The optimism from the White House press secretary comes days after President Donald Trump's "liberation day" tariff news sparked economic pa
Pocharapon Neammanee at HuffPost:
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that the U.S. economy was beginning to ramp up amid a nationwide panic following President Donald Trump’s so-called “liberation day” tariff announcement.
“GREAT NEWS! The economy is starting to roar with a strong 228,000 jobs added in the month of March — well ahead of the market’s expectation,” Leavitt wrote on X, formerly Twitter, citing data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released Friday.
Despite the anxieties surrounding the Trump administration’s deep cuts to the federal work force, approximately 228,000 nonfarm jobs were added in March, according to the survey. Unemployment rose slightly, from 4.1% to 4.2%, and the bureau noted that government employment declined.
Leavitt attributed positive news in the labor market to Trump’s “push to onshore jobs,” but many manufacturing companies in the U.S. have laid off workers as a result of Trump’s economic policies, including steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs and automaker Stellantis, which owns Jeep, Citroën and Ram.
She also mentioned “a sharp increase” in construction, but the BLS said there was “little change” in that industry.
White House Spokesliar Karoline Leavitt is huffing paint by suggesting that the economy is “starting to roar” despite the reality that the economy is in freefall due to Trump’s broad-scale tariff tax hike.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, widely viewed as a 2028 Democratic presidential contender, made his first-ever appearance on conservative-leaning
Dan Petrella at Chicago Tribune:
Gov. JB Pritzker on Sunday used his first-ever appearance on Fox News to take his criticisms of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs to the network’s conservative-leaning audience, labeling the Republican administration’s levies on imports “taxes on working families.”
Pritzker, who has made frequent national media appearances since Trump retook the White House this year, is widely viewed as a potential contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. And as “Fox News Sunday” host Shannon Bream noted in the morning show interview, the billionaire governor has taken a more aggressive approach to criticizing the president than other Democratic governors who are also frequently mentioned in those conversations, including Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and California’s Gavin Newsom.
Illinois’ two-term Democratic governor wasn’t asked directly about his presidential aspirations, and he sidestepped a question about a Fox News poll that showed majority support for GOP positions on issues such as bans on transgender athletes, deportation of immigrants in the U.S. without legal permission and increased domestic oil production.
Instead, the American people “want affordability to go up,” Pritzker said when asked whether Democrats are out of step with voters. “They want their costs to go down when they go to the grocery store. That’s the opposite of what this administration does. This administration says they’re for working families and then attacks working families with the biggest tax increase in U.S. history with these tariffs.”
Pritzker’s roughly 10-minute interview followed a week when Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs roiled stock markets and left American investors, businesses and the nation’s trading partners perplexed about what the president is attempting to achieve. The governor’s Fox interview was immediately preceded on the TV program, which airs on Fox affiliates across the country, by a segment about support for tariffs in the shrimping industry in the South.
Pritzker said the potential for tariffs to help certain industries that face competitive disadvantages is “an argument for targeted tariffs.”
“But that’s not what President Trump has done,” the governor said. “He’s put massive tariffs across the board, and that’s going to affect not only the cost for average working families going to the grocery store, but it’s also going to affect the sales of crops that we grow in the state of Illinois and across the United States.”
Pushing the U.S. toward potential trade wars with some of its largest export markets is going to make it harder for highly productive Illinois farmers to sell their corn, soybeans, pork and beef, Pritzker said.
“We’ve got to focus on targeted tariffs,” he said. “Good trade policy, I might add, is really about protecting U.S. workers, making sure that we’re expanding markets overseas, and focusing on lowering costs for American families. And none of what President Trump has done really does that.”
Pritzker also pushed back on the argument that Trump’s use of tariffs is causing U.S. companies to consider building up domestic production or retain jobs here that otherwise might have gone overseas.
Some of those decisions already were being made as a result of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, while any possible significant increases in U.S. manufacturing and jobs as a result of steep tariffs would take years to materialize, “and we’re going to lose a lot of jobs and have a big recession in between,” Pritzker said.
Pritzker also criticized Trump for using tariffs as a way of “punishing” major allies and trading partners, including Europe, Canada and Mexico, where the governor recently completed a trade mission and signed a memorandum of understanding with the state that contains Mexico City.
“We’ve got a free trade agreement between Mexico, Canada and the United States that should be strengthened, and we should continue to use that,” Pritzker said. “It’s one that President Trump put in place, President Biden abided by during his term, and now President Trump wants to blow all that up and re-trade the very thing that he negotiated.”
