Finally, the long-predicted fallout between Musk and Trump appears to have happened. Is it for real?  When Musk announced his “retirement” from DOGE a few days ago, a lot of people thought it was an act, that he’d just shift to being a less visible player. And that might have been the plan. but I think this is for real now. Musk is continuing to trash Trump’s Big Ugly Bill, which is kicking Trump where it hurts.

Josh Marshall:

I don’t have more than speculation on what these two guys are thinking or feeling. But the White House took a big swipe at Musk by canning Musk’s handpicked NASA chief the day after his cringey departure ceremony. That action both took something valuable away from Musk and treated him with a very public disrespect. So while Musk is clearly trying to undo the ocean of brand damage he brought on himself and his companies, I don’t think the White House is playing along and trying to help with that project. I think they’re really trying to show him who’s boss, a classic example of Trumpian dominance politics.

These two are capable of doing a lot of harm to each other. Musk could put his money into defeating MAGA candidates. Trump could cancel the contracts Musk arranged for himself while he had his fingers in the government. I don’t know those things will happen. And as of Wednesday afternoon I can’t find any reaction from Trump about what Musk said, which is uncharacteristic of Trump. I do think Musk’s ravings — which are about how the bill spends too much money, not about how it cuts too much taxes — might possibly soften support for the bill in Congress. And there are little signs that might be happening. See, for example, After Muscling Their Bill Through the House, Some Republicans Have Regrets.

However, they’re still in denial about what the BUB would do to the deficit. The CBO just came out with the official score:

The sweeping Republican bill for President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda is projected to add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, according to a new estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It is slightly higher than an earlier version of the bill, which the CBO projected to add $2.3 trillion in new debt.

The report also says that 10.9 million Americans would lose their health care coverage if the bill becomes law. I doubt you’ll get many congressional Republicans on record acknowledging this. But there may be a few.

I am cheering for anything that slows the bill down, because I suspect the longer it stalls, the less likely it will pass, or at least pass without substantial changes. There appear to be a handful of Republican senators, including Josh Hawley, who realize the fallout of gutting Medicaid and probably Medicare would have real-world consequences that could hurt their constituents and, worse, hurt their re-election chances.

I also think that Trump is not exactly growing political capital. If he’s really lost Musk, what about the rest of the Tech Bros? There are news stories going back a couple of months saying that tech leaders were “breaking up” with Trump, which I hadn’t noticed.

But Trump also recently burned bridges between himself and Leonard Leo, and the Federalist Society generally, and that might be more significant than losing Musk. See Elie Mystal at The Nation, Trump Is Headed to War With the Federalist Society—and It’s Gonna Be Huge. Mystal is writing about judicial appointments, but it’s also the case that pretty much all conservative judges on the bench today are Federalist Society judges. And they are more loyal to Leonard Leo than they are to Trump. This is not going to help Trump in court. At some point he’s going to start looking pretty damn ineffectual.

I realize that most Americans have no idea what’s going on. I say that because Trump’s disapproval numbers are staying stubbornly stuck in the upper 40s. But as the year goes on I suspect at least some of the low-info crowd will notice the real world. Because as much incompetence as Trump has packed into his administration there will be screwups, and some of those screwups will be so big and splashy that even the low-infos will notice them. At least, we can hope. I don’t want another Hurricane Katrina-level disaster, but do remember what that did to George W. Bush. He never recovered.

The MAGA movement is basically a nihilistic one. It doesn’t know what it’s for, just what it’s against. It looks to Trump to restore an America that never existed, without realizing that Trump is destroying everything that did make America great. I don’t expect them to learn. But according to YouGov, “Among the entire population of adult citizens, the share of MAGA supporters has never risen above 20%.” I would have guessed 30%, but I’ll take 20%. That means there’s a lot of room for approval numbers to go down before they hit the 20% floor.

And at some point, maybe even Mike Johnson and Marjorie Taylor Greene will start to ignore him.

Some updating to the last couple of posts — yesterday Trump held a rally in Pittsburgh and announced he is raising tariffs on imported steel and aluminum to 50 percent. He says this will be good for the steel industry.

Some media outlets are trying to understand why he is doing this. Like there’s a reason. From Time:

Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, argues that the Trump Administration has yet to fully explain the exact math behind the number for the steel and aluminum tariffs.

“They’ve never given any justification why 25% is the right number, let alone why 50% is,” Winegarden says. “It was just doubled.”

Numbers shmumbers. Steel and aluminum were not affected by last week’s trade court decision. Instead of taking authority from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which the court said he couldn’t do, he had placed tariffs on steel and aluminum by virtue of Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act. And so far, no court has said he couldn’t do that. He raised the tariffs on steel and aluminum because he could. He gets off on messing with tariffs and making big headlines about it. Back to Time:

The back-and-forth on tariff dates and rates has left many businesses in limbo, though Felix Tintelnot, professor of economics at Duke University, says that with steel and aluminum, the Administration has generally followed through on the timings they’ve announced.

The question, he says, is how long the 50% will stand, as he’s seen the rates “flip-flopping all the time.” Tintelnot argues that the resulting uncertainty is causing real harm to U.S. businesses and thus, in turn, impacting workers, despite Trump’s claims that the tariffs will bring large amounts of money to the U.S. steel industry.

