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Wall Street Journal: Trump Tax Plan Will Not Cut the Deficit

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2025 //
15

Richard Rubin of The Wall Street Journal politely explains the lie behind Trump’s “big beautiful budget plan”: it will not cut the deficit. It will increase it.

WASHINGTON—House Republicans pushed President Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax-and-spending bill past a key hurdle late Sunday night, but the last-minute grappling has them colliding with a stark reality: The plan won’t reduce federal budget deficits and would make America’s fiscal hole deeper.

The bill could reach the House floor this week, and it is a tenuous balance between the party’s tax-cut wing and factions seeking larger, quicker spending cuts. To get a bill through the House with their 220-213 majority, GOP tax cutters trimmed their ambitions and scheduled some breaks to expire. Many spending hawks, meanwhile, backed the plan while groaning that it doesn’t go far enough fast enough. Others are holding out for more…

Moody’s Ratings, in downgrading the U.S.’s AAA rating on Friday, said it didn’t expect Congress to produce material multiyear spending or deficit reductions. Publicly held federal debt stands at about $29 trillion, nearly double the level when Trump and Republicans passed the 2017 tax law. Nearly $1 in every $7 the U.S. spends goes toward paying interest, more than the country spends on defense.

Categories Economy, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump’s Politics of Distraction

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2025 //
10

Heather Cox Richardson uses her well-honed skills as a historian to weave together disparate events and demonstrate the media strategy of the Trump administration. It could be summarized by the succinct phrase: “Dazzle them with BS.”

She writes:

MAGA world is performing over-the-top outrage over a photo former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey posted on Instagram, where he has been teasing a new novel. The image shows shells on a beach arranged in a popular slogan for opposing President Donald J. Trump: “86”—slang for tossing something away—followed by “47”, a reference to Trump’s presidency.

Using “eighty-six” as either a noun or a verb appears to have started in the restaurant industry in the 1930s to indicate that something was out of stock. It is a common term, used by MAGA itself to refer to getting rid of somebody…until now.

MAGA voices are insisting that this image was Comey’s threat to assassinate the president. Trump got into the game, telling Brett Baier of the Fox News Channel: “that meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear…. [H]e’s calling for the assassination of the president…that’s gonna be up to Pam and all of the great people…. He’s a dirty cop.” Trump’s reference to Attorney General Pam Bondi and law enforcement paid off: yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service are investigating Comey. He showed up voluntarily at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., today for an interview.

In the past day, Trump’s social media account has also attacked wildly popular musical icons Bruce Springsteen and, somewhat out of the blue, Taylor Swift. Dutifully, media outlets have taken up a lot of oxygen reporting on “shellgate” and Trump’s posts about Springsteen and Swift, pushing other stories out of the news.

In his newsletter today, retired entrepreneur Bill Southworth tallied the times Trump has grabbed headlines to distract people from larger stories, starting the tally with how Trump’s posts about Peanut the Squirrel the day before the election swept like a brushfire across the right-wing media ecosystem and then into the mainstream. In early 2025, Southworth notes, as the media began to dig into the dramatic restructuring of the federal government, Trump posted outrageously about Gaza, and that story took over. When cuts to PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and the U.S. Agency for International Development threatened lives across Africa, Trump turned the conversation to white South Africans he lied were fleeing “anti-white genocide.”

Southworth calls this “narrative warfare,” and while it is true that Republican leaders have seeded a particular false narrative for decades now, this technique is also known as “political technology” or “virtual politics.” This system, pioneered in Russia under Russian president Vladimir Putin, is designed to get people to vote an authoritarian into office by creating a fake world of outrage. For those who do not buy the lies, there is another tool: flooding the zone so that people stop being able to figure out what is real and tune out.

The administration has clearly adopted this plan. As Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post noted in early March, the administration set out to portray Trump as a king in order “to sell the country on [Trump’s] expansionist approach to presidential power.”

The team set out not just to confront critics, but to drown them out with a constant barrage of sound bites, interviews with loyalists, memes slamming Democrats, and attack lines.

“We’re here. We’re in your face,” said Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital team. “It’s irreverent. It’s unapologetic.” The White House brought right-wing influencers into the press pool, including at least one who before the election was exposed as being on the Russian payroll. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung, who before he began to work for Trump was a spokesperson for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, said their goal was “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”

Dominating means controlling the narrative. That starts with perceptions of the president himself. Trump’s appearances have been deeply concerning as he cannot follow a coherent thread, frequently falls asleep, repeatedly veers into nonsense, and says he doesn’t know about the operations of his government. Yesterday, after journalist S.V. Date noted that the administration has posted online only about 20% of Trump’s words, Cheung told Date “You must be truly f*cking stupid if you think we’re not transparent.”

The White House also pushed back dramatically against a story that appeared in Business InsiderMonday, comparing Donald Trump Jr. to former president Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The White House suggested it would take legal action against Business Insider’s German parent company.

Controlling the narrative also appears to mean manipulating the media, as Russians prescribed. Last month, Jeremy Kohler and Andy Kroll of ProPublica reported that Trump loyalist and political operative Ed Martin, now in charge of the “Weaponization Working Group,” in the Department of Justice, secretly seeded stories attacking a judge in a legal case that was not going his way. Martin has appeared more than 150 times on the Russia Today television channel and on Russian state radio, media outlets the State Department said were “critical elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem,” where he claimed the Democrats were weaponizing the court system. Now he is vowing to investigate Democrats and anyone who criticizes the administration.

As Trump’s popularity falls, Trump’s political operators have spent in the “high seven figures,” Alex Isenstadt of Axios says, to run ads in more than 20 targeted congressional districts to push lawmakers to get behind Trump’s economic program. “Tell Congress this is a good deal for America,” the ad says. “Support President Trump’s agenda to get our economy back on track.”

In their advertising efforts, Musk’s mining of U.S. government records is deeply concerning, for the treasure trove of information he appears to have mined would enable political operatives to target political ads with laser precision in an even tighter operation than the Cambridge Analytica program of 2016.

The stories the administration appears to be trying to cover up show a nation hobbled since January 20, 2025, as MAGA slashes the modern government that works for ordinary Americans and abandons democracy in order to put the power of the United States government into the hands of the extremely wealthy.

Trump vowed that high tariffs on goods from other countries would launch a new golden era in the United States, enabling the U.S. to extend his 2017 tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, some of which expire at the end of this year. But his high tariffs, especially those on goods from China, dramatically contracted the economy and raised the chances of a recession.

His constant monkeying with tariff rates has created deep uncertainty in the economy, as well as raising concerns that at least some of his pronouncements are designed to manipulate the market. Today, Walmart announced it would have no choice but to raise prices, and the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index dropped to its second lowest reading on record.

