 36 appearances, Kennedy linked autism to vaccines, despite overwhelming scientific evidence supporting the use of vaccination to protect people from deadly infectious diseases and refuting any ties to autism, The Post found in a review of more than 400 of Kennedy’s podcast appearances, interviews and public speeches since 2020.

Kennedy, who is scheduled to face a Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, criticized vaccines more broadly in at least 114 appearances, calling them dangerous, saying the risks outweigh the benefits and making misleading claims about vaccine safety testing or discrediting vaccine efficacy.

Holy sh*t. Senator Bennet absolutely annihilated RFK Jr. and exposed him for what he really is—an anti-vaxxer crackpot and grifter. In the pre-Trump era, this would have been the end of his nomination, and he would have withdrawn immediately.pic.twitter.com/Mmu6Ic23Vn

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) January 29, 2025

 

Ambassador Caroline Kennedy’s statement to the US Senate on RFKJr’s nomination for HHS Secretary

This is a reading of a letter she just sent to Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions

I’m so proud of my courageous mother, who’s lived a life of dignity,… pic.twitter.com/feysNA0Wwp

— Jack Schlossberg (@JBKSchlossberg) January 28, 2025

Brett Forrest, Caitlin Ostroff and Rebecca Feng at WSJ:

To defend and burnish Tulsi Gabbard’s image as her political star was rising, her congressional campaign hired a public-affairs firm in 2017 that tried to suppress coverage of an alleged pyramid scheme connected to her Hindu sect, according to interviews, emails and Federal Election Commission records.

Gabbard, a former House member who is now President Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, was raised in the Science of Identity Foundation, a sect tied to a direct-marketing firm accused of running a pyramid scheme in several countries. Neither Gabbard, the sect nor the firm, QI Group, wanted the relationships scrutinized.

Gabbard’s campaign paid Washington, D.C.,-based Potomac Square Group for the PR cleanup, trying to mask the connections. But the operation was directed by a Science of Identity follower—and longtime Gabbard adviser—who sits on the board of a QI subsidiary.

The revelations shed further light on Gabbard’s ties to the religious group—publicly described by some former followers as a cult that demands total loyalty to its founder—and to the Hong Kong-based QI, which has been a target of criminal and civil cases alleging fraud and racketeering in at least seven countries.

...

Gabbard’s relative inexperience in national intelligence, as well as her past support for regimes in Russia and Syria, has raised concern among some national-security officials and lawmakers. Gabbard served two years on the House Homeland Security committee.

Gabbard seemed confused about a key U.S. national-security surveillance power in recent meetings with Senate Republicans. GOP lawmakers are expected to support her nomination.

Opinion on Trump Policies

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

Karlyn Bowman at AEI:

Trade: Trump has discussed a new 10 percent tariff on imports from China and a 25 percent tariff on imports from Mexico and Canada. There is longstanding concern in public opinion about China’s unfair trade practices as well as sustained support for protecting workers’ jobs and American manufacturing. Fifty-two percent of registered voters in the new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll favored imposing tariffs on China. Fewer, 40 percent, supported new tariffs on Canada and Mexico. In a new AP/NORC poll, only 29 percent favored a tariff on all imports, while 46 percent opposed the idea. Sixty-eight percent in the Wall Street Journal poll said new tariffs would raise prices.

Immigration: Americans want policymakers to get serious about the border and illegal immigration. In the Harvard/Harris poll, 61 percent favored closing the border and reinstating past policies that discouraged illegal immigration (39 percent were opposed). Seventy-one percent favored deporting undocumented or illegal immigrants who have committed crimes (29 percent were opposed). There is majority support in several polls for mass deportations. The new Fox poll, however, provides a more nuanced impression: 30 percent of registered voters wanted to deport all illegal immigrants, 50 percent deport only those with a criminal record (but allow those without a record to remain and eventually qualify for citizenship), and 10 percent allow all illegal immigrants to stay.

