“The Trump administration was able to reshape America’s trade policy in large part because it simply decided to ignore anything that punctured its manufactured reality about how tariffs work.
Economic data show that American businesses and consumers—not China—are overwhelmingly paying the cost of the tariffs? Send Peter Navarro out to do some television hits where he baselessly claims otherwise.
Thousands of American companies are lining up at hearings to explain why the tariffs would hurt their bottom line? Give Wilbur Ross a can of tomato soup and let him explain that those added costs are actually no big deal.
Farmers are getting gutted by the trade war? Send them fat checks, deny that your policies were to blame, and inadvertently create a new, expensive aid program that will be politically difficult to unwind.”
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“the Biden administration seems determined to keep the circus going a while longer. Take, for example, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo doing her best Navarro impression during an interview earlier this month with MSNBC. Asked about whether the Biden administration would roll back the Trump tariffs on steel, aluminum, and other goods from China, Raimondo argued that “the data shows that those tariffs have been effective.”
Have they? Raimondo was careful to avoid saying exactly what the tariffs have been “effective” at accomplishing, but the actual data would suggest the answer is not much—except, of course, raising prices for American businesses and consumers.”
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“The fundamental problem is the same one that Trump, Navarro, Ross, and others spent the past few years trying to hand-wave away: Tariffs simply create more losers than winners. The U.S. steel industry, for example, employs about 141,000 workers. But there are more than 6 million workers in manufacturing businesses that consume steel. The tariffs are meant to protect the former group by imposing higher costs on the latter, much larger group.”
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“Through its first 50 days in office, the Biden administration has given no indication that it is interested in providing relief to American businesses beset by Trump’s tariffs. If anything, Democrats in the White House and Congress appear to be entrenching those policies.”
“Former President Donald Trump did not succeed in overturning his election loss to Joe Biden. But he did succeed during his lame-duck period in knocking Fox News down a peg.
Over the past few months, Trump repeatedly derided Fox News while promoting upstart rivals like Newsmax and One America News Network (OAN), both of which more reliably pushed his conspiracy theories about the election being stolen. Fox News responded to this very public post-Election Day rift with Trump — and the sagging ratings that came with it — by purging its newsroom and doubling down on grievance-soaked punditry.”
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” Though it’s obviously silly to get mad at a cable news channel for accurately calling an election result, that’s exactly what Trump did. In the weeks following his defeat, he routinely blasted the network for its sagging ratings, describing its daytime quasi-news programming as “not watchable” as he promoted further-right alternatives like Newsmax and OAN.”
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“Earlier this month, two executives involved in the Arizona call — Bill Sammon, senior vice president and managing editor at Fox’s Washington bureau, and politics editor Chris Stirewalt — were forced out. Diana Falzone and Lachlan Cartwright reported for the Daily Beast that those moves were part of a broader “purge” to “get rid of real journalists.””
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“If the goal of these moves is to win back viewers who are now opting for Newsmax and OAN instead of Fox News, they haven’t so far worked. Twice since the election, including once earlier this month, Newsmax has bested Fox News in a key demographic during an hour of programming.
Newsmax and OAN have carved out niches as networks especially willing to spread right-wing conspiracy theories and misinformation. In the weeks leading up to the January 6 Capitol riot, for instance, former Trump national security adviser and key QAnon figure Michael Flynn went on Newsmax and floated the idea of Trump declaring martial law to overturn his election loss and didn’t receive any pushback at all.”
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“Nonetheless, Fox News seems willing to give its audience more conspiracy-theory-based programming. On Tuesday night, the top-rated anchor on Fox News, Tucker Carlson, platformed another Trumpist figure facing a defamation lawsuit for spreading fake news about the election — MyPillow founder Mike Lindell — and allowed him to push more conspiracies about voting machines.”
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“Fox News spent most of the Trump years enjoying a symbiotic relationship with the president. Its hosts ran interference for him and gave his family members and administration officials unlimited access to softball interviews before a national audience, and in return Trump promoted the network with live tweets, praise, and scorn for the competition.
But with Trump out of power, Fox News quickly shifted from “all Trump, all the time” to becoming a gadfly, devoting multiple segments of programming each day to pointing out alleged liberal hypocrisy and using culture war issues to stoke grievances.”
