Keeping Criminals Out

That line of Trump's, when I heard it on the radio—"Isn't it wonderful that we're keeping criminals out of our country?"—struck me as begging a couple of important and opposed questions: asking us to assume, on the one hand, that what he's been doing can be described that way, and on the other that it's an unambiguously good idea.

I've given a lot more attention to the first, especially starting in the 2024 campaign, because the shamelessness of the lying, on the part of Trump and Bannon and Stephen Miller, got me so mad, and the respectable people were hardly discussing it: that when the Trumpies screamed about the millions of criminal aliens they were planning to deport, the murderers and rapists and human traffickers and opiate dealers, the escapees from prisons and "lunatic asylums" Trump had created out of his own linguistic confusion, they weren't talking about anything real.

Waiting For Octopus City

 

Octopus City, rendering of a plan by Peter Thiel's Seasteading Institute, via Wired, May 2015, when the techie billionaires were giving up on their idea. Then Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy.

Found myself unexpectedly attracted by a conspiracy theory around the tariff mishegas, from a Substacker, Daniel Pinchbeck, with an excitingly transgressive headline: Paul Krugman is wrong.

Not that I was planning to go that far myself! I think Krugman's judgment of the White House at the moment is fundamentally right:

These Are Not Serious People

 

Hey, Mom, I told you I'd finish the project in time. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, via Newsweek.

I had a pretty strong suspicion that there was some bullshit involved when I heard about the chart (at first on the radio) of Trump's proposed "reciprocal tariffs", announced on NPR as

a 10% minimum tariff to apply to goods from all countries. However, certain trading partners will face higher, "reciprocal tariffs" aimed at penalizing them for their trade barriers. Those taxes on imported goods are calculated on a country-by-country basis, and the levels Trump announced for some trading partners are substantial. He said he plans to impose 34% tariffs on China, 20% on the European Union and 24% on Japan, among an array of other trading partners.

and a little more suspicion when I saw the charts Trump put on display for illustration, which seem to be describing something different, or maybe two different things, with the left columns headed "tariffs charged to the U.S.A. including currency manipulation and trade barriers", and the right column headed "U.S.A. discounted reciprocal tariffs" of around half the amount given in the first column, except for a number of countries, such as UK, Brazil, Singapore, Chile, Australia, and Colombia, where the number in both columns was 10%, which looked like a reference to the 10% "minimum tariff" instead. Why were those on the same chart? 

But the thing I really wanted to know about was where the numbers in the other cells of the left column came from: how had the administration calculated a single number for "tariffs charged to the U.S.A. including currency manipulation and trade barriers" for each of the 65 countries, 67% for China, 39% for the EU, 90% for poor Vietnam? Not that I would have any ability to imagine other numbers, or even to say whether such numbers exist, but could they say something about how they did it? There are no clues in today's executive order or in the presidential memorandum to which it alludes.

Anyway, I was pleased to see that Dr. Krugman, who is probably as well positioned to talk about these subjects as anybody alive (work in international trade theory is what he won his Nobel for), put up a quick note on the Substack that has replaced his New York Time column that suggests he was wondering exactly the same thing: 

So where does this 39 percent number [representing the EU's "tariffs charged to the USA"] come from? I have no idea. Many people speculated that Trump would count value-added taxes as tariffs, even though they aren’t — European producers selling to the EU market pay the same VAT as US producers, so it doesn’t discriminate and therefore isn’t protectionist. But even if you get that wrong, EU VAT rates are in the vicinity of 20 percent, so you still can’t get anywhere close to 39 percent.

You have to wonder whether Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids are now producing tariff numbers.

Now it seems, as NPR reports it, that's pretty much what happened:

Trump calls the move "reciprocal tariffs," however, the White House acknowledged it would be hard to calculate the actual trade barriers from every country, NPR's Scott Horsley tells Up First. As a result, the Trump administration picked an arbitrary number they thought would be high enough to chip away at each country's trade surplus. Economists say the tariffs will likely mean higher prices and slower growth in the U.S.

