A Clown in a China Shop

Our perfectly smooth-brained president is having a perfectly wonderful time.

A weird split-screen underway this morning: With Liberation Day tariffs slamming in place pretty much everywhere overnight, the wheels are well and truly coming off the economic bus. J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said this morning on Fox News that a recession has become “a likely outcome.” And as Peter Hamby pointed out at Puck News last night, people just aren’t buying Trump’s economic plan: His approval numbers on the economy, a major strength before the election, have taken a catastrophic dive.

And yet here’s Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a rising star and possible 2028 contender in the Democratic party, in D.C. today giving a speech offering two cheers for protectionism: “I understand the motivation behind the tariffs, and here’s where President Trump and I do agree. We do need to make more stuff in America. . . . Let’s give more hardworking people a fair shot at a decent life. And let’s usher in, as President Trump says, a ‘Golden Age’ of American manufacturing.”

We are but humble newsletter writers. But we’re not totally convinced Democrats should be out here offering even nuanced, guarded praise for the trade philosophy that is about to turbo-crash the global economy. Happy Wednesday.

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(Photo by Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images.)

A Microwaved Mind

by Andrew Egger

There’s a paradox to covering Donald Trump these days. On the one hand, he’s never out of the news—a wannabe dictator busy remaking the government and the economy so that more and more decisions about our futures answer only to his whim. On the other hand, there’s so much news about what he’s doing that it’s easy to reduce our thinking about Trump to the sum of his actions. There’s Trump the bundle of bad policy ideas, Trump the destroyer of institutions, Trump the fountain of post-truth grievance. It’s hard to take the time to dwell on the man himself—to focus our attention on Donald Trump the clown.

Yesterday afternoon, as markets continued crashing and with the further implementation of backbreaking tariffs just hours away, the clown was on full display. Trump participated in the ceremonial signing of an executive order on “unleashing American energy.” In the East Room event, he was in his element: coal miners in hard hats behind him, an audience crammed with his political flunkies in front. He ended up riffing for about 45 minutes. Let’s listen in, shall we?

On clean, beautiful coal

The topic du jour, of course, was energy, specifically the “beautiful clean coal” that Trump loves so much. Trump riffed at length on the supposed stupidity of proposals to retrain miners for skilled labor in other industries, reminiscing his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton:

“One thing I learned about the coal miners . . . You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of a job and they’d be unhappy. Coal mining is what they love to do,” Trump said. “And she was gonna put them in a high-tech industry, to make little cell phones, I don’t know. Do you think you’d be good at that? I don’t know.”

Anyway, no need for any of that now, the president exulted: “We’re gonna be crushing Biden-era environmental restrictions. . . . And we have clean air and clean water and now we have clean coal. And at the same time we’re gonna do other things and forms of technology and also energy, like our country has never seen before.”

And don’t get him started on the “liquid gold” of U.S. oil. “We will unleash that as well,” Trump said. “I didn’t want to mention that. Today is about clean and beautiful coal.”

On tariffs

Trump didn’t totally avoid talk of the market crash he kicked off last week—a “whole situation,” he noted, that “was somewhat explosive.”

But, Trump added, you should see the response we’re getting! “We have had talks with many, many countries. . . . And our problem is, we can’t see that many that fast. But we don’t have to because, you know, the tariffs are on, and money is pouring in at a level that we’ve never seen before.”

How much money are we talking? “We’re taking in almost $2 billion a day in tariffs,” Trump said. “America is gonna be very rich again very soon.”

Got all that? Yes, markets are tanking because of the tariffs. But not to worry: We’re going to strike great deals to replace them soon. But not too soon, because we don’t have time to deal with all these countries at once. But that’s okay, because look at how much money these tariffs are making us!

On his big, beautiful brain

At one point, Trump was rattling off a list of states where his administration was approving new coal mining expansions: Wyoming, Alabama, Utah, North Dakota, and many others. But he apparently noticed one was missing from his prepared remarks: “West Virginia!” he said. “Can’t believe they didn’t put West Virginia down. It’s lucky I mentioned that, right? . . . Good to have a president like that that can pick that up, right? You think Joe Biden would have picked that up? I don’t think so.”

On brainstorming

When you’re as smart as Trump, you never want to let an errant genius idea go to waste. Twice during the speech, the president unveiled new policy proposals as they occurred to him pretty much in real time.