“We’re talking about expansion of capacity of heavy industry that comes with significant upfront investments, and no business leader should take heavy upfront investments if they don’t believe that the same policy [will be] there two, three, or four years from now,” Tintelnot says. “Regardless of whether you’re in favor [of] or against these tariffs, you don’t want the President to just set tax rates arbitrarily, sort of by Executive Order all the time.”

All you need to know about anything Trump does is that he gets off on playing god-king.

Trump can’t grasp anything more complex than a Happy Meal toy. But he really, really gets off on throwing tariff numbers around. He doesn’t understand what the numbers indicate, but bigger numbers get more attention. And that gives him the ego fix he incessantly craves.

Today’s tantrum is aimed at Leonard Leo, the guy at the Federalist Society in charge of the project of putting right-wing judges in all our courts. This is from Politico:

President Donald Trump leveled unusually pointed criticism of a prominent conservative legal activist and organization Thursday as he railed against a ruling that struck down his sweeping tariffs.

The president, in a post on his social media platform, slammed Leonard Leo, the former chair of the Federalist Society, calling him a “sleazebag” who “probably hates America.”

It was a striking characterization of Leo, who played a key role in working with Trump to shape the conservative Supreme Court.

Translation: Trump thinks he owns the entire Department of Justice and expects judges he appoints to be loyal to him, not to Leonard Leo.

Everything with Trump is transactional. And everything with Trump is personal. In his mind, his opponents don’t oppose him over principles but because they don’t like him. I don’t think he grasps the concept of principles. And if all these judges are saying that his genius tariff plans are unconstitutional, that must be because they don’t like him and Leonard Leo is incompetent. I don’t think he grasps the concept of “unconstitutional.” In his mind, if he wants to do something, it must be constitutional.

What’s worse, the big baby might not ever get his fancy plane from Qatar. This is from the Washington Post:

Despite claims by the Defense Department to the contrary, legal teams representing the U.S. and Qatari governments have not finalized an agreement for transferring the luxury Boeing 747-8 jetliner that President Donald Trump wants for Air Force One amid outstanding requests by Qatar for Washington to clarify the transaction’s terms, said officials familiar with the matter.

The plane from Qatar is currently in the United States, according to sources familiar with the matter as well as President Donald Trump, who confirmed the plane was here. However, Qatar wants to clarify the details surrounding the transfer, specifically emphasizing that the Trump administration was responsible for initiating the discussions about the donation of the luxury jet to the U.S. government, sources familiar with the negotiations said.

In brief, the Qataris want the world to know they didn’t initiate the offer to just give Trump a jet. Qatar wanted to sell the jet. Trump somehow steamrolled them into giving it to the Defense Department for his use. I also understand the Qataris want nothing to do with any future transfer of the jet to the Trump presidential library. And even if the Department of Defense does get full ownership of the jet, we still have the issue of how much time it will take and how much money it will cost to retrofit the jet for presidential use. The jet is a massive white elephant that may end up rusting away on a tarmac somewhere, unused. If Trump wants it, he can damn well spend the billions he’s making with his meme coin scam and buy the thing. And when he doesn’t get his “free” jet, watch him throw a tantrum at Qatar.

Back to the tariffs. In yesterday’s post I wrote about various laws passed by Congress in the past that he could still use to manipulate tariffs. The problem with all of them is that they all come with limits. Josh Marshall writes at Talking Points Memo that Trump’s not going to be happy with those limits.

There are a series of laws Congress has passed to give trade authority to presidents. But they tend to be focused on two things — protecting industries with a strong connection to national security and protection in response to unfair trade practices. Those are two areas in which Congress, not unreasonably, thought it might not be able to move with sufficient speed. Those laws require comment periods and investigations. They still give the President a lot of leeway to make “findings” of what threatens U.S. national security or constitutes unfair trade practices. But those criteria and processes and comment periods, even for this administration, significantly reduce the unilateral and willful authority Trump has used to go about all of this.

It’s not just a matter of easier or harder, quicker or slower. A huge amount of the drama of the last two months has been precisely the spectacle of Trump’s purportedly total and unchecked power. Trump can wake up one morning and totally upend the whole global economy. He can just tweet about 50% tariffs on Europe and well … now we’re up for a totally new drama.

Messing up the world’s economy  gives Trump god-like power! He sees himself as an ancient jealous god who throws lighting bolts at mortals who piss him off and sends locusts and floods to torment people for his amusement.

These other laws work very differently. They tend not to apply to consumer goods. The cheap measuring cups you buy on Amazon have no impact on U.S. military capacity. They’re focused on things like steel production, high-end computers, uranium — again, things that the government can’t just leave to the market because control over them is required for military power and national security. If there are specific unfair trade practices, you need to say what they are. They need to be at least kind of real.

Assuming the SCOTUS doesn’t give Trump all his magic tariff powers back —

If it does stick, that means not only that Trump’s capacity to wage trade wars will be much more limited — though by no means ended. It also means the spectacle of his total power will be diminished as well. And that’s significant in a way that goes beyond the narrow confines of trade policy. I’d really urge you to focus almost as much on the curtailment of the spectacle of total power as the impact on trade policy itself.

So he may well use those other laws discussed yesterday to continue his trade wars, but it won’t be nearly as satisfying to his ego and he’s likely to lose interest and move on to some other outrage.

