Tag: elections
Trump Is 'Godfather In Reverse' -- And Now Faces Economic Catastrophe

Trump Is 'Godfather In Reverse' -- And Now Faces Economic Catastrophe

Yesterday’s election in Canada was a bit closer than polls predicted. Nonetheless, Mark Carney’s Liberal Party, which appeared doomed just two months ago, won a solid victory. And the credit goes mainly to Donald Trump.

If Trump had merely made economic demands on our northern neighbor, Canada might have acquiesced, although it’s not clear what concessions it could have made. But by repeatedly insisting that Canada must become the 51st state, he made any hint of Trumpiness toxic in Canadian politics. Hence the stunning defeat for Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader (who lost his own seat in Parliament.)

The Canadian election, then, demonstrates why Trumpist trade policy, and foreign policy in general, is doomed to catastrophic failure. Trump isn’t trying to drive tough substantive bargains. Mainly, he seems to want to indulge in narcissism, demanding that other nations humiliate themselves so he can put on a display of dominance. And America doesn’t have remotely enough leverage, even against Canada, to make such demands. You could say that Trump is a reverse Godfather, making offers other countries can’t accept.

Consider the state of negotiations — or, actually, non-negotiations, since talks appear to have broken down — with Japan, another country Trump appears to have thought he could bully. Japan does sell a lot to the United States and might have been willing to offer something to preserve its access to our market.

But reports indicate that Japanese representatives sent to Washington left without accomplishing anything because they found Trump’s people impossible to deal with. The Americans insisted that the Japanese make offers without giving any indication of what our side wanted — in effect, they demanded that Japan make a show of obeisance without any reason to believe that it would get anything in return. The Japanese government wouldn’t, probably couldn’t do that. After all, it has to answer to its own voters. So there is no deal.

And then there are the Chinese, who — unlike the Canadians or even the Japanese — probably have more economic leverage over us than we have over them. They have no interest in helping Trump sustain his fantasies of dominance. Bear in mind that Trump’s trade war is working out very well for them. Bloomberg reports that

President Xi Jinping’s diplomats are fanning out across the world with a clear message for countries cutting deals with Donald Trump: The US is a bully that can’t be trusted.

Unfortunately, they’re right. And Trump’s repeated insistence that the Chinese are negotiating with him, when they say they aren’t, comes across as pathetic.

Will Trump manage to make any trade deals? I guess it’s possible that Trump will announce trade deals with a few countries here and there. But his ability to get even fake deals is rapidly dwindling, for two reasons.

First, he’s plunging in the polls. True, he’s insisting that the polls are wrong and that pollsters should be investigated for election fraud. And the MAGA base may believe him. But this denial just makes him look even more pathetic to foreign governments, and they won’t be inclined to throw a drowning Trump a lifeline.

Second, Trump’s trade war is about to have a disastrous effect on the U.S. economy — more disastrous than even pessimistic economists, myself included, expected. Tariffs always raise prices. But the sheer size and suddenness of Trump’s tariffs, combined with the paralyzing effect of uncertainty about what comes next, are about to deliver a Covid-type supply shock to an economy already sliding into recession. This looming disaster, which will further weaken Trump, makes it even less likely that our main trading partners will help him pretend that he’s achieving anything.

Oh, and Amazon is planning to show the effects of tariffs on its prices — and the White House has gone berserk.

Back to Canada: Our northern neighbor is, along with Mexico, among the countries most at risk from Trump’s trade war. Canada does a lot of trade with the much larger U.S. economy. According to Statistics Canada, 2.6 million Canadians, 13 percent of the work force, are employed directly or indirectly producing goods exported to the United States. So U.S. tariffs will impose a huge shock on Canada’s economy.

It's not clear how much Carney can or will do to mitigate that shock. But he has no alternative to going elbows up: There’s no way to satisfy Trump’s demands. And you do have to wonder whether Trump will fold once it becomes clear how badly his trade war is going.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former professor at MIT and Princeton who now teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times. Please consider subscribing to his Substack, where he now posts almost every day.

Reprinted with permission from Paul Krugman.


'Sudden Stop': A Trump-Branded Crisis Hits US Economy (And Dollar)

'Sudden Stop': A Trump-Branded Crisis Hits US Economy (And Dollar)

Bloomberg posted an article titled “Markets Are Discovering the Real Trump Trade Is ‘Sell America’.” That’s about right. Look at the value of the dollar on international markets, shown at the top of this post. For a while after the election investors loved Trump, not wisely but too well. But in the face of one idiotic policy move after another, they’ve gradually fallen out of love, and now seem to be capitulating. I think they still haven’t faced up to how bad it is, but they’re figuring it out.