“In at least 41 criminal cases — including an assault on a Latinx man in Florida and threats against a Syrian-born man in Washington state — Trump’s name was invoked in connection with violence or threats, according to an ABC News analysis. The network found no criminal cases with such direct connections to presidents Barack Obama or George W. Bush.”
“The Treasury has a cash pile of well over $1 trillion, which will allow the government to quickly disburse money in line with the sweeping new law, including direct checks to millions of Americans that are expected to start hitting bank accounts in the coming week. That robust rainy-day fund was built last year by then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who preemptively cranked up the pace of government borrowing, unsure of how and when Congress might mandate further relief measures.
So, despite concerns that markets will be flooded with new U.S. government debt to pay for the rescue package, the Treasury Department might not have to change its borrowing plans much at all to fund the legislation signed into law”
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““There are enormous implications for everyone else, but the Treasury was out in front of this nine months ago,” said Lou Crandall, chief economist at research firm Wrightson ICAP.
The advance moves by the Trump team are proving to be key to limiting turbulence in government debt markets from such massive spending. Bond yields have already been inching up in recent months due to brighter prospects for the economy”
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“The planning by Mnuchin also demonstrates that, even as Republicans now balk at the price tag of Biden’s rescue package, the Trump administration itself was prepared for the possibility that the economy would need another big infusion of cash to fully emerge from the pandemic.”
“His son Don Jr. who had addressed the crowd earlier, condemned the rioters on Twitter shortly after 2 p.m. Trump took quickly to Twitter, too — before his staff could urge him to alter his message. But instead of urging rioters to stop, he blasted Pence for blocking Biden’s victory. A few minutes later, he tweeted his support of the Capitol Police and asked rioters to “stay peaceful.””
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“Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie repeatedly tried to get in touch with Trump. House Minority Kevin McCarthy, one of the president’s closest allies, called Trump and “begged” Trump to put out a stronger statement. Kellyanne Conway, a former aide who remains close to the president, called the White House after the D.C. mayor’s office asked her help getting Trump to call up the National Guard.
Inside the White House, there was paralysis. Trump’s son-in-law and de facto chief of staff Jared Kushner was flying back from the Middle East. Several aides, including Trump’s daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka Trump, urged the president to say more. Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany considered whether to hold a briefing but didn’t. Instead, at 4:17 p.m., Trump released a video. “Go home,” he told the rioters before reassuring them that “We love you.””
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“Trump, still fuming about Pence’s decision not to interfere with the certification, never called his vice president. Pence had been forced to hide with his family in the Capitol while rioters chanted that they wanted to hang him. Later, Trump expressed frustration to Meadows and other aides that Pence had gotten credit for deploying the National Guard and coordinating with other government officials on the overall response, but it would be days before the two men spoke directly.”
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“even as authorities struggled to regain control of the Capitol and the city imposed a 6 p.m. curfew, Trump tweeted again: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!” An hour later, Twitter slapped his account with a temporary suspension.”
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“For the increasingly isolated president, the pile-on didn’t stop with the steady stream of resignations. When the deaths of five people during the riots were confirmed—including Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick—the right-leaning editorial board at the Wall Street Journal, a Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper, called for Congress to impeach and remove Trump if he declined to “take personal responsibility and resign.”
The stinging indictment by a newspaper Trump had read religiously for decades was more upsetting to him than the flood of administration officials springing for the exits, according to one senior administration official. That was the point Trump began seriously discussing with aides what more he could say to spare himself further humiliation. Kushner and others suggested a televised address from the Oval Office, but the president didn’t like that idea. Several allies gently prodded him to publicly apologize to Pence, despite his notorious refusal to show contrition.
“You would think the news that five people died in a riot of your own making would scare you straight, but no, it was when one of his favorite media outlets turned on him that he finally realized the trouble he was facing,” said a Republican close to the White House.
