Who benefits from Trump’s abrupt reversals of policy?

When last Wednesday Trump announced his huge set of tariffs on every country, the stock markets tanked globally on Thursday and Friday. Then on Monday and Tuesday, Trump insisted that the tariffs were here to stay and that there would be no pause in them going into effect but the markets rallied somewhat because, as is often the case after a big sell off, some investors swoop in to buy stocks that they think are now available at bargain prices.

Then today, Trump abruptly announced what he had said he definitely would not do and that is issue a 90-day pause in the implementation of the tariffs, though it was not clear whether it meant all the tariffs or just some, since he also announced that tariffs on China would increase to 125% after they said that they would impose tariffs of 84% on US goods in retaliation to the earlier US tariffs. But despite that ambiguity in exactly what the pause meant, the stock market surged upwards today.

Which raises the obvious question: Who in addition to Trump would have known about these policy actions and reversals? Because whoever knew could make a killing on the stock market.
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Eggflation

One of the curious things is how the price of eggs has become the go-to proxy for the level of inflation in the country. This is due to Trump who during the presidential campaign kept talking about the price of eggs (and bacon) as being extremely high and blaming Joe Biden for it and promising that he would bring prices down on day one of his presidency. Of course, that was rubbish, like pretty much everything he says. Short of imposing direct price controls on specific items, the government has little sway over their prices. Trump has conveniently stopped talking about the price of eggs and indeed of inflation altogether which remains at the levels before he took office. He now says that it may take some time to get inflation down. Well, duh.
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Trump’s ‘act first and fight the courts’ policy faces first major test

[UPDATE: Chief justice John Roberts has lifted the midnight deadline today and asked lawyers to present written arguments by 5:00pm tomorrow (Tuesday).

The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily paused a court-imposed midnight deadline to return to the US a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, agreeing to a request from President Donald Trump that will give the justices more time to consider the case.

Chief Justice John Roberts granted the “administrative stay,” a move that will extend the deadline until the court hands down a more fulsome decision in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was deported on March 15.

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It is clear that Trump thinks that the president can do anything they want, the laws and norms of democracy be damned. He takes any action that he likes and then fights any challenges vigorously in the courts. He has been sued many times and lost in the lower courts but refuses to reverse the action, instead taking it to the next level of the Appeals Courts. So far, none of these cases have made it to the Supreme Court. The key question is what he will do if even that body, so friendly to him, rules against him.

Today we are going to see what happens in the case of a Kilmar Abrego Garcia who was deported to El Salvador and is being held there in a maximum security prison.

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Trump plays dominance games with the world economy

In discussing Trump’s presidency, I though that one of the few things that he cared about, other than his own business interests, was the stock market. It looks like I was wrong. His imposition of drastic tariffs on pretty much all countries have tanked stock markets worldwide and led to fears of a recession. Even he must have known that this would happen and yet he went ahead anyway, raising the question: Why?

One answer is that he thinks that the tariffs will raise enormous amounts of new revenue, enough to pay for the tax cuts for the rich. Of course, since the costs of the tariffs will be borne by the importers of goods who will pass it on to consumers in the form of higher prices, this is just another typical reverse Robin Hood plan by Republicans, taking from the poor and giving to the rich, a policy much favored by the oligarchy. The higher costs paid by most people will be more than what they will receive in the form of small tax cuts, but that inconvenient fact will be omitted while Trump brags about the tax cuts.

But I have to think that there is more at play here, that the tariffs are really a power play. A clue to what might be going on can be seen in some comments he made.
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Why is RFK Jr going to this funeral?

A second child has died in Texas, reportedly due to measles.

The US health and human services department confirmed the death to NBC late Saturday, though the agency insisted exactly why the child died remained under investigation. On Sunday, the New York Times reported that the eight-year-old girl had died from “measles pulmonary failure” early Thursday at a hospital in Lubbock, Texas, citing records obtained by the outlet.

It marked the second time a child with measles – which is easily preventable through vaccination – had died since 26 February. The first was a six-year-old girl – also hospitalized in Lubbock – whose parents had not had her vaccinated.