And then there’s Trump vs. Harvard. I haven’t been following all the twists and turns, but I understand at the moment Harvard is enjoying some court protection. But the all-out war on Harvard is utterly irrational on Trump’s part. This is not to say that no one could ever have reason to be miffed at Harvard over one thing or another, but Trump’s actions are outside all rational bounds. Trump’s antipathy to Harvard points to something personal to him, on some level, but I don’t know exactly what. There was a web rumor that Harvard rejected Barron, but the Trumps deny that.

Trump is also suddenly really pissed at China. The State Department is moving to revoke Chinese students’ visas. And Trump is screaming that China is in violation of some tariff deal, but he isn’t saying exactly how. There’s something going on with Chinese technology and advanced AI chips. Whatever it is, Trump is now having a tantrum at China after years of claiming he and Xi Jinping get along so well.

If I had any money, I’d pay some to find out what Trump’s blood pressure is these days.

Update: More on Trump’s tirade against Leonard Leo, from Greg Sargent at The New Republic:

I’d like to highlight something else in Trump’s tirade because it constitutes an actual argument on his part about his exercise of unilateral power on tariffs. Trump said this:

The horrific decision stated that I would have to get the approval of Congress for these Tariffs. In other words, hundreds of politicians would sit around D.C. for weeks, and even months, trying to come to a conclusion as to what to charge other Countries that are treating us unfairly. If allowed to stand, this would completely destroy Presidential Power—The Presidency would never be the same!

“Under this decision, Trillions of Dollars would be lost by our Country,” Trump fumed. “The President of the United States must be allowed to protect America against those that are doing it Economic and Financial harm.”

Here Trump derides the very idea that Congress should have a good deal of authority over the levying of tariffs. Trump claims this can’t apply in the case of his new tariffs because it prevents him from acting to protect the country in an emergency. In this case, that emergency is the one Trump has invoked—our trade deficits—to appropriate for himself virtually unlimited power to levy sweeping taxes on products imported from all over the world….

…  Trump is openly declaring that he should have the power to circumvent Congress in levying these tariffs to address emergencies. Yet as Trump himself demonstrates here, in claiming this authority, he’s invoking an emergency that is not real. Trillions of dollars are not being “lost” by our country due to trade deficits, as his rant proclaims. That is not how trade deficits work, and they certainly do not constitute “emergencies.” As Trump’s tirade plainly shows, he made up the “emergency” to grant himself extraordinarily sweeping authorities.

Very fundamentally, Trump doesn’t understand separation of powers and how the federal government functions. And you really can’t call trade deficits an “emergency.” The last time the U.S. didn’t have trade deficits was 1970. We’ve been running deficits for 55 years.

Photo by Stockcake

Well, well. So last night the U.S. Court of International Trade found most of Trump’s tariffs unconstitutional. And as of today ports are not supposed to collect the tariffs. And if the ruling stands, companies are to be reimbursed for whatever tariffs they have paid so far.

The Constitution is unambiguous in giving the power to impose tariffs exclusively to Congress. The question before the court was whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (“IEEPA”) delegates those powers to the President. The decision of the court (you can read it here) seems to me to make an airtight argument that, even assuming we were in some emergency, the IEEPA just plain doesn’t extend to tariffs.  Congress may delegate some limited tariff-imposing functions to the POTUS, as long as it “lay[s] down by legislative act an intelligible principle to which the person or body authorized to [exercise that authority] is directed to conform.” I take that to mean that any such delegation must  be limited and must conform to a specific situation. What Trump has been doing is way off the charts.

If you don’t want to wade through the whole decision, you can read a good summation at Reason magazine. (If the title of the column, The Volokh Conspiracy, sounds familiar, it started out as an independent right-wing blog by a law professor named Eugene Volokh, who was all in the tank for George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq back in the day.)

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Scott Lemieux pulls this quote from the decision as the core of the argument:

Underlying the issues in this case is the notion that “the powers properly belonging to oneof the departments ought not to be directly and completely administered by either of the other departments.” Federalist No. 48 (James Madison). Because of the Constitution’s express allocation of the tariff power to Congress, see U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 1, we do not read IEEPA to delegate an unbounded tariff authority to the President. We instead read IEEPA’s provisions to impose meaningful limits on any such authority it confers. Two are relevant here. First, § 1702’s delegation of a power to “regulate . . . importation,” read in light of its legislative history and Congress’s enactment of more narrow, non-emergency legislation, at the very least does not authorize the President to impose unbounded tariffs. The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariffs lack any identifiable limits and thus fall outside the scope of § 1702.

Second, IEEPA’s limited authorities may be exercised only to “deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared . . . and may not be exercised for any other purpose.” 50 U.S.C. § 1701(b) (emphasis added). As the Trafficking Tariffs do not meet that condition, they fall outside the scope of § 1701.

In summation, Scott writes, “the statute simply does not authorize extremely high across-the-board tariffs, changed at random intervals, in better-than-usual economic conditions. Emergency powers are being exercised in the absence of an emergency, and this exceeds the power delegated by Congress.”

