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?*
____________________
... 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.
