Now, a 4 am post of "TRUE!!!" is not exactly a reliable policy pronouncement. But it's certainly suggestive.
But can Trump do it? Both law and culture bar the military from engaging in domestic law enforcement. Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act, but that would trigger instant court action since there's plainly no insurrection happening at the moment. And even if Trump prevailed in court, the military traditionally insists that its involvement be limited to a specific jurisdiction.
Trump might get away with it. Maybe the Supreme Court would cave in to some sophistry or another and maybe Trump could bulldoze the military into reluctantly going along. But it would be a helluva mess. He'd be better off just asking Congress for $30 or $40 billion to authorize a truckload of new ICE officers. Maybe they could hire all the January 6 protesters Trump plans to pardon.
POSTSCRIPT: It's worth recalling that Trump already tried this in his first term. It was a smallish deployment to the border in 2018, and even at that troops were forbidden by law from detaining migrants. All they could do was provide limited logistical support (air, medical, etc.) to border patrol officers.
Just a quick reminder! Last year the US imported $3.1 trillion in goods from the rest of the world. If we imposed a 10% tariff on every last penny of that amount it would raise $310 billion per year. That's it. That's the cap even in theory. It's a tiny fraction of the annual federal deficit, which clocked in at $1.8 trillion last year.
In practice, of course, even if Trump goes through with this (a) treaties will restrict what he can do, (b) he will grant exceptions, (c) imports will fall due to their higher prices, and (d) other countries will retaliate. The actual amount of revenue tariffs can raise is certainly no more than $150 billion and might very well net out to zero. It's a flyspeck.
If Republicans are looking for spending cuts to offset their huge tax cuts, the only big pot of money plausibly open to them is Medicaid. Guess what?
President-elect Donald Trump’s economic advisers and congressional Republicans have begun preliminary discussions about making significant changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other federal safety net programs to offset the enormous cost of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts next year.
....House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) told reporters Wednesday that a “responsible and reasonable work requirement” for Medicaid benefits resembling the one that already exists for food stamps could yield about $100 billion in savings. He also said another $160 billion in reduced costs could come from checking Medicaid eligibility more than once per year.
....Republicans have long denied that they are trying to reduce benefits for low-income Americans on either Medicaid or food stamps.
"Republicans have long denied." Ha ha. That's hilarious. Of course they want to reduce Medicaid and food stamps. Poor people are not a constituency they give a shit about.
The only good news here is that Arrington is presumably talking about 10-year savings, which means his Medicaid proposals come to about $26 billion a year. That's not huge even if they go through with it. Medicaid may be the only big pot of money around, but even it's nowhere near big enough to pay for their stupendous, budget-busting tax cuts for the rich.
Do we really have to play this game? Trump's appeal to the working class isn't based on the economy. It's based on cultural hot buttons and resentment of elites. Is this even controversial? I doubt that even blue-collar workers themselves would disagree.
As president, Trump will:
Raise tariffs, which hurt the working and middle classes.
Appoint union busters to every possible position.
Cut taxes on corporations and the rich.
Try to repeal Obamacare, which primarily helps the poor and working classes.
Try to repeal the IRA and CHIPS Acts, which provide lots of blue-collar jobs.
Fail to follow through on his promise to eliminate income tax on tips, overtime, Social Security, etc.
Do his best to roll back regulations on workplace safety, consumer protection, and financial ripoffs.
Appoint conservative judges who routinely favor corporations over consumers.
I'm sure I'm missing some things, but it doesn't matter. The notion that Trump is on the side of workers is laughable. What's the point of pretending?
The Wall Street Journal has a long piece tonight that goes on and on and on about how Joe Biden blew it by passing the $1.9 trillion ARP bill and firing up inflation. About halfway through the story, Nick Timiraos buries this single sentence:
A separate analysis by the [San Francisco Fed's] economists estimated the ARP boosted inflation, excluding food and energy items, by 0.3 percentage point a year in 2021 and 2022.
This saves me the trouble of writing yet another post about the fact that ARP barely had any effect on inflation. The Journal's own story does it for me. Hell, it more than does it. Even I'd be willing to acknowledge that ARP might have contributed one percentage point to inflation, but they've already underbid me at 0.6 points. Great! I'll take it.
But if that's the case, why bother writing the story?
Here's an odd thing. I got curious today about just how many trans girls (i.e., biological males transitioning to become girls) actually compete in girls' sports. The answer is that nobody knows, but a very rough extrapolation from a few state-level numbers suggests perhaps 200 in high school and 50-100 in college. These numbers are so tiny that it makes me think both sides probably ought to lower the volume on this.
But that's not what I'm writing about. As I was browsing around I ran into this:
Shazam! That's a lot, and certainly doesn't gibe with with my estimates above. And what's the UN's interest in this, anyway?