Trump insisted earlier that other countries would come begging to negotiate, but now appears to have given up on the idea. “It’s not possible to meet the number of people that want to see us,” he said, announcing today that he will simply set new rates himself. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump argued that other countries would pay high tariff duties, helping the U.S. Treasury to address its high deficits at the same time the wealthy got further tax cuts.

Over the course of this week, Republicans tried to push through Congress a measure that they have dubbed “One, Big, Beautiful Bill,” a reference to Trump’s term for it. The measure extended Trump’s tax cuts at a cost to the nation of about $4.6 trillion over ten years and raised the debt ceiling by $4 trillion. At the same time, it cut Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and a slew of other programs.

The Republicans failed to advance that bill out of the House Budget Committee Friday afternoon. Far-right Republicans complained not that it cut too much from programs Americans rely on, but that it cut too little. Citing the dysfunction in Washington, D.C. and the uncertain outlook for the American economy, Moody’s downgraded the credit rating of the country today from AAA to AA1.

Since Trump took office, the “Department of Government Efficiency” also claimed to be slashing “waste, fraud, and abuse” from government programs, although actual financial savings have yet to materialize. Instead, the cuts are to programs that help ordinary Americans and move money upward to the wealthy. News broke today that cuts of 31% to the enforcement wing of the Internal Revenue Service will cost money: tax evasion among the top 10% of earners costs about $700 billion a year.

The cuts were driven at least in part by the ideological extremism of Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought was a key author of Project 2025, which calls for decimating the federal government.

Vought talked about traumatizing federal workers, and has done so, but the cuts have also traumatized Americans who depend on the programs that DOGE tried to cut. Cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) meant about $2 billion less in contracts for American farmers, while close to $100 million worth of food that could feed 3.5 million people rots in government warehouses.

Cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration have left airports without adequate numbers of air traffic controllers. After two 90-second blackouts at Newark Liberty International Airport when air traffic controllers lost control with airplanes, yesterday the air traffic controllers at Denver International Airport lost contact with planes for 2 minutes.

Cuts to a program that funds the healthcare of first responders and survivors of the September 11 World Trade Center terror attacks are leaving thousands of patients unclear whether their cancer treatments, for example, will be covered. Yesterday, acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) David Richardson told staff that FEMA is not prepared for hurricane season, which starts on June 1, and will work to return responsibility for the response to emergencies to the states. A document prepared for Richardson and obtained by Luke Barr of ABC News said: “As FEMA transforms to a smaller footprint, the intent for this hurricane season is not well understood, thus FEMA is not ready.”

Yesterday, news broke that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been in talks with the producers of the reality show Duck Dynasty for a new reality show in which immigrants compete against each other in cultural contests to win the chance to move their U.S. citizenship applications ahead faster. It is made-for-TV, just like so many of the performances this administration uses to distract Americans from the unpopular policies that are stripping the government of benefits for ordinary Americans and moving wealth upward.

Such a show might appeal to confirmed MAGA. But it is a profound perversion of the American dream.

Categories Character, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Extremism, Fake News, Trump

Michael Hiltzik: Trump’s Tariff War is Nonsensical

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2025 //
1

Michael Hiltzik is a Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist for the Los Angeles Times, who write about business and whatever else he wants. In this column, he tries to make sense of Trump’s tariff war. It’s hard to do because it doesn’t make sense. Trump claims to have made great deals with China and the United Kingdom, but on closer inspection, he didn’t. People assume that Trump was a successful businessman, but he wasn’t. He played one on TV. He declared bankruptcy six times, and he had no background in international economic policy.

Hiltzik writes:

Are you confused about Donald Trump’s tariff policy, including why he instigated a global trade war, what its impact will be on the U.S. economy and how hard it will hit your pocketbook?

Join the club. So too are economists, trade experts, political prognosticators and Trump himself. Their bewilderment has only intensified with the White House’s recent announcement of trade “deals” with Britain and China. 

Those quote marks are proper, because it’s unclear how much of a bargain Trump has struck with those countries despite his triumphalist rhetoric. 

Running a trade deficit is nothing new for the United States. Indeed, it has run a persistent trade deficit since the 1970s—but it also did throughout most of the 19th century.

— Brian Reinbold and Yi Wen, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

On Monday, for instance, Trump declared that he had achieved a “total reset” in trade relations with China. That doesn’t appear to be true, given that the thrust of the announcement was a 90-day pause in the recent round of U.S.-imposed tariffs on Chinese goods and retaliatory Chinese levies on goods imported from the U.S.

Indeed, the announcement appears at least superficially to represent another climb-down by Trump of the stern tariff regime he claimed to be imposing. No one is even sure that the purported cease-fire will survive for the full 90 days. Even if it does, it means 90 days of continued uncertainty about the relations between the two largest economies on the planet.

Praise for Trump’s tariff policy has been largely concentrated among his Cabinet members and other courtiers. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, for one, was effusive about the British negotiations, even though they plainly achieved nothing concrete. “We started at 10% [tariffs] and we ended at 10%,” Lutnick told an Oval Office press gathering last week. “We got it done in 45 days, certainly because we work for Donald Trump.”

Stock market investors have shown every sign of hanging on for dear life as the on-again-off-again tariffs have unfolded. 

As of Monday’s market close, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index is down 3.39% since Trump’s inauguration. The tech-oriented Nasdaq index is down by more than 5.3% since the inauguration. Both indices are in the red year-to-date.

Let’s try to clear away some of the confusion.

On Feb. 4, Trump imposed a 10% tariff on all Chinese goods, then raised it to 20% on March 4. That meant that the effective rate on some imports from China rose to 45%, including a 25% levy on imported steel and aluminum. That rose by another 10% on April 5, reflecting global 10% “reciprocal” tariffs that Trump described as countering tariffs placed on U.S. goods by countries around the world. A few days later, Trump raised total China tariffs to at least 145%.

Meanwhile, China was retaliating with its own tariffs on U.S.-made imports, ultimately set at 125%. Trade between the two countries virtually halted. Shipping traffic at West Coast ports, notably the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, plummeted amid proliferating predictions of empty shelves in the U.S. by September.

Where are we today? According to the initial announcement, the “reciprocal” tariff on China will remain at 10%; according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who represented the U.S. at bilateral talks this weekend. Chinese goods will still be subject to an additional 20% levy Trump has described as punishment for China’s role in fentanyl exports to the U.S. 

China, in return, cut its retaliatory tariffs to 10% from 125%, but left in place tariffs on U.S. farm goods — an additional 15% on chicken, wheat, corn and cotton and 10% on sorghum, soybeans, pork, beef, seafood, fruits, vegetables and dairy products. That’s bad news for U.S. farmers, for whom China had been a growing market, reaching a record $36.4 billion in 2022 before shrinking to $24.7 billion last year. 

