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Trump Is Triggering a New Nuclear Weapons Race

In Trump 2.0 America, there is much to fear, ranging from social program funding cuts coupled with the destruction of federal agencies, to potential soaring consumer prices combined with a recession, to masked federal agents seizing people (no citizens as yet) in their homes or on the streets and making them disappear, to the effort to erase racial and sexual minorities, to the future one's children or grandchildren may face in a country with an increasingly fascist and authoritarian government.  Add to the list, as laid out in a very long piece in Politico Magazine is a new nuclear weapons race among former U.S. allies spurred on in part that the realization that America is no longer a reliable ally who will honor its defense treaty obligations.  Just as the Felon's tariff war has upended the world economy, so too have statements by the Felon and his henchmen - think Vance and Rubio - that have insulted Asian and European nations and suggested that when push comes to shove America may not honor its common defense agreements.  Hence countries from German, Poland, Japan and South Korea are beginning to discuss building their own nuclear arms defenses.  Here are article highlights:

In his first presidential term, shortly before heading off to what would become an infamous 2018 summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Trump called nukes “the biggest problem in the world” and summed up for reporters what he hoped to accomplish: “No more nuclear weapons anywhere in the world.” Trump has repeatedly sounded the theme in his second term as well, warning over and over of “World War III.”

So it’s more than a little curious to consider that, in less than three months as president, Trump has already set in motion the opposite trend: potentially the fastest and most dangerous acceleration of nuclear arms proliferation around the world since the early Cold War.

The new nuclear powers aren’t just the rogue nations that have long been the focus of U.S. concern, countries like Iran and North Korea. Increasingly, the nations considering going nuclear are longtime U.S. allies, from Germany to South Korea, Japan to Saudi Arabia. Faced with the threat of U.S. withdrawal from its defense commitments, more and more countries are now openly talking about embracing the bomb — and just as worrisome, actually deploying nukes if hostilities break out.

Nor is there any evidence that in the flurry of activity marking what Trump has called “the most successful” start of any presidency in U.S. history, his administration has even begun reckoning with the implications of these seemingly contradictory policies.

“I’ve heard it’s a pure ghost town,” said Matt Costlow, who worked in the Pentagon’s Office of Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy in Trump’s first term. “There’s just no one there. And the staff that is there is spread so thin it’s causing this paralysis.” As a result, he adds, “I don’t know that the Trump administration yet has a set view on the desirability of allies going nuclear. I think there’s a mix of views.”

Yet it’s clear that Trump’s signaling of a global drawdown of the U.S. defense umbrella has also produced an accelerated trend toward building — or at least considering deploying — nuclear weapons. Potential U.S. adversaries as well as allies say they are puzzled by the fact that no one in the Trump administration seems willing or able to grapple with the issue.

In Beijing, Chinese officials are growing worried that “regional security is fragmenting and eventually they’ll have to deal with more nuclear or ‘nuclear-latent’ countries in Asia,” said Francesca Giovannini, head of the Project on

Managing the Atom at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who met with Chinese officials in late March. The problem, she said, is that the Chinese “really have zero idea of who he will appoint for arms control dealings. The Trump people don’t have the expertise in place to make decisions.”

One senior official who was just confirmed by the Senate, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, has been a leading and often strident voice in pressing European and Asian allies to beef up their own defenses. Last year Colby told the Yonhap News Agency that South Korea was going to have to take “primary, essentially overwhelming, responsibility” for its own defense and added that Washington should not sanction Seoul if it decides to go nuclear.

In his Senate testimony in March, Colby also said that Trump believes Taiwan needs to boost its defense spending from under 3 percent to about 10 percent of gross domestic product to deter a war with China — a hike that Taiwanese Premier Cho Jung-tai called “impossible.”

Many U.S. allies now have a sense that Trump is abandoning the entire postwar global system and casting the world back into a vicious scramble for power in which the biggest powers get to dominate their regions and the smaller countries fend for themselves. Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but said as much in a Jan. 30 interview with conservative pundit Megyn Kelly, when he effectively conceded that Washington’s hegemonic global stature had been “an anomaly.”

“The message coming from the U.S. is that Trump’s foreign policy is all about spheres of influence. Russia can have Ukraine. China can have Taiwan,” said Karl Friedhoff, an expert in East Asian security at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

As a result, some national security experts say this could be turning into the most unstable period since the early Cold War — an unstable period that could have a lot more nukes in a lot more places.

The danger posed by nuclear weapons in the 21st century is shaping up to be a very different threat than it was in the 20th century.

For decades during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union built up massive arsenals of nuclear missiles that could be launched from the air, ground or sea. The destructive power of those weapons led the two nations to conclude a series of arms control agreements that eventually reduced the size of those arsenals.

Then, in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, there was a concern that the breakup of the Soviet Union would result in loose nukes and newly independent post-Soviet states being armed with nuclear weapons. As a result, three former Soviet republics — Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus — were pressured into relinquishing the weapons stationed on their territories. In 1998, President Bill Clinton made an anguished plea to Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif not to test a bomb; after Sharif refused, Clinton imposed sanctions. Finally, in the mid-90s the Clinton administration pushed successfully to extend the NPT from 25 years to an indefinite term. Among the nations that ultimately gave up active nuclear weapons programs: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Italy, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and Yugoslavia.