So I dug up the source, which turns out to be a recently published report called "Violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences," written by Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. The report is 24 pages long and it's mostly just what you think it is. But it also includes this:
The replacement of the female sports category with a mixed-sex category has resulted in an increasing number of female athletes losing opportunities, including medals, when competing against males. According to information received, by 30 March 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports.
Hmmm. What exactly does this mean? It doesn't say that 890 women have lost medals to trans competitors. It says that because of the "replacement of the female sports category with a mixed-sex category" women have been "losing opportunities"—which is deliberately almost impossible to parse. I have no idea what it means. So let's look at the source:
The Women's Liberation Front is a group dedicated to keeping trans girls out of sports. Ditto for the ICFS and Dianne Post. And Lavender Patch turns out to be Lavendar Patch, which is yet another anti-trans group.
But where do the numbers come from? It turns out there's an invisible link in the footnote that takes you to SheWon.org, which maintains a running total of medals ("or records, scholarships or other opportunities") supposedly lost since 2001. The list is apparently self-submitted and includes competitions of every conceivable variety at every level around the world. In addition to the usual cycling and track meets, it includes things like poker, disc golf (lots and lots of disc golf), Irish dancing, darts, and so forth. Even developmental events. It's up to 1,055 as I write this, but counting only US high school events it comes to 13 during all of 2023. Some of the entries have a citation—usually a confusing one—and some don't. It's a dog's breakfast.
As it happens, the UN rapporteur, Reem Alsalem, is herself opposed to trans girls and women competing in girls' and women's sports. So what we have is a trans athlete opponent writing a murky sentence based on a submission from anti-trans activists that's not really from them at all but is just the latest number from a website of unknown provenance that's been around for years.
I'm not myself in favor of trans girls participating in girls' sports, but this is nonetheless ridiculous. The cite of 890 "medals" is a number pulled out of someone's ass and then deliberately distorted by both the UN rapporteur and every right-wing group that then reported it as a "UN estimate." It means nothing.
Pandemic inflation in the US and Europe was nearly—but not quite!—identical:
Why was it nearly the same? Because in both places the underlying causes were the same: supply chain shortages combined with rescue packages that kept demand steady.
Why was it a little different? Because the US passed a gigantic stimulus all at one time in March 2020. This produced a nearly vertical surge in inflation a year later.
Europe, by contrast, relied more on its existing safety net, which expanded more slowly. It also passed a stimulus bill, but it was smaller than ours and came four months later. This produced a surge that started later and grew a bit more slowly.
Nothing after that mattered more than slightly. Inflation peaked four months apart and then declined at exactly the same rate. The ECB raised interest rates later than the Fed; held them lower; and cut them sooner. It didn't make any difference.
The entire non-poor world had almost identical experiences. Low-income countries, which were largely on the opposite end of supply chains, were a bit different: they suffered even worse inflation and it persisted through 2023.
Let me get this straight. While he was married (to his second wife) Pete Hegseth started an affair with a Fox producer. They had a child out of wedlock in August 2017. Two months later Hegseth had a drunken hookup with a third woman¹ who showed signs of rough handling and filed a complaint with the police. Last year he paid the woman to keep quiet because he was afraid if the hookup went public it could result in "immediate termination" from his job.²
But he's a Christian, and that's why he sports tattoos from the Crusades that also happen to be favored by white nationalists.³ Uh huh.
¹While on a road trip speaking to the California Federation of Republican Women!
The New York Postreported that RFK Jr. was "spotted" on Trump's plane "sheepishly posing with a McDonald’s Big Mac and a Coca-Cola."
No. This was obviously a planned and very deliberately shared photo. And it was typical Trump: a ritual humiliation forced on RFK Jr. to test his loyalty. I guess everyone has to go through it.
A lot was going on in 2020, and an amazing thing about the Biden campaign (yes, I am praising it!) was that it did not go out there and start screaming about "thugs" and "freaks." To use the shorthand of the times, they pretty much embraced "wokeness" during a period of major social turmoil and then they won.
Hmmm. This is not how I remember things. During the primary Biden was practically the only candidate who pushed back against open borders. He loudly opposed defunding the police. He rejected Medicare for All and instead supported increased subsidies and a limited public option. He avoided woke language in favor of Bidenisms. Trans issues weren't on the radar. Biden was, by a good margin, the most moderate candidate in a field led by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
As president, Biden moved to the left. But that's not how he got there. He got there with endless appeals to his working-class upbringing in Scranton and by being almost militantly moderate. He might not have engaged in much hippie punching, but he kept his distance from them.
Now, a 4 am post of "TRUE!!!" is not exactly a reliable policy pronouncement. But it's certainly suggestive.