NATO: For years, Americans have believed our NATO allies aren’t contributing their fair share to defense costs. Forty-five percent in the Harvard/Harris poll wanted to raise NATO members’ minimum contributions to 5 percent of their GDP, but 55 percent were opposed to this substantial increase which is larger than what the US spends on its own defense. Only 24 percent wanted to withdraw from the alliance.

Energy and Environment Policy: Americans want to tap America’s vast energy potential — but carefully. Forty-seven percent in the Harvard/Harris poll favor undoing Biden’s ban on offshore oil and gas drilling, but 53 percent are opposed. In the AP/NORC poll, the public split more evenly on increased oil drilling on federal lands, with 35 percent in favor, 39 percent opposed, and 25 percent in the middle. In the Wall Street Journal poll, 50 percent favored easing these regulations, but 46 percent were opposed. More than twice as many Americans opposed withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement as favored the action, 52 percent to 21 percent. As the data on NATO and energy show, Americans see value in working with other countries to address problems.

Pardons: In the AP/NORC poll conducted before Trump’s executive order, 60 percent opposed pardoning most people who participated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, with 21 percent in favor. The Wall Street Journal poll found 57 percent opposed and 38 percent in favor.

Government: Americans have long believed that the government in Washington is wasteful and inefficient. In the Journal’s poll, 53 percent wanted Trump to make changes in how government is run, but 61 percent opposed closing the Department of Education. Sixty-one percent opposed replacing thousands of career civil servants with presidential appointees.

Trump Does Not Care About the Debt

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It notes that neither candidate talked a lot about specific deficit reduction plans.

Lachlan Markay and  Asawin Suebsaeng, Daily Beast, Dec. 5 2018 10:32AM EST:

Since the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s aides and advisers have tried to convince him of the importance of tackling the national debt.

Sources close to the president say he has repeatedly shrugged it off, implying that he doesn’t have to worry about the money owed to America’s creditors—currently about $21 trillion—because he won’t be around to shoulder the blame when it becomes even more untenable.

The friction came to a head in early 2017 when senior officials offered Trump charts and graphics laying out the numbers and showing a “hockey stick” spike in the national debt in the not-too-distant future. In response, Trump noted that the data suggested the debt would reach a critical mass only after his possible second term in office.

“Yeah, but I won’t be here,” the president bluntly said, according to a source who was in the room when Trump made this comment during discussions on the debt.

Catie Edmondson and Andrew Duehren at NYT:

While Republicans have traditionally agitated for less government spending, Mr. Trump has displayed a laissez-faire attitude toward cutting costs and proposed a number of policies that would actually increase the nation’s debt.

Some Republicans have privately made it clear that they’d rather not include some of Mr. Trump’s most expensive proposals in the legislation, especially as they battle concerns from hard-right Republicans that the bill will cost too much.

But Mr. Trump has personally been lobbying lawmakers on some of the issues he campaigned on. In a private meeting with Republican congressional leaders in the Cabinet Room at the White House on Wednesday, he urged them to implement his campaign promise to eliminate taxes on tips.

He told them repeatedly that he saw the move as a winning issue, according to two people familiar with his comments who were not authorized to discuss the private meeting.

Of the suite of tax cuts Mr. Trump proposed during the campaign, terminating taxes on tips has gained the most traction on Capitol Hill. The idea won bipartisan support during the campaign, and Republican aides are working on legislation that would translate the “no tax on tips” slogan into policy that won’t kick off a gold rush of tax avoidance.

There are several other promises Republicans would rather avoid. Free traders on Capitol Hill have particularly bristled at Mr. Trump’s vows to enact across-the-board tariffs. While the president has the authority to unilaterally impose tariffs, some Republicans have studied the possibility of imposing tariffs through law — an idea that quickly proved unpopular within the party.

Trump v. Law and Norms

Our next book is titled The Comeback: the 2024 Elections and American Politics.

Peter Baker at NYT:

He freed even the most violent of the rioters who assaulted the Capitol in his name four years ago. Out of pique over questions of loyalty, he stripped former advisers facing credible death threats of their security details. Disregarding a law passed with bipartisan support and upheld by the Supreme Court, he allowed the Chinese-owned TikTok app to remain in use in the United States despite serious national security concerns.