Today, largely as a result of all this frenetic diplomacy led by Washington, there are just nine nuclear powers in the world, as there have been for decades: the United States, Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia and most recently, North Korea.

Yet increasingly, nuclear weapons are being sought by countries that aren’t global superpowers but instead face threats from neighbors or regional rivals, such as Russia in Europe, or Iran in the Middle East. That means the nuclear equation is increasingly a region-by-region strategic puzzle with global ramifications.

Here’s some of what that looks like.

In Germany — a country where even discussing the bomb used to be a political third rail — the likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, didn’t rule out the idea of developing one in a March interview. Merz also said Berlin should start talks about expanding the French and British nuclear deterrents to Europe, and he suggested Germany may finally be ready to go along with France’s on-again, off-again push for strategic autonomy from the United States. French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed extending France’s nuclear umbrella; on March 18 he said France will deploy its own Rafale fighter jets equipped with supersonic nuclear warheads along its border with Germany in 2035.

And in Poland, a NATO front-line nation, Prime Minister Donald Tusk in March became that country’s first leader to hint at going nuclear, saying in a speech his nation should “reach for opportunities related to nuclear weapons.” He also suggested that Ukraine made a mistake by giving up its nuclear arsenal in the 1990s, leaving itself vulnerable to Russia.

As for Ukraine, which feels threatened with abandonment by Washington in the face of Russia’s aggression, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has openly talked about reestablishing a nuclear deterrent. . . . . “Say you’re Zelenskyy and you’re being forced into unsatisfactory peace with Russia without good security guarantees, what’s your best bet?” said Daniel Serwer of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Could the Ukrainians technically do this? Sure. Look what they’ve done driving the war. They know their business. They’ve handled a lot of nuclear material. They have good physicists and really good engineers. It’s not beyond Polish, German, Japanese or Taiwanese capabilities either.”

And in the long run a French guarantee of extended nuclear deterrence would not suffice for many European states. “Would the Poles see it as credible? Not a chance. It’s not likely the Germans would either,” said Roberts, who foresees a future of new regional groupings of nuclearized states, including the Nordic countries.

In the Middle East, experts believe Iran has been backed into a strategic corner since Israel decimated its proxy armies, especially Hezbollah in Lebanon, and that its leaders are now more motivated than ever to build a bomb. . . . Iran has raced to develop its program, and current assessments estimate that Iran is close to producing weapons-grade uranium and is only months, not years, away from completing a nuclear bomb.

Both Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have indicated they would duplicate Iranian nuclear capabilities if Tehran got a bomb. Turkey will begin operating its Russia-built Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant — its first — this year. And numerous reports over the years have indicated that the Saudis may have a secret diplomatic understanding with Pakistan under which Riyadh could quickly obtain a nuclear weapon from Islamabad, which developed its own bomb in the 1990s with Saudi financial backing. (Saudi Arabia denies such an understanding.)

But since his first administration, Trump and senior defense officials also have been pushing Asian allies hard to build up their own defenses. As a result, in South Korea and even Japan — where building a bomb was once unthinkable after Hiroshima and Nagasaki — there is a new willingness to embrace nuclear weapons in some form. . . . since the Russian invasion of Ukraine we’ve seen a total wake-up call in Japan about what kind of additional military power to possess,” said Junjiro Shida, a national security expert at Meio University on Okinawa, where about half of the 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan are stationed.

In a statement last fall, Ishiba proposed an “Asian version of NATO” that must “specifically consider America’s sharing of nuclear weapons or the introduction of nuclear weapons into the region.”

South Korean politicians have gone further. In January — a week before Trump’s inauguration — South Korea’s politically embattled president, Yoon Suk Yeol, said for the first time that his country might consider building nuclear weapons in the face of mounting threats from nuclearized North Korea. Yoon has since been ousted after being impeached for declaring martial law last year. But even his likely successor, Lee Jae-myung, leader of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea — which once stoutly opposed nukes — has not ruled this out.

“There is growing doubt among allies and partners about whether the United States will meet its defense commitments when the chips are down,” said Eric Brewer, the former director for counterproliferation at the National Security Council in Trump’s first term. “But there are a lot of other systemic factors driving countries to talk about developing nuclear weapons. One is the deteriorating regional security environments. In Europe, [you have] Russia’s growing nuclear arsenal and threat. In Asia you have the growing North Korean and Chinese nuclear arsenal. In the Middle East you have Iran at the nuclear threshold. The other factor is the absence of cooperation among great powers.

But as Costlow and others point out, just a willingness to broach the prospect of going nuclear could be something of a Pandora’s box.

“I compare it to uranium enrichment: The first 20 percent is actually the hardest hurdle to overcome. The last 80 percent doesn’t take much time,” Costlow said. “For some of these countries just the fact that they’re now talking about becoming a potential nuclear state is the toughest hurdle.”

