The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

As President Trump imposes tariffs on products from countries around the world, foreign governments are answering back with tariffs of their own.

China has targeted corn farmers and carmakers. Canada has put tariffs on poultry plants and air-conditioning manufacturers, while Europe will hit American steel mills and slaughter houses.

The retaliatory tariffs are an attempt to put pressure on the president to relent. And they have been carefully designed to hit Mr. Trump where it hurts: Nearly 8 million Americans work in industries targeted by the levies and the majority are Trump voters, a New York Times analysis shows.

The figures underscore the dramatic impact that a trade war could have on American workers, potentially causing Mr. Trump’s economic strategy to backfire. Mr. Trump has argued that tariffs will help boost American jobs. But economists say that retaliatory tariffs can cancel out that effect.

The countermeasures are aimed at industries that employ roughly 7.75 million people across the United States. The bulk of those — 4.48 million — are in counties that voted for Mr. Trump in the last election, compared with 3.26 million jobs in counties that voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, according to a calculation by The Times that included examining retaliatory tariffs on more than 4,000 product categories. [snip]

The jobs that could be hit by retaliation are especially concentrated in pockets of the upper Midwest, South and Southeast, including many rural parts of the country that are responsible for producing agricultural goods. It also includes areas that produce coal, oil, car parts and other manufactured products.

Robert Maxim, a fellow at the Brookings Metro, a Washington think tank that has done similar analysis, said that other countries had particularly targeted Trump-supporting regions and places where “Trump would like to fashion himself as revitalizing the U.S.” That includes smaller manufacturing communities in states like Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan, as well as southern states like Kentucky and Georgia, he said.

The message foreign countries are trying to send, he said, is, “You think you can bully us, well, we can hurt you too. And by the way, we know where it really matters.”...

We truly hesitate to applaud any actions that can lead to hardship for any Americans.  But we've already reached the point where the Malignant Loser's sabotage of the American economy is on him, and on the tens of millions of voters who put him back in office four years after he demonstrated his incompetent and malicious stewardship.  If his people didn't think his bullying tariffs and thuggish undocumented immigrant sweeps were going to affect them personally, well maybe it's time to pop their MAGA bubble.  You get what you vote for. 

The bad:

Portions of Pennsylvania, New York and Mid-Atlantic and Southeast states were still under a National Weather Service watch for damaging wind and tornadoes, as the death toll from weekend storms rose to 36 people across six states.  [snip]

 

The storms that hit the South and the Midwest headed east on Sunday. More than 340,000 consumers had no power in the affected areas as of late afternoon on Sunday, according to the website PowerOutage.

Missouri reported the largest number of deaths, 12 fatalities spanning five counties, the state's highway patrol posted on X. Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe said there was still one person missing in the state, which saw widespread destruction across 27 counties.

 

Robbie Myers, the director of emergency management in Missouri's Butler County, told reporters that more than 500 homes, a church and a grocery store in the county were destroyed. A mobile home park had been "totally destroyed," he said.

 

"Everything around it here is really bad," Missouri resident Rick Brittingham told Reuters from Butler County. "The trailer park up the street had fatalities. So, I mean, we don't have nothing compared to anything like that. I still have a home. They don't."

 

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves posted on X that six deaths had been reported in the state – one in Covington County, two in Jefferson Davis County and three in Walthall County.

 

According to preliminary assessments, 29 people were injured statewide and 21 counties sustained storm damage, Reeves said.

 

In Arkansas, three deaths occurred, the state's Department of Emergency Management said, adding that there were 32 injuries.

 

Eight deaths were confirmed in a crash involving more than 50 cars in Sherman County in Kansas, caused by a severe dust storm, the Kansas Highway Patrol said in a statement. Many injured travelers were taken to local hospitals.

We posted some pictures yesterday of the damage across central and southern states. We'll keep an eye on how well (or poorly) the Malignant Fascist tends to the disaster, and more that will follow during tornado season the the U.S.

The ugly:

Donald Trump claimed late Sunday — in a middle-of-the-night rant on his Truth Social platform — that he’d declared the pardons that were issued by his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, before leaving office to be “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT.”

The president claimed Biden’s pardons were signed by an autopen, seizing on a report last week from a right-wing group that alleged frequent use of the mechanical device in the Biden White House. Commentators used that report to boost allegations of Biden’s cognitive decline.

“In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them,” wrote Trump, who also used autopen during his first term. [snip]

Trump in the post further warned those who’d been pardoned by Biden — such as members of the House committee that investigated the U.S. Capitol riot and who weren’t charged with any crime — should now “fully understand that they are subject to investigation at the highest level.”  [snip]

Critics slammed Trump’s comments as “dictator shit,” questioned the legality of the post and warned how it could backfire on the president...

We omitted the deranged social media post from the moron madman Malignant Fascist (you're welcome), but the chilling threat of investigation and prosecution as retribution is, indeed, "dictator shit," even if there's nothing in the Constitution that gives the Malignant Fascist the power to void previously issued pardons.  It also conforms with his lawless decision to ignore Federal judges' orders whenever they don't suit him.  None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to his increasingly arbitrary and autocratic outbursts for, like, ever.  With a spineless Republican MAGA cult and a supine Democratic leadership in the Senate playing circa 1996 checkers to the Malignant Loser's "Warhammer 40,0000," and the courts increasingly being ignored, we have yet another Constitutional crisis on our hands.  How many is that in the past 2 months?  We lost track.