Got that? It would be hard to calculate, so they decided they'd just make the numbers up. And it's not like it was totally arbitrary, they were careful to pick numbers that sounded "high enough". Close enough for country music, as we used to say. Everybody's OK with that, right?

It was government by bullshit. They just brought their big charts with the made-up numbers out to the Rose Garden like Trump's hurricane map and read Stephen Miller's statement, with news that is I mean cataclysmic for most of these countries, threatening them all with recession, and lay back in the expectation that everybody would treat it as some kind of real thing. Presumably it's another Trumpy extortion attempt. Hey Vietnam, nice little export economy you have here, shame if anything were to happen to it, why don't you make us an offer? (Except Vietnam did make them an offer, back in February, and ambassador Marc Knapper assured them that Trump's tariffs were not going to be aimed at them in any way. Maybe President Trump wasn't informed of what President Trump was doing.) 

I'll have more to say about the whole event later on, but I feel like this thing on its own is so key to the understanding of what the Trumpery is about: they made the numbers up, because they felt getting real ones would be too hard, and admitted it to Scott Horsley, and they still expect to be treated as adults.

Update: The actual calculations are now available from various sources, including good old Atrios, Dean Baker, and The New York Times. And Krugman, with some hard evidence that the formula was created by an Large Language Model generative AI (though Gemini 3.5 is very insistent that it’s a stupid idea). Still insane, but helpful indicators of what kind of insanity.

Oh Freedom Over Me

 

In the email from rightwing poll aggregator Real Clear Politics:

Sweet Christ, Carl, you're still fretting about how four and a half years ago Twitter followed FBI advice that the New York Post's Hunter laptop story might be infected by Russian disinformation and blocked links to the Post for [checks notes] nearly three whole days, leaving users to the humiliation of having to find it on Facebook instead? 

(If it had been four days, Trump totally would have won the election? Uh, maybe a comforting thought for Trump but I really don't think so.)

Meanwhile, the Republican White House is openly blackmailing the country's public school system, public and private universities, medical research institutions and hospitals, museums, national parks, armed services, federal and state judges and prosecutors, numerous prestigious law firms, and the privately owned press and public broadcast media to adopt its ideological positions on everything from history to biology and energy production, for which Twitter now, acquired by a multibillionaire who appears to have become literally the president's single-dad housemate, what a setup for Aaron Sorkin's new series "The East Wing", serves as a propagandist. 

Maybe you'd like to say that there's no constitutional prohibition against the Executive making laws abridging the freedom of the press so there's nothing we can do about it? It's not over till it's over! Don't surrender in advance!

And the FBI was right, too, BTW; the laptop (which wasn't in fact the laptop, which seems to have been squirreled away in impenetrable FBI secrecy for years, but Rudolph Giuliani's alleged copy of its hard drive), was certainly infected by Russian disinformation from the Russia agents he worked with, Pavel Fuks, Andrij Telizhenko, Andrij Derkach, and so on, though it never made it into a criminal case against Hunter Biden anyway, largely because as evidence it was total garbage with which special prosecutor Durham could never think of anything to do. And it was never a First Amendment case even under one of the weird interpretations that are going around (social media companies were always able to, and frequently did, ignore the FBI's advice).

But whoever has ever been living in terror that a bunch of college students might "cancel" them or even be publicly rude to them really needs to wake up to the evidence of what real deprivation of freedom of speech is like, where the president's impression of wrongthink is getting people fired from their jobs in really large numbers, prevented from doing peer-approved research, prevented from curating peer-approved museum exhibitions and staging peer-approved plays and dance events and the like, fired from research jobs and medical jobs and teaching jobs or if they're students thrown out of school, or if they're foreigners thrown out and transported by midnight plane without communicating with their families or lawyers to the 21st-century equivalent of Devil's Island. Something like the McCarthy era (under the guidance of Roy Cohn's old pupils Stone, Manafort, and Trump) is really back.

