The Week that Was ...
Ending Sunday, April 6, 2025
Welcome to the latest edition of The Week that Was, my rundown of what happened last week, curated, in the loosest sense of the word, for your reading pleasure, or displeasure.
This week there were massive protests all across the country as our somewhat elected leader charted a path of destruction for everyone but himself.
1. Photos of the Week: The Cargo Vessel as Moloch
2. Tariffs! Tariffs!
3. Black Monday
4. R.F.K.Jr. Accidentally Fires 20% of the Staff Required to Accomplish Anything
5. The New York Times Just Doesn’t Get Claudia Sheinbaum
6. Major Outrages that Now Seem Small
7. At Last! A Good Analysis of Mexico’s Fourth Transformation
8. Canadians Wary and Weary of Visiting the U.S.
9. Protests Across the U.S.A.
10. Bonus Video: General Buck Turgidson Informs President Merkin Muffley that General Jack D. Ripper Has Ordered the B-52s Under His Command to Attack the Soviet Union
1. Photo of the Week:
© AP Photo/Noah Berger
2. Tariffs! Tariffs!
The initial big news this week, announced so hugely, was massive increases in U.S. tariffs around the world. I mean big.
Of course, it’s all justified and reasonable. In fact, Trump is the victim, at least in his mind. Of all alleged billionaires, he’s the most victimy of them all.
You see, these are “reciprocal” tariffs. And the Office of the United States Trade Representative can explain it all.
See Trump’s list: More than 180 countries and territories facing reciprocal tariffs
Of course, not every country was hit.
That information is not easy to find, but Lipstick Alley was on the case.
Full List of Countries Not Hit With Reciprocal Tariffs by Donald Trump
However, perhaps not unsurprisingly (in fact, about as obviously as is possible), Trump’s math was a bit off. As in way off the chart, the rocker, and other metaphors as well.
Reciprocal sounds like charging the same tariff as the other country charges us. And that’s what Trump said, in his inimitable way.
But the calculation used by these high-level math dudes was, essentially, “our trade deficit with that country, divided by our total imports from that country.”
Trump’s functionaries then disguised this nonsensical, resentment-based illogic with a fancy looking formula.
Guess what?
“The intrigue: As it happens, if you ask ChatGPT the best way to calculate a tariff on another country to get the balance of trade to zero, it comes up with this exact formula.
“It will also tell you that "while revenue-matching tariffs might feel 'fair' on paper, they'd likely lead to economic inefficiency, international backlash, and serious harm to the superpower's own economy and global trade system."
Trump tariffs based on massive error, conservative think tank says
In fact, the ridiculousness of the Trump tariffs is such that @krishnarohit explains it:
This might be the first large-scale application of AI technology to geopolitics
This whole episode in the life of our nation is a real head scratcher.
This rather long but absorbing conversation between Sam Seder of The Majority Report and David Dayen on The Majority Report can help lend some light on this matter.
David Dayen, the Executive Editor of The American Prospect, starts at around 25:40. At around 36:44, Dayen starts discussing the fact that the U.S. does not have enough customs officials to enforce the tariffs.
Trump's Tariffs Melt The Stock Market w/ David Dayen
In the vein that these are not really tariffs, but more like sanctions and in fact really a low-grade attempt at gangsterism
David Dayen at The American Prospect went into some detail about the possible thinking behind the Trump tariff policy.
“I’m watching the stock market plunge, and the expectations for recession and stagflation rise, along with everyone else. I’m aware of the innumeracy of the Trump administration, apparently using a shortcut AI formula to reset global trade imbalances and trying to bullshit their way through the criticism.
“But I think we give too much credit to Donald Trump and his lieutenants when we suggest that they’re pursuing a misguided trade policy, or that they aren’t pairing tariffs with the necessary steps to boost domestic manufacturing. Those things are true, of course: U.S. trade policy has been deeply inequitable for decades, favoring multinationals over workers and the environment, giving benefits to those corporations in free-trade agreements that they could never get through normal legislative channels, and handing over economic decisions to Wall Street. But these careful explanations, however correct, have nothing to do with what we saw on display in the Rose Garden yesterday.
Because these aren’t really tariffs at all. ….
“What Trump is doing is a sanction policy, only he’s doing it against the whole world, all at once, for the assumed harm of “ripping off” the United States for decades. Sanctions have become a dangerously large component of American geopolitical strategy, an instrument of economic war felt disproportionately by the world’s poorest citizens. The stated reason that Russia and North Korea and other rogue states aren’t on the tariff lists is because sanctions have destroyed their ability to have a trading relationship with the U.S. Trump is applying those punitive measures to the rest of the world.