What we’re seeing now is something familiar to those of us who have studied economic crises in other countries, usually but not always emerging markets. For this is looking more and more like a “sudden stop.” That’s what happens when a country that has relied on large inflows of foreign capital loses the confidence of international investors. The inflow of money dries up — and the economic consequences are usually ugly.

Trump inherited an economy in remarkably good shape. We’d had “immaculate disinflation”: The inflation spike of 2021-22, largely caused by Covid-related supply chain disruptions, had faded away without a large rise in unemployment:


Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve

But Trump wasted no time in squandering the hand he’d been given. It’s not just the destructive tariffs. It’s also the chaos, as policy zigzags wildly, and the craziness. If you were a foreign investor, would you want to bet on America right now? Would you even want to visit to look at investment prospects, given the risk that you might be imprisoned by ICE because you once sent a text critical of Trump?

The economic consequences of sudden stops are, as I said, usually ugly. I’m writing this from Portugal, which — along with other southern European nations — was hit by a sudden stop in capital inflows just as it was recovering from the global financial crisis of 2008. The result was another severe economic slump that produced immense misery:


Can the United States suffer comparably? We have some big structural advantages that, say, Portugal in 2011 or Argentina in 2001 lacked. Above all, America’s foreign debt is overwhelmingly in dollars. This means that a plunging dollar won’t cause the domestic-currency value of our debt to explode, the way it typically does in emerging-market crises. And U.S. businesses and individuals have large overseas investments that will become more valuable in dollar terms as the dollar falls. As a result, the Trump slump in the dollar will, at least temporarily, lead to an improvement in our international investment position, the difference between U.S. assets and liabilities.

On the other hand, Portugal in 2011 or even Argentina in 2001 had mostly sane leadership. We don’t. As a number of people have pointed out, there may be no other government in the world that would have kept Pete Hegseth in office given his performance so far.

And as things get worse, there’s no reason at all to believe that Trump and those around him will look for policy solutions. Instead, we’ll see a combination of denial and efforts to blame someone else. Trump has already declared that reports of rising prices are “fake news.” And he’s already setting the stage for making Jerome Powell — “Mr. Too Late” and “a major loser” — his scapegoat for everything that goes wrong.

Coming next are conspiracy theories.

[Screengrab may have been fake?]

None of this was necessary. The U.S. economy was doing well before Trump came into office. Trumponomics isn’t a response to real problems. It’s a president who has waged a war on competence indulging his personal obsessions.

But America and the world will suffer the consequences.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former professor at MIT and Princeton who now teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times. Please consider subscribing to his Substack, where he now posts almost every day.

Reprinted with permission from Paul Krugman.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

What Wisconsin's Supreme Court Election Could Mean For Abortion Rights

What Wisconsin's Supreme Court Election Could Mean For Abortion Rights

On April 1, Wisconsin voters will elect their next Supreme Court justice. A seat that opened up after Justice Ann Walsh Bradley announced she would not seek reelection when her term expires on July 31 will be filled by either conservative candidate Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Brad Schimel or liberal candidate Dane County Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford. The new justice will take office in August.

If Schimel is elected, he would flip control of the high court from its current 4-3 liberal majority and possibly determine the ruling on the validity of an 1849 statute that could ban abortion in the state.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and the federal constitutional right to abortion in June 2022, Wisconsin’s 1849 law went into effect, and for over a year, it was used to ban abortion in the state.

In December 2023, Dane County Circuit Judge Diane Schlipper ruled that the law pertained to infanticide and not to abortion, but challenges to the law continue through the courts. The state Supreme Court heard oral arguments in November 2024, and a ruling is expected in the coming months.

Where it specifically mentions abortion, the 174-year-old statute provides exceptions for “therapeutic abortion” performed by a physician and deemed necessary “to save the life of the mother.”

Schimel has said he believes that “life begins at conception,” and in a recent debate with Crawford on March 12, when he was asked about the 1849 statute, Schimel said, “It was passed by two Houses of the legislature and signed by a governor. That means it’s a valid law.”

An expert in health care law and a physician told the Wisconsin Independent that the wording of the law is vague and could put patients’ lives in danger.

Richard Davis, a Milwaukee attorney with the firm Quarles and Brady, said that while the law was being enforced as a ban on abortion, he advised his clients to meticulously document every case in which an abortion was required to save the life of the patient.

“The key there is medical documentation, making sure the physician involved in the procedure or ordering the procedure is able to clearly and accurately state why the procedure is necessary to save the life of the mother, and keeping thorough records of that,” Davis told the Wisconsin Independent.

“Just kind of thinking forward from that physician’s perspective, if the state were to try to bring a case here, having that clear documentation of saying, No, this was necessary to save the life of the mother in my medical judgment for X, Y and Z reasons, and the more clearly and effectively they could state that, the lower the liability here is under the statute.”