Yesterday on Fox News Sunday with host Shannon Bream, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) rightly called out Donald Trump’s tariff tax hike an injury to “working families.”
From the 04.13.2025 edition of Fox's Fox News Sunday:
Is the Supreme Court about to bless Trump’s trade war with the world?
Brandi Buchman at HuffPost:
The Supreme Court announced on Tuesday that it will hear arguments on whether President Donald Trump’s “emergency” imposition of “reciprocal” and “trafficking” tariffs was illegal.
The Trump administration urged the high court to take up oral arguments mere days after a split panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., ruled that many tariffs Trump set into motion under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act were unlawful since IEEPA does not allow tariffs to be imposed without an end date hashed out.
For now, tariffs will stay in place as the administration prepares to make its case to the justices.
The showdown at the Supreme Court will be critical in deciding the fate of Trump’s self-inflicted trade war that has caused prices to soar on imports to the U.S. The president imposed both “reciprocal” and “trafficking” tariffs on key trading partners earlier this year, arguing that “reciprocal” tariffs of 10% to 50% on most goods would shore up the U.S. economy and “trafficking” tariffs, applied to goods coming from Mexico, China and Canada, would stem the flow of fentanyl into America. (Though fentanyl overdose deaths in the U.S. have long been an epidemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in August that, since 2023, fentanyl overdose deaths have actually been on the decline.)
The Supreme Court will take up a pair of cases related to the legality of whether or not Donald Trump’s imposition of his economically disastrous tariff policy is allowed to stand. Oral arguments will be heard in early November.
The rigged radical 6-3 MAGA Majority on SCOTUS is at least fairly likely to rule in Trump’s favor here, but there could be a surprise.
See Also:
SCOTUSBlog: Supreme Court agrees to decide the fate of Trump’s tariffs
America’s Economic Might and Influence Around the World Are Now in Peril
Jim Acosta at The Jim Acosta Show:
We already knew this. But it is worth repeating. Donald Trump’s lies come at a high price. The flashes of terror now hitting retirees and other Americans who are freaking out over the security of their 401k plans and other life savings mark only the latest example.
Millions of Americans learned this lesson during Covid when Trump tried to hoodwink the public into thinking that alternative remedies like Hydroxychloroquine or, as he infamously pondered aloud, disinfectants could somehow ward off the virus. One of the key members of his Covid task force, Doctor Debbie Birx later estimated that Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans. Other experts believed it may have been many more than that.
“I believe if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining, the getting friends and family to understand the risk of gathering in private homes, and we had increased testing, that we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30 percent less to 40 percent less range,” Birx told congressional investigators in 2021.
This reporter had a front row seat in the White House briefing room during the pandemic, when Trump seized control of those bewildering news conferences from such respected scientists as Birx and Doctor Anthony Fauci who ultimately struggled to beat back Trump’s lies. Who can forget the look on Birx’s face as Trump suggested that Americans could use disinfectants or bring light into their bodies to protect themselves? Too many Americans, who bought into Trump’s snake oil routine during his first administration, ignored the advice of public health experts who all but begged the public to follow simple social distancing measures that could have prevented further loss of life. Former Republican candidate Herman Cain died from Covid after attending a Trump rally that was held despite warnings of a superspreader event. Even as he contracted the virus and nearly died, Trump peddled lies that fueled the pandemic instead of shortening it.
The deadly consequences of Trump’s dishonesty came into full view again on January 6, 2021, when the disgraced president’s lies about the 2020 election culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The families of police officers who died in the days following the insurrection know this all too well. Trump is still lying about that election to this day, recently telling reporters that his quest for a third term in office would actually be a fourth because, he falsely claims, the 2020 race was stolen from him. Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was shot by a police officer inside the Capitol during the assault, is held up by Trump as a Jan. 6 martyr. Of course, had Trump not lied about his election loss, Babbitt would almost certainly be alive today.
Now in his second term, Trump’s stubborn lies about tariffs have placed the entire global economy on the precipice of a preventable calamity. For years, he has told the lie that tariffs are placed on countries when, in fact, they are applied to the goods themselves as they arrive in the U.S. Importers pick up that tab and often pass on those costs to consumers. Economic experts have repeatedly scolded Trump for childishly repeating these lies to no avail.
Some in his party are beginning to see the warning signs. Senator Rand Paul, R-KY made an astute observation this past week, assessing the potential political fallout of Trump’s foolish gamble on tariffs.
“Tariffs have also led to political decimation,” Paul said this past week. “When (President) McKinley most famously put tariffs on in 1890, they lost 50 percent of their seats in the next election. When (Senators Reed Smoot and Willis C. Hawley) put on their tariff in the early 1930s, we lost the House and the Senate for 60 years.”