The White House already has declared it will file an appeal to the Supreme Court by this Friday. And nobody can be certain what the SCOTUS will do. Which is probably why the markets are a tad subdued today. Nobody’s ready to celebrate yet. And so far I haven’t seen any of the legal pundits I respect, like Andrew Weissmann or Joyce Vance, weigh in on this. Maybe later today. And do see The Supreme Court May Not Step in and Save Trump’s Tariffs at Politico. I have a hard time believing that the SCOTUS will just reverse the decision and let Trump go on as before, because the violation of the Constitution is too nakedly obvious. But if recent decisions are any guide, they’ll try to give him something.

What else might happen? This article at Tahoo Finance says there are two other statutes Trump could use to exercise tariff powers.

The most prominent quick strike option is the so-called balance-of-payments authority derived from Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. That power could allow Trump to move quickly, but with a 150-day limit on how long any tariffs can be in place.

The second route is a possible renewed focus on sectoral duties such as “Section 301” or “Section 232” tariffs.

These long-established tariff authorities (one derived from the Trade Act of 1974 and another from a separate Trade Expansion Act of 1962) are ones Trump has used in the past, but with the downside, from his perspective, that they can take time to implement.

Perhaps the most intriguing scenario involves the president moving on both fronts to try to quickly implement a short-term patch followed by a permanent fix.

One assumes he could ask the Republican-controlled Congress to impose tariffs for him, but I’m betting he won’t do that because he wants to be in control and make up the rules to fit his moods. It makes him feel special, I’m sure. It’s more likely that if he asks Congress to help him out, it would be to craft a new law that lets him continue to be the Tariff King for a while longer.

Paul Krugman:

Until he announced the massive “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, Trump mainly relied on Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, which empowers the president to impose tariffs when imports “threaten to impair national security.” Such tariffs are supposed to follow a quasi-judicial process in which the Commerce Department investigates the claim, reaches a decision, and the president then chooses whether to act:

But hey, this is the Trump administration, so if the president wants his flunkies’ officials’ opinion, he’ll tell them what it is. The result has been a series of absurd claims — Canadian aluminum is a national security threat? — but no real pushback.

Even so, that didn’t give Trump has much of a free hand as he wanted. So he began relying on the IEEPA. And I suspect that’s over.

At CNBC, see Four tools at the Trump administration’s disposal after a U.S. court blocks tariffs. In addition to the Sections 122, 301, and 232 tariffs mentioned above, there is also Section 338 of the Trade Act of 1930. This “allows the president to impose levies of up to 50% on imports from countries that discriminate against the U.S.” Trump hasn’t tried to use it before, but it sounds right up his alley.

The other possibility is that the SCOTUS will give Trump a decision that allows him to impose tariffs, but with with some conditions and limitations. And Trump decides he don’t need no steenking conditions and limitations, and he tells SCOTUS to kiss his ass and goes on doing what he’s been doing. That would be … interesting.

And I have one final question, which is that if Trump’s tariff options are limited, will that impact the Big Bill of Evil now being considered in the Senate? Because part of Trump’s argument for the tax cuts is that we’re going to have all this tariff money rolling in, so the cuts doesn’t matter. Which is nonsense, but Republicans pretend to believe it. I’d like to think that at least some Republicans in the Senate would realize there is no choice but to scale back the tax cuts. However, current Republicans are more likely to call for just shooting Medicaid recipients as a cost-saving measure. So I’m not too hopeful.

Update: From Axios:

A federal appellate court on Thursday temporarily stayed a ruling that effectively wiped out most of President Trump’s tariffs.

Why it matters: The intervention will deepen the chaos around the Court of International Trade’s Wednesday order, which threatens to upend global commerce.

Catch up quick: The trade court ruled that Trump did not have the authority under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose sweeping reciprocal and retaliatory tariffs.

The administration immediately appealed, and suggested Thursday it could go straight to the Supreme Court to seek relief if other courts did not act quickly.

Driving the news: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued an order Thursday staying the trade court’s ruling while it considers motions from both sides.

It ordered the plaintiffs in the case to file a response by June 5, and the government to reply by June 9.

This may delay taking the case to the Supreme Court. But then there’s also this. From Politico:

A second federal court has ruled against President Donald Trump’s emergency tariffs on imports from around the world, dealing another blow to his trade agenda and efforts to strike new deals with dozens of countries.

“The International Economic Emergency Powers Act does not authorize the President to impose the tariffs set forth” in four executive orders Trump issued earlier this year, D.C. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras said in a decision ordering a preliminary injunction on the collection of the duties on the two plaintiffs who brought the case.

I don’t know which decision came first. So are tariffs being collected, or not?

Over the past few days I’ve seen much commentary about how the Democratic Party is still unpopular and what it must do to win elections. And IMO a lot of this advice is really terrible. A lot of it is just variations of the don’t-scare-the-chickens, appeal-to-the-center crap that Dems have been telling each other since the debacle of 1972.The Democratic Party has spent the past 50+ years trying to appeal to the “center” and running in terror from anything remotely resembling the muscular New Deal liberalism that had once been its strength. And too many Dem candidates fail to offer a clear contrast to what the Republicans are offering. “Centrism” apparently translates into Republican Lite; mostly right-leaning, but nicer.

I’ve said this before, but I’m damn tired of Dem candidates in television ads promising to “reach across the aisle” to “get things done.” What things?