And, he added, they’re starting to clear it.

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Trump Is Demonstrating Why Dictatorships Fail

After wild gyrations in the stock market the market is again down, the American economy (and the world's) is at risk, and the trade war with China is intensifying with China now hitting back with 125% tariffs on American goods.   Meanwhile, the federal civil service is being torn asunder and war has been declared on public education with threats to withhold federal funding, efforts to rewrite history so than no one other than white heterosexual males play a role, and book banning.  All the result of a single individual who is a malignant narcissist and who has contempt for true experts and expertise in general. As bad as things are and the way prices are going to significantly rise thanks to irrational tariff actions, much of MAGA world continues to drink the Kool-Aid and grasps for anything to suggest their glorious leader is not wrong, be it citing lower oil prices  - which are dropping due to economic uncertainty caused by the Felon - or applauding the white washing of true history that puts their ancestors in a bad light (for disclaimer, I have my own slaving owners in Charleston, South Carolina, which is a reality I cannot change).   They refuse the ineptitude and arbitrariness of the Felons actions which as a piece in The Atlantic lays out shows why dictatorships eventually fail, especially under a petulant and vengeful dictator, after ding great damage to the country involved.  Here are column highlights: 

He blinked. But we don’t really know why.  Whether it was the stock market cascading downward, investors fleeing from U.S. Treasury bonds, Republican donors jamming the White House phones, or even fears for his own portfolio, President Donald Trump decided yesterday afternoon to lift, temporarily, most of his arbitrary tariffs. This was his personal decision. His “instinct,” as he put it. His whim. And his decision, instinct, or whim could bring the tariffs back again.

The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate him, in this or almost any other matter. The Cabinet is composed of sycophants and loyalists who are willing to defend contradictory policies, even if doing so makes them look like fools. The courts haven’t decisively intervened yet either. No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that’s what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning.

This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like. And this is why the men who wrote the Constitution never wanted anyone to have it. In that famously hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia, windows closed for the sake of secrecy, they sweated and argued about how to limit the powers of the American executive. They arrived at the idea of dividing power between different branches of government. As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 47”: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

More than two centuries later, the system created by that first Constitutional Congress has comprehensively failed. The people and institutions that are supposed to check executive power are refusing to restrain this president. We now have a de facto tyrant who thinks he can bend reality to his will without taking any facts or any evidence into consideration, and without listening to any contrary views. And although the economic damage he has caused is easier to measure, he has inflicted the same level of harm to scientific research, to civil liberties, to health care, and to the civil service.

From this wasteful and destructive incident, one useful lesson can be drawn. In recent years, many people who live in democracies have become frustrated by their political systems, by the endless wrangling, the difficulty of creating compromise, the slow pace of decisions.

Just as in the first half of the 20th century, would-be authoritarians have begun arguing that we would all be better off without these institutions. “The truth is that men are tired of liberty,” said Mussolini. Lenin spoke with scorn about the failings of so-called bourgeois democracy. In the United States, a brand-new school of techno-authoritarian thinkers find our political system inefficient and want to replace it with a “national CEO,” a dictator by a different name.

But in the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has just given us a pitch-perfect demonstration of why legislatures are necessary, why checks and balances are useful, and why most one-man dictatorships become poor and corrupt. If the Republican Party does not return Congress to the role it is meant to play and the courts don’t constrain the president, this cycle of destruction will continue and everyone on the planet will pay the price.

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What Trump Just Cost America

There is some speculation that the Felon's rollercoaster, on again of again tariff circus is actually about stock market manipulation and the use of insider trading to allow the super wealthy to further enrich themselves.  Candidly, suggesting there is a plan behind the madness is likely too generous for a clown squad that simply doesn't know what it is doing and which has never had any careful thought out plan. The reality is that the tariff policy - if one can even call it that - is being driven by an impulsive, malignant narcissist who enjoys dominating the news cycle and who gets off by playing the tough guy and seeking to push others, both individuals and nations to grovel and to quote the Felon "kiss his ass." In the process of this shit show, incalculable damage has been done to America's economy and rather than weakening China, the Felon has unwittingly strengthened China's hand while convincing former friends and allies that America cannot be trusted and that investments in America need to be rethought. As pieces in both The New Yorker, The Atlantic and New York Times lay out what likely pushed the Felon to suddenly announce his 90 day pause in tariffs except against China were signs that the bond market, especially U.S. Treasury securities, was about to collapse, sending America into a severe financial crisis that would be blamed on one orange madman.   First, this from the Times on the damage done to America:

I have many reactions to President Trump’s largely caving on his harebrained plan to tariff the world, but overall, one reaction just keeps coming back to me: If you hire clowns, you should expect a circus. And my fellow Americans, we have hired a group of clowns.