The deal Trump claimed to have reached last week with Britain was also murky. To begin with, the rationale for imposing “reciprocal” tariffs made no sense. Trump had justified those tariffs as countermoves to trade deficits the U.S. recorded with the target countries — but Britain is among the major trade partners that have consistently run a trade surplus with the U.S., meaning that it bought more from this country than it sold. 

(Britain ranks only eighth among America’s trading partners; Canada, Mexico and China are the top three, respectively.) 

As was the case with China, the agreement announced with Britain amounted to an agreement to keep talking, rather than a concrete deal. For all that Trump and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer congratulated themselves for their commitment to “deliver shared prosperity for American and British citizens alike,” the document they issued explicitly states that it “does not constitute a legally binding agreement” but only anticipates a “reasonable period of negotiation.”

Even so, the terms the White House mentioned stoked concerns among U.S. automakers. That’s because they included cutting tariffs on imported British cars to 10% from the 25% imposed on cars and auto parts imported from other countries, chiefly Canada and Mexico under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which Trump negotiated in his first term.

“It will now be cheaper to import a U.K. vehicle with very little U.S. content than a USMCA-compliant vehicle from Mexico or Canada that is half American parts,” complained the American Automotive Policy Council, a lobbying group for Ford, General Motors and Stellantis. Which British automakers would be its chief beneficiaries? Land Rover, Jaguar, Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Mini, McLaren and Aston Martin. About 103,000 vehicles from those brands came into the U.S. in 2024, auto market analyst Sam Fiorani told the Detroit Free Press.

That brings us back to Trump’s reliance on tariffs as a weapon in trade negotiations. His core belief appears to be that every bilateral trade deficit suffered by the U.S. is harmful to its economy, or an attack on its national security or even its sovereignty. 

Many economists find this notion bizarre. “Running a trade deficit is nothing new for the United States,” Brian Reinbold and Yi Wen of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis have observed. “Indeed, it has run a persistent trade deficit since the 1970s — but it also did throughout most of the 19th century.”

For the most part, they argue trade deficits have been good for the U.S. economy. They reflected the importation of capital goods that fed into America’s rapid industrialization a century ago. More recently, they’ve reflected America’s wealth, which enabled U.S. consumers to buy more from abroad.

The truth is that the international trade regime in place for the last half-century or so has been a boon for American consumers and businesses. The U.S. outsourced the lowest-skilled work for the manufacture of products including electronics and baby clothes to countries with the lowest prevailing wage rates, while turning a blind eye to the abuses visited on those laborers — adults and children alike. Tariffs were low and, perhaps more importantly, stable.

In return, sellers — such as Apple — of those manufactured goods purchased by American consumers became some of the most valuable public companies in the world. U.S. stock prices and the value of high-tech companies in Silicon Valley soared. A new class of billionaire plutocrats, their wealth based less on manufacturing than on services, emerged.

Inexplicably, it was Trump, who blew this long-lasting arrangement to smithereens. Not because he thought the globalization of manufacturing was morally suspect, but because he saw it as damaging to the U.S. economy.

It’s true that manufacturing employment has seen a precipitous drop from 2000 through the 2008-2009 recession. According to international trade expert Kyle Handley of UC San Diego, some 6 million manufacturing jobs were lost in that period. But international trade was only one of several factors in the decline; automation and “a broad shift toward service sector employment” also played a role, especially in sectors such as healthcare, business and professional services, and communications and transportation.

“Many of the changes are irreversible,” Handley wrote last year. Nevertheless, “nostalgia for the past remains salient in national conversation.” 

Trump’s inability, or disinclination, to look deeper into the roots of U.S. trade deficits, which he sees as invariably the result of illicit trade barriers blocking U.S. exports, may explain the bewildering course of White House tariff policy. 

For the White House to “suggest that the trade deficit is somehow reflective of trade barriers, and the administration’s cherry-picking of the data (which excludes services where the United States has a surplus) further points to the arbitrary nature of its claims,” Inu Malak of the Council on Foreign Relations observes. 

How Trump’s deal-making will proceed from here is anyone’s guess. One question concerns whether they’re even constitutional, since the Constitution vests trade policy in Congress. A lawsuit making that point filed by five small importers harmed by the tariffs will be heard Wednesday by the federal Court of International Trade. 

Trump has misused the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to claim that authority for himself, the lawsuit asserts. “The government’s position,” Ilya Somin, a constitutional law expert at George Mason University who represents the plaintiffs, told me, “is that IEEPA gives the president the power to impose whatever tariffs he wants, against any country, for as long as he wants, so long as he first declares a ‘national emergency’ (which they argue he can do anytime he wants for any reason).” 

But IEEPA doesn’t mention tariffs, the plaintiffs note, and has never been used to impose or increase them. Nor can trade deficits rise to the level of a “national emergency,” as Trump claims, given that the trade imbalances present when he took office had been in place for years, even decades, the plaintiffs say. 

The question remaining is how lasting Trump’s disruption of international trade relations will be. His policies have already had one effect: Trust in the U.S. as a reliable trading partner has been profoundly shaken. 

America profited from that trustworthiness for many decades. It may not be restored for years to come.

Categories Economics, Economy, Ignorance, Trump

John Thompson: Oklahoma Has Its Own DOGE, Just as Destructive as Elon’s

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2025 //
17

After Trump introduced Elon Musk and his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” several Republican-controlled states created their own DOGE operations. Like the one Musk launched, these were non-governmental, unelected, unaccountable cost-cutters, set loose to apply a chainsaw to state government.

John Thompson reports on what happened in Oklahoma.

CBS’s Sixty Minutes recently reported on the danger of H5N1 bird flu spinning out of control. It cited Dr. Kamran Khan who explained why “We are really at risk of this virus evolving into one that has pandemic potential.” Another expert agreed that “this flu could make Covid look like a walk in the park.”

This frightening reporting comes as the DOGE–OK seeks to cut nearly $150 million for programs that provide immunization services, pathogens surveillance, and emerging infectious diseases prevention, and provide Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity for Prevention of Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases.

And this is only one reason for looking into the DOGE–OK process.

Anyone paying attention to Elon Musk’s leadership of the Trump administration’s DOGE campaign to cut federal programs has reason the fear the DOGE campaigns launched in 26 states. After all, as the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) explains, when Governor Kevin Stitt opened Oklahoma’s DOGE-OK, he called for a reduction in our personal income and corporate tax rates, thus making the state’s tax code even more regressive.

The EPI further explained that Stitt selected Marc Nuttle, “who was the ‘chief strategist’ behind Oklahoma’s 2001 so-called right-to-work referendum—a policy designed to disempower workers and lower wages (and contrary to proponents’ claims, it did not bolster job growth in the state).” The executive order empowered Nuttle to lead efforts of a newly formed agency to study the state budget.