I mean, the Reagan administration and the Bush II administration had the cynicism and clownishness and the violent foreign policy from South and Central America to West Africa and the Middle East and the furious push to increase economic inequality through the tax system, a democratic society really shouldn't have tolerated any of it. I'n not fighting it because I'm such a good person, I'd fighting it because they're after me. I'm not even saying it's worse now, I'm saying it's personal. 

If I should have fought it harder in the past, now I have no choice. They're really after me and my friends and family. If I should have felt the attack on everybody, now I feel it on us. If I've made fun of the cult of the Founders and their commitment to FREEDOM, because of the way they willingly denied freedom to enslaved people and women and workers and foreigners and "deviants" of one kind and another from the beginning, it's my freedom now: I've always been able to complain about the abuse I saw around me, and do a little something for others, giving a few dollars to ACLU and a candidate here and there, grousing about the reactionary views of some of my kids' teachers, writing a blog. I'm not sure even these little things can last. All freedom is threatened now, except for the freedom you can buy with huge amounts of money, like Justin Sun openly—openly!—escaping fraud charges with $400 million in bribes, or that other asshole with the fake e-vehicle, Trevor Milton. That kind of freedom works better than ever.

They want us in jail. They want suicides. And they give zero fucks about "free speech" because, you know why? Because they've got expensive speech, all you could ever desire, from the philosophical Charles Koch to the drugged-up Elon Musk. You know what I'm saying? Your freedom is absolutely in jeopardy.

Annals of Intelligence

 

Director of Central Intelligence lies to Senator Ossoff.

Unsurprisingly, Pete Hegseth's first instinct was to lie about the thing, brazenly, and about the messenger, Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, suggesting that he'd somehow made the story up:

“I've heard how it was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans, and that's all I have to say about that,” Hegseth said shortly after landing for a layover in Hawaii on a trip to Asia.

Hegseth criticized Goldberg as “a deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist who's made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again, to include the, I don't know, the hoaxes of Russia, Russia, Russia, or the fine people on both sides, hopes, or suckers and losers.”

“This is the guy that pedals [sic] in garbage. This is what he does,” he added.

It's true that Goldberg scooped a bunch of news about Trump's contempt for America's war dead ("Why should I go to that cemetery? It's filled with losers"), but it's not as if there were any doubt about the truth of that, given his publicly undisguised contempt for Vietnam POW John McCain, and World War II hero George H.W. Bush (shot down as a Navy pilot by Japanese), and the parents of Humayun Khan, killed in Iraq in 2004, etc. And if Goldberg was an early proponent, in summer 2016, of the idea that Trump might be a "de facto" Putin agent, he plainly meant not a Putin agent—

Trickle-Down Misinformation

One of my nephews—a good and smart kid (actually past 30 and becoming a father next month but they're all forever kids to me), but with some manosphere items in his media diet—told his mom that the Trump administration is going to free everybody who earns under $150,000 a year from paying any federal taxes, or at least federal income tax, and she texted me to find out what I knew about this, which at that point was pretty much nothing (my first thought was I'd heard something that might have sounded like this but actually meant something different). But it hasn't been reported by The New York Times or The Washington Post or NPR, perhaps because they don't want anybody to know what a generous populist our president is.

In fact there really is something, though I wasn't able to trace such a plan to Trump himself. Trump has definitely talked about eliminating income tax for everybody, and the 16th Amendment, altogether, and going back to the McKinley era when the federal government was entirely financed by import tax revenues or tariffs. I believe that's a very long-term aspiration: right now, individual income taxes raise just short of a trillion dollars a year ($959 billion), 51% of government revenue, along with something like another trillion in corporate taxes, while tariffs bring in $35 billion, or 1.9% of the total. If Trump went as far with the tariffs as he's suggested he'd like to do, Peterson Institute calculates he could get that up to $225 billion, or a little less than a quarter of the way to replacing personal income tax (causing a massive recession along the way as the prices on imported consumer goods rose to make up for it, and an international financial crisis as US consumers stopped buying imported goods such as steel, aluminum, motor vehicles, appliances, food, lumber, and so on, and turned to housing themselves in Hoovervilles and eating at breadlines, so that they'd never raise that much revenue anyway; probably bankrupting the Social Security trust fund and Medicare too, as all the newly unemployed workers stopped paying the payroll tax!). 