Not satisfied to simply eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, he ordered government workers to snitch on anyone suspected of not going along or face “adverse consequences,” a practice familiar to anyone of a certain age who lived in Russia. He fired at least a dozen inspectors general who monitor departments for corruption and abuse in a late-night purge on Friday, ignoring a law requiring him to give Congress 30 days’ notice and provide specific reasons.

...

He decided to rewrite the 14th Amendment to the Constitution as it has been understood for more than a century to declare that it does not guarantee automatic citizenship to all children born in the United States. It took just three days for a federal judge to step in and temporarily block the move, which he called “a blatantly unconstitutional order,” but the issue will surely go to the Supreme Court.

 ...

Just three days before his inauguration, he released a crypto token called $Trump that together with other family tokens rose to around $10 billion in value on paper. The tokens create new opportunities for companies and other financial players inside and outside the United States to curry favor with the new administration.

Moreover, while other presidents had wealthy patrons who enjoyed access to the Oval Office, Mr. Trump has gone so far as to surround himself with billionaires on the inaugural platform and give Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, a mandate to revamp the federal government that puts billions of dollars in his pocket through various contracts.

Trump and the Bureaucracy

Our next book is titled The Comeback: the 2024 Elections and American Politics.

With Vance casting the tiebreaker, the Senate confirmed Hegseth as SECDEF.  McConnell voted no.

“Stewardship of the United States Armed Forces, and of the complex bureaucracy that exists to support them, is a massive and solemn responsibility. At the gravest moments, under the weight of this public trust, even the most capable and well-qualified leaders to set foot in the Pentagon have done so with great humility – from George Marshall harnessing American enterprise and Atlantic allies for the Cold War, to Caspar Weinberger orchestrating the Reagan build-up, to Bob Gates earning the wartime trust of two Commanders-in-Chief, of both parties.

“Mere desire to be a ‘change agent’ is not enough to fill these shoes. And ‘dust on boots’ fails even to distinguish this nominee from multiple predecessors of the last decade. Nor is it a precondition for success. Secretaries with distinguished combat experience and time in the trenches have failed at the job.

“Effective management of nearly 3 million military and civilian personnel, an annual budget of nearly $1 trillion, and alliances and partnerships around the world is a daily test with staggering consequences for the security of the American people and our global interests.

“Mr. Hegseth has failed, as yet, to demonstrate that he will pass this test. But as he assumes office, the consequences of failure are as high as they have ever been.

David Nakamura,  Lisa Rein and Matt Viser at WP:

The White House late Friday fired the independent inspectors general of at least 12 major federal agencies in a purge that could clear the way for President Donald Trump to install loyalists in the crucial role of identifying fraud, waste and abuse in the government.

The inspectors general were notified by emails from the White House personnel director that they had been terminated immediately, according to people familiar with the actions, who like others in this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private messages.

The dismissals appeared to violate federal law, which requires Congress to receive 30 days’ notice of any intent to fire a Senate-confirmed inspector general.

 Lisa FriedmanHiroko Tabuchi and Coral Davenport at NYT:

President Trump is stocking the Environmental Protection Agency with officials who have served as lawyers and lobbyists for the oil and chemical industries, many of whom worked in his first administration to weaken climate and pollution protections.

Lee Zeldin, Mr. Trump’s choice to lead the E.P.A., has little experience with environmental policy. He will be expected to hit the ground running, though, to fulfill Mr. Trump’s fire hose of orders directing the agency to cut regulations.

Mr. Zeldin already has marshaled more than a dozen deputies and senior advisers. The quick appointments are in contrast to Mr. Trump’s first term, when many Republicans hesitated to join the administration and internal squabbling delayed the selection of the deputy administrator as well as the chief air pollution regulator for nearly a year.

The top appointees, who have already moved into their offices, include David Fotouhi, Mr. Zeldin’s second-in-command, a lawyer who recently challenged a ban on asbestos; Alex Dominguez, a former oil lobbyist who will work on automobile emissions; and Aaron Szabo, a lobbyist for both the oil and chemical industries who is expected to be the top air pollution regulator.