Think of what Trump; his chief knucklehead, Howard Lutnick (the commerce secretary); his assistant chief knucklehead, Scott Bessent (the Treasury secretary); and his deputy assistant chief knucklehead, Peter Navarro (the top trade adviser), have told us repeatedly for the past weeks: Trump won’t back off on these tariffs because — take your choice — he needs them to keep fentanyl from killing our kids, he needs them to raise revenue to pay for future tax cuts, and he needs them to pressure the world to buy more stuff from us. And he couldn’t care less what his rich pals on Wall Street say about their stock market losses.

After creating havoc in the markets standing on these steadfast “principles” — undoubtedly prompting many Americans to sell low out of fear — Trump reversed much of it on Wednesday, announcing a 90-day pause on certain tariffs to most countries, excluding China.

Message to the world — and to the Chinese: “I couldn’t take the heat.” If it were a book it would be called “The Art of the Squeal.”

But don’t think for a second that all that’s been lost is money. A whole pile of invaluable trust just went up in smoke as well. In the last few weeks, we have told our closest friends in the world — countries that stood shoulder to shoulder with us after Sept. 11, in Iraq and in Afghanistan — that none of them were any different from China or Russia. They were all going to get tariffed under the same formula — no friends-and-family discounts allowed.

Do you think these former close U.S. allies are ever going to trust getting into a trench with this administration again?

This was the trade equivalent of the Biden administration’s botched exit from Afghanistan, from which it never quite recovered. But at least Joe Biden got us out of a costly no-win war for which America, in my opinion, is now much better off.

Trump just put us into a no-win war.

How so? We do have a trade imbalance with China that does need to be addressed. Trump is right about that. China now controls one-third of global manufacturing and has the industrial engines to pretty much make everything for everyone one day if it is allowed to. That is not good for us, for Europe or for many developing countries.

But when you have a country as big as China — 1.4 billion people — with the talent, infrastructure and savings it has, the only way to negotiate is with leverage on our side of the table. And the best way to get leverage would have been for Trump to enlist our allies in the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, India, Australia and Indonesia into a united front. Make it a negotiation of the whole world versus China.

But instead of making it the whole industrial world against China, Trump made it America against the whole industrial world and China.

Now, Beijing knows that Trump not only blinked, but he so alienated our allies, so demonstrated that his word cannot be trusted for a second, that many of them may never align with us against China in the same way. They may, instead, see China as a better, more stable long-term partner than us.

What a pathetic, shameful performance. Happy Liberation Day.

As for the pending financial crisis that prompted the Felon to blink, The Atlantic has this (the New Yorker largely echoes the same storyline):

Only yesterday, President Donald Trump was mocking Republicans nervous about his global trade war as “Panicans.” In a defiant speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee, he insisted, “This time I’m doing what I want to do with respect to the tariffs,” and that only he had the courage to defy “the globalists.”

But the globalists turn out to have had enough power to bring Trump to heel after all. This afternoon, the president announced a 90-day pause on what he has called his “reciprocal tariffs” against every country other than China.

According to Charlie Gasparino of Fox News, Trump retreated in the face of troubling developments in the bond market. Asked by reporters, Trump didn’t deny this, noting that, even with a “beautiful” bond market, “I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy.” This was a completely new layer of danger that appeared overnight. Before yesterday evening, the interest rate on Treasury bonds had fallen slightly, a sign of increased demand as nervous investors retreated to the historically safe strategy of lending their savings to the U.S. government. Then, suddenly, investors began pulling money out, sensing that the U.S. government was no longer safe, a prospect that created the risk of everything from higher interest payments on the debt to a full-scale financial crisis.

All of this is to suggest that if a stock-market swoon, or even a recession, does not frighten Trump, the prospect of a 2008-style meltdown apparently still does. And so the gargantuan trade war is back off, for now.

Where does this leave the economy? The new 10 percent tariff on almost every good imported from every country not controlled by Vladimir Putin remains in place.

That policy is, to be clear, quite harmful. Despite Trump’s rhetoric about reindustrialization, the universal tariff applies indiscriminately to almost every country and product. Some of those products, like coffee and bananas, cannot be practically grown in the United States, and will just get more expensive. Others, like metals and other industrial inputs, will make American manufacturing less competitive, not more.

The stock market surged after Trump’s “pause” announcement, but once the relief wears off, reality is likely to dull investors’ enthusiasm. Goldman Sachs, absorbing the news, has returned to its previous economic forecast, which calls for meager 0.5 percent economic growth this year and a 45 percent chance of recession. That is not the blinking-light disaster that the economy was facing before the pause, but it is still terrible, and much worse than the situation Trump inherited when he took office.

Nobody has made a new trade agreement with Trump. To the contrary, other countries have found the administration unable to even articulate its goals or objectives, because Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs are the product of a nonsensical formula putatively serving a grab bag of mutually exclusive goals.

To the extent that the reciprocal tariffs created any leverage, it rests on the side of Trump’s counterparties, who now know that he may be a madman, but is not mad enough to risk a full-blown global economic meltdown. The gun on the table is pointed at Trump’s own foot.