Nobody in the Dem party notices that the Republicans have been promising BIG RADICAL CHANGE, often in reactionary terms, meaning change going backward, since Reagan. And that wins for them. The electorate isn’t as afraid of change as Democrats are.

Bernie Sanders recently spoke in Ireland:

He stated that America is broken as a country, and that Trump came in with promises to fix a system that needed fixing – and people believed him.

Speaking in Ireland, Sanders said: “Understand that most young people in America will have a lower standard of living than their parents.

“When you want to understand Trumpism, and why people are angry, they are angry because in America over the last 52 years, despite huge increases in worker productivity – the average American worker is worse off in inflation-accounted-for dollars than he or she was 52 years ago.”

He continued: “When it comes to elections, Democrats say that they’re going to tinker around the edges, but they ultimately feel the status quo is pretty good.

“Then Trump comes along and says ‘The system is broken, and I Donald Trump will fix it’. Well, he got half of that right. The system is broken, he’s correct. But his solutions will only make a terrible situation even worse.”

At the other end of the scale is Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan.  There’s an interview of Slotkin by David Leonhardt in the New York Times. (I’m debating whether to use my last gift link for the month on it. I think I’ll use a “regular” link, but let me know if you can’t live without reading it.) The thing is titled “How to Turn the Middle Against Trump.” What she says isn’t necessarily awful — it’s basically “focus on middle-class issues” — but added up it’s the same tepid, let’s not scare the chickens stuff that has been eroding the Dem brand lo these many years. And while she and Leonhardt dismiss Bernie Sanders as a “socialist,” she doesn’t offer any concrete ideas about what she wants to do for the middle class, or even whether she understands what’s happening to the middle class. And, frankly, I think Kamala Harris did focus almost exclusively on middle-class issues last year.

(You may remember Slotkin from her response to the SOTU this year, in which she said “As a Cold War kid, I’m thankful it was Reagan and not Trump in office in the 1980s.” She was trying to draw a contrast between Reagan and Trump, but as far as I’m concerned Reagan paved the way for Trump.)

Another thing that Leonhardt says (after talking about Bernie Sanders):

I agree with you that most Americans don’t want socialism and they want to believe in the country that we have. I also can’t help but notice that when you think about the most successful politicians of our modern era, they’ve basically all run as change agents. It’s true of Bill Clinton, it’s true of Barack Obama. It’s obviously true of Donald Trump. And it seems to me that one of the things that the Democratic Party is sort of groping for is some way to develop a message that is authentic, anti-establishment and also gives people some hope that the future can be better than the present. I’m interested if you see any ways to tie an anti-establishment message to the hunger that Americans want for fixing these pretty deep problems that we have.

Bill Clinton was a “change agent” for sensibly raising taxes to reduce the federal deficit and balance the budget for the last time that ever happened. And as soon as he took office George Dubya Bush blew that change out of the water and turned the clock back to Reaganomics. But I mostly remember Clinton being a non-change agent, someone who was okay with prevailing conservative ideas about a lot of things. Clinton was a leader of the neoliberal “third way,” New Democrat crowd that pretty much cut all remaining ties to the New Deal tradition and pulled the party to the right. And as much as I like Barack Obama as a person, in a lot of ways he was over-cautious as a president and didn’t really deliver on the promise of “yes we can.” Perhaps the fight to get the Affordable Care Act passed discouraged him from trying much else. I acknowledge he didn’t get much help from Congress. But I do think that he didn’t so much win re-election as Mittens Romney lost. Nobody could mistake Mittens as a “change agent,” I guess.

I don’t disagree with Slotkin about the Dems needing a message that is anti-establishment and promises hope for the future. But the only members of the Dem party who have anything tangible to offer in that regard are the progressives — e.g., Liz Warren, AOC. And independent Bernie Sanders. And note that Slotkin has voted for about nine of Trump’s nominees. The only senator with a worse record in that regard is John Fetterman. She’s trying to cast herself as a leader in the fight against Trump, but in other recent interviews she’s advised Dems to stop being “woke” and also drop the term “oligarch” from their vocabularies. So, yeah, she’s starting to annoy me.

At least it’s almost sorta kinda being acknowledged by Dems that they have a communication problem. I don’t think the way to solve that problem will be found in seminars on “how to speak to young men.” They need a better understanding of why so much of the electorate is frustrated with them and speak to that. And they need to see the nation through the eyes of Americans who are trying to square their day to day lives with the image of America as a land of opportunity. The future I expected as a young person, which isn’t necessarily what I got, was much nicer than the one young people are looking forward to right now. And I don’t think a lot of the Dems in Washington understand that.

Of course, it’s also the case that a lot of Trump’s appeal is just old-fashioned racism, sexism, and jingoism. Maybe a really nasty recession caused by Trump’s policies will persuade people they have more dangerous things to be afraid of than too much diversity.

Update: This just happened.

A federal court on Wednesday ruled President Trump does not have the authority under economic emergency legislation to impose sweeping global tariffs.

Why it matters: The U.S. Court of International Trade’s ruling could bring the administration’s trade war to a screeching halt.

By blocking entirely most categories of tariffs, the court effectively wiped out most of the regime Trump put in place since taking office.

Driving the news: The court, ruling in two separate cases, issued a summary judgment throwing out all the tariffs Trump imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA.