Health and the Deficit

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It notes that neither candidate talked a lot about specific deficit reduction plans.


Meredith Lee Hill at Politico:

House Republicans in competitive districts warned GOP leaders Thursday: We could lose our seats if you gut Obamacare to pay for a massive border, energy and tax bill.

A group of about a dozen centrist Republicans delivered the message in a meeting with GOP Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) and other senior lawmakers, according to four Republicans familiar with the meeting who were granted anonymity to speak frankly. GOP members are already concerned that they’re poised to lose their trifecta and a swath of seats in the 2026 midterms — they worry GOP efforts to pare back the Affordable Care Act could pour fuel on the fire.

Hans Nichols at Axios:

GOP tax writers are gathering support for creative ways to make the price tag $0 for extending Trump's 2017 tax cuts.

Why it matters: The procedural and budgetary gambit will free Republicans from the burden of finding the $4 trillion in spending cuts. But deficit hawks, including member of the House Freedom Caucus, haven't completely signed off on the novel approach.

Zoom in: Scott Bessent, Trump's nominee for Treasury secretary, has privately indicated to senators that he's sympathetic to their view that the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts should be zero, according to people familiar with the matter.

By the numbers: Under a "current law baseline," extending Trump's personal and estate tax cuts will cost $4 trillion over 10 years.The tax cuts expire at the end of 2025, and the Congressional Budget Office has to score how much revenue the Treasury will miss if Congress passes it for another 10 years.

But what if Congress runs the numbers from a different starting point, and considers "current policy"?

Current policy has the tax cuts in place (at least until the end of the year). Among friends, say Republicans, what if we use current policy as the baseline? Then extending the tax cuts will cost … zero.

Trump to California: Drop Dead

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.   Because of Harri's lopsided victory in California, Trump fell short of a majority of the aggregated popular vote.

He noticed.

Cat Zakrzewski, Sarah Ellison and Michael Birnbaum at WP:

President Donald Trump threatened to withhold federal aid from California as it works to recover from devastating wildfires, recycling several baseless claims and attacks against California’s Democratic leaders during his first sit-down interview since his inauguration.

“I don’t think we should give California anything until they let water flow down,” he told Sean Hannity during a Fox News interview that aired Wednesday night.

Trump was repeating a false claim he has repeatedly made that California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and other public officials have refused to allow water from the northern part of the state to flow down into the Los Angeles area.

Withholding aid, or making it conditional, would be a significant change in standard practice for how the government responds to natural disasters. Recent hurricane funding for mostly GOP-led states passed Congress without conditions.

Los Angeles does not get its water from the Northern California systems Trump described, and water experts have repeatedly explained that the scale and severity of the Southern California fires was not caused by empty reservoirs or a lack of water flowing from Northern California.

Dishonest Inaugural

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

Glenn Kessler fact-checks Trump's inaugural address.  Two examples:

“The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices.”

Trump is leaving out the biggest factor for the 9 percent inflation in June 2022, the highest level in 40 years: the covid pandemic.

Inflation initially spiked because of pandemic-related shocks — increased consumer demand as the pandemic eased and an inability to meet this demand because of supply chain problems, as companies reduced production when consumers hunkered down during the pandemic. Indeed, inflation rose around the world — with many peer countries doing worse than the United States — because of pandemic-related shocks that rippled across the globe. Inflation in December was 2.9 percent.

...

“Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”

Trump is flat wrong to claim that tariffs are paid by a foreign country. Economists agree that tariffs — essentially a tax on domestic consumption — are paid by importers, such as U.S. companies, which in turn pass on most or all of the costs to consumers or producers who may use imported materials in their products. As a matter of demand and supply elasticities, overseas producers will pay part of the tax if there are fewer goods sold to the United States. Domestic producers in effect get a subsidy because they can raise their prices to the level imposed on importers. There is little debate over the fact that consumer prices will rise in response to tariffs.

Trump Greenlights Violence

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the aftemath of the January 6 insurrection.