Moreover, the EPI explains:

DOGE-OK is itself duplicative since the Office of the State Auditor and Inspector is constitutionally mandated to “examine the state and all county treasurers’ books, accounts, and cash on hand, stipulating that [the office] shall perform other duties as may be prescribed by law.” Similar to DOGE-OK, the auditor reviews staffing levels, assesses state spending, and issues public reports to promote transparency.

The DOGE-OK report now explains:

Once DOGE-OK ideas are received, they are analyzed and vetted with the appropriate group. If validated, ideas are added to the DOGE-OK website. 

But, when I studied the report, I found no sign of hard evidence to back its claims. For instance, they didn’t explain their methodology, and offered no cost/benefit analyses. DOGE didn’t explain what “groups” it considered to be “appropriate,” and what data was used to analyze and vet, and validate their ideas.  

Since the first DOGE headlines focused on $157 million in supposedly “wasteful health grants” by the federal government, I focused on Medicaid and Department of Health cuts.

These proposed cuts are especially disturbing because, as Shiloh Kantz, the executive director of the nonpartisan Oklahoma Policy Institute, explained, “Oklahoma already ranks among the worst in health outcomes.”

First, DOGE-OK claimed that $60 million per year would be saved if the state, not the federal government, performed eligibility checks on children. And, they cited two drugs that received accelerated approval without working, costing $42 million. But, they did not mention the number and the benefits of the other drugs, like the Covid vaccine, that received accelerated approval.

Also, DOGE-OK inexplicably said that easing the prescription drug cost cap would improve prices. And they recommended repeal of staffing requirements for Long-Term Care facilities in order to save $76 million annually, without mentioning harm to elderly patients due to under-staffing.

DOGE-OK also said that three Oklahoma State Department of Health programs should be cut by almost $150 million because their funding exceeded the amount necessary.  As already mentioned, in the wake of Covid pandemic, and as measles and bird flu spread, these programs provide immunization services, pathogens surveillance, and emerging infectious diseases prevention, etc. So, how did DOGE reach the conclusion that the full funding of those programs is no longer necessary?  

Then, DOGE-OK said that 7 programs should have cuts because of “duplication,” with partners doing the same or similar work. They said $2.2 million would be saved by getting rid of the team efforts necessary to improve health.

And Sex Education should be cut by $236,000 because of its low Return on Investment.

Again, I saw no evidence behind their recommendations for $157,606,300 in overall health care reductions. Neither did they address financial costs of implementing their ideas. And, there is no evidence that DOGE seriously considered the costs in terms of the lives that would be damaged or lost.

Given the history of the Trump/Musk DOGE, none of the DOGE–OK should be a surprise. When Gov. Stitt selected Nuttle, a true-believer in Milton Friedman, to run the project, Stitt said, “With his help, we’ll leave state government leaner than we found it.”

Is that the proper way to launch a supposedly balanced and evidence-driven investigation of such complex and crucial policy approaches?

Stitt’s news release previewed Nuttle’s methodology: “use his knowledge of the inner workings of government to comb through agency budgets, legislative appropriations, and contracts.”

So, to paraphrase the DOGE-OK report’s description of its methodology, its proposals would be “analyzed and vetted” by what they see as the “appropriate group.”

In other words, Oklahomans were never promised an open, balanced, evidence-based DOGE process for making our state better. But the same is also true for Musk’s federal DOGE chainsaw.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Oklahoma

Thom Hartmann: Democracy Can Die in Broad Daylight

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2025 //
11

Thom Hartmann sees the pattern on the rug. Trump and Musk are stifling democratic institutions and rushing headlong towards the tyranny they both admire. Trump thinks that he can make himself dictator for life, Like his buddies in Russia and North Korea. Will the public defend the Constitution?

He wrote:

When Harvard, one of America’s oldest and most revered institutions of higher learning, stands defiant as the federal government freezes billions in funding simply because it refuses to knuckle under to authoritarian demands — like gutting DEI programs and turning faculty into immigration informants — we’re no longer playing the usual game of politics.


This is the open throttling of academic freedom, part of a larger, deliberate campaign to silence dissent, centralize power, and erase democratic norms.


We’ve seen this playbook before in other countries — but now it’s being run right here, in the land that once proudly called itself the world’s beacon of liberty.


Democracy doesn’t die in darkness, as the saying goes; it suffocates in broad daylight.


Americans are witnessing an unprecedented assault on the very foundations of our democratic experiment, orchestrated with a precision that would make authoritarian strongmen worldwide nod in approval.


Senator Chris Murphy has raised alarm bells about what he describes as a methodical attack on American institutions that are supposed to keep government accountable to its citizens. By his account, the strategy isn’t dramatic coups or burning parliaments; that’s not how modern democracies perish. Instead, they’re slowly dismantled through the calculated erosion of accountability mechanisms.


History provides a disturbing playbook, and we’re watching it unfold right now here in America. Putin, Orbán, and Erdoğan didn’t need tanks in the streets. They understood that the process is multi-part but straightforward:


— Legitimize political violence,
— Capture the media,
— Intimidate lawyers,
— Install corrupt leaders within regulatory and police agencies,
— Disappear first minorities and later opposition leaders,
— Silence universities, and
— Starve opposition movements by denying their nonprofit status and funding.


Consider what we’re seeing unfold. The recent January 6 pardons sent an unmistakable message about the acceptability of political violence. When legislators openly express fears of “retaliation” — as Senator Lisa Murkowski just did — we’re already several steps down a dangerous path.


Meanwhile, the concentration of media power in the hands of billionaires who increasingly bend to political pressure isn’t accidental. Whether through ownership, lawsuits, or regulatory threats, the ability to speak truth to power is being systematically constrained.


Universities, traditionally bastions of free thought and youth activism, face unprecedented pressure to conform or lose federal support.

Legal professionals, our front-line defenders of constitutional rights, are being asked to choose between principles and practice.


The economic dimension of this strategy can’t be ignored. Targeted tariffs and funding cuts effectively create a corporate compliance regime where business survival depends on political loyalty. When small-dollar online giving platforms become targets, it’s clear this is about drying up resources for political opposition.


Senator Murphy’s warning carries particular weight: “I still believe we can stop it,” he says. His prescription includes institutional solidarity, mass mobilization, and political courage. These steps aren’t just wishful thinking: history shows they work when deployed with determination.


The challenges are clear, but so is the path forward. Democrats and defenders of democracy must recognize this isn’t politics as usual. The systematic undermining of accountability mechanisms isn’t merely partisan: it’s anti-democratic in the most fundamental sense.


It’s the first stages of outright tyranny, the first American dictatorship.


If conventional resistance proves insufficient, Murphy suggests civil disobedience may become necessary. That’s not a suggestion to be taken lightly, especially from a sitting US senator.