It turns out, however, that the more modest proposal for incomes under $150,000 comes from our clownish billionaire secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, as he told CBS in an interview on Wednesday:

I know what his goal is — no tax for anybody making under $150,000 a year. That's what I'm working for...

That's 93% of the population, though only about 25% of the individual income tax revenue, but sounds like he's eliminating the payroll tax (another $1.5 trillion a year) as well. And he remains committed to renewing the 2017 tax cuts especially benefiting the wealthiest, and a further reduction in corporate income tax (so we can lure businesses home from Ireland). But then maybe those DOGEboys will find a way to cut $2 trillion a year from the budget one of these days, and then there are those $5 million "gold cards" buying you instant permanent residence, if you could sell those to something like 40,000 billionaires per year you'd practically be home free. No, there aren't that many billionaires, or centimillionaires (something over 28,000 in the world, a pretty large number already Americans) either. 

But then again, who needs Social Security? Not Howard Lutnick's 94-year-old mother-in-law, though she does appreciate it when the check shows up:

"Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who's 94, she wouldn't call and complain," Lutnick — a billionaire former Wall Street CEO — told the billionaire "All In" podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya. "She just wouldn't. She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining."

It's only a bunch of malcontents who think they're entitled to it (they are, that's why it's called an "entitlement"), and they're probably fraudsters (they aren't).

And the reason The Times and WaPo and NPR haven't reported the story of the near-universal income tax exemption is that it's not ever going to happen, but isn't quite funny enough (unlike the plans to conquer Greenland, or the cheerful indifference to money of Mrs. Lutnick's mom). Or even Fox News or New York Post, as far as I can tell

But it does get picked up by Newsweek and Forbes and Reuters, and the Hindustan Times and the Farm CPA Report, and taken pretty seriously by the libertarians of Reason and Mint and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and from there down to a goodly number of bottom-feeding YouTubers like Mr. Snyder up at the top of the page, and that's how it gets out to the Internet, and somebody says, “Wow, if I ever make $150K this is gonna save me $24,000!”

Free Mahmoud

 

"It's part of a wider strategy to obfuscate MAGA antisemitism and an increasingly fascist regime Gift link to the piece.

Somebody I respect, I don't actually remember who, was warning us against trying to show that Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian with a graduate degree from Columbia University who was kidnapped from New York over the weekend by ICE, and spirited away to Louisiana for deportation proceedings, was innocent of whatever wrongthink he's suspected of, on the grounds that it doesn't matter. He's clearly not charged with any crime, which would be a problem, but he has a right in the United States of America to hold any thoughts whatever, and associate with whomever he wishes to associate with, whether they're good people or bad, if only because that's what the First Amendment says, and if I were to use Mahmoud Khalil's personal behavior as evidence that he doesn't "deserve" to be deported I'd be suggesting that other people in a similar position might indeed "deserve" it, but the First Amendment isn't about what you deserve. It's about what you are owed, your unalienable rights, even if you are a bad person or have bad friends. It's "the thought we hate", as Justice Holmes said, that needs the most protection of all, because that's where it's easiest to not care about people's rights and let the cops do whatever they want with them.

On the other hand, it isn't just about him.  It's about what ICE and the Trump regime have in mind, what they are trying to accomplish, which isn't really about the thought they hate. That's just an excuse. If you look more closely at the case of Mahmoud Khalil, if you try to figure out what he's accused of and whether or not he might have done something that merits deportation, you get a clearer picture of what they're really up to, and how it threatens all of us.

That there was something very funky about the case was evident right from the beginning:

Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia until this past December, was inside his university-owned apartment Saturday night [March 8] when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told The Associated Press.

Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead, according to the lawyer. (AP)

How did the ICE agents not know whether the man they were picking up had a student visa or not? (He had finished his masters' degree—in public administration, at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, and of course gotten married, which favored his getting the green card.) Or, given the swiftness with which they changed their story, were they making stuff up?