“So they’re not only bad economically; they’re bad politically,” Paul added.
In today’s politics, losing the House and Senate for six decades would be an extinction event for any party. The GOP faces that kind of real possibility should Trump plunge the world into another Great Depression.
Keep in mind, Republicans were finally able for regain the White House in 1952 by putting forward a war hero, General Dwight Eisenhower as their nominee. By that point, FDR had been elected four times, before handing the Oval Office to Harry Truman, who won a hotly contested election himself. Democrats had carried the country through the Great Depression and World War Two while passing the New Deal, leaving Republicans in an almost permanent political wilderness.
Even as Trump announced his “reciprocal tariffs” in the Rose Garden Wednesday, he relied on bogus numbers and peddled outright whoppers about America’s trade imbalances with other nations.
[...]
Trump and top administration officials enjoy conjuring up the caricature of Europeans as decadent ingrates, mooching off of the U.S. Witness last month’s exchange between J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth in the Signalgate chats.
Contrast that false narrative with the outpouring of support for the four American soldiers who died in a training exercise in Lithuania. Political and religious leaders, as well as thousands of Lithuanians lined the streets of Vilnius to pay their respects as the remains of the soldiers were transported back to the U.S. When those remains arrived back in the U.S., it was Hegseth who was present for the ceremony. Trump was attending a golf event at Mar-a-Lago.
[...]
Somebody should break it to the emperor that he has no clothes before we all lose our shirts.
Jim Acosta has an excellent Substack piece on how 47’s lies come at a very high harmful price to our country.
After weeks of hype, Trump announced new 10% across-the-board tariffs, giving the nation its biggest tax increase in decades.
S.V. Dáte at HuffPost:
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Wednesday gave America its largest tax increase in at least three decades — more than $2 trillion over 10 years — by imposing an across-the-board 10% levy on all imports, with higher rates on dozens more countries and a further 25% tax on all foreign cars.
“Foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream,” Trump said at a chilly, overcast ceremony in the White House Rose Garden attended by most of his Cabinet and hundreds of invited guests.
“Our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike,” he said.
The 10% rate is half of the 20% Trump had spoken about on the campaign trail, but nevertheless will cost American importers about $2.1 trillion in additional taxes over the next decade, costs that are passed along to consumers, according to a Tax Foundation estimate.
Erica York, the group’s vice president of federal tax policy, said the total will be greater than that because of the higher tariffs charged to some countries.
That would make Trump’s tax hikes larger than the three that have been perennial targets of Republican wrath through the years: Republican George H.W. Bush’s increases of 1990, Democrat Bill Clinton’s in 1993, and Democrat Barack Obama’s in 2010 to pay for the Affordable Care Act.
Trump, by invoking emergency powers, is going around Congress to impose the tariffs. He has created a base 10% tariff but is taxing imports from many countries more, based on how those countries tax American imports. For example, imports from European Union nations will be taxed at a 20% rate because Trump’s advisers claim its tariffs and “currency manipulation and trade barriers” amount to a 39% tax on American goods going into the EU.
But while Trump and his aides claimed these tariffs were “reciprocal” ― merely matching the tariffs charged on U.S. imports by the country in question ― in reality, the rates were an arbitrary calculation of a country’s balance of trade with the United States.
“The trade deficit that we have with any given country is the sum of all trade practices, the sum of all cheating,” a Trump aide told reporters on condition of anonymity on a conference call just before Trump’s speech.
It’s unclear how precisely imports from Canada and Mexico — the two other signatories in the United States’ biggest free trade agreement — will be treated. Trump had imposed 25% tariffs on goods from those nations, supposedly to punish them for allowing fentanyl to be smuggled into the U.S., but then delayed implementation for a month. The order Trump signed Wednesday says that it excludes products “compliant” with the trade agreement but did not offer definitions.
[...]
In reality, tariffs are merely taxes imposed on imported products. When goods arrive at a U.S. port of entry, the importer — sometimes a private individual but more often a manufacturer, a wholesaler or a retailer — is required to pay to U.S. Customs the import tax due before the goods are released into the country. That expense is then added into the production cost of the goods, which is ultimately paid by the American consumer in the form of higher prices.
Whether Trump understands how this works is unclear, even though his businesses often purchased both raw material and finished goods from other countries, including China.
Wednesday afternoon on "Liberation Day", Donald Trump imposes an economy-crushing tax hike by declaring a 10% tariff rate minimum for all nations besides Mexico and Canada (with several countries getting slapped with much higher rates).