The coming months will test America’s democratic resolve. The institutions being targeted aren’t merely political; they’re the scaffolding of self-governance itself. As Murphy warns, “We still have the power, but we probably have less time than most think.”


For those wondering where the line exists between alarmism and appropriate warning, consider this: When elected officials speak openly about fear of retaliation, when media owners preemptively capitulate, when universities face unprecedented political pressure, and when legal professionals must toe ideological lines, we’re no longer discussing hypotheticals.


The American experiment has faced threats before, but, outside of the Confederacy, rarely have they been so comprehensively designed or so methodically executed.


Recognition of this reality isn’t partisan, it’s patriotic. The future of American democracy depends on understanding what’s at stake and acting accordingly.


The assault on Harvard is just one chapter in a larger story — one where the villains aren’t hiding in shadows, but are operating in full view with chilling precision.


The question isn’t whether this is happening. It’s whether enough Americans will recognize the danger in time to stop it.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Musk, Elon, Trump, Tyranny

Robert Reich: Trump Is Following Viktor Orban’s Model

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2025 //
24

Robert Reich has been a champion of democracy throughout the Trump era. An economist, he knows that we are crippled as a nation by escalating income inequality. He describes here how Viktor Orban provided a model for Trumpism and what we should do to resist our headlong plunge into oligarchy, authoritarians, and ultimately full-blown fascism. h/t to Retired Teacher, who called my attention to this article.

Reich writes:

Friends,

A few days ago I had breakfast with my old friend John Shattuck, who, as president of Central European University in Budapest, saw firsthand how Viktor Orbán took over Hungary’s democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state. 

When Trump was elected in 2016, Trump endorsed Orbán, and Orbán started attacking universities — forcing the Central European University out of Hungary. 

John believes Trump is emulating Orbán’s playbook. (Steve Bannon once declared that “Orbán was Trump before there was Trump.”)

Orbân’s playbook has 10 parts, according to John: 

One: Take over your party and enforce internal party discipline by using political threats and intimidation to stamp out all party dissent. 

Two: Build your base by appealing to fear and hate, branding immigrants and cultural minorities as dangers to society, and demonizing your opponents as enemies of the people.

Three: Use disinformation and lies to justify what you’re doing.

Four: Use your election victory to claim a sweeping mandate — especially if you don’t win a majority.

Five: Centralize your power by destroying the civil service.

Six: Redefine the rule of law as rule by executive decree. Weaponize the state against all democratic opponents. Demonize anyone who doesn’t support the leader as an “enemy of the people.” 

Seven: Eliminate checks and balances and separation of powers by taking over the legislature, the courts, the media, and civil society. Target opponents with regulatory penalties like tax audits, educational penalties such as denials of accreditation, political penalties like harassment investigations, physical penalties like withdrawing police protection, and criminal penalties like prosecution. 

Eight: Rely on your oligarchs — hugely wealthy business and financial leaders — to supervise the economy and reward them with special access to state resources, tax cuts, and subsidies. 

Nine: Ally yourself with other authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and support his effort to undermine European democracies and attack sovereign countries like Ukraine.

Ten: Get the public to believe that all this is necessary, and that resistance is futile.

John noted that Orbán’s influence now reaches across Europe.

In Austria, a political party founded by former Nazis will be part of a new coalition government this year headed by a leader who has close ties to Russia and opposes European support for Ukraine. A similar nationalist far-right government has taken over next door in Slovakia.

Europe’s three biggest countries, Italy, France and Germany, have all swung toward the far-right, but so far they remain democracies.

Italy has a nationalist government headed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who’s followed parts of the Orbán playbook but has been pushed toward the center and has softened her position on immigration and Ukraine.

In France, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen won last year’s parliamentary elections, but a coalition of opposition parties, prodded by Emmanuel Macron, united to deny her party a parliamentary majority. Their resistance will be tested by new elections in June.

In Germany, the center-left government headed by Olaf Scholz fell at the end of last year. In late February, parliamentary elections took place that determined whether the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party would become part of a new government. Viktor Orbán, Elon Musk, and JD Vance all endorsed the AfD before the elections, but it came in second with just under 20 percent of the vote, and polls show that 71 percent of Germans believe that the AfD is a threat to democracy because of its overt connections to the Nazi past.

Poland, the biggest new democracy in Eastern Europe, at first adopted but is now resisting the Orbán model. A far-right government elected in 2015 almost destroyed the independence of the Polish judiciary, but opposition parties united to defend the courts and defeated the government in 2023, replacing it with a centrist regime headed by Donald Tusk, with a strong commitment to restore Polish democracy.

What lessons can be drawn from all this?

John believes that the best way to respond to Orbán’s right-wing populism is by building coalitions for economic populism based on health care, education, taxes, and public spending. 

He points to historical examples of this, like the American Farmer-Labor coalition that brought together urban workers, white farmers, and Black sharecroppers and led to the Progressive Movement and the New Deal in the 20th century. Today there’s an urgent need for a new populist movement to attack economic inequality.

John says that defending democracy should itself be a populist cause. In the Orbán playbook, the national flag was hijacked by the authoritarian leader. John believes that the flag of American democracy must be reclaimed as a symbol of the rule of law, a society built on human rights and freedoms, and international alliances and humanitarian values. 

When these soft-power democratic assets are destroyed, a huge void opens up — to be filled by authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, who are the ultimate political models for Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump.

John urges that we pro-democracy anti-Trumpers move quickly with protests, lawsuits, and loud resistance. He says that those who believe Democrats should just play dead and wait for the 2026 midterm elections are profoundly wrong. Speed is essential. 

I was struck by John’s optimism. He believes that the U.S. is better situated than Hungary to resist authoritarianism. We are 30 times bigger and infinitely more diverse, and our diversity is the source of our economic and cultural strength. The U.S. has an enormous and active civil society, a judiciary that remains mostly independent, a free and open if partially captured and manipulated media, and a constitution that guarantees the rights of the people to challenge and change their government. 

Trump won less than 50 percent of the vote in last fall’s election, and his approval rating is well below that in recent polls.

National polls show that 70 percent of Americans today see democracy as a core American value.Resistance to the assault on democracy is not only possible, John says, but it’s essential — and it can work, as shown by the growing number of successful lawsuits that have been brought against Trump’s flood of executive decrees and the rising tide of grassroots mobilization by civil society groups across the country who are organizing demonstrations and lobbying legislators to stand up for democracy.

For two and a half centuries, Americans have fought to expand the right to vote, to achieve equal protection, to oppose intolerance and political violence, to gain freedom of speech and religion, to guarantee due process of law. 