Ivana Saric at Axios:

Here are the most notorious Jan. 6 defendants impacted by Trump's executive order.

Enrique Tarrio: ex-Proud Boys leader

One of the most well known rioters to receive a pardon is Henry "Enrique" Tarrio, the former leader of the right-wing extremist Proud Boys group.Tarrio was sentenced in 2023 to 22 years in prison after being found guilty of engaging in seditious conspiracy related to the Jan. 6 riot, the longest prison sentence handed down in the Jan. 6 cases.
Seditious conspiracy is committed when two or more people in the U.S. conspire to overthrow, destroy, seize the property of or levy war against the U.S. government, or to prevent the execution of any U.S. law.

Zoom in: While Tarrio wasn't at the Capitol riot himself, prosecutors argued that he maintained command over the Proud Boys during that time and took credit for what unfolded on behalf of the group.Tarrio's mother posted on X Monday night that her son was being released. "Tarrio is free!" she wrote.

Stewart Rhodes: founder of Oath Keepers

Trump commuted the sentence of Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right militia group Oath Keepers.Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2023 for seditious conspiracy, after he helped lead a plot to halt the certification of the 2020 election results.
Rhodes was released from prison early Tuesday morning, Reuters reported.

 Trump pardons Proud Boys leaders

Three other Proud Boys leaders — Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Ethan Nordean — were all military veterans and Proud Boy leaders who had their sentences commuted by Trump.Biggs and Rehl were sentenced for seditious conspiracy and other charges in their Jan. 6 cases, with Biggs was sentenced to 17 years in prison and Rehl to 15 years in prison.
Nordean was sentenced to 18 years in prison after also being found guilty of seditious conspiracy.
It was not immediately clear when the trio would be released.
Kelly Meggs: Oath Keepers leader

One of Rhodes' top deputies, Kelly Meggs, also had his sentence commuted by Trump.Meggs, a former Florida leader of the Oath Keepers, had been sentenced to 12 years in prison for seditious conspiracy and other felonies.
His wife, Connie Meggs, also received a pardon for her role in the riot, per Reuters.

Go deeper: Trump pardons most Jan. 6 defendants

Trump v. Arithmetic

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. Trump completes the comeback with his inauguration today.

He faces big challenges as he becomes president again. These challenges have one thing in common: arithmetic.

Trump has promised “the largest deportation program in American history,” targeting millions of undocumented immigrants. According to the American Immigration Council, it would cost up to $88 billion to deport a million immigrants in a year. And that’s just the direct cost of finding, detaining, and removing them. Americans would have to pay billions more to replace the labor that undocumented immigrants currently perform.

Trump also wants to cut taxes and raise military spending. Together with the cost of mass deportation, these decisions would increase the federal deficit, now nearly two trillion dollars a year. Those deficits would add to the federal debt, which currently stands at an astounding thirty trillion dollars. American taxpayers must pay a trillion dollars a year for interest on this debt.

How will Trump offset his tax cuts and spending increases? He proposes new tariffs, claiming that other countries will pay them. That is false. American importers pay tariffs, and they pass the cost to American consumers. The result will be higher prices. Inflation led to Joe Biden’s defeat and would make Trump unpopular, so do not expect him to follow through with this policy.

Trump has named Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head a commission to fight wasteful spending. (Ramaswamy, however, will reportedly leave the commission to run for governor of Ohio.) There have been many such commissions over the years, and they have never had much impact on the deficit. Do not expect Musk to fare any better. He has no government experience or any expertise in the federal budget.

Perhaps the best thing for the United States would be for Trump to break his promises on taxes and spending.

MAGA Lite

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  

Aaron Zitner and Xavier Martinez at WSJ:

Some 53% want Trump to make significant changes in how government is run once he is inaugurated Monday. But more than 60% oppose one of his central ideas for doing so—replacing thousands of career civil-service workers with people chosen by the president.

More than 60% also oppose eliminating the Education Department, a marquee Trump proposal for paring the federal government. Only 18% would supersede congressional powers and give Trump more authority over federal spending, as he has proposed.