Trump could very well restore the gigantic tariffs, especially if he feels humiliated by today’s events. The likelier outcome is that he will muddle through with policies that push prices up and growth down, but don’t directly precipitate an economic collapse. Trump’s allies will tolerate an enormous amount of damage to the country, especially damage that takes place over an extended period of time or primarily hurts people who aren’t rich. Immediate, massive harm to his wealthiest supporters appears to be one of the few red lines that Trump still won’t cross.

The end result of all the insanity?  America is weaker and more isolated than ever in recent memory while its enemies smile as they gleefully watch the self-inflicted harm the Felon has wrought.

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So Many People Delude Themselves About Trump

Yesterday was another bad day on Wall Street and with the Felon's 104% tariffs against China kicking in last midnight, today likely will be no better. Everything from clothing to computers and smart phones and electronics comes from China and such a tariff if it remains will drive prices through the roof and put some businesses literally out of business. Most baffling is the reality that economist predicted the economy would be far better under a Kamala Harris administration, yet so many ranging from Wall Street to so-called Main Street either deliberately closed their eyes to the reality of the a second regime for the Felon or they embraced his attacks on social consciousness and green lighting of racism and bigotry, thus showing their own sick mindsets, let their greed get the better of them.  Indeed, everyone was warned by the Felon's own words as to what he might do by turning international trade upside down and basically alienating all of America's allies. Yet they chose to ignore plain warnings and have ushered in real damage to the economy and America's standing in the world. Given the outrages perpetrated by ICE, even foreign tourists are choosing to vacation somewhere other than in America,  A column in the New York Times looks at the delusions that helped get us to this frightening point: 

Donald Trump’s 2024 election sent many finance types into spasms of anticipatory ecstasy as they imagined freedom from regulations, taxes and unfamiliar pronouns. “Bankers and financiers say Trump’s victory has emboldened those who chafed at ‘woke doctrine’ and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people,” The Financial Times reported a few days before Trump’s inauguration. It quoted one leading banker crowing — anonymously — about finally being able to use slurs like “retard” again. The vibes had shifted; the animal spirits were loose.

“We’re stepping into the most pro-growth, pro-business, pro-American administration I’ve perhaps seen in my adult lifetime,” gushed the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman in December.

One Wall Street veteran, however, understood the risk an unleashed Trump posed to the economy. After Trump’s victory in November, Peter Berezin, chief global strategist at BCA Research, which provides macroeconomic research to major financial institutions, estimated that the chance of a recession had climbed to 75 percent. “The prospect of an escalation of the trade war is likely to depress corporate investment while lowering real household disposable income,” said a BCA report.

The surprising thing isn’t that Berezin saw the Trump tariff crisis coming, but that so many of his peers didn’t.  You don’t have to be a sophisticated financial professional, after all, to understand that Trump believes, firmly and ardently, in taxing imports, and he thinks any country that sells more goods to America than it buys must be ripping us off. All you had to do was read the news or listen to Trump’s own words. Yet Berezin was an outlier . . . .

On Monday, as stocks whipsawed on shifting news and rumors about the tariffs, I spoke to Berezin, who is based in Montreal, about how Wall Street had gotten Trump so wrong. He told me that many investors who pride themselves on their savvy are in fact just creatures of the herd. “All these cognitive biases that amateur retail investors are subject to, the Wall Street pros, are, if anything, even more subject to them because they’ve got career risk associated with bucking the trend,” he said.

People in finance, said Berezin, are more likely to be punished for being too cautious and pessimistic than for being too hopeful and aggressive. . . . . “You don’t get fired for being bullish, but you do get fired for being bearish on Wall Street,” said Berezin.

Some investors also felt a cultural affinity with the new administration that further clouded their judgment. When wokeness was ascendant, plenty of people in tech and finance quietly seethed at being guilt-tripped and forced to feign concern about social justice. “When the opportunity came to jettison all that, they were happy to do it,” said Berezin. “And Trump enabled them to do it.”

So last October, when Scott Bessent, soon to become Treasury secretary, said that Trump was really a free trader who used tariffs as a negotiating tactic, Wall Street was eager to believe him.

This claim was obviously absurd. Trump has been obsessed with tariffs, which he called “the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” for decades. In his 2018 book “Fear,” Bob Woodward reported that Trump scrawled “TRADE IS BAD” in the margin of a speech he gave after the G20 summit. It makes sense that Trump would see things this way. When he makes sales, whether of Trump University courses or Trump-branded cryptocurrency, he is usually taking advantage of the buyer, and he views global trade through the same zero-sum lens.

It’s widely known that during his first term, the so-called adults in the room thwarted some of Trump’s most destructive whims. There have been far fewer such figures in the Trump sequel, resulting in the wholesale degradation of American governance. The conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer just directed a purge of the National Security Council. Thanks to Elon Musk’s haphazard cuts, employees who once worked to prevent the spread of diseases like Ebola are gone, as are nuclear safety experts. . . . . Somehow, traders failed to recognize that there would eventually be economic fallout from such profound misrule.

“The markets should have put two and two together that if you’re talking about annexing Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, you’re probably going to be more radical on trade as well,” said Berezin.