It is not at all surprising that Trump sees the appeal in sanctions. It is no different from a mob boss moving into town and sending his thugs to every business on Main Street, roughing up the proprietors and asking for protection money so they don’t get pushed out of business. Trump believes that the U.S. is indispensable enough that it can intimidate every country on Earth by, well, asking for protection money, which would take many forms: curbing migration, taking in more U.S. farm exports or weapons systems, reducing industrial capacity in China and forcing more consumption, buying long-dated U.S. debt on the cheap, siding with a war strategy against Iran, literally anything the White House wants. Trump now has a tool by which he can achieve whatever goals he conjures up, or simply have his leg-breakers beat the global economy to a pulp. It’s a mentality fit for someone repeatedly linked to organized crime.
They’re not tariffs they’re sanctions
Another fascinating perspective on the Trump tariffs comes from Yanis Varoufakis, who compares the Trump tariffs to the Nixon Shock of 1971.
Will the Trump Shock prove as momentous as the Nixon Shock?
3. Black Monday
Meanwhile, as I type this, stock markets in the Far East are crashing. And the U.S.A. could see the worst of it all.
“Black Monday” Redux? Jim Cramer Warns of Historic Crash as US Tariffs Rattle Global Markets
4. RFK Jr. Accidently Fires 20% of the Staff Required to Accomplish Anything
Mistakes were made.
“Some of the roughly 10,000 employees fired from the Department of Health and Human Services are being asked to come back.
“’The agency's secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, said the mass firings were consistent with the government's goals to purge the federal workforce but said 20% of them were made in error.
"’Personnel that should not have been cut, were cut. We're reinstating them. And that was always the plan’, he said, adding ‘we'll make mistakes’".
“Terminating an entire team dedicated to lead poisoning and prevention at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention was among the mistakes, he said.”
We'll make mistakes' says RFK as fired US health staff asked to return
5. The New York Times Just Doesn’t Get Claudia Sheinbaum
The neoliberal press continues to be unable to grasp what is happening in Mexico. In particular, they just cannot wrap their heads around Claudia Sheinbaum, the English-speaking Ph.D. climate scientist who was elected President of Mexico with 60% of the vote and how commands 85% approval and who is resolutely opposed to neoliberalism.
Michele Goldberg of The New York Times starts with some personality journalism:
“A secular Jewish climate scientist, Sheinbaum is in many ways the antithesis of the swaggering strongmen who make this moment in world politics feel so suffocating. I’m talking not just about Trump and Vladimir Putin, but also the new techno-caudillos of Latin America, figures like El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Argentina’s Javier Milei, who combine far-right politics with the postmodern smirk of message-board trolls.
“Around the globe, liberal humanism is faltering while the forces of reactionary cruelty are on the march. So Sheinbaum, who has adopted López Obrador’s slogan “For the good of all, first the poor,” can seem like a shining exception to the reigning spirit of autocratic machismo.
Then she graciously admits her inability to shed her U.S. perspective:
“For those of us steeped in American identity politics, it can be hard to understand how a woman like Sheinbaum came to lead the world’s 11th-most-populous country. Her parents, both from Jewish families that fled Europe, were scientists who’d been active in the leftist student movement of the 1960s. As a child, Sheinbaum was dedicated to dancing ballet, a discipline that still shows up in her graceful posture and in the many social media videos of her doing folk dances with her constituents. She did research for her Ph.D. in energy engineering at UC Berkeley and shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for her work on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“She is, in short, part of the cosmopolitan intelligentsia typically demonized by populist movements. But as I was told again and again in Mexico, her rarefied background meant little in light of her close relationship with López Obrador, who she’d worked beside since he was mayor of Mexico City 25 years ago, and whose economic populism earned him the enduring devotion of many downtrodden citizens.
Okay, Goldberg “was told again and again” that her background didn’t matter. I guess Goldberg is referring to Sheinbaum’s Jewish and academic background, but what about her and her parents’ involvement in “the leftist student movement of the 1960s.” Does Goldberg equate this with the anti-war movement in the U.S.? Mexico was not involved in the Vietnam War. Its student movements were about the right to protest and the right to have a meaningful vote. In Chicago in 1968, the police beat up demonstrators; in Mexico City in 1968, the police massacred hundreds. That is a difference, I would suggest.
Goldberg weaved the word “downtrodden” into her piece when describing the Mexican people. Well, anyone who visits Mexico, and I mean Mexico outside of a few nice neighborhoods in Mexico City and other large cities, sees a people with a fantastic vitality and a country that is simply full of life.
