Hockey Night in Canada 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱  

Oh Canada:  In January, due to a loss of public support, Justin Trudeau announced that he was stepping down as Prime Minister of Canada and head of the country’s Liberal Party.  At that point it was widely expected that the country’s next Prime Minister would be Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, a reasonable assumption given that after ten years of Trudeau’s leadership Canadians were ready for a change and Poilievre was leading Trudeau’s Liberal Party successor, interim Prime Minister Mark Carney, by around 25 points.  Then the Trump factor kicked in.  Not only did Trump continue to insist that Canada should become our 51^st state; he went all in on his tariffs, violating the revised NAFTA agreement he’d negotiated with Canada and Mexico during Trump 1.0.  Carney’s 25-point lead went up in smoke, he even lost his seat in Canada’s Parliament and as a result Liberal Party leader Mark Carney is now Canada’s newly elected Prime Minister.  It wasn’t a total win for the Liberals, Carney’s party fell three seats short of a majority so he will have to put together a coalition, but it was a resounding rebuke of Trump, who sees himself as the King of the World and suggested yesterday that he would make a good Pope.  Moreover, it was an incredible comeback from what was supposed to be an easy Conservative victory. Good news for Canada, but unfortunately there are 1360 excruciatingly long days remaining in Trump’s presidency and he appears determined to make the most of those days, and by most, think continue his destructive path.  Last night, probably in response to all the terrible polls that were recently released, he went to Michigan where he told the crowd, and yes for some unfathomable reason, there was a crowd, that the first 100 days of Trump 2.0 were the best ever for any US president.  And why wouldn’t he say that? It’s a lie, he knows it’s a lie, but he also knows that if he repeats it often enough, he’ll convince a lot of low information voters, and probably some who ought to know better, that its true. It doesn’t help that Michigan Governor Whitmer was there to greet him but at least she got a new fighter jet mission for a Michigan National Guard base in exchange.  Trump’s also been sitting down for 100-day interviews with a number of reporters from the mainstream media outlets that he usually attacks.  During one of those interviews, that included The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg most recently of Signal fame, along with Washington Post escapees Ashley Parker and Mark Scherer, he repeatedly insisted that he’d won the 2020 election. That was just one of the unbalanced things he said as he bragged about all the 24-karat gold leaf he’d had installed in the White House since moving back in while asking the three their opinion on whether or not he should install a crystal chandelier on the soon to be gilded Oval Office ceiling. The bottom line, he’s nuts, dangerous, president and has garish taste.

Tariff Follies:  Trump isn’t the only one who is deceitful, the people around him are too.  Treasury Secretary Bessent, one of those who knows better, continues to defend the tariffs that he knows are economy killers, even as he appears to be melting into a puddle in plain sight, a problem because he’s supposed to be negotiating with China.  Commerce Secretary Lutwick who unlike Bessent seems to be enjoying his moment in the sun, insists that Trump has negotiated trade deals with many countries but can’t announce any of them, including one “bigly” one because they are top secret pending formal approval by the countries on the other side. Despite their best efforts none of the reporters on the tariff beat have managed to identify any of those countries with impending deals though some speculate based on wishful hints from White House insiders that India or South Korea could be among them though South Korea can’t agree to anything until their June elections.  Yesterday, after it was reported that Amazon planned to break out tariff costs online, a “pissed off” Trump made it clear to Jeff Bezos that doing so would cost him all the goody points he’d earned by cancelling The Washington Post’s Kamala endorsement and by contributing millions to the Trump cause.  Bezos relented, denied that Amazon was ever going to do what Press Secretary Leavitt said would have been a “hostile and political act.”  Spoiler alert, if that item you purchase next week costs $25 more than what you would have paid last month, the increase is the “secret” tariff amount.  While Trump’s team continue to insist that tariffs will not be passed on to US consumers and won’t negatively impact the economy, the facts on the ground, or more accurately in the sea say otherwise.   The executive director of the Port of Los Angeles told CNBC yesterday that he expects incoming cargo volumes to slide by more than a third next week compared to the same period in 2024.  Yesterday the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (the ILWU) released a statement calling on “every worker, every union, and every person who believes in economic justice to stand with us against these Trump tariffs." He went on to say that “the tariffs on Chinese imports, recently raised to 145 percent, had instigated ‘a de facto trade war’ between the world's two largest economies, and warned that this will impact the ‘hundreds of thousands of jobs’ connected to global trade.” Concerned about a sharp decline in package deliveries, yesterday UPS announced 20,000 layoffs and a number of corporations including General Motors, Kraft, JetBlue have either delayed or are in the process of revising earnings estimates downward due to the uncertainty related to the impact of the tariffs. The holidays will be impacted too, the NYTimes reports that Christmas toy orders are being “paused.”  These are the kind of reports that spur all those recession predictions.    

Funny Math:  Remember when Elon Musk said that he and his DOGE-niks would chop $2 trillion than just $1 trillion off next year’s budget? He’s now revised that number down again to $150 billion and according to the NY Times David Farenthold, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has made a career out of monitoring Trump’s funny math, that number is probably an overstatement.  Farenthold and his co-author Jeremy Singer-Vine point out that among other things, Musk’s claim includes billion-dollar errors, counts spending that was never likely to happen, and includes cancellations of contracts that did not exist.  That’s not to say that Musk hasn’t been hugely successful at disrupting and eliminating programs particularly those affecting health and foreign aid, he just hasn’t saved much by doing so.  In fact, according to Politico total spending has risen by 6.3 percent, or $156 billion since Trump took office. On the subject of bad math, Trump continues to make demands on Speaker Johnson who is supposed to be finalizing his budget package.  Johnson who is trying to figure out how to cut Medicaid and other benefits that matter like food for the hungry  in a manner that will allow him to blame everyone not in his party including of course the usual scapegoats Joe Biden and Barack Obama has received directions from Trump to cut taxes on tips while also upping state and local tax deductions and providing aid to farmers. 

Oops:  Yesterday, perhaps in an effort to distract from reports of his chaotic management, Defense Secretary Hegseth who still has his job, signed an order cancelling a Pentagon program that boosts the participation of women in peace building and conflict prevention.  He called the program “yet another woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative that overburdens our commanders and troops.”  The program wasn’t a Biden program, it had been sponsored by Little Marco when he was a Senator and by cosplay Noem when she was in the House.  It was signed into law by Trump during his first last term.  Because sometimes both sides can be right about some things, yesterday a Harvard task force released a “scathing account” finding that anti-Semitism had “infiltrated coursework, social life, the hiring of some faculty members and the worldview of certain academic programs.”  A separate report on anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias on campus was also released.  Harvard has lots of work to do and it’s good that they are acknowledging it, but the timing is a bit awkward given that the Trump administration has been using Harvard and other institutions’ anti-Semitism problem to justify their attempt at Viktor Orban style takeovers of institutions of higher learning.

#BringThemAllHomeNow