Poor Trump’s going to be up all night POSTING IN ALL CAPS and using up most of the nation’s supply of exclamation points.

I hope y’all are enjoying Memorial Day. I’ve been taking a bit of a break, as I had to haul my head out of politics for a couple of days. But here’s a new development. See the Associated Press, President Donald Trump says Russian leader Vladimir Putin ‘has gone absolutely CRAZY!’

President Donald Trump made it clear he is losing patience with Vladimir Putin, leveling some of his sharpest criticism at the Russian leader as Moscow pounded Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with drones and missiles for a third straight night.

“I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” Trump wrote in a social media post on Sunday night.

Trump said Putin is “needlessly killing a lot of people,” pointing out that “missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever.”

Russia has ben engaged in a military assault of Ukraine, needlessly killing a lot of people, since bleeping February 2022. Trump is just now noticing this?

The U.S. president warned that if Putin wants to conquer all of Ukraine, it will “lead to the downfall of Russia!”

Exclamation points! Trump must be really concerned. I mean, concerned!!

But Trump expressed frustration with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as well, saying that he is “doing his Country no favors by talking the way he does.”

“Everything out of his mouth causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop,” Trump wrote on social media.

Trump is still a moron. Some things don’t change. The Kremlin has dismissed Trump’s lèse-majesté as “emotional overload.” Note that his is what abusive men always say about women. She’s just being hysterical.

David Sanger writes in the New York Times,

“I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin,” President Trump told reporters on Sunday afternoon, just before boarding Air Force One for a short trip from his golf club in New Jersey to Washington. Hours later, he posted about the Russian leader, saying, “He has gone absolutely CRAZY.”

Mr. Trump’s rare criticism of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia came after a weekend of the largest bombardment of Ukrainian cities over the past three years, mostly aimed at civilian targets, from residential areas in Kyiv to university dormitories. The Russian attacks also happened only days after Mr. Trump had what he described publicly as an “excellent” two-hour phone call with Mr. Putin that Mr. Trump promised would immediately lead to direct peace negotiations.

Mr. Trump has long said he enjoys a “good relationship” with Mr. Putin, and it was not the first time he expressed shock that the Russian president was unleashing attacks on Ukrainian civilians. A month ago Mr. Trump wrote “Vladimir, STOP” as a barrage of missiles and drones hit Ukraine, including crowded playgrounds. But Mr. Trump has never linked the attacks with his own decision, reaffirmed last week, to refuse to join the Europeans in new financial sanctions on Russia, or to offer new arms and help to the Ukrainians.

The result is a strategic void in which Mr. Trump complains about Russia’s continued killing but so far has been unwilling to make Mr. Putin pay even a modest price.

The pattern is a familiar one, several outside experts and former government officials said. Mr. Trump signals he is pulling back from a conflict he often describes as Europe’s war, then expresses shock that Mr. Putin responds with a familiar list of demands that amount to a Ukrainian surrender, followed by accelerating attacks. Mr. Trump episodically insists he is “absolutely” considering sanctions, including on Sunday.

And his culties think Trump is such a tough guy. What a joke.

Yet each time when he is forced to make a decision about joining Europe in new economic penalties, he has pulled back.

“Russia said no cease-fire and Trump is increasingly washing his hands of it,” Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group, a geopolitical consulting firm, wrote on Monday. The result is that “support for Ukraine continues to recede in importance for the Americans,” he added. Mr. Bremmer predicted that “what comes next is more fighting — expanded Russian attacks across Ukraine, fewer restraints on Ukraine targeting inside Russia.”

The latest cycle of this odd interaction between the American and Russian leaders happened just last week. Mr. Trump, who has made no secret of his desire for a summit meeting soon with Mr. Putin, declared that only he and the Russian leader had the power and influence to end the war. Yet by the time they were done talking in their call last week, Mr. Trump had changed his position, saying it was now up to Ukraine and Russia to end the war in direct negotiations.

Trump may have really thought Putin would back off of Ukraine if he asked nicely. But now he may have accepted that Putin is not going to give him a diplomatic win, so he’s lost interest.

In a subsequent conversation with the leaders of Germany, France, Italy and Finland, along with the European Commission, Mr. Trump had yet another view: Mr. Putin thought he was winning the war and would press his advantage. According to several officials briefed on the conversation, Mr. Trump made it clear he had no intention on putting pressure, much less harsh economic sanctions, on Russia.

“He said, essentially, ‘I’m out,’” said one of the officials, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to describe the conversation.

Maybe with Trump out, other European countries can step in.

House Republicans pulled an all-nighter to get their Big Bill of Evil passed and shipped off to the Senate. As I wrote yesterday, it’s not impossible that the Senate will tone it down a bit. We’ll see. Note that the final House bill cuts Medicaid more. Emine Yücel at Talking Points Memo:

The massive reconciliation package — which already included massive cuts to Medicaid and the popular food assistance program SNAP, as well as tax cuts that will largely benefit wealthy Americans — got a makeover on Wednesday largely to appease the far-right members who were threatening to sink the bill.

Notably, leadership made substantial changes to the Medicaid portion of the bill overnight.

The new text moves up the start date of Medicaid work requirements from Jan. 1, 2029 to Dec. 31, 2026. That was one of the demands members of the Freedom Caucus had been pushing since last week.