“Our government is going to do something that is very different,” Trump said. “This was my idea from about 15 minutes before I got up here. We are going to guarantee that we have a strong business for many years to come—that your coal companies and miners don’t get all excited about their jobs and then, should a radical left liberal become president, they end the business right away. . . . We are going to give a guarantee that the business will not be terminated by the ups and downs of the world of politics.”

How that would work, he didn’t elaborate.

A few minutes later, Trump was riffing on instructing his Justice Department to sue over state and local regulations that were making it harder to mine in some parts of the country when another novel thought seemed to occur to him. “Have you noticed that lots of law firms have been signing up with Trump?” he said. “We’re gonna use some of those firms to work with you on your leasing and your other things.”

Finally, a president who’s willing to strong-arm America’s law firms into doing pro bono work for someone really deserving—the coal industry.

On his second term

Maybe the most accurate thing Trump said came during a riff on his decision to order two California reservoirs opened back in January—a triumph of which he remains very proud despite expert consensus that it did nothing but waste billions of gallons of needed water that the state’s farmers will sorely miss this summer.

“It’s a beautiful thing to see. I saw a picture of it this morning and the water is just flowing down there,” Trump said. “I told them to do it my first term. I said, ‘Do it.’”

“The second term, I think, is more powerful,” he mused. “When I say, ‘Do it,’ they do it.”

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Trump’s Fatal Attraction

by William Kristol

American politics today is a race between the extraordinary damage Donald Trump is doing and attempts to limit that damage. To limit that damage, it’s necessary to drive down Trump’s popularity. In the short term, this could weaken his hold on congressional Republicans and constrain his ability to carry out parts of his agenda. In the medium term, this would lay the groundwork for a massive repudiation of Trump in the midterms, with a Democratic takeover of the House and perhaps even the Senate.

For the first two months of his presidency, Trump was winning the race. His destruction was outpacing efforts to limit the destruction.

But that could be changing.

Yesterday the Navigator Research group released new polling, conducted from April 3-7—i.e., the period after Trump’s tariffs announcement and the beginning of the subsequent market meltdown.

Approval of President Trump’s job performance has taken a hit. In the survey, Trump is now at 44 percent approval, 53 percent disapproval—a net -9 percent, down from a net +2 percent on February 3. It was -1 percent on February 24, and -2 percent on March 17. In other words, what was a very slow erosion in Trump’s approval has, in the last three weeks, turned into a pretty precipitous drop.

This was driven by a fall in approval of Trump’s performance on the economy. That’s now at 42 percent approval, 55 percent disapproval, a net -13 percent, down from a net positive +1 percent in early February. And this is mirrored by Americans’ declining confidence in their personal situations. Only 36 percent said they are confident while 62 percent are uneasy—a net -26 percent, down from net -13 percent three weeks ago.

Of course, tariffs were key to all this. Trump’s tariffs are viewed unfavorably by 58 percent of Americans and favorably by only 30 percent. Even more striking: 56 percent think Congress should take back its power and control over how tariffs are used. Only 33 percent of the public believes Trump should be able to impose tariffs without congressional approval.

Navigator is, to be sure, a Democratic-aligned firm, and so one might be tempted to discount these findings. But its polling is reputable, and in any case the above comparisons are between earlier and later Navigator polls, so it’s apples to apples.

And the lesson is pretty obvious. Democrats should be relentless in attacking Trump’s tariffs. But beyond screaming and yelling, Democrats in Congress should be acting. They should be introducing legislation to overturn Trump’s tariffs. They should be insisting on votes on these measures. They should be publicizing Republican maneuvers to prevent such votes. They should be calling out by name Republican members who profess to be concerned about Trump’s tariffs but won’t do anything about it.

In sum: Democrats can make Trump’s tariffs the Republican party’s tariffs. They can wrap the tariffs around Republican members’ necks. This could weaken Trump in the near term. In the long term, it could lay the predicate for a blue wave in November 2026.

Trump has said many times that he loves tariffs. He’s now acting on his reckless and destructive obsession. The Republican party is enabling him. For Trump and his GOP, tariffs may turn out to have been their fatal attraction.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• It Takes Guts to Quit on Principle… BILL LUEDERS writes in praise of those who stood up to the Trump administration.

• Republicans Are Obsessed with a Censorship Lie… They’re even eager to name-drop Joseph Goebbels! NINA JANKOWICZ, covering the House GOP’s fifth hearing about a lie and why they blithely ignore the urgent First Amendment threats posed by Trump.