Other Republican allies urged Trump to attempt a do-over with a more conciliatory and straightforward message. Realizing the treacherous legal waters he had waded into, Trump agreed. At around 7:30 that evening, Trump released a video through the White House, more straightforwardly conceding the election and asking “healing and reconciliation” for the nation. He never uttered Biden’s name. In many ways, it was the speech that most members of Trump’s inner circle, including his wife and Kushner, had wanted him to make in the days after Biden was declared president-elect by the bulk of Washington.”
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“what was on Trump’s mind was the PGA’s decision to cut ties with him — an embarrassing development the golf-obsessed president had awoken to that morning. Overnight, board members of the PGA had voted to cancel Trump’s Bedminster, N.J. golf club as the site for its 2022 championship. He was angrier about this loss of prestige than the riot.”
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“At 6:30 p.m., shortly after Pelosi signed the article of impeachment, Trump released a lengthy video statement — written by Stephen Miller, Scavino and attorneys, including Cipollone. Delivered in his flat Teleprompter voice, the statement didn’t mention the historic rebuke of his behavior, but it did, for the first time, unequivocally urge his supporters to shun political violence. It was something Kushner had been pushing for a couple days.”
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“as problems persisted with statewide Covid-19 vaccine rollouts and the U.S. death count crept closer to 400,000, Trump didn’t appear to weigh in — publicly or privately. Nor did he seem interested when the Labor Department released new data showing the first net decline in U.S. employment since the spring and staggering job losses across the food and beverage and hospitality industries. One top economic official who continued to work out of the White House said it had been two weeks since he last saw the president.”
“On President Donald Trump’s final full day in office, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blamed him by name for the riot that occurred at the US Capitol on January 6.
“The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people, and they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like,” McConnell said Tuesday on the Senate floor.
McConnell has reportedly privately expressed interest in purging Trump from the Republican Party, but this was his sharpest public rebuke yet of a president he stood by through an impeachment, a disastrous pandemic response, and a never-ending string of scandals.”
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“While it’s good that McConnell is now willing to call out Trump by name, it’s not like he’s blameless. For one, even though the Trump campaign and its allies were unable to produce any evidence of large-scale fraud, McConnell didn’t recognize Biden’s victory until December 15, when he delivered remarks on the Senate floor congratulating the president-elect and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory.”
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“The bottom line is the departing president is no longer useful to the soon-to-be minority leader in particular, and establishment Republicans more broadly, who received little help from Trump as their party lost two Senate runoffs earlier this month and thus majority control of the chamber. There are no more tax cuts or conservative judges to be had. On the contrary, McConnell has self-interested incentives for speaking out against a president who has heaped scorn on him, not to mention directly endangered his personal safety.
McConnell tossing Trump under the bus on the president’s way out of the White House is a remarkable thing — but it doesn’t mean he’s turned over a new leaf. Instead, he’s already tried to sabotage Biden by refusing to hold a single confirmation hearing for his nominees during the transition period. With President Trump out of the picture, McConnell is likely to resume the role he had when he was minority leader during the early Obama years: obstructing a Democratic president at every turn.”
“President Trump has ended his term in office in a very appropriate way for him — by handing out pardons to some of his close associates and supporters for corruption crimes.
Perhaps the most notable of these pardons was the one given to Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign CEO and White House chief strategist, announced late Tuesday night. Bannon was awaiting trial on fraud charges — specifically, he was charged with defrauding donors to a crowdfunding campaign promising to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. Yes, that means Trump pardoned Bannon for allegedly defrauding Trump’s own supporters.
The clemency grant list released by the White House early Wednesday morning also included Elliott Broidy, a wealthy Republican donor, lobbyist, and former RNC finance committee member who had pleaded guilty to violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act in October. It included three former Republican members of Congress and a former Democratic mayor of Detroit, all of whom were charged with corruption crimes. Celebrity rappers Lil Wayne and Kodak Black also made the cut, as did dozens of lesser-known people (including some who seem to have genuinely deserved clemency).
Trump has now pardoned two of his campaign chiefs (the other being Paul Manafort), in addition to his first national security adviser (Michael Flynn), his longtime political guru (Roger Stone), and the first two members of Congress to endorse his 2016 campaign (former Reps. Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter).
In recent months, Trump considered going even further — he mused about offering “preemptive pardons” to people who haven’t even been charged with crimes, like his attorney Rudy Giuliani and several of his children, as well as a dubiously legal “self-pardon.”