But Wall Street professionals, like so many other ostensibly smart people, refused to see Trump clearly, mistaking his skill as a demagogue for wisdom as a policymaker. . . . . What an odd assumption to make about a man who bankrupted casinos.

Berezin thinks Wall Street still hasn’t come to terms with the cost of the nascent Trump presidency. “I do think that at this point we might have passed the event horizon, meaning that even if Trump backs off from the tariffs, there’s been enough damage done to the U.S. economy, to the global economy, to investor confidence, consumer confidence, that we’re probably going to see a recession regardless of what happens,” he said.

He points out that while public attention is focused on the stock market, there are alarming signs in the bond market. Usually, if stocks go down, so do yields on U.S. Treasuries . . . . right now, that’s not happening, which he thinks could signal a crisis of confidence in the stability of the U.S. government and the debt it issues.

“If we’re moving to this new world where the U.S. just can’t be trusted, then do we really want to hold a lot of Treasuries?” he said as he sketched out investors’ thinking. “Do we really want to use the dollar as a reserve?” It turns out that there’s a price for taking all the soft power America has accrued since World War II and setting it on fire. Who knew.

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Political Styles of the Rich and Clueless

It's another week and the economic chaos and wreckage of the Felon's regime continues with trillions of dollars lost in the stock market plunge - for both everyday Americans with 401(k) accounts and the very wealthy, many of the latter of whom backed the Felon dreaming of more tax cuts and elimination of regulations that would bring back a new version of the Gilded Age - and America viewed with contempt by the rest of the world.  With seemingly no end game in sight, the Felon continues to make things worse and has threatened even more tariffs against China and likely any other country that fails to genuflect before him and engage in political and economic fellatio. A piece by one economist looks at those who voted for the Felon and their motivations - and delusions - for trusting the Felon, a pathological liar with anything he said. Those most targeted by the piece are the ultra wealthy who allowed their greed and hubris - think Jeff Bezos and those of that ilk - to blind them to who and what they were supporting.  Now, belatedly, a few seem posed to turn on the Felon.  Of, course all should have known better.  Here are column highlights:

As we wait to see what fresh hell awaits us this week, one obvious question is, who put these malevolent clowns in power?

The short answer is ignorant people. But political ignorance takes two different forms.

On one side there are “less-engaged” voters who don’t follow politics closely. And to be fair, ordinary Americans have good excuses for not paying close attention to the news: They have jobs to do, children to raise, lives to live. Unfortunately, many of these voters believed Trump’s fabulist promises. They are only now beginning to understand what they voted for.

But less-engaged voters weren’t the only people who missed the warning signs and supported Donald Trump. Trump also had a number of ultra-wealthy backers, both on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, who are now shocked, shocked to discover that he is who he always was.

Over the weekend Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund billionaire who has been one of Trump’s most vocal supporters, suddenly turned on his champion, declaring on X that

by placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital.

But Ackman refused to take any responsibility for enabling the destruction:

I don't think this was foreseeable. I assumed economic rationality would be paramount. My bad.

Indeed. Who could have foreseen that the self-proclaimed Tariff Man, who posts crazy stuff on Truth Social every day, would impose destructive tariffs? Who could have imagined that the many economists, myself included, who warned that a Trump victory would be very bad for the economy would turn out to have been right? Or if we were wrong, it was only because we underestimated the damage.

OK, Ackman is a fool, but he wasn’t alone in getting Trump all wrong. Many wealthy people imagined that Trump II would be like Trump I, mostly a standard right-winger with a bit of a protectionist hobby.  They thought he would cut their taxes, eliminate financial and environmental regulations and promote crypto, making them even wealthier. They expected him to back off his tariff obsession if the stock market started to fall. If he ripped up the social safety net, well, they don’t depend on food stamps or Medicaid.

It's also true that successful businessmen often believe that their financial success makes them experts on economic policy even though they haven’t made any effort to understand the issues.

I was struck over the weekend when Elon Musk (I know, I know), seemingly breaking with Trump, called for zero tariffs between the United States and Europe. I think it’s safe to assume that Musk has no idea that trans-Atlantic tariffs were, in fact, close to zero in 2024: The average European Union tariff on U.S. goods was 1.7%, the average U.S. tariff on EU goods was 1.4%.

Finally, great wealth often enables great pettiness. Some readers may remember Wall Street’s “Obama rage”: Financial titans were furious at the president who bailed them out after the global financial crisis because he dared to hint that they had played some role in causing that crisis. Why, he even called them “fat cats!”

To be honest, I’m actually glad that Trump II is proving to be such a disaster for the economy. If he had exercised some restraint, if he had simply claimed credit for the very good economy Joe Biden left him, many wealthy people would have cheered him on while he destroyed democracy. Now they may turn on him.