• Everything Trump Thinks About Tariffs is Wrong… Come join WILL SALETAN and MONA CHAREN on Just Between Us as they try to unravel Trump’s tariff fantasies.

• They Elected a Moron, Now They’re Coping… On MSNBC yesterday, TIM MILLER popped off on the Trump tariffs tanking the economy and sending us toward a recession as Republican lawmakers do absolutely nothing. Catch up on Bulwark+ Takes.

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Quick Hits

THE GREATEST CROSSOVER EVENT IN HISTORY: Two months ago, the Department of Homeland Security asked the IRS to help them track down millions of suspected illegal immigrants by sharing identifying information from their tax returns. The IRS rebuffed that request, saying it would run afoul of tax privacy laws.

But this week, the two agencies reached an agreement under which some IRS data will be shared for DHS enforcement purposes. The IRS will not hand over its data set to outside agencies, the truly massive breach of privacy the White House was reportedly pushing for. But IRS officials have agreed to cross-reference names and addresses of immigrants provided by DHS to confirm them against IRS records—a smaller ask that is nevertheless still more than privacy laws permit. The Washington Post reported this morning that acting IRS commissioner Melanie Krause, already the third person to head the agency since Trump took office, plans to resign over the decision, which was reached without her input.

The data-sharing may be a boon to DHS enforcement efforts. But it will likely come at a fiscal cost. Our colleague Adrian Carrasquillo reported last month that word of possible DHS/IRS collaboration was already making undocumented workers skittish about filing their taxes at all this year. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated last year that undocumented workers paid almost $60 billion in federal taxes in 2022. That money helps fill the Social Security fund’s coffers. Without it, the program will move closer to insolvency.

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THE YO-YO YO-YOS: It’s been darkly humorous, watching markets spasm violently the last few days—surging at every hint of a suggestion that a tariff reprieve might be coming before sagging despondently back at the next indication that, no, the White House is truly very serious about the new mega-tariff regime. If a single fake tweet from some random guy named Walter Bloomberg can move trillions in value, it’s a pretty good sign that traders are tweaking like crazy—nobody knows where the bottom is, and nobody wants to miss the chance to buy when they get there.

“Yesterday market players saw how the hint of ‘good news’—in that case it was chatter about a pause in the Liberation Day tariffs—could rally markets by whole percentage points very quickly,” venture capitalist Michael Block said Tuesday in a note to investors reported by CNN. “Even though that proved to be all smoke, traders are now poised for the fire—that is, real news.”

Sounds like a pretty good opportunity for Trump to grab an easy victory, if you ask us! Go ahead, Mr. President: Announce some pointless new window-dressing trade agreements, yank the tariffs off, and watch the markets shoot back up like a cork from a bottle. Alas, at an NRCC fundraiser last night, Trump showed no interest in taking a manufactured W. Looking forward to the midterms, he declared: “I really think we’re helped a lot by the tariff situation that’s going on, which is a good situation,” “It’s going to be legendary, you watch.”

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BOYS WILL BE BOYS: The Elon Musk/Peter Navarro feud is going from remarkable to insane at breakneck speed. Navarro, Trump’s tariff-loving trade adviser, took to CNBC Monday to scoff off Musk’s tariff concerns, calling him a “car assembler” and accusing him of indulging in the sort of vile international trade the administration was determined to stamp out.

“In many cases, if you go to his Texas plant, a good part of the engines that he gets, which in the EV case are the batteries, come from Japan and come from China,” Navarro said. “The difference in our thinking and Elon’s on this, is that we want the tires made in Akron. We want the transmissions made in Indianapolis. We want the engines made in Flint and Saginaw. And we want the cars manufactured here.”

Musk went ballistic, calling Navarro’s claims “demonstrably false.” And he got personal, writing that Navarro, whom he termed “Peter Retarrdo,” is “truly a moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks.”

The White House is full of people who love Trump but hate each other, a recipe for a certain amount of strife. But for months, the administration has done a decent job managing to keep that all bottled up. “The president and Elon and his entire cabinet are working as one unified team,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters back in February, a refrain she’s often repeated since.

This week, the vitriol has been too public to leave even a gifted and shameless spin doctor like Leavitt much room to maneuver. “These are obviously two individuals who have very different views on trade and on tariffs,” she told reporters yesterday. “Boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue.”

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