These goals may now seem to be blocked by Trump, but the U.S. is not Germany in the 1930s nor Hungary in 2025. Americans across the country are beginning to resist. John believes American democracy will emerge stronger for our efforts.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Extremism, Fascism, Higher Education, International, Trump

Thomas Friedman: “I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future”

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2025 //
6

Thomas Friedman is not an alarmist. He has been writing about foreign policy for The New York Times for many years. He has written about crisis after crisis. But now we are an unprecedented point in our history. An unhinged ignorant man is President. Probably he is being manipulated by others. And at times, he acts on whims and grievances.

On any day, he comes up with some dangerous idea. He is ruining most people’s life savings. Eliminating or disabling federal agencies. Attacking academic freedom; extorting major law firms and universities. Trampling on the rule of law and the Constitutuon. There is no rationale or ending to his madness.

Friedman admits he is fearful for the future of our country. So am I. Trump is demolishing all established relationships, antagonizing allies, aligning us with Putin’s goals, and breaking whatever he can. Why? Either he is crazy or stupid or acting on Putin’s behalf. I believe it’s all of the above.

Friedman writes:

So much crazy happens with the Trump administration every day that some downright weird but incredibly telling stuff gets lost in the noise. A recent example was the scene on April 8 at the White House where, in the middle of his raging trade war, our president decided it was the perfect time to sign an executive order to bolster coal mining.

“We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” said President Trump, surrounded by coal miners in hard hats, members of a work force that has declined to about 40,000 from 70,000 over the last decade, according to Reuters. “We’re going to put the miners back to work.” For good measure, Trump added about these miners: “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of a job and they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal; that’s what they love to do.”

It’s commendable that the president honors men and women who work with their hands. But when he singles out coal miners for praise while he tries to zero out development of clean-tech jobs from his budget — in 2023, the U.S. wind energy industry employed approximately 130,000 workers, while the solar industry employed 280,000 — it suggests that Trump is trapped in a right-wing woke ideology that doesn’t recognize green manufacturing jobs as “real” jobs. How is that going to make us stronger?

This whole Trump II administration is a cruel farce. Trump ran for another term not because he had any clue how to transform America for the 21st century. He ran in order to stay out of jail and to get revenge on those who, with real evidence, had tried to hold him accountable to the law. I doubt he has ever spent five minutes studying the work force of the future.

He then returned to the White House, his head still filled with ideas out of the 1970s. There he launched a trade war with no allies and no serious preparation — which is why he changes his tariffs almost every day —and no understanding of how much the global economy is now a complex ecosystem in which products are assembled from components from multiple countries. And then he has this war carried out by a commerce secretary who thinks millions of Americans are dying to replace Chinese workers “screwing in little screws to make iPhones.”

But this farce is about to touch every American. By attacking our closest allies — Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea and the European Union — and our biggest rival, China, at the same time he makes clear he favors Russia over Ukraine and prefers climate-destroying energy industries over future-oriented ones, the planet be damned. Trump is triggering a serious loss of global confidence in America.

The world is now seeing Trump’s America for exactly what it is becoming: a rogue state led by an impulsive strongman disconnected from the rule of law and other constitutional American principles and values.

And do you know what our democratic allies do with rogue states? Let’s connect some dots.

First, they don’t buy Treasury bills as much as they used to. So America has to offer them higher rates of interest to do so — which will ripple through our entire economy, from car payments to home mortgages to the cost of servicing our national debt at the expense of everything else.

“Are President Trump’s herky-jerky decision-making and border taxes causing the world’s investors to shy away from the dollar and U.S. Treasuries?” asked The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page on Sunday under the headline, “Is There a New U.S. Risk Premium?” Too soon to say, but not too soon to ask, as bond yields keep spiking and the dollar keeps weakening — classic signs of a loss of confidence that does not have to be large to have a large impact on our whole economy.

The second thing is that our allies lose faith in our institutions. The Financial Times reported Monday that the European Union’s governing “commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some U.S.-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage, a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China.” It doesn’t trust the rule of law in America anymore.

The third thing people overseas do is tell themselves and their children — and I heard this repeatedly in China a few weeks ago — that maybe it’s not a good idea any longer to study in America. The reason: They don’t know when their kids might be arbitrarily arrested, when their family members might get deported to Salvadoran prisons.

Is this irreversible? All I know for sure today is that somewhere out there, as you read this, is someone like Steve Jobs’s Syrian birth father, who came to our shores in the 1950s to get a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, someone who was planning to study in America but is now looking to go to Canada or Europe instead.

You shrink all those things — our ability to attract the world’s most energetic and entrepreneurial immigrants, which allowed us to be the world’s center for innovation; our power to draw in a disproportionate share of the world’s savings, which allowed us to live beyond our means for decades; and our reputation for upholding the rule of law — and over time you end up with an America that will be less prosperous, less respected and increasingly isolated.

Wait, wait, you say, but isn’t China also still digging coal? Yes, it is, but with a long-term plan to phase it out and to use robots to do the dangerous and health-sapping work of miners.

And that’s the point. While Trump is doing his “weave” — rambling about whatever strikes him at the moment as good policy — China is weaving long-term plans.

In 2015, a year before Trump became president, China’s prime minister at the time, Li Keqiang, unveiled a forward-looking growth plan called “Made in China 2025.” It began by asking, what will be the growth engine for the 21st century? Beijing then made huge investments in the elements of that engine’s components so Chinese companies could dominate them at home and abroad. We’re talking clean energy, batteries, electric vehicles and autonomous cars, robots, new materials, machine tools, drones, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

The most recent Nature Index shows that China has become “the leading country globally for research output in the database in chemistry, earth and environmental sciences and physical sciences, and is second for biological sciences and health sciences.”

Does that mean China will leave us in the dust? No. Beijing is making a huge mistake if it thinks the rest of the world is going to let China indefinitely suppress its domestic demand for goods and services so the government can go on subsidizing export industries and try to make everything for everyone, leaving other countries hollowed out and dependent. Beijing needs to rebalance its economy, and Trump is right to pressure it to do so.

But Trump’s constant bluster and his wild on-and-off imposition of tariffs are not a strategy — not when you are taking on China on the 10th anniversary of Made in China 2025. If Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent really believes what he foolishly said, that Beijing is just “playing with a pair of twos,” then somebody please let me know when it’s poker night at the White House, because I want to buy in. China has built an economic engine that gives it options.

The question for Beijing — and the rest of the world — is: How will China use all the surpluses it has generated? Will it invest them in making a more menacing military? Will it invest them in more high-speed rail lines and six-lane highways to cities that don’t need them? Or will it invest in more domestic consumption and services while offering to build the next generation of Chinese factories and supply lines in America and Europe with 50-50 ownership structures? We need to encourage China to make the right choices. But at least China has choices.

Compare that with the choices Trump is making. He is undermining our sacred rule of law, he is tossing away our allies, he is undermining the value of the dollar and he is shredding any hope of national unity. He’s even got Canadians now boycotting Las Vegas because they don’t like to be told we will soon own them.

So, you tell me who’s playing with a pair of twos.

If Trump doesn’t stop his rogue behavior, he’s going to destroy all the things that made America strong, respected and prosperous.

I have never been more afraid for America’s future in my life.

Categories Democracy, Economy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Stupid, Trump, Tyranny

Thomas L. Friedman: After Trump’s Tariff Fiasco, Will Any Other Nation Trust America?

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2025 //
8

Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs opinion writer for The New York Times. In this post, he excoriates Trump for his arrogance and stupidity in handling the tariffs issue, and especially for his arrogance and stupidity in dealing with China. First, he insisted that he would “hang tough” on his plan to impose draconian tariffs. When the stock and bond markets crashed, he decided to put a 90-day pause on tariffs, exempting China.

He has alienated our allies and outraged China. His arrogance has isolated us in the world as a faithless bully. It seems that Trump’s “art of the deal” consists of bullying, threatening, insulting, and humiliating the other party. It doesn’t work in the international stage. Trump dissipated long-standing alliances and has made us look foolish in the eyes of the world. In less than three months, he has squandered good will, scorned close relationships, and thrown away our reputation as “leader of the free world.” The emperor has no clothes. He stands naked before the world as a stupid and reckless man.

It’s important to remember that Trump was never a successful businessman. He went bankrupt six times. No American bank would extend loans to him because of his abysmal record. Yet his MAGA cult believes in his business acumen because he played a successful businessman on TV. He is a performer who knows nothing about foreign trade, economics, or history.

How will we survive four years of Trump’s demented whims?

Friedman wrote:

I have many reactions to President Trump’s largely caving on his harebrained plan to tariff the world, but overall, one reaction just keeps coming back to me: If you hire clowns, you should expect a circus. And my fellow Americans, we have hired a group of clowns.

Think of what Trump; his chief knucklehead, Howard Lutnick (the commerce secretary); his assistant chief knucklehead, Scott Bessent (the Treasury secretary); and his deputy assistant chief knucklehead, Peter Navarro (the top trade adviser), have told us repeatedly for the past weeks: Trump won’t back off on these tariffs because — take your choice — he needs them to keep fentanyl from killing our kids, he needs them to raise revenue to pay for future tax cuts, and he needs them to pressure the world to buy more stuff from us. And he couldn’t care less what his rich pals on Wall Street say about their stock market losses.

After creating havoc in the markets standing on these steadfast “principles” — undoubtedly prompting many Americans to sell low out of fear — Trump reversed much of it on Wednesday, announcing a 90-day pause on certain tariffs to most countries, excluding China.

Message to the world — and to the Chinese: “I couldn’t take the heat.” If it were a book it would be called “The Art of the Squeal.”

But don’t think for a second that all that’s been lost is money. A whole pile of invaluable trust just went up in smoke as well. In the last few weeks, we have told our closest friends in the world — countries that stood shoulder to shoulder with us after Sept. 11, in Iraq and in Afghanistan — that none of them were any different from China or Russia. They were all going to get tariffed under the same formula — no friends-and-family discounts allowed.

Do you think these former close U.S. allies are ever going to trust getting into a trench with this administration again?

This was the trade equivalent of the Biden administration’s botched exit from Afghanistan, from which it never quite recovered. But at least Joe Biden got us out of a costly no-win war for which America, in my opinion, is now much better off.

Trump just put us into a no-win war.

How so? We do have a trade imbalance with China that does need to be addressed. Trump is right about that. China now controls one-third of global manufacturing and has the industrial engines to pretty much make everything for everyone one day if it is allowed to. That is not good for us, for Europe or for many developing countries. It is not even good for China, given the fact that by putting so many resources into export industries it is ignoring the meager social safety net it offers its people and its even more threadbare public health care system.

But when you have a country as big as China — 1.4 billion people — with the talent, infrastructure and savings it has, the only way to negotiate is with leverage on our side of the table. And the best way to get leverage would have been for Trump to enlist our allies in the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, India, Australia and Indonesia into a united front. Make it a negotiation of the whole world versus China.

Then you say to Beijing: All of us will gradually raise our tariffs on your exports over the next two years to pressure you to shift from your export economy to a more domestic-oriented one. But we will also invite you to build factories and supply chains in our countries — 50-50 joint ventures — to transfer your expertise back to us the way you compelled us to do for you. We don’t want a bifurcated world. It will be less prosperous for all and less stable.

But instead of making it the whole industrial world against China, Trump made it America against the whole industrial world and China.

Now, Beijing knows that Trump not only blinked, but he so alienated our allies, so demonstrated that his word cannot be trusted for a second, that many of them may never align with us against China in the same way. They may, instead, see China as a better, more stable long-term partner than us.

What a pathetic, shameful performance. Happy Liberation Day.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Extremism, Ignorance, International, Stupid, Trump

As Global Economy Imploded, Trump’s Cash Register Was Going Ka-Ching

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2025 //
6

Investigative reporters at the New York Times–Eric Lipton, Theodore Schleifer, and Zoltan-Youngs, with assistance from Maggie Haberman– were watching the busy scene at Mar-a-Lago during the brief period when Trump announced draconian tariffs on other economies (but not Russia, North Korea, Belarus or Cuba), but before his decision to postpone the tariffs for 90 days. Trump demonstrated that he could rattle the global economy with a statement, then shift gears a few days later. What fun he must have had! He knew he could crater the stock markets and he knew that he could make it soar.

In between times, Mar-a-Lago was enriching Trump and his PACs.

The financial market meltdown was underway when President Trump boarded Air Force One on his way to Florida on Thursday for a doubleheader of sorts: a Saudi-backed golf tournament at his family’s Miami resort and a weekend of fund-raisers attracting hundreds of donors to his Palm Beach club.

It was a fresh reminder that in his second term, Mr. Trump has continued to find ways to drive business to his family-owned real-estate ventures, a practice he has sustained even when his work in Washington has caused worldwide financial turmoil.

The Trump family monetization weekend started Thursday night, as crowds began to form at both the Trump National Doral resort near Miami International Airport, and separately at his Mar-a-Lago resort 70 miles up the coast.

Mr. Trump landed on the edge of one of the golf courses in a military helicopter — just in time for a dinner at Doral. The next day, LIV Golf, the breakaway professional league backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, was scheduled to hold a tournament at the course for the fourth time.

On Thursday at Mar-a-Lago, hundreds of guests gathered for the American Patriots Gala, a conservative fund-raiser that featured Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and President Javier Milei of Argentina, who told his supporters back home that he was hoping to catch up with Mr. Trump while there, seemingly unaware that Mr. Trump was double-booked at two of his family properties that night.

And that was just the weekend’s lead-up.

Mr. Trump ordered a new set of global tariffson Wednesday from the White House using his trademark Sharpie pen, a version of which is on sale at Mar-a-Lago for $3.

The announcement set off one of the largest market crashes in American history, erasing $5 trillion in market value from companies in the S&P 500 in just two days. Mr. Trump has said his policy would reverse what he calls unfair trade practices, and that eventually the “markets are going to boom.”

On Friday, as markets continued to tumble, thousands of golf fans visited Doral, as did Eric Trump, Mr. Trump’s son, and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s $925 billion sovereign wealth fund. Mr. Al-Rumayyan is also the chairman of LIV Golf, and was there to see its stars compete.

“It is a nice club,” Mr. Al-Rumayyan said as he walked around the golf course watching the players tee off.

LIV Golf — a venture intended to lift the Saudi profile worldwide even as it has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars of state funds — is styled as a daylong party, with club music pumping out of speakers lining tournament courses and machines dispensing wine and large beers. On Friday, fans watched a bit of golf and danced on the edges of the course. Others in MAGA hats walked around smoking cigars.

In short, the economic turbulence seemed far away.

“You are all looking a little too stiff!” said Matt Rogers, a LIV Golf announcer, as he yelled into a microphone, blasting his message across the greens as the first group of golfers on Friday prepared to play with dance music blaring in the background. “You need to turn this up! This is LIV Golf.”

Every room at the 643-room Trump Doral, including the $13,000-a-night presidential suite, was sold out through the weekend. Not a seat could be found at the BLT Prime steakhouse bar, where a porterhouse steak cost $130.

“This is the perfect venue,” Eric Trump said as he strolled the golf course Friday.

He had driven his father in a golf cart from the military helicopter to the resort dinner the day before, as the festivities over the big moneymaking weekend were getting underway.

The president spent much of Friday at yet another Trump family venue, Trump International Golf Club, not far from Mar-a-Lago, sending out social media messages during the day, including, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH, RICHER THAN EVER BEFORE.” [Had he already decided to pause the tariffs?]

By Friday night, the center of attention had shifted back to Mar-a-Lago, as Mr. Trump held another in a series of $1 million-a-head dinners at his private club in Palm Beach.

Since he was elected in November, Mr. Trump has hosted at least four of the fund-raisers, including one in December, two in March and the one Friday night, with a fifth planned for April 24.

The fund-raisers unfold in similar ways, according to people who have attended them.

Roughly 20 people gather around a candlelit table with big white flowers in the club’s “White and Gold Room” after a photo session. Mr. Trump speaks, then listens to the guests discuss their businesses, one by one. In just an hour or two, he can raise as much as $20 million — a great return on his time investment, associates say.

Attendees at some of the post-election dinners at Mar-a-Lago hosted by MAGA Inc., one of Mr. Trump’s fund-raising political action committees, have included the casino owner Miriam Adelson, the sugar magnate Pepe Fanjul and James Taiclet, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest military contractor, along with representatives from the cryptocurrency and energy industries.

On Friday, Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir, and Steve Wynn, the former casino executive, both billionaires, were among the guests at the Mar-a-Lago fund-raiser, according to two people briefed on the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the event.

The dinners have been just the start. Mar-a-Lago remains a popular site for Republicancandidates to host their own fund-raisers, Federal Election Commission records show. It is not clear to some Republicans why Mr. Trump has been raising money so aggressively, according to eight people involved in conservative fund-raising who have kept track of his efforts. Never before has a president ineligible for re-election vacuumed up so much money for a super PAC.

Some of Mr. Trump’s associates believe it is prudent to fund-raise when the money is available, as corporate interests and others seek to get access to the president or make amends for perceived slights, people close to him acknowledge.

The packed agendas at the two Trump venues recalled the constant buzz and spending by lobbyists, members of Congress and foreign leaders at Trump International Hotel in Washington before the Trump family sold its lease after Mr. Trump’s first term.

In addition to the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, top sponsors of the Doral golf tournament included Aramco, the Saudi oil company; Riyadh Air, the airline owned by the sovereign wealth fund; and TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media company whose fate Mr. Trump is helping to decide, according to a large billboard outside one of the event’s party tents.

Mr. Trump’s merchandise shops — there are at least three of them at Doral — were also doing swift business, selling everything from a $550 Trump-branded crystal-studded purse to $18 Doral-branded paperweights made in China. The store clerk said that he did not know if new tariffs on imported products would mean price increases.

Fans in the crowd said that they had traveled from as far as South Africa to attend the event. Some purchased special tickets that cost as much as $1,400 to enter exclusive party areas with free drinks and food — tickets that were sold out as of Saturday.

In interviews, tournament attendees and others said that they did not mind the disconnect between the Wall Street meltdown and the events at the Trump properties.

“The sky is falling every day,” said Mike Atwell, a Key Largo, Fla., restaurant owner who was attending the LIV event with his wife enjoying lunch and drinks. “When you are happy, you drink. When you are sad, you drink. It all works out.”

Tyrell Davis, a 39-year-old entrepreneur spending Saturday afternoon in Palm Beach, said that he admired Mr. Trump for focusing on his own businesses while also implementing tariffs that he believed would benefit Americans. 

Mr. Davis said that the United States had given away money to other countries for years while not investing in American cities, and that it only made sense Mr. Trump would continue to bolster his own businesses while in office.

“It’s all about business and money,” Mr. Davis said. “That’s what it’s all about. America is a business. It’s a corporation.”

On Saturday, as the tournament continued at Doral, Mr. Trump showed up at yet another family golf course, in Jupiter, Fla., which is holding its own, more modest tournament.

Good news was announced by the White House staff: “The president won his second round matchup of the senior club championship today in Jupiter, Fla., and advances to the championship round on Sunday.” Reporters and photographers were prohibited from watching him play, and were held down the street at a coffee shop.

As Mr. Trump returned to Mar-a-Lago, one of his political committees sent out an offer to his followers: They could buy a signed replica of his executive order changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The minimum contribution was $50. “I want you to have a PIECE OF HISTORY in your home,” Mr. Trump said in the solicitation.

The White House then announced that there would be no more public events on Saturday.

Categories Cheating, Economy, Trump

Should We Trust Trump?

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2025 //
7

Trump is a performer who plays the part of a businessman. In New York City, he was known for his high-flying lifestyle, his frequent appearances at nightclubs, and his escapades with beautiful women. A businessman? He declared bankruptcy six times. His credit rating was so poor that no American bank would lend him money.

MAD magazine published this Trump cartoon in 1992:

Categories Accountability, Creativity, Economy, Ethics, Failure, Ignorance, Stupid, Trump
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