THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Donald Trump had a plan. It was not a good plan, or even a plausible one. But it was, at least, a coherent plan: By imposing large trade barriers on the entire world, he would create an incentive for American business to manufacture and grow all the goods the country previously imported.Whatever chance this plan had to succeed is already over.The key to making it work was to convince businesses that the new arrangement is durable. Nobody is going to invest in building new factories in the United States to create goods that until last week could be imported more cheaply unless they’re certain that the tariffs making the domestic version more competitive will stay in place. (They’re probably not going to do it anyway, in part because they don’t know who will be president in four years, but the point is that confidence in durable tariffs is a necessary… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Democrats have a problem: too many problems. Identifying the problems is not one of those problems.“Democrats have a trust problem,” suggests Representative Jason Crow of Colorado.“Democrats have a big narrative problem,” adds Representative Greg Casar of Texas.“Democrats have a vision problem,” says Representative Ro Khanna of California.In general, Democrats have a “Democrats have a problem” problem.This is to be expected from a party suffering through a “major brand problem” and a “major image problem,” and whose favorability ratings have plunged to new lows, in part thanks to its “smug problem” and “media and communications problem.”“Over the last decade, the Democratic Party has had a working-class voter problem,” Representative Brendan Boyle, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, told Politico last week. “It started out as a white working-class voter problem,” Boyle said. “And it has, as I’ve long feared, spread. It is not just a white working-class issue. It has now spread to… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump celebrated America’s so-called Liberation Day by announcing a slew of tariffs on dozens of countries. His plan, if fully implemented, will return the United States to the highest tariff duty as a share of the economy since the late 1800s, before the invention of the automobile, aspirin, and the incandescent light bulb. Michael Cembalest, the widely read analyst at JP Morgan Wealth Management, wrote that the White House announcement “borders on twilight zone territory.”The most fitting analysis for this moment, however, does not come from an economist or a financial researcher. It comes from the screenwriter William Goldman, who pithily captured his industry’s lack of foresight with one of the most famous aphorisms in Hollywood history: “Nobody knows anything.”You’re not going to find a better three-word summary of the Trump tariffs than that. If there’s anything worse than an economic plan that attempts to revive the… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

The litigation over the government’s summary renditions of foreign nationals to an El Salvador prison, with no due process of law, is now at the Supreme Court’s door. The justices will soon decide whether to relieve the Trump administration from the trial court’s order halting the expulsions. Whether the government has complied with the order isn’t directly before the Supreme Court. But whether the Court can trust the government’s representations during such quickly unfolding litigation is—and the justices have every reason not to.In this and other cases now being litigated, the government is following a playbook established during the fight over the first Trump administration’s travel ban, which barred entry into the United States from several majority-Muslim countries. From that litigation, the administration learned a strategy for implementing portions of its legally dubious agenda without the Court’s explicit blessing: go fast. Speed facilitates obfuscation. By pushing litigation to a breakneck… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

All Donald Trump had to do was start telling people the economy was good now. Take over in the middle of an economic expansion and then, without changing the underlying trend line, convince the country that you created prosperity. That’s what he did when he won his first term, and it is what Democrats expected and feared he would do this time.But Trump couldn’t do the easy and obvious thing, apparently because he did not view his first term as a success. He considered it a failure, and blamed the failure on the coterie of aides, bureaucrats, and congressional allies who talked him out of his instincts, or ignored them. The second term has been Full Trump, as even his most delusional or abusive whims are translated immediately into policy without regard to democratic norms, the law, the Constitution, public opinion, or the hand-wringing of his party.That is why Trump’s… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.