Similarly, the poll finds that, while voters want Trump to build his promised wall along the border with Mexico and address illegal immigration, they also want limits to his plans for sweeping deportations of undocumented immigrants.

Nearly three-quarters say that only those with criminal records should be removed from the country, and 70% would protect longtime residents from removal if they don’t have criminal records. Trump is planning to scrap a policy that focused arrests on serious criminals and discouraged officials from targeting illegal residents who have no criminal record.

Schumer Gave Biden the Final Push

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses Biden's withdrawal from the race.

Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater at NYT:

It was July 13, 2024, a humid summer afternoon just before four o’clock, and Mr. Schumer, the Democratic leader of the Senate, was about to make a blunt case to Mr. Biden that he needed to drop his bid for a second term.

If there were a secret ballot among Democratic senators, Mr. Schumer would tell the president, no more than five would say he should continue running. Mr. Biden’s own pollsters assessed that he had about a 5 percent chance of prevailing against Donald J. Trump, Mr. Schumer would tell him — information that was apparently news to the president. And if the president refused to step aside, the senator would argue, the consequences for Democrats and Mr. Biden’s own legacy after a half-century of public service would be catastrophic.

“If you run and you lose to Trump, and we lose the Senate, and we don’t get back the House, that 50 years of amazing, beautiful work goes out the window,” Mr. Schumer said. “But worse — you go down in American history as one of the darkest figures.”

He would end with a directive. “If I were you,” Mr. Schumer said, “I wouldn’t run, and I’m urging you not to run.”

Danger for Dems in CA

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.   Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

California is in bad shape. The wildfires are just the latest in a series of problems that threaten the reigning Democrats.

 Zachary Basu at Axios:

The big picture: Musk's bluster aside, Democrats acknowledge they face serious challenges in California that predate the fires — and that their supermajority in the legislature makes it difficult to blame Republicans.

Crime, homelessness, illegal immigration, high prices and an intractable housing crisis helped Trump increase his vote share in 45 of California's 58 counties in 2024.

In Los Angeles County — which shifted an astonishing 11 points to the right — a progressive district attorney was defeated by a former Republican who vowed to crack down on crime.

California voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure, Prop 36, to increase penalties for drug and theft crimes, and recalled Oakland's mayor and local district attorney over public safety issues.

Reality check: The main beneficiaries of California's backlash have been independents and moderate Democrats — not Republicans, and certainly not the strain of MAGA Republicans publicly agitating for a revolution.Most Californians believe climate change is contributing to the fires, even if they're unhappy with state leadership's handling of the crisis.

House Republicans' threat to condition federal aid to California, meanwhile, risks public blowback at a moment of vulnerability for Democrats.

What to watch: Republicans today are flush with billionaire cash and influence, much of it concentrated in Silicon Valley, Hollywood and other parts of California where supporting Trump is no longer taboo. Flipping the state is still a "long-term project," as pro-Trump activist Charlie Kirk put it last month — but one that could be accelerated by this type of systemic shock.

"We don't see these shifts overnight," California Assembly Republican leader James Gallagher said in a local news interview. "Texas was once a blue state, and slowly but surely it became a red state."

Democratic Challenges

Our next book is tentatively titled The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.   Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

John Haskell:

There are more red states than blue by a margin of 24-19. And as partisan lines have hardened this century we have now reached the point where Democrats have exactly zero senators from these states. The last of them had a tough time surviving — a seemingly impossible one in West Virginia that Joe Manchin managed, and improbable success in Montana for Tester and Ohio for Brown. Alas, Manchin stepped side in 2024 and other two were defeated.

The red state Senate Democrat can now be reclassified from an endangered species to an extinct one.

Even if the party gets every single blue seat (they have all but the one seat in Maine stubbornly held onto by Susan Collins), they start at a severe disadvantage. The balance of power in the Senate rides on the seven purple states. Democrats do very well there, with 10 of the 14 seats, but even that is not enough, with Republicans now holding a 53-47 overall edge. Democrats’ prospects of turning that around are vanishingly slim. More likely is that Republicans gradually begin to even the score in the purple states, adding to their advantage.

