Trump’s insistence that a tariff wall will make America rich is not based in economics; indeed, it would destroy the current system, which is so strong that modern economists are marveling. Trump is fantasizing about a world without regulations or taxes, where high tariffs permit the wealthy to collude to raise prices on ordinary Americans and to use that money to live like kings while workers, farmers, and entrepreneurs barely scrape by… a world like McKinley’s.
Richardson's command of American history serves well in this newsletter post. She takes us through the post-Civil War era to the 1920s, during much of which high tariffs were the revenue source of choice in Washington. Then she explains how it relates to what Trump is advocating now. (This is called context, something you don't often see in modern journalism.) The late 1800s, which Trump has said he wants to emulate, were marked by massive inequality of opportunity and wealth – so extreme that it's only been matched (and, disgustingly, exceeded) by today's grotesque imbalances. Trump's plans would move us much closer to a master-serf economy, which is exactly what his his radical backers want. For the rest of us, it'll be living on the crumbs that fall off their overflowing tables.
While various misinformationabout the response has spread widely without Trump’s involvement, the Republican presidential nominee has been one of the country’s leading deceivers on the subject. Over a span of six days, in public comments and social media posts, Trump has used his powerful megaphone to endorse or invent false or unsubstantiated claims. The chief targets of his hurricane-related dishonesty have been Vice President Kamala Harris, his opponent in the November presidential election, and President Joe Biden.
CNN's Dale is doing a public service with his relentless chronicling of right wing lies. in this case, there's something beyond disgusting about what Trump, his associates, and his cult are doing in the wake of the deadly Hurricane Helene. Their lies have sparked a torrent of fear and loathing in the suffering communities that the Federal Emergency Management Agency and others are breaking their backs to help. Calling these lies "shameful" – as many have done – doesn't begin to capture the outright malevolence. People's lives are at stake; FEMA employees have been getting death threats, and no one will be surprised if some Trump nutcase takes some potshots at them. FEMA itself has put up a web page refuting the lies. Maybe it's an exercise in futility, but it's necessary when the highest profile people – by the way including Elon Musk, who is more and more of a danger – are deliberately creating and amplifying such pure deceit. Also recommended: Brian Stelter's warning about what this behavior portends for the next month before Election Day.
Anyone can misremember, of course. But the debate had been just a week earlier and a fairly memorable moment. And it was hardly the only time Mr. Trump has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately. In fact, it happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention.
There's a lot to unpack in the New York Times' much-noticed article today, in which the Time's chief normalizer of extremism, Peter Baker, discovered that Trump is old and incoherent. Considering the age-and-acuity-focused, full-court press the Times engaged in to drum Biden out of the race, it's indeed overdue for the so-called "Paper of Record" to notice this on Page 1, and with detail inside. But Trump's speeches haven't really reignited "the question of age," as the headline says. They've highlighted his growing derangement. Yet the Times hasn't stopped normalizing the increasingly violence-tinged extremism that characterizes Trump, his apparatchiks (including Vance), his puppet media operations, and his cult. When the Times starts caring as relentlessly about that, I'll feel like our top journalism organization gets it. That said, this article is progress.
De la Torre and his conspirators have not gone to these lengths to hide the proverbial receipts of their misdeeds because they are innocent. They did it because their cash grabs bankrupted the company, caused the deaths of dozens if not hundreds of patients, and left dozens of communities with gaping holes in their health care delivery systems. And if Democrats don’t have the appetite in an election cycle to pass laws preventing this from happening again, at the very least they might devote a small fraction of the legal ingenuity they displayed prosecuting Donald Trump into making a case that sucking billions of dollars out of Medicare and Medicaid coffers to buy yachts and planes and a 500-acre ranch for your trophy wife is not actually a perfectly legal thing to do.
One of America's most cartoonishly evil financial manipulators, Ralph de la Torre, told Congress to get lost when a House committee subpoenaed him recently to explain his looting of a medical care company. Many Democrats (and a few Republicans) have been hoping this guy's epic sleaze, and arrogance, will be a wedge into reining in the "private equity" and "hedge fund" looters of so many industries and communities. But state efforts are going nowhere fast. In a demonstration of how un-progressive California Gov. Gavin Newsom tends to be, he vetoed a law that would have – very modestly – restrained some of these moden robber barons' worst abuses. As this article makes clear, other state attempts to rein in the modern robber barons have also turned into mush. So our hopes seem to lie with the feds. Biden has been vastly better on this all recent presidents, and his regulatory appointees have been a breath of fresh air in promoting real competition and consumer benefit. Where does Harris stand? She's said some good things, but she's plainly under a lot of pressure to pull back.
Voting is just part of democracy, but it's the essential place to start. Make sure you're registered. Doublecheck in the fall, well before Election Day, because in some states Republican officials are removing people, mostly those who tend to vote for Democrats, from voting rolls.
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Heather Cox Richardson
Daniel Dale
Maureen Tkacik
