Politics

Waving a big chart as a prop in the White House Rose Garden, Donald Trump suggested his new tariff plan was simple: “Reciprocal – that means they do it to us, and we do it to them. Very simple. Can’t get simpler than that.”

Perhaps a bit too simple. The method used to calculate the most important numbers in international trade, politics and economics has left some of the world’s leading experts shocked.

For each country, the White House looked up its trade in goods deficit for 2024, then divided that by the total value of imports. Trump, to be “kind”, said he would, however, offer a discount, so halved that figure. The calculation was even distilled into a formula.

A cautionary tale as Trump decides to do this again. I see no way around this being an engineered collapse given historical data. Essentially, if you think 2008 was bad, think more 1930.

The text "AI ART & intellectual property" in blue, next to the ancom flag with a green brain made of circuits over it. This is all on a digital art wooden background featuring individual textured planks with varying distances between them lined up as a wall.

The Trump/Musk regime is traumatizing the economy. It is abducting innocent people and deporting some without due process to a foreign torture prison. It is dismantling essential government agencies and purging good people who’ve served them well. It is extorting universities and law firms. It has upended our status in the world. It has attacked the rule of law.

And this weekend, there’s something you can do about it.

On Saturday, April 5, thousands – maybe even millions – of people will join together in cities and towns across the country in nonviolent protest.

It’s essential that you take part, if you can. Sign up now. Tell your neighbors. Tell your friends.

The event, called “Hands Off!”, was launched by Indivisible, but now has over 200 organizational partners including MoveOn, the Working Families Party, 50501, Common Cause, Public Citizen, the ACLU, and the AFL-CIO.

The Trump administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE have begun dismantling the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), beginning with stated plan is to cut half of the agency’s workforce.

Their biggest cuts appear to be in the Large Business and International division, which audits wealthy individuals and companies with more than $10 million in assets. These are essentially the workers that make sure billionaires and corporations pay their taxes.

Musk and Trump claim to be sage businessmen, but it would be hard to find a business owner in America that would dismantle their accounts receivable department when their wealthiest clients still owe them money.

So make no mistake: These cuts will cost taxpayers a lot more than they save.

This video is informative and well worth a watch.

Robert Reich always has something intelligent to say.

Tonight, Democrats have their first chance to fight back against Donald Trump and reverse some of their party’s losses in the 2024 election — and Republicans have a shot to score a big judicial victory in a court currently controlled narrowly by liberals, and in a state that is key to the presidency and control of the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s a race everyone is watching and people are spending significant sums on. I’m talking of course about the Wisconsin Supreme Court race between liberal Susan Crawford and conservative Brad Schimel.

Odds are you have probably heard of the election from the coverage of Elon Musk’s involvement, which has included him spending $20 million in television and digital advertising as well as giving away checks for $1 million to random rally goers this weekend (which is, apparently and shockingly, not illegal). But the stakes are significant: The Wisconsin Supreme Court has recently decided cases on gerrymandering, campaign finance, and voting rights, and would have jurisdiction over a pending abortion case and important electoral cases before the 2028 presidential race. Across all parties, nearly $100 million has been spent on the race.

Prognosticators mostly expect Crawford to narrowly win the race, with room for uncertainty and a small Schimel victory. Crawford has led most of the polls conducted of the race, and the line at Split Ticket is that Republicans have an off-year turnout problem that tilts the scales against them. You can apply a similar logic from my ”dual electorates” piece and draw the conclusion that Schimel is likely to have a bad time, though a win is not impossible. The prediction market Kalshi (I know) gives Crawford an 84% chance (the markets tend to overestimate odds for losers, so her real odds might be higher than this).

Whatever the odds, what really matters is who votes, and here is how to watch the results like a nerd pro:

• Union representatives for HHS employees received a notice Thursday that 8,000 to 10,000 employees will be terminated.
• 3,500 jobs at the Food and Drug Administration, which inspects and sets safety standards for medications, medical devices and foods.
• 2,400 jobs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which monitors for infectious disease outbreaks and works with public health agencies nationwide.
• 1,200 jobs at the NIH.
• 300 jobs at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the Affordable Care Act marketplace, Medicare and Medicaid.

Dear American Brothers and Sisters of the United States Postal Service,

I write to you from Rome, Italy, where we postal workers have already lived through the catastrophe that now looms over you in the United States: privatization.

I write not only in solidarity but in warning, so that you may learn from our painful experience and resist this assault with the full strength of an organized working class. The fate of the United States Postal Service (USPS) is not just an American issue—it is an international struggle against the same capitalist forces that have dismantled public services worldwide to enrich a handful of elites.

The comedian Nikki Glaser, one of the few celebrities to walk the red carpet at this year’s Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prizes, now thinks twice before doing political jokes directed at Trump.

“Like, you just are scared that you’re gonna get doxxed and death threats or who knows where this leads, like, detained. Honestly, that’s not even like a joke. It’s like a real fear,” she told Deadline.

The only things really new here are the anecdotal lede and this tidbit, but I thought I'd share for those who perhaps don't follow the news all that closely.

This is very bad.

The Point: Thiel makes an investment Mathias Döpfner, CEO and part-owner of Axel Springer — the German media giant that owns Politico — has developed remarkably close ties to tech billionaire Peter Thiel. His son, Moritz Döpfner, previously served as chief of staff at Thiel Capital, the billionaire’s family office. Now, according to German media, the young Döpfner has started a new venture capital fund – with a $50 million investment from Thiel.

We thought it would be instructive to look at the 17 states with Democratic governors and Democratic majorities in their state legislatures over the past two years, and study what they actually got done. We wanted to separate those states that took up the challenge of governing from those that were unwilling to use the power they have been bequeathed by the electorate.

The resulting ranking, which we’re calling the Blue State Power Index, is admittedly highly unscientific. We took into account the margin of Democratic support in the legislature: What a nearly all-Democratic legislature can do should be more than a closely divided one. We thought about what record these states already had in place: If states had already accomplished key elements of a progressive agenda, then they had less to potentially achieve. Given that most states must balance their budgets, we took into account their resources and tax bases: What a state with a poor population can manage to fund is necessarily more constrained than a state with a rich one—especially with Trump administration cuts and threats looming.