See Also:
PoliticusUSA: Complete And Total Incompetence As Trump Slaps Tariffs On Penguins
The Left Hook (Wajahat Ali): Everyone Gets Tariffs, Trade Wars, and Turmoil on Bizarro Trump’s “Liberation Day.”
Daily Kos: Trump marks ‘Liberation Day’ with bizarre rant, conspiracies—and lame props
The Guardian: Trump announces sweeping new tariffs, upending decades of US trade policy
Trump's blunderbuss tariff policies are a declaration of war on the half of America that didn’t vote for him.
David Atkins at Washington Monthly:
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and said the quiet part out loud: “The president is reordering trade… we are shedding excess labor in the federal government… that will give us the labor we need for the new manufacturing.”
At any other time, that kind of language would set off alarm bells across the political spectrum. Are laid-off NIH cancer researchers really going to find jobs in the iPhone factories that are being relocated to America? But today, it barely registers on the MAGA meter.
To be clear, Trump himself remains motivated by the same half-baked economic ideas he’s always had: a fixation on trade deficits, rooted in the zero-sum notion that if we buy more from a country than we sell to them, we’re being “ripped off.” He’s been told repeatedly that trade deficits aren’t inherently bad. He doesn’t care. The misunderstanding is the point. And he’ll drag the global economy into a ditch rather than learn how it works.
But those around him—the far-right think tanks and political operatives shaping this agenda—are playing a longer, darker game. Trump’s tariffs aren’t just bad economics. They’re a declaration of economic war on the half of America that didn’t vote for him. This is deliberate and strategic. It’s a cultural counter-revolution disguised as industrial policy. And we know it’s not about economic leverage because Trump isn’t even pretending these tariffs are a negotiating tactic—he intends to make them permanent.
As I said last month, the project is about deskilling America: reducing white-collar work through AI and remote job cuts, destroying universities, starving higher education, using tariffs to wall off the country as a manufacturing-and-extraction island, gutting the cities, and pushing men into manual labor while nudging women into domestic roles. It’s not incoherent—it’s a plan being implemented methodically.
This isn’t about economic efficiency. It’s about political control. Education has always been a democratizing force. It creates citizens who are harder to intimidate, likely to demand fair treatment, and less willing to obey autocrats. It delays childbirth, disrupts patriarchal family structures, and builds civic coalitions that threaten right-wing hegemony. That’s why it’s under attack. The goal isn’t to elevate the dignity of manual work—it’s to eliminate choice, to collapse the pathways that allow people to escape precarity and assert autonomy.
A key pillar of this reactionary movement is masculinity politics—an obsession with control over women and the restoration of a pre-modern vision of gender roles. Right-wing pundits are now proudly declaring that Trump’s tariffs will “end the masculinity crisis.” Fox News chyrons bluster that his “manly” economic policies will “make you more of a man.” The idea is that factory jobs and closed borders will somehow restore a lost sense of masculine authority that was never actually economic but cultural and social.
Much of the MAGA worldview is built on the grievances of conservative men: angry that women increasingly don’t want to date them, that younger generations are abandoning the religion that once gave them automatic status, that they are no longer guaranteed a high-paying job out of high school without having to compete with the “nerds” in their class—or with immigrants, or with workers of color overseas. Trump’s tariffs are imagined as a cure-all: destroy the livelihoods of the educated men they resent, displace women from the professional fields where they thrive, and reassert dominance over a labor force they believe was rightfully theirs.
That’s what’s behind the economic shock therapy now underway. It’s similar to the disaster economics that the U.S. used in Chile and post-Soviet Russia, and Javier Milei is inflicting on Argentina today. But it’s inflected with the fervor of a Cultural Revolution—ironically more reminiscent of Mao than Pinochet with its war on intellectuals and its bestowing glory on farms and factories. The goal is to destroy the professions that make resistance possible—this is why you start with law firms instead of HMOs—then tighten the screws once people are desperate enough to submit. When the unrest comes—and it always does—so do crackdowns.
The Trump Tariff Tax Hike policy also has a cultural component: drive women out of the workforce and reassert male dominance.
Emergency Triad: The United States commits imperial suicide.
Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark:
1. Canada
Fittingly, it was the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who declared the official time of death.
[...]
We cannot overstate what has just happened. It took just 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the American economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order.
He did this with the enthusiastic support of the entire Republican party and conservative movement.
He did it with the support of a plurality of American voters.
He did not hide his intentions. He campaigned on them. He made them the central thrust of his election. He told Americans that he would betray our allies and give up our leadership position in the world.