Davis said that if the 1849 law were to again be interpreted as an abortion statute as opposed to a feticide statute and be enforceable by the high court, his greatest legal concern is a lack of clear parameters guiding physicians in practice.

“From a legal perspective, there’s only so much we can say, this is what the law says, and it really does boil down to the physician’s medical judgment,” Davis said.

Dr. Shefaali Sharma, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Madison, said that she’s concerned that the vague wording of the 1849 statute will result in more maternal deaths.

“When you put in vague wording that scares people in terms of how they practice, and instead of practicing based on the clinical picture in front of them and the science and the data and the evidence and objective standpoints with shared decision-making with the patient after they’ve been counseled, and instead you use fearmongering and political agendas to define what a life is and how on the edge it needs to be before you can intervene to save it, we’re going to see more maternal deaths,” Sharma said..

Sharma said that the 1849 law would devastate the state’s medical system and that patients would seek care from providers outside of the state in crisis situations such as a miscarriage or a desired abortion.

She also said that some physicians might leave the state.

“That means that more women are going to be at risk for complications,” Sharma said. “We’re going to see changes in the quality and the rigor of the training and the caliber of physicians that stay in state, because we’re going to lose those skills, and that’s going to result in so much devastation to the health care of women in the state of Wisconsin.”

Reprinted with permission from Wisconsin Independent.

Polls In Florida's Sixth District Special Are Scaring Republicans

Polls In Florida's Sixth District Special Are Scaring Republicans

Last Tuesday, a Democrat pulled off an upset win in a deep-red Pennsylvania state Senate seat where President Donald Trump won by 15 percentage points last year.

Add that into the list of other special elections Democrats have overperformed in this year, and it’s clear why Republicans are suddenly sweating the special election in Florida's Sixth Congressional District.

Florida’s Sixth District was vacated by Republican Mike Waltz, who you might now know as the world’s most incompetent national security adviser. Last year, Trump won the district by 30 points—a huge margin—so it shouldn’t be, by any stretch of the imagination, competitive.

And yet …

A poll by St. Pete Polls for news outlet Florida Politics finds that Republican nominee Randy Fine is leading Democrat Josh Weil by a measly four points, 48 percent to 44 percent. That puts a Weil victory within the poll’s margin of error. Even worse for Republicans is that an internal poll from Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s 2024 pollster, finds Fine down 3 points to Weil, according to Axios. The same pollster had Fine up 12 points in February.

But let’s take a breath. Normally, undecided voters end up voting in line with their district/state’s partisan lean, which is R+14 for Florida’s Sixth, according to the Cook Political Report. That means it’s 14 points more Republican than the country as a whole. So, in a normal election, I would expect the Republican would win this seat with roughly 57 percent of the vote to the Democrat’s 43 percent—a spread of 14 points.

That, in itself, would flash some warning signs in GOP hallways. In November, Waltz won the seat with over 66 percent of the vote, in what ended up being a good cycle for Republicans overall.

But this isn’t a normal election. This is a special election in April, in a climate in which rank-and-file Democrats are seething over the state of the nation. Turnout will be the name of the game, and by all indications, Democrats are far more motivated than Republicans.

In the St. Pete/Florida Politics poll, Weil leads among those who have voted, 51 percent to 43 percent. As of Thursday, in early-voting returns, registered Republicans have just a five-point advantage in who has voted so far. The chances of an upset are small, but they do exist—shockingly. And a lot of that could be because, according to that St. Pete’s/Florida Politics poll, 51 percent of the district’s likely voters approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 45 percent disapprove. Remember, he won by 30 points in November. Given that, it’s not so surprising to see Fine’s anemic early performance.

Uncertainty over this district reportedly played a role in the Trump administration pulling Rep. Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be U.N. ambassador. The nomination had already been languishing as House Republicans were loath to (temporarily) lose her vote, given their razor-thin majority in the chamber.

But pulling Stefanik’s nomination doesn’t solve the GOP’s bigger problem. Its ability to maintain party discipline in the House has been genuinely impressive, and has been driven almost exclusively by Trump’s strong-arm efforts to threaten members who stray with primary challenges. They fear Trump. And Elon Musk, who might fund those challengers if a representative crosses the president.

But what happens if Trump is also alienating voters to such an extent that districts that backed him by 30 points are now competitive?

Put another way, Trump keeps his troops in line because they think his backing will give them the best chance to win reelection in 2026. So what happens if being closely tied to Trump makes it less likely they survive? What good is weathering a Republican primary only to end up getting steamrolled by a Democrat in the general election? It’s quite the conundrum, isn’t it?

The closer the margin in Tuesday’s special election, the bigger that conundrum for Republicans. And if Democrats pull off a big upset?

Then look out.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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