As for the House, we’ll know a lot more after the 2026 midterms. At this point the body is on a knife’s edge with 220 likely GOP seats to 215 for the Democrats once all is said and done. But Democrats hold far more Trump district seats (14) than Republicans have Harris district seats (3).

While the situation in the House is not as clear cut as it is in the Senate, it too doesn’t look promising for Democrats. It’s worthwhile to be reminded that the states that stand to gain the most seats after the 2030 census are governed by Republicans who have access to those computer programs that facilitate gerrymandering. What states will losing seats? You guessed it, they’re mostly blue. Add it up: a net gain for Republicans beginning in 2032.

What we’re starting to see is a mirror image of the 1954-1994 period where the House was solidly in Democratic hands and the Senate was usually but not always also Democratic. Today it’s a solid Republican Senate with John Thune of South Dakota headed for a long run as Majority Leader and Chuck Schumer having to make himself comfortable in the minority leader’s office space. In the House, a majority is within reach for Democrats, but maybe not for long.

Jack Smith's Final Report

 Our next book is tentatively titled The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.   Among other things, it discusses the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage at NYT:

The Justice Department released a 137-page volume early Tuesday morning laying out the details of the investigation that the former special counsel Jack Smith conducted into President-elect Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.

The release of the report, which Mr. Trump’s legal team had vehemently fought, is likely to be the Justice Department’s final word on the attempt to use the legal system to hold Mr. Trump accountable for conspiring to subvert the election results. Because Mr. Trump won the 2024 election, prosecutors were forced under a binding Justice Department policy to drop the case against him.

...

In what amounted to his report’s most important finding, Mr. Smith asserted he was confident that his team of prosecutors and investigators had amassed enough evidence to convict Mr. Trump had the case been allowed to go to trial.

The report spent nearly 30 pages recounting the details of how Mr. Trump engaged in multiple criminal conspiracies. Much of that was already in public view through the indictment in the case and a lengthy evidentiary memo that Mr. Smith filed in October as part of the fallout from the Supreme Court’s ruling that Mr. Trump enjoyed presumptive immunity for his official acts as president.

Mr. Smith said his office “stands fully behind” both “the strength of the government’s proof” and “the merits of the prosecution.” And despite the major setbacks he faced in his more than two years of pursuing the case, he stuck by the core accusations leveled against Mr. Trump.

“The through line of all of Mr. Trump’s criminal efforts was deceit — knowingly false claims of election fraud — and the evidence shows that Mr. Trump used these lies as a weapon to defeat a federal government function foundational to the United States’ democratic process,” Mr. Smith wrote.

Senate 2026

Our next book is tentatively titled The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.   Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Nathan Gonzales at Roll Call:

The smallest initial Senate battleground in history (probably) is good news for Republicans (probably).

At this early stage of the 2026 cycle, Inside Elections rates just five senators as vulnerable, including three Democrats (Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, Michigan’s Gary Peters and New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen) and two Republicans (Maine’s Susan Collins and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis).

Recent cycles have shown a strong correlation between how a state votes for president and who it sends to the Senate, putting Ossoff, Peters and Collins in electoral danger because of the 2024 results (Donald Trump won Georgia and Michigan, while Kamala Harris won Maine). Harris won New Hampshire and Trump won North Carolina, but both states remain competitive.

Everything else looks like a stretch for both parties. It’s hard to imagine Republicans winning in Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico or Oregon, while Democrats need a lot to go right to seriously compete in Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Ohio or Texas.

Bass in Trouble

Our last book was titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Our next book will look at the 2024 election. Among other things, it discusses state and local elections.

Shawn Hubler and Soumya Karlamangla at NYT:

After the first rally in her campaign for mayor of Los Angeles in 2021, Karen Bass spoke candidly about what she saw as a potential drawback to the job — a lack of world travel and involvement in global affairs.

Ms. Bass was accustomed to circling the globe as a Democratic member of Congress and of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and had spent decades working on U.S.-Africa relations. It was one of the most absorbing parts of her political career, she told The New York Times in an interview on Oct. 17, 2021, at her home in the Baldwin Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles.