But I hope the rest of us have learned a lesson from the oligarchy’s support for Trump, even if it’s now cracking: Extreme wealth inequality has given great power to people who exert a malign influence on our politics.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Trump Is Gaslighting Us

Growing up I recall watching the old movies "Gaslight" starring among others Ingrid Bergman whose husband is seeking to drive her insane through lies and manipulations. In the movie, the villain is exposed and Bergman's character is rescued.   Fast forward 81 years and we see lies and manipulations from the Felon's regime and Republican enablers in Congress applying gaslighting on a national scale.  Resisting the lies and manipulations is a full time effort, but one that is critical for everyday Americans and the nation as a whole as argued in a piece in The Atlantic by a former Republican.  With the Felon, the lies began the moment he descending the escalator in 2015 and have been non-stop ever since. Sadly, the Republican Party has become an echo chamber filled with lies and disinformation and one has to wonder what it will take for the MAGA base to stop drinking the Kool-Aid. The stock market is crashing, prices will soon be soaring and thousands of federal workers have been fired - something that will soon seep into the private sector as businesses flounder or engage in cut backs to address the growing economic chaos.  True, some who voted for the Felon are shocked that they have lost jobs and are facing slashed benefits, yet the Felon over and over telegraphed what he would do.  No one should be surprised.  Now, the question is how to resist the lies and gaslighting:

The first Trump administration began with a lie.  On January 21, 2017, President Donald Trump’s then–press secretary, Sean Spicer, claimed that Trump had drawn the largest audience to ever witness a presidential inauguration. Photographs clearly showed that the assertion was false; Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, had drawn a much larger crowd at his first inauguration. But it didn’t matter.

In one sense, Spicer’s lie was trivial. But in another sense, it mattered quite a lot, because it was a lie about a demonstrable fact. Kellyanne Conway, then a counselor to Trump, memorably defended Spicer by claiming that he was offering “alternative facts,” treating observable reality like hot wax, to be molded at will.

Fast-forward eight years. Trump is once again president. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was mistakenly included on a private group chat—via Signal, a nongovernmental messaging app—in which Trump-administration officials discussed a planned bombing campaign in Yemen. Goldberg reported on the reckless and devastating breach of national security. But rather than acknowledging the mistake and promising to address it, the Trump administration reflexively followed its standard approach: attack. Smear. Prevaricate.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on social media, “This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”

As The Washington Post reported, “The Yemen attack timeline that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted to a Signal chat group would have been so highly classified, under Pentagon guidelines, that the details should have been restricted to a special, compartmented channel with its own code word and with access tightly limited, according to former Defense Department officials.”

[T]he Trump administration once again wants you to believe that two and two make five.

IN THE 1944 FILM GASLIGHT, a young woman, Paula Alquist, falls in love with and marries an older man, Gregory Anton. Over the course of the film, Gregory—cunning, moody, charismatic—deceives Paula into thinking that she is losing her mind. He does so by manipulating her memory, accusing her of hiding paintings and stealing things, isolating her, diminishing her self-worth and confidence, and denying reality. The film’s title refers to Gregory’s trick of secretly dimming and brightening the indoor gas lighting while insisting that Paula is imagining the changes.

The film gave us the term gaslighting, which describes a certain type of psychological manipulation. To succeed, it requires those who are targeted to become so disoriented that they begin to doubt themselves, to become confused, and to question their own perception of reality. Clinical psychologists say that as gaslighting plays out, not only do its victims start to deny reality; they begin to accept the false reality of the person gaslighting them.

Gaslighters are manipulative and controlling, comfortable belittling and insulting others. They are accomplished at denying, lying, and projecting. And sometimes, if they’re lucky enough and skilled enough, they make it to the White House. When they do, the horrors that are usually visited on an individual are instead visited on an entire nation.

At that point, the enormous machinery of the federal government, supported by outside groups and media outlets, becomes part of a massive and relentless disinformation campaign. The aim is to provoke distrust, confusion, and disorientation, which corrodes people’s confidence in institutions and undermines their grasp of reality. The ultimate goal is to divide and weaken civil society, and to undermine its ability to mobilize and cohere.

When there is no objective truth, when everyone gets to make up their own reality, their own script, and their own facts, authoritarians thrive.

AS DISINFORMATION INCREASES, and as more and more individuals and institutions go silent, it becomes ever more important for truth tellers to speak up, if only to assure those who don’t believe the propaganda that they’re not losing their mind.

They need to do for their fellow citizens what the police inspector did for Paula Alquist.

Getting through America’s epistemic crisis—where there’s no agreed-upon reality, where there’s a breakdown of a society’s system for deciding what’s true—won’t be quick or easy, especially because the Trump administration still has more than 1,350 days to go. The task of reconstructing truth is a generational one, and a lot of pieces need to come together.

It starts by asking the right questions, such as the one recently posed by Kristin Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University: “How do we as citizens participate in a democracy when disinformation is so prevalent, and when so many seem so willing to believe the lies and ignore the reality that is right in front of us? When so many are willing to abandon all values to choose their side, every single time?”

People who feel more and more powerless have asked me a version of this question: “What can I do practically as a citizen, apart from vote and call my representative, to help preserve American democracy against Trump’s assault against our institutions and truth itself?”