These haven’t materialized. The big picture, though, is that Trump has brazenly used the pardon power to shield his associates from consequences for criminal wrongdoing in a way no president has for decades.”
“While Trump’s Operation Warp Speed program provided incentives for private companies to speed vaccine development and did directly help Moderna develop an effective vaccine, it’s not necessarily the case that vaccines wouldn’t be available today had it not been for Trump. The first FDA-approved coronavirus vaccine was developed by Pfizer last year without any direct help from the federal government.
To be clear — Trump deserves some credit for the fact that multiple vaccines were developed so quickly. As my colleague Dylan Scott reported last October, the federal government’s multibillion-dollar investment in helping companies like Moderna and Johnson & Johnson develop vaccines no doubt helped the country get to a point where there is finally some light at the end of the tunnel. Biden has acknowledged this, saying in December that “I think that the [Trump] administration deserves some credit, getting this [vaccine effort] off the ground, Operation Warp Speed.”
But vaccines don’t do much good if there’s no plan to get them into arms, and this is where Trump really fell short. As was the case when the US struggled to ramp up coronavirus testing infrastructure in the early days of the pandemic, the Trump administration’s plan for vaccine distribution did little more than pass the buck to under-resourced states. Trump’s failure to plan for the “last mile” resulted in episodes where unused vaccines were thrown out in the weeks before Biden took office.”
“It appears likely, moreover, that the GOP-controlled judiciary will be a thorn in Biden’s side. Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch, for example, is already laying the groundwork to strip federal agencies of much of their power to regulate after Biden takes office, and Gorsuch almost certainly has the five votes he needs to make this happen.
The Republican Party dominates the federal judiciary in no small part due to six years of work by outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. When Justice Antonin Scalia died nearly a year before President Barack Obama left office, McConnell announced almost immediately that Obama’s Supreme Court nominee would get the cold shoulder from a Republican Senate. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died shortly before the 2020 election, McConnell ensured that her conservative replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, would be confirmed just days before the nation voted to cast Trump out of office.
During the final two years of Obama’s presidency — the only two years of his presidency that Republicans controlled the Senate — McConnell imposed a near-total blockade on new appointments to the federal courts of appeals (often referred to as “circuit” judges). The result was that now-outgoing President Donald Trump got to fill nearly all of the judicial vacancies that came open during his presidency, plus nearly all of the appellate court seats Obama should have filled in his final two years.
Although Obama served for twice as long as Trump, there are currently 53 active circuit judges appointed by Trump and only 50 appointed by Obama. (Obama’s judicial confirmations also got off to a fairly slow start, though they picked up considerably once the Senate changed its rules in 2013 to make it easier to confirm judges.)”
“The most successful terrorist campaign in American political history took place after the Civil War.
Ex-Confederate soldiers and ordinary Southerners unwilling to give up on white supremacy formed a series of violent cells aimed at undermining Reconstruction. Their attacks, the most infamous of which were lynchings of recently freed Black people, aimed to disrupt racially egalitarian governments and impose costs on the North for continuing to occupy Southern land. The violence increased after Reconstruction ended, working to intimidate local Black populations while Southern states created new regimes that would render them second-class citizens.”
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“We do not actually need a huge spike in far-right violence for it to be politically impactful. The mere threat of future violence can poison a democracy.”
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“If more moderate Republicans are afraid to speak up, extremists will increasingly speak for the party. The more the extremists speak for the party, the more they will push Republicans voters to the far right and embolden violent far-right actors, further intimidating moderate voices from speaking out.
This is one key difference from the political dynamics of the 1970s. Back then, no significant faction of the Democratic Party was aligned with the violent radicals. Today, large sections of the far right see themselves as acting on behalf of or in conjunction with the Trumpist forces in the Republican Party. In footage of Capitol Hill mobbers ransacking the Senate floor, one attacker justifies his actions by saying “[Ted] Cruz would want us to do this.”
“There seem to be enough guns, political support, and rhetorical space to sustain at least some degree of mobilization by violence-curious radicals,” says Paul Staniland, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. “It’s a lot easier to unleash carnage than to pack it back away.””