Heather Cox Richardson, in her "Letters from an American" substack, summarizing the ongoing Musk/ Trump coup and tariff bungle:
I’m going to start tonight by stating the obvious: the Republicans control both chambers of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. They also control the White House and the Supreme Court. If they wanted to get rid of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, they could introduce a bill, debate it, pass it, and send it on to President Trump for his signature. And there would be very little the Democrats could do to stop that change.
But they are not doing that.
Instead, they are permitting unelected billionaire Elon Musk, whose investment of $290 million in Trump and other Republican candidates in the 2024 election apparently has bought him freedom to run the government, to override Congress and enact whatever his own policies are by rooting around in government agencies and cancelling those programs that he, personally, dislikes.
The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup. The U.S. president has no authority to cut programs created and funded by Congress, and a private citizen tapped by a president has even less standing to try anything so radical...
The time for Democrats to have gamed out this worst case scenario was last November. There is no time now for largely symbolic legislative moves that the lawless fascist regime would ignore just as it's ignoring the U.S. Constitution and established law. Now that we've all been punched in the face, we'd like to know what's their new plan. Maybe someone's learned you don't bring norms to a Trump fight?*
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... As soon as [White House Spokesliar Karoline] Leavitt announced the upcoming tariffs, the stock market began to fall, and by last night, stock market futures had fallen 450 points on the expectation of tariffs hitting at midnight tonight. Today, the stock market continued to fall. Even reliable Trump allies began to complain that the tariffs would raise prices. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called Trump’s tariffs “the dumbest trade war in history.”
Today, the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, announced that she and Trump had “reached a series of agreements” that would pause the threatened tariffs for a month. Mexico agreed to “reinforce the northern border with 10,000 elements of the National Guard immediately, to prevent drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States,” while the U.S. “commits to work to prevent the trafficking of high-powered weapons to Mexico.”
When Trump announced their conversation shortly afterward, he omitted the part of the agreement that committed the U.S. to try to stop the flow of guns to Mexico. He also did not mention that, in fact, Mexico committed to putting 10,000 troops at the border in 2021. As Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post commented above a record of Mexican troop deployments: “Any news outlet reporting Mexico conceded anything to Trump to get him to delay tariffs has not done its homework. Trump boasts he got Mexico to commit to stationing 10K troops at our border. Apparently he didn’t realize Mexico already has 15K troops deployed there[.]”
The crisis at the northern border worked out in a similar fashion. After conferring, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Trump announced a 30-day pause in the implementation of tariffs. Trudeau agreed to appoint a border czar and to implement a $1.3 billion border plan that Canada had announced in December.
In other words, while Musk was causing a constitutional crisis, Trump created an economic crisis that threatened both domestic and global chaos, then claimed Biden administration achievements as his own and declared victory...
Unlike the real life coup taking place, a lot of us are thinking that the Malignant Fascist's tariffs gambit is prototypical MF: as a performative exercise to thrill those parts of the MAGAt base that love the faux strongman image, while simply using the threat of tariffs to make bogus advances and then claim victory. While he has had a lifelong love affair with tariffs, the MF may have been feeling the heat from other parts of his MAGAt base -- i.e., the USCofC and NAM -- and decided now was not the right time to stick it to our friends, allies and, of course, to his mouth- breathing base (if we could only read his mind ... it would be a very short story). Of course, with this klepto-kakistocracy, chaos is the point.
*h/t Marc Elias.
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