Experts in the field of misinformation say that we know a lot about different kinds of misinformation, who is targeted and why, and the means to spread it. . . . . Figuring out how to scale up trust and truth is a central challenge of our time. It will take individuals and groups working together to insist on seeing the world as it actually is. Think of it as a dissident movement, an American Solidarity movement.

I HAVE A HUNCH, OR AT LEAST A HOPE. As Donald Trump’s malevolence intertwines with his incompetence, public disenchantment will grow. We’re already seeing signs of that as public fury at Elon Musk is being directed at Tesla. We’ve also seen it in town halls in red districts, where Republican members of Congress are being met not just with anxiety but also with anger. Republicans are being told to stop holding in-person town halls with constituents. And we see it in the rising panic caused by the stock-market collapse, the result of Trump’s carelessly destructive tariff policy, which is destabilizing the world’s trading system and shattering the American-led world order.

If disenchantment with Trump and Musk and the rest of this freak show leads to mass protests, it could be an inflection point, not just against Trump’s policies but also against the vertigo-inducing disinformation he promotes during almost every one of his waking hours.

I’ve long wondered how long it will take Americans to stop tolerating the unrelenting conflict and antipathy, which divides not just citizens but also families, that is endemic to life in the Trump era. The answer may be that they will stop tolerating it at the point when the quality of their life is degraded, when preventable diseases spread, when car prices and egg prices skyrocket, when 401(k) accounts start losing significant value. At that point, Trump-style nihilism may lose its appeal; his disinformation campaign may begin to blow apart, and people may be reminded that living in truth is better than living within lies.

The drama has a long way to go, but the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

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American Life Expectancy Falls Compared to Europe

For over a decade now, life expectancy in America has been falling and now the wealthiest middle-aged and older adults in the U.S. have roughly the same likelihood of dying over a 12-year period as the poorest adults in northern and western Europe. And this doesn't factor in the horrific damage being done to medical research and health care agencies being done by DOGE and RFK, Jr.  Expect things to get even worse, particularly among the MAGA white working class base in which many rely on Medicaid for health coverage that is targeted for large cuts in the tax and spend cuts bill being pushed through Congress by Republicans. Meanwhile, the measles outbreak in Texas is worsening and a second child has died thanks to anti-vaccine extremists- including RFK, Jr.  - who have revived a disease that not that long ago had been deemed eradicated. All of this shows that America is exceptional, but in a very  negative way that literally killing citizens prematurely.  Sadly, things will likely worsen under the Felon's regime as consumer costs soar and  social safety net programs are gutted.  Those who will suffer most?  MAGA poor and working class voters and their families. A piece at NBC News looks at the troubling problem that ought to be a national embarrassment: 

Today, the wealthiest middle-aged and older adults in the U.S. have roughly the same likelihood of dying over a 12-year period as the poorest adults in northern and western Europe, according to a study published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. 

Some medical and health policy experts say the trend is a sign of deep-seated issues not just within the U.S. health care system, but with the typical American lifestyle of overconsuming junk food, not getting enough exercise and facing loneliness or financial stress.

The study looked at the relationship between wealth and mortality among nearly 74,000 adults from 2010 to 2022. More than 19,000 of the adults were in the U.S., and roughly 54,000 were spread across 16 countries in Europe. All were ages 50 to 85.

The researchers divided the participants into four groups based on their overall assets (not including their homes). In both Europe and the U.S., the group with the most assets — the wealthiest — had a 40% lower mortality rate than the poorest group.

The poorest people in the U.S. had the highest mortality rate of any group, which is consistent with previous research showing that health outcomes are worse in America. 

“We were expecting to find greater inequity in the U.S. But what was surprising was how the richest in the U.S. compared to the richest in Europe,” said Irene Papanicolas, the study’s lead author, who directs the Center for Health System Sustainability at Brown University’s School of Public Health.

The wealthiest group in northern and western Europe had mortality rates about 35% lower than the wealthiest group in the U.S., she said.

Poor health outcomes in the U.S. are often attributed, in part, to a lack of access to affordable health care, which can result in high out-of-pocket costs for medication or procedures — or in some cases, not seeing a doctor at all. 

“Certainly health care must have something to do with it, but it cannot be even a dominant part of the story if we’re seeing wealthier Americans having similar or worse outcomes than poor individuals in other wealthy countries.”

In addition to universal health care, many European countries offer free or heavily subsidized higher education and more comprehensive unemployment benefits compared with the U.S. 

“A lot of these countries have social welfare programs that don’t prevent people from losing their jobs or experiencing poverty, but when they go through those tough times, it doesn’t threaten their health,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine and population health at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine.

Woolf said the Trump administration’s recent gutting of federal health agencies and termination of research grants puts the U.S. on the wrong trajectory when it comes to lowering risk factors for mortality. 

“The thing that’s alarming us so much in the health and medicine world is that the policies that are now being pursued in a pretty muscular way are the opposite of what you would want to do to make America healthy again,” he said, referring to Kennedy’s agenda. 

“In all likelihood, my prediction will be that the gap in health between Americans and people in other countries is now going to widen even more dramatically,” Woolf said.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty