“Donald Trump went on national TV last week and proposed bombing Mexico.
Asked by Fox News’s Jesse Watters if he’d consider strikes against drug cartels operating in the country, Trump said yes — and framed his answer as a threat against the Mexican government. “Mexico’s gonna have to straighten it out really fast, or the answer is absolutely,” the former president said.
This is not a one-off answer to a stray question. Trump suggested firing missiles at Mexico during his presidency, asked advisers for a “battle plan” against the cartels last year, and recently proposed sending special operators to assassinate drug kingpins. The idea of war in Mexico is popular among the Republican elite; a Trump-aligned think tank even drew up a broad-strokes plan for how such a war might work.
There is every reason to take Trump’s proposal seriously. Presidents tend to at least try to deliver on campaign promises, and they have nearly unlimited war-making power nowadays. As unthinkable as it may sound, there is a reasonable chance the United States will be at war on its southern border in the coming years if Donald Trump returns to office.”
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“This is part of a bigger pattern. If you actually look at Trump’s policy agenda, he’s called for some wild stuff: policies so extreme that, had they been proposed prior to 2016, would have defined the entire course of the campaign. Today, a few get some coverage, but mostly feel like sideshows — with policy as a category taking a backseat to personality and polling.
Recently, the lack of policy focus is partly due to a remarkably chaotic stretch of American political life. One candidate, the incumbent president, bungled his debate performance so badly that his party replaced him with his vice president. The other almost got killed on national television by a would-be assassin.
But even in more normal times this is a general problem with the media: Policy is technical and boring, while horse-race reporting is exciting and easier for audiences to grasp.
Elements of Trump’s persona also make policy reporting a lot tougher. The combination of habitual lying, flip-flopping, and personal disinterest in detail can make it tough to know what’s an actual proposal and what’s something he said just for the hell of it.”
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“Before I started writing this story, I asked my colleagues at Vox what stood out as Trump’s signature policy proposals in this election — the equivalent of “Build the Wall” in 2016. We came up with two big answers: Trump’s proposal for a general 10 percent tariff and his plan for “the largest deportation in American history.”
Each of these policies is genuinely extreme.
A 10 percent blanket tariff isn’t just putting a tax on specific imports to protect a particular industry, or to retaliate against a country like China engaging in unfair trade practices. It’s a blanket attempt to make all imports from every country, including from neighbors like Canada and allies like the European Union, 10 percent more expensive.
This is a radical shift from the way that trade policy typically works in the United States — one with huge and predictably negative implications for US consumers and the economy.
The tariffs mean that people will either buy American-made goods that cost more than their current foreign competitors, or they will keep buying foreign-made goods at a 10 percent markup. That’s inflation basically by definition: an odd proposal for a candidate running against inflation as his central issue.
The center-right Tax Foundation estimates that the tariffs would shave nearly 1 percent off of US GDP growth annually, costing roughly 684,000 jobs. This estimate did not take into account retaliation from other countries, who almost certainly would impose their own tariffs on American goods in response. A second estimate, from the centrist Peterson Institute, finds that every group of Americans — from the poorest to the wealthiest — would see drops in their annual income.
Neither of these estimates takes into account the all-but-certain retaliation from the affected countries, especially China (who Trump wants to hit with a special 60 percent across-the-board tariff).”
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“No one is exactly sure how many people are going to be targeted for deportations: Trump never sets a specific target, but often implies he’s going to deport every undocumented immigrant in the United States (there are currently around 11 million). A group of four NBC reporters tried to figure out how deporting so many people was supposed to work, and ended up concluding that it was such a break with the way immigration enforcement typically works that it was near-impossible to grasp the scope of the effort.
Typically, police don’t go out looking for undocumented migrants currently residing in the United States. They find them by accident, during a traffic stop or criminal arrest, and then discover that they are undocumented and notify ICE to begin deportation. Targeted enforcement raids happen, but they’re comparatively rare and make up only a fraction of annual deportations.
For Trump’s “mass deportation” policy to work, he would need to devote extraordinary resources — state, federal, and local — to finding and apprehending undocumented immigrants. Once found, they still pose a massive logistical challenge: current law does not allow ICE to deport longstanding US residents without a hearing (or the migrant’s consent), posing a huge burden on the legal system. The government would also need to figure out the travel logistics for deportation, including negotiating with home countries that might not be very happy to receive large numbers of functional refugees.
During all of this, the US government would need to house millions of people — which ICE currently lacks the capacity to do. Hence the now-infamous Trump proposals for keeping detained immigrants in camps: there’s literally nowhere else to put them while they await deportation.
All of this is not only a human rights disaster, but an economic and law enforcement one. The cost of devoting police and judicial resources to this task, in terms of trade-offs with addressing actual crime, would be significant. So too would be the financial cost of building immigrant camps and providing them with food and medical care.
Removing so many people from the workforce would also be inflationary, far outweighing any (questionable) increase in wages for native-born workers. One estimate suggests that, all told, mass deportations would cost the American economy $4.7 trillion over a 10-year period.
The point, in short, is that Trump is proposing sweeping changes to the way the US economy and legal system operates — ones with consequences for every American — and we’re barely even talking about what they would mean.”
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“there’s a difference between Trump’s random utterances, or what he might do about some obscure policy issue, and his consistent instincts on the issues central to his political identity — like trade and the southern border. And there, he could not be clearer: across-the-board tariff, mass deportation, and waging war on the drug cartels.
Even if we set aside everything else we know (or think we know) about what Trump would do, these three items alone would have the potential to transform life in America as we know it. It’s time to start covering Trump like he means what he says.”
“The Fed hiked interest rates around the same time that the supply chain got back up and running, which makes it hard to assign credit. But there’s an even more fundamental issue here. “Anything in macroeconomics is very hard to empirically test,” says Vox senior correspondent Dylan Matthews. “You can’t run experiments with the Fed.”
Ultimately, Matthews says that inflation — and our economy as a whole — is still so hard to understand because of the nature of money. “Money feels like this very hard thing, but money is also a psychological idea. Money is this idea that we can put numbers on what we owe to each other, even as we understand that these numbers are kind of made up.”
Inflation, in a sense, is a psychological phenomenon. “So understanding inflation, I think, is ultimately about understanding people and how they relate to each other. And that’s the ultimate mystery.””
“The Supreme Court handed down a stern rebuke to some of the most right-wing judges in the country.., holding that no, judges do not get to micromanage how the Biden administration speaks to social media companies.
The vote in Murthy v. Missouri was 6-3, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joining the Court’s three Democratic appointees in the majority. Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.
As Barrett’s majority opinion lays out, this lawsuit never should have been filed in the first place, and no federal court should have entertained it. Her opinion holds that the Murthy plaintiffs, who raised vague allegations that the government tried to censor them, could not even show that the government did anything to harm them in the first place.
Murthy involves a wide range of communications among the White House, various federal agencies, and major social media platforms like Facebook and X (the website formerly known as Twitter). Some of these communications urged platforms to remove content, such as speech seeking to recruit terrorists, to spread election disinformation, or to promote false and potentially harmful medical advice — including false claims about Covid-19 and vaccines.
The plaintiffs in Murthy are two red states plus an array of individuals who had content removed or suppressed by at least one of the social media platforms. They claimed that platforms censored them because of pressure from the government, and that this pressure violates the First Amendment.
That is a highly dubious claim. While the First Amendment forbids the government from coercing media outlets into removing content, nothing prevents the government from asking a platform to do so. Indeed, at oral arguments in Murthy, both Justices Elena Kagan and Kavanaugh recounted times when, during their service as White House officials, they pressured journalists to remove or correct editorials or other content that contained factual errors.
Nevertheless, the far-right US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit did not simply embrace this claim, it issued a vague and sweeping injunction forbidding the Biden administration from having “consistent and consequential” communications with social media companies — whatever that means. As a practical matter, this difficult-to-parse injunction made it virtually impossible for the administration to have any communications whatsoever with the platforms.
But the Supreme Court held that the Fifth Circuit was wrong to even consider these plaintiffs’ dubious First Amendment arguments, ruling that federal courts lack jurisdiction over this case.”
“On a 6-3 party-line vote, the Supreme Court ruled..that state officials may accept “gratuities” from people who wish to reward them for their official actions, despite a federal anti-corruption statute that appears to ban such rewards.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinion in Snyder v. United States for the Court’s Republican-appointed majority. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissent on behalf of the Court’s three Democratic appointees.
Snyder turns on a distinction between “bribes” and “gratuities.” As Kavanaugh writes, “bribes are payments made or agreed to before an official act in order to influence the official with respect to that future official act.” Gratuities, by contrast, “are typically payments made to an official after an official act as a token of appreciation.” (Emphasis added.)”
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” As Jackson writes in her dissent, the most natural reading of this statute is that it targets both bribes (payments that “influenced” a future decision) and gratuities (payments that “rewarded” a past decision). As Jackson writes,
” veryone knows what a reward is. It is a $20 bill pulled from a lost wallet at the time of its return to its grateful owner. A surprise ice cream outing after a report card with straight As. The bar tab picked up by a supervisor celebrating a job well done by her team. A reward often says “thank you” or “good job,” rather than “please.””
Jackson argues that the statute should be read to prohibit “rewards corruptly accepted by government officials in ways that are functionally indistinguishable from taking a bribe,” much like the payment at issue in this case appears to be.”
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“Kavanaugh’s strongest argument is that the law makes it a very serious crime, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, for a federal official to accept a bribe, but federal officials who accept gratuities only risk two years in prison. Meanwhile, the statute at issue in Snyder, which only applies to state officials, applies a 10-year sentence across the board. So Kavanaugh argues that it would be odd to read the law to draw a sharp distinction between bribes and gratuities given to federal officials but to make no distinction when state officials accept a gift.
In any event, the decision in Snyder is narrow. It does not rule that Congress could not ban gratuities. It simply rules that this particular statute only reaches bribes. That said, the Court’s Republican majority also has a long history of imposing constitutional limits on the government’s ability to fight corruption and restrict money in politics.”
“The partnership does not make NATO a direct player in the Indo-Pacific but allows it to coordinate with the four partners on issues of mutual concern, said Mirna Galic, senior policy analyst on China and East Asia at the U.S. Institute of Peace. For example, she wrote in an analysis, they can share information and align on actions such as sanctions and aid delivery but do not intervene in military crises outside of their own regions.
The NATO summit will allow the United States and its European and Indo-Pacific allies to push back against China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, according to Luis Simon, director of the Centre for Security Diplomacy and Strategy at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.”