The bill already included a provision that banned coverage of gender-affirming care for minors. The new text extends that ban to adults under the program as well. Republicans also expanded the criteria for a provision that could cause states to lose a portion of the funds they receive through the federal matching rate if they offer coverage to undocumented immigrants.

Another notable change is expected to incentivize states not to expand their programs under the Affordable Care Act. A newly added measure would give states a financial incentive not to expand coverage outside of the traditional enrollees, making higher payments to providers, like hospitals, for uncompensated care.

Some of the blue state people were able to raise the SALT cap, but IMO that’s not going to help them much in the next elections if Medicaid and Medicare are screwed.

Here’s another endearing change, reported in the New York Times:

The domestic policy bill proposes to stop efforts to improve staffing levels in long-term care homes in a section titled “preventing wasteful spending.” Specifically, the bill prohibits the health secretary from enacting a Biden administration rule that was meant to increase the number of care workers and improve conditions for about 1.2 million people in nursing homes in the United States.

But if they cut enough Medicaid, most of those places are going to have to close, anyway, so what’s the problem?

Here’s another bit from the Times:

The market for U.S. government bonds, the bedrock of the global financial system, continued to shudder on Thursday, as President Trump’s bill to extend expensive tax cuts and create new ones without significantly slashing spending passed through the House of Representatives. The bill has unnerved investors, deepening worries that the country’s debt is becoming unmanageable.

Yields on U.S. bonds, which underpin consumer and business interest rates around the world, from mortgages to corporate loans, have been rising in recent weeks. Yields rise as prices fall. Higher yields reflect investors’ concerns that lending to the government by buying its debt has become more risky.

Ya think? I wouldn’t lend money to the U.S. right now.

I’d like to think there are at least some Republican senators — and it wouldn’t take all that many — who recognize what a disaster this is and don’t want to be associated with it. We’ll see. House Republicans are just nuts. Or else they’re a lot more intimidated.

Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic.

The heedlessness of the process is an indication of its underlying fanaticism. The members of the Republican majority are behaving not like traditional conservatives but like revolutionaries who, having seized power, believe they must smash up the old order as quickly as possible before the country recognizes what is happening.

House Republicans are fully aware of the political and economic risks of this endeavor. Cutting taxes for the affluent is unpopular, and cutting Medicaid is even more so. That is why, instead of proudly proclaiming what the bill will accomplish, they are pretending it will do neither. House Republicans spent months warning of the political dangers of cutting Medicaid, a program that many of their own constituents rely on. The party’s response is to fall back on wordplay, pretending that their scheme of imposing complex work requirements, which are designed to cull eligible recipients who cannot navigate the paperwork burden, will not throw people off the program—when that is precisely the effect they are counting on to produce the necessary savings.

Except it may not produce savings. When states have tried work requirements they’ve found the “savings” were mostly eaten by the additional bureaucracy needed to implement the program. Although maybe they just plan to use AI now.

(Update: See Republicans Sneak Massive Medicare Cuts Into Their Horrid Tax Bill by Hafiz Rashid at The New Republic.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office issued a report Tuesday finding that the GOP’s budget bill would automatically trigger over $500 billion in automatic cuts to Medicare, exposing President Trump for lying that Medicare wouldn’t be touched. The CBO estimates that there would be about $45 billion in cuts in 2026, and $490 billion in cuts between 2027 and 2034.

That’s MEDICARE, folks. Are they insane?)

The Mega-Bill of Evil is not yet ready to be voted on in the full House, I understand. This is from the Washington Post:

The Big, Awful Budget Bill is out of committee. Passage in the House is another hurdle. But never fear; the Big Man himself, Donald Trump, came to Capitol Hill and ordered congressional Republicans to pass the bill asap.

However, the bill Trump was pitching isn’t the one that was just released by the committee.

Trump told Republicans he didn’t want Medicaid cuts beyond rooting out “waste, fraud and abuse.”

“Don’t fuck around with Medicaid,” Trump said, according to a source in the room.

But the current bill makes dramatic Medicaid reductions, more than $700 billion over the next decade, with Republicans considering additional changes that would cut hundreds of billions more in order to get conservatives on board.

He told Republicans the bill was a choice between “the biggest tax cut in the history of our country” or “a 68% tax increase.” Neither claim is remotely true. The bill would largely extend current individual tax rates, and if the rates expired, most people would see a 2% or 3% increase in their taxes.

And, he suggested, politically, it wasn’t really wise to increase the state and local tax deduction, reasoning that blue state governors would be the big winners. The current offer from leadership, according to Punchbowl, is to quadruple the state and local tax deduction, from $10,000 to $40,000, allowing wealthy homeowners to write off their huge property tax bills on their federal returns. (SALT caucus members still want more.)

As one House member said,, “He’s not a detail guy.”

When Trump was campaigning last year, he did promise to bring back the SALT deduction that used to let taxpayers deduct what they paid in state and local taxes from federal taxes. This is popular in blue states, which tend to have higher state and local taxes because nobody wants to be Mississippi. And blue state Republicans who are not locks for re-election want to bring it back, too. But now Trump is opposed to it, because he hates Gavin Newsom. See Tobias Burns at The Hill, 5 things to know about SALT, the tax break holding up Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’.