NBC and Axios reported that the Trump administration health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, was expected to attend the funeral of the second child, with the service scheduled for Sunday.

If the cause of death is still under investigation by the department of HHS, the department run by antivaxxer RFK Jr. , why is he going to the funeral? To urge people to vaccinate their children? That seems unlikely given his past. What it suggests that he and the HHS know that she did die of measles and that he is trying to shield himself from the fallout of yet another needless death caused by his promotion of anti-vaccine propaganda.

I hope the mourners give him a piece of their mind, though if the parents of the dead child are vaccine deniers, they may not want to acknowledge their complicity in this senseless tragedy. The family belongs to the same Mennonite religious community to which the first child belonged. The parents of the first child stand by their decision not to vaccinate.

There is no convincing people when their beliefs are a combination of religious dogmatism and anti-science ignorance, even when it leads to a horrendous personal tragedy. When that dangerous combination is supported by high government officials like RFK Jr., then we are in real trouble.

The fierce intensity of small town politics

Carmel-by-the-Sea is very small upscale town near where I live, where Clint Eastwood and Brad Pitt own homes and rich people own vacation homes. It is a quirky place that has some very strange laws that derive from its early history when it was incorporated in 1916 as a place for artists of various kinds.

One of the many quirks is that the houses have no street numbers, a topic I wrote about a few years ago, looking into the history of that issue. Currently homes are identified by specifying ““Lincoln Street 3 southeast of Fifth Avenue” or other formulations. Any measure to introduce street number arouses fierce opposition from some residents, even though they seem to be in the minority.
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The bizarro world of Trumpian economics

Trump has released his big tariffs plan and most observers are stunned, not just by the size and scope of the tariffs ,but also by the bizarre reasoning that has been given for the numbers

It is clear from the reasoning given for the sizes of the tariffs that Trump sees things in very simplistic terms. He thinks that the US should have a trade surplus with every other country and that if it has a deficit, that must be because those countries are engaging in unfair trade and should be punished accordingly. That is how he arrived at his tariff numbers.
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Wisconsin and Florida elections

There were three major elections yesterday, two for congressional seats in Florida and one for a state supreme court justice in Wisconsin. The Florida seats were vacated by the resignations of Matt Gaetz and Michael Waltz. Gaetz, a controversial figure accused of having sex with underage girls as well as using drugs, did not resign because of that but because, incredibly, Trump had nominated him for the position of attorney general. But when even some Republicans viewed his nomination unfavorably, he withdrew it.

Waltz resigned because Trump appointed him as national security advisor, where he has recently been criticized for allegedly including the editor of The Atlantic magazine in a high-security chat group over the unsecured commercial channel Signal. It turned out that this was not the only unsecured group chat Waltz had created to discuss sensitive information, having created 20 more on Signal. He seems sloppy and incompetent to say the least.
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TV review: The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram

On March 15, 2019, a man walked into two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand during Friday prayers and killed 51 people and injured 89 others. He live-streamed the first attack. The. following month on April 27, another man walked into a synagogue in San Diego during Passover and started shooting, killing one woman and injuring three others. On October 12, 2022, yet another man shot and killed two people and injured another outside a gay bar in Bratislava, Slovakia. In each case the person was caught and the authorities concluded that they were so-called ‘lone wolf’ attacks in that the perpetrator acted alone.
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Top health officials resign over Kennedy’s misinformation and lies

[UPDATE: ProPublica reports that “Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging”. That has all the signs of Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism.]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent years peddling crank theories about vaccines and yet the Republicans in the Senate approved of his nomination to be the head of the department of Health and Human Services, the cabinet office that oversees almost all the agencies that deal with public health, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

During his hearings he claimed that he was not a vaccine skeptic but anyone who has followed his career knows that he was being disingenuous at best, if not outright lying. And sure enough, top career people in those agencies are quitting, with one of them Dr. Peter Marks, pointing to Kennedy’s misinformation and lies as the reason.
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