There are only three possible explanations as to why Americans voted for this man:
they wanted what he promised;
they didn’t believe what he promised; or
they didn’t understand what he promised.
Pick whichever rationale you want, because it doesn’t matter. Whatever the reason was, it exposed half of the electorate—the 77 million people who voted for Trump—as either fundamentally unserious, decadent, or weak.
And no empire can survive the degeneration of its people.
2. No Going Back
Understand this: There is no going back.
If, tomorrow, Donald Trump revoked his entire regime of tariffs, it would not matter. It might temporarily delay some economic pain, but the rest of the world now understands that it must move forward without America.
If, tomorrow, Donald Trump abandoned his quest to annex Greenland and committed himself to the defense of Ukraine and the perpetuation of NATO, it would not matter. The free world now understands that its long-term security plans must be made with the understanding that America is a potential adversary, not an ally.
This realization may be painful for Americans. But we should know that the rest of the world understands us more clearly than we understand ourselves.
Vladimir Putin bet his life that American voters would be weak and decadent enough to return Donald Trump to the presidency. He was right.
Europeans are moving ahead with their own security plans because they realize, as a French minister put it, “We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every four years.” He was right.
The Canadian prime minister declared the age of American leadership over. He was right.
Instead of arguing with this reality, or denying it, we should face it.
It’s bad enough being a failing empire. Let’s not also be a delusional failing empire. Let’s at least have some dignity about our situation.
The world will move on without us.
Economically this means that international trade will reorganize without the United States as the central hub. Relationships will be forged without concern as to our preferences. The dollar may well be displaced as the world’s reserve currency. American innovation will depart for other shores as the best and brightest choose to make their lives in countries where the rule of law is solid, secret police do not disappear people from the streets, and the government does not discourage research and make economic war on universities.
[...]
The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it.
Jonathan V. Last wrote this in The Bulwark, and he is 100% right regarding Trump’s moronic tariff tax hike proclamation (and his return to the White House in general): “The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it.”
Economists mocked the Trump administration's methods for calculating taxes on imports from abroad.
Arthur Delaney at HuffPost:
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump claimed Wednesday that sky-high new taxes on imported goods would be “reciprocal,” meaning they were payback for tariffs other countries have slapped on U.S. exports.
But the reciprocal tariffs turned out not to be based on actual levies imposed by other countries. Instead, they’re based on a formula made up by the White House ― and widely mocked by experts.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a conservative economist American Action Forum and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, called it “malpractice” in response to another conservative economist who called it “embarrassing.”
The formula, which resulted in wildly different tariffs for various foreign countries, including several uninhabited islands, first came to wide attention thanks partly to analysis by an anonymous social media user who reckoned the percentage rate of the tariffs matched other countries’ trade surpluses with the U.S. divided by their exports. The journalist James Surowiecki also noticed the correlation.
“They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did,” Surowiecki wrote. “Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.”
In other words, the supposedly reciprocal tariffs, which are supposed to combat arbitrary foreign barriers to U.S. goods, are themselves based on an arbitrary formula.
In a response on X, the website formerly known as Twitter, White House spokesman Kush Desai called the analyses “incorrect” and pointed to a fuller explanation of the formula from the U.S. Trade Representative, which claimed that other countries’ “non-tariff policies” cause them to sell more goods to the U.S. than we sell back to them.
“If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the USTR said on its website, which included a seemingly more complicated math equation and several academic citations.
[...]
Cole noted that the U.S. purchases a lot of consumer goods that are made more cheaply in other countries and that the outgoing dollars are often reinvested in American companies and government debt, rather than simply hoarded by foreigners. He questioned the wisdom of trying to upend the global order by making it more expensive for Americans to buy clothing and electronics made in Indonesia, for example.
“The U.S. is this hub for all sorts of investment, and people love our financial assets, and they have to give us goods in exchange, and that’s kind of how the world’s been working for a long time, and that’s why we’ve run a trade deficit,” he said. “Why should Americans be sewing shirts together, for example? A huge fraction of these tariffs are based on bilateral trade imbalances with Southeast Asia, where they’re good at making textiles.”
Since the tariffs are paid by U.S. importers who can raise prices to recoup all or part of the cost of the tariffs, Trump’s “liberation day” announcement this week could be tantamount to the largest tax increase on U.S. consumers in decades. At the same time, economists have said the tariffs could increase price inflation and slow economic growth, potentially even throwing it in reverse and triggering a recession.
47’s using an arbitrary formula to determine which nations got the baseline 10% and which got higher illustrates how insane his broad-based tariff policy is.