The bill is a disaster. It’s ruinous to the national economy and probably to a majority of its citizens. Most Republicans, including the ones who are smart enough to understand what they’re doing, are refusing to face reality. See David Graham at The Atlantic, Congressional Republicans vs. Reality.

Any straightforward accounting points to one conclusion: The president’s “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” (as Republicans insist on formally calling it) would make the country’s fiscal situation worse. It would slash taxes for years to come, and although it would make some budget cuts, they aren’t anywhere near enough to cover the difference. The bill is projected to add trillions of dollars to the deficit; the only real disagreement among analysts is over how many trillions. Yet Republicans leaders keep trying to pretend otherwise. …

…Later on Friday, the credit-rating agency Moody’s lowered the nation’s rating from the top Aaa to Aa1 with a negative outlook, citing, um, greater federal spending without greater taxes to cover it. “Over the next decade, we expect larger deficits as entitlement spending rises while government revenue remains broadly flat. In turn, persistent, large fiscal deficits will drive the government’s debt and interest burden higher,” Moody’s said in a statement.

Republican leaders’ response to the downgrade has been denial. On Meet the Press, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, “I think that Moody’s is a lagging indicator. I think that’s what everyone thinks of credit agencies.” Even insofar as this is true, why exacerbate the existing problems that Moody’s notes? This morning, Majority Leader Steve Scalise told CNBC, “This bond downgrade is another serious blow that shows that America needs to get its fiscal house in order. We start to do that in this bill.” Never mind that Moody’s is responding to exactly the bill’s approach.

Russell Vought, the White House budget chief, made the tortured argument that because the bill cuts more than the 1997 Balanced Budget Act agreement, it must be fiscally conservative, as though the huge reductions in revenue included in the bill are somehow irrelevant. Vought also noted that the GOP’s accounting is based on “$2.5 trillion in assumed economic growth”—in other words, keeping their fingers crossed for the rosiest results. Among other things, the bill would extend tax cuts passed in Trump’s first term, which didn’t live up to GOP projections that they’d pay for themselves.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went with a simple up-is-down approach. When asked this morning whether Trump was okay with the bill adding to the deficit, she deadpanned, “This bill does not add to the deficit.”

So there it is. They are counting on the Magic Prosperity Fairy to bail them out.

But even assuming the House GOP manages to vote as one and get the bill passed, what will happen to it in the Senate is anybody’s guess.

Trump’s people were on a real roll today. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem explained to a Senate hearing that “Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country, and suspend their right to—.” That’s as far as she got before she was interrupted by an exasperated Senator Maggie Hassan.  There were a lot of interesting hearings today, in fact, with RFK the Lesser and Marco Rubio, who holds several jobs now. I imagine him singing the “Largo al Factorum” from Barber of Seville, about how everybody needs him for something. Lesser and Little Marco notably didn’t know anything about what they were asked. Trump’s people are brilliant at not knowing anything. I guess none of them are detail guys.

Well, the Court giveth, and the Court taketh away. Today SCOTUS decided it was okay to let Trump remove nearly 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants from Temporary Protected Status so that he can go ahead and deport them.

At issue before the Supreme Court was a subsequent designation made in October 2023 and extended in January just before Donald Trump took office. It is set to expire in October 2026.

In February, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sought to unwind those determinations, meaning the protections would expire this year instead.

California-based U.S. District Judge Edward Chen blocked the move, citing concerns that the decision was based in part on racial animus.

Noem’s actions meant the affected immigrants face “possible imminent deportation,” he wrote.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in the administration’s emergency application that the courts could not review Noem’s decision.

And why can’t the courts review Noem’s decision? Oh, never mind. This is from the New York Times:

The justices announced they would allow the Trump administration to end the protections pending appeal of the case, potentially allowing the administration to move ahead with deportations. The justices also clarified, however, that they would preserve the ability of individual immigrants to bring some legal challenges if the government tried to cancel their work permits or to remove them from the country.

And do the justices seriously think Trump’s people are going to allow these Venezuelans to bring legal challenges before they’re loaded on a plane to go who knows where? If so, are those justices stupid? Oh, never mind.

This is even more outrageous:

Trump calls for probe into Springsteen’s involvement in Harris presidential campaign
President Donald Trump early on Monday said he would call for an investigation into musician Bruce Springsteen’s endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential run.

“I am going to call for a major investigation into this matter,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social network. “Candidates aren’t allowed to pay for ENDORSEMENTS, which is what Kamala did, under the guise of paying for entertainment.”

What can one say but, what the bleep? Trump is pissed at The Boss for dissing him during performances in London.  Trump is also calling for investigations into several other celebrities:

President Donald Trump has called for a “major investigation” into celebrities who aided Kamala Harris‘ 2024 election campaign, including Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey, and Bono, saying their appearances were potentially illegal contributions.

Trump had some celebrity endorsers, also, and some of them appeared at his rallies. Some people don’t know when to leave well enough alone. I believe celebrity endorsements go back to when Al Jolson endorsed Warren Harding.

In other news, the Terrible Horrible Budget Bill did make it out of committee. It has to be voted on in the House, and then who knows what the Senate will do with it. The best commentary I’ve seen on this is by Paul Krugman: Attack of the Sadistic Zombies.