“I went to Africa every couple of months, all the time,” she said, adding, “The idea of leaving that, especially the international work and the Africa work, I was like, ‘Mmm, I don’t think I want to do that.’”

She ultimately decided that she did, telling The Times that if she was elected mayor, “not only would I of course live here, but I also would not travel internationally — the only places I would go would be D.C., Sacramento, San Francisco and New York, in relation to L.A.”

That pledge has been spectacularly broken.

When a cascade of deadly and destructive wildfires erupted across the Los Angeles region on Tuesday, the mayor was on her way home from Ghana in West Africa, where she had attended the inauguration of a new president.

...

 “I think being out of state and not at her post when the crisis broke out is fairly devastating for her,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican political consultant who was an aide to former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “This is the biggest disaster in Los Angeles since the Watts riots. You have one job as mayor. It’s to be here and be leading. This wasn’t unpredictable, like an earthquake.

...

The National Weather Service’s Los Angeles office began telegraphing increasingly dire messages about heavy winds on Sunday. A red flag warning about fire danger that was issued Sunday was upgraded Monday to a “particularly dangerous situation” warning, only the fifth time the agency had ever issued such a warning for Los Angeles.

“HEADS UP!!! A LIFE-THREATENING, DESTRUCTIVE, Widespread Windstorm is expected,” the agency posted on X Monday, saying that winds could reach 100 m.p.h and would hit places that were not usually affected.

Convicted Felon Trump

In Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics, we look at Trump's dishonesty and disregard for the rule of law.

Our next book will look at the 2024 campaign and the impact of Trump's legal problems

Peter Baker at NYT:

A big economic package, mass deportations, maybe even some invasions of other countries. Oh, and one more item. “I’ll do my little thing tomorrow,” a busy President-elect Donald J. Trump mentioned the other night.

That little thing was the first criminal sentencing of an American president. That little thing was confirmation that Mr. Trump, just 10 days later, would become the first president to move into the White House with a rap sheet. That little thing is the latest shift in standards that once governed high office.

Mr. Trump does not really consider it a little thing, of course, given how strenuously he sought to avoid Friday’s sentencing for 34 felony counts in his hush money case. But to a remarkable degree, he has succeeded in making it a little thing in the body politic. What was once a pretty-much-guaranteed disqualifier for the presidency is now just one more political event seen through a partisan lens.

After all, no one seemed shocked after Friday’s sentencing in New York. While Mr. Trump was spared jail time or financial penalties, he effectively had the word “felon” tattooed on his record for all time unless a higher court overturns the conviction. But that development was already baked into the system. Voters knew last fall that Mr. Trump had been found guilty by a jury of his peers, and enough of them decided it was either illegitimate or not as important as other issues.

Trump Threatens Allies

Our next book will look at the 2024 election and its aftermath.

Canada and Denmark are NATO allies. David E. Sanger and Michael Shear at NYT:

President-elect Donald J. Trump refused on Tuesday to rule out the use of military or economic coercion to force Panama to give up control of the canal that America built more than a century ago and to push Denmark to sell Greenland to the United States.

In a rambling, hourlong news conference, Mr. Trump repeatedly returned to the theme of American sacrifice in building the canal and accused China, falsely, of operating it today. When pressed on the question of whether he might order the military to force Panama to give it up — in violation of treaties and other agreements reached during the Carter administration — or to do the same with Greenland, he said: “No, I can’t assure you on either of those two.”

“We need them for economic security — the Panama Canal was built for our military,” he said. Asked again if he would rule out the use of military force, he said: “I’m not going to commit to that. You might have to do something.”

Mr. Trump’s statements propelled his repeated calls for expanding American territory to a new level, one that is bound to roil three American allies — Panama; Denmark, which handles Greenland’s foreign and security affairs; and Canada, which he has mocked as America’s “51st State.” On Tuesday he made clear, though, that he was not joking, suggesting that if Canada remained a sovereign state the financial cost to its trading relationship with the United States could be crushing.