The Weekly Sift: Still Sanewashing

It’s hard to avoid the sense that what we’re seeing on tariffs is another version of the sanewashing that Trump has benefited from ever since he entered politics. People just keep wanting to believe that he’s making sense, that he isn’t as ignorant and irresponsible as he seems. But he is.

- Paul Krugman "The Trade War Isn't Over"

This week's featured posts are "What's up with the Supreme Court?" and "The Big Beautiful Bill".

This week everybody was talking about the FY 2026 budget

Trump's "big beautiful bill" squeaked through the House Budget Committee yesterday. Details about what the bill is intended to accomplish are in one featured post.

and Trump's retreat on tariffs

It's been about six weeks since Trump announced "Liberation Day", when drastically increased tariffs freed Americans from the tyranny of full shelves and cheap products made overseas. Stephen Miller called it "the most significant action on global trade policy that has taken place in our lifetimes".

Then it all started to unravel. (Timeline from The Guardian.) The bizarrely determined individual "reciprocal tariffs" imposed on imports from each country came and went in less than a day, even though deals had been announced only with the UK -- and that one was still tentative. A week ago, Trump announced that the 145% tariffs on Chinese goods would go down to 30% for 90 days.

So here we are. The Treasury secretary is still threatening that the "reciprocal" tariff levels will be back if countries don't negotiate "in good faith", as if the US has been acting in good faith. But the markets have returned to their pre-liberation levels, as investors seem to be pretending the last six weeks were just a bad dream. Maybe Trump has learned his lesson now, as Senator Collins claimed after voting to acquit in his first impeachment.

Paul Krugman would like to differ.

If you get your picture of what’s happening from “news analyses” rather than experts who actually do the math, you might well think that the Trump trade war is basically over, that we’re back to more or less normal policy.

The reality is that we’ve gone from a completely insane tariff rate on imports from China to a rate that’s merely crazy. And China accounts for only a fraction of our imports. Tariffs on everyone else are still at 10 percent, a level we haven’t seen in generations. And there are still other shoes to drop: Trump has, for example, been promising tariffs on pharmaceuticals.

The trade war is still very much on. ... In other words, not much has changed since last week. We may not be looking at the complete economic meltdown that seemed quite possible (and is still a possibility), but we’re still looking at much higher inflation and an economic slowdown at best — i.e., stagflation.

and bribery

Other than going to Vatican City to sleep at Pope Francis' funeral, the first overseas trip of Trump's second administration was the tour of the oil-rich kingdoms of the Persian Gulf he completed this week. He took with him friendly tech-company CEOs "including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, Palantir’s Alex Karp and two dozen others".

While it's not unusual for presidents to promote US business interests overseas, the trip's biggest headlines concerned the benefits to Trump himself, including Qatar's gift of a $400 million "palace in the sky" intended to replace Air Force One, which Trump has long considered shabby and whose replacement is behind schedule. (Technically, the plane is a gift to the US government, but Trump's plan is for it to go to his presidential library foundation -- which he will control -- after he leaves office.)

A much more direct enrichment of Trump came from an Abu Dhabi firm that invested $2 billion in his crypto-coin scheme. Some of the investments in US corporations involved changes in government policy, like allowing the United Arab Emirates to buy quantities of top Nvidia chips that would have been forbidden under Biden administration policies, trusting the UAE not to pass such advanced tech on to a rival superpower like China.

Richard Painter, previously a government ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, commented:

[T]he impression is given that the position of the United States can be swayed and even bought.

and the Guardian reported:

Past administrations would have run from the perceived conflicts of interest being welcomed by Trump. ... “The status quo has been saying no, because it’s an actual and apparent conflict of interest, and it could jeopardize our domestic and foreign policies,” said [Scott] Amey [of the non-profit Project On Government Oversight]. ”It certainly doesn’t pass the sniff test for a lot of Americans.”

The lavish gifts and other investments come as Trump is reshaping America’s policy in the Middle East, skipping Israel and turning toward the Gulf states in a flurry of deal-making that could benefit both sides handsomely.

and the Palm Springs bombing

An IVF clinic in California was bombed Saturday morning, in an apparent terrorist attack. My first thought was that this was the work of people who believe in ensoulment at conception, upset that IVF clinics destroy fertilized embryos after they are no longer needed.

But no, it looks like the perpetrator, who also appears to have been the sole fatality, is an antinatalist. I had no idea what that was until NPR explained it: An antinatalist believes it is wrong to have children.

and you also might be interested in ...

We can expect a robust tourist trade this summer.

It's got to be hard for satirical sites like The Onion to compete with real headlines like this one: "Trump's DHS considers reality show where immigrants compete for citizenship, producer says".

DOGE is still around, and still exceeding any possible authority it might have. It's been trying to take over agencies that serve Congress, like the Library of Congress and the General Accounting Office.