Then Goldberg starts in with the standard “some [fill-in the blank]” quotes, and she weaves in a few quotes from the usual suspects, including Carlos Heredia, whom she describes as a “left-leaning” economist, and “one-time advisor” to López Obrador. I’m not sure when that was, but Heredia was in the same party with AMLO in the late 1990s. More recently, he has been involved with the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, named after the American president who ordered an invasion of Vera Cruz in 1914 when he had some spare time between screenings of Birth of a Nation. Heredia is also involved with, and you can’t make this up, The Trilateral Commission.
Goldberg acknowledges obliquely and ruefully that some of us north of the border who are in some fashion “leftists” are inspired by MORENA and Claudia Sheinbaum.
“Not surprisingly, some leftists in the United States have latched on to Sheinbaum as a rare symbol of progressive success. Her ascendance seems like evidence that the road to victory lies in running against entrenched economic elites and delivering concrete material benefits to people who are struggling. In other words, it’s a data point supporting the politics of people like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“When I spoke to Representative Ro Khanna of California in January, he described Sheinbaum’s victory as ‘an example of working-class politics working.’ At a forum for left-leaning New York City mayoral candidates last month, the democratic socialist and social media phenomenon Zohran Mamdani drew cheers when he promised to take ‘a page from neighbors like Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico who has shown what can be won when you’re willing to fight.’”
Then Goldberg delves into the standard U.S. neoliberal line on Mexico, namely, that the country is basically hopeless.
“It is, in Mexico’s case, a fragile hope; the country has a weak economy and is besieged by cartel violence. Trump has been a boon to Sheinbaum’s popularity, but his policies could still wreak havoc, even if Mexico has so far been spared the worst of his tariffs.”
Then Goldberg indulges in some liberal self-pity, resorts to the age-old logical fallacy of reasoning from prejudicial language, and then deploys the hoary phrase “left-wing populism,” from the lips of another of the usual suspects, Carlos Bravo Regidor, who made an appearance in The Week that Was a scant two weeks ago.
“Many Mexican liberals find foreign romanticization of Sheinbaum exasperating, a projection that says more about American despair than Mexican reality. She is, after all, López Obrador’s protégé, and they see him as an analogue to Trump, not an antidote.
“’Left-wing populism is not a democratic alternative to right-wing populism,’ said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst in Mexico City. ‘It’s still authoritarian, but it’s a more palatable authoritarianism.’”
More palatable authoritarianism? I cannot believe that phrase made it into print. What is “palatable” about authoritarianism? Oh wait a sec, I remember. Liberal authoritarianism. Now that’s palatable.
The rest of the article reminds me of the scene in Amadeus where Mozart says to Salieri, “The rest is just the same, isn’t it?”
In this column, yes, the rest is just the same.
Is Claudia Sheinbaum the Anti-Trump?
6. Major Outrages that Now Seem Small
On Tuesday, DOGE took over a building with a value of $500M just by barging in and taking it.
“On Tuesday, US district judge Beryl Howell effectively allowed the transfer of the headquarters building of the United States Institute of Peace to the General Services Administration.
“In fact, the building—and all of the property inside it—had already been transferred on Saturday, according to Howell’s ruling. ‘The deal is no longer merely ‘proposed’ but done,’ Howell wrote, ‘rendering plaintiffs’ requested relief moot as to that property.’”
Federal Judge Allows DOGE to Take Over $500 Million Office Building for Free
Gmail is generally not recommended for secure emails. However, that didn’t stop Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, fresh off using Signal to coordinate bombing in Yemen.
“Senior members of the Trump administration’s National Security Council — including its top national security adviser, Michael Waltz — used Gmail to conduct government business, The Washington Post reported, citing documents and three unnamed government officials.”
Trump’s national security adviser reportedly used his personal Gmail account to do government work
Laura Loomer is now a personnel advisor to Trump.
“Several members of President Trump's embattled National Security Council have been fired, a U.S. official and a second source familiar told Axios on Thursday.
“Why it matters: The firings come a day after conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer visited the Oval Office and pressed Trump to fire specific NSC staffers. Axios has not confirmed whether the firings were directly linked to that incident, but the source familiar sai’d they were ‘being labeled as an anti-neocon move."
Scoop: Multiple firings on Trump's National Security Council after Loomer visit
This is another reason to buy free-range chicken fed on organic, non-GMO feed. At least if you want to eat the chicken and not fund MAGA.
I won’t go into the horrors of these particular factory farms. The pic below should suffice.
© Joseph Allman
“While the direction of Cameron’s dollars isn’t unusual in the meat industry, the scale of giving dwarfs that of his competitors. Since 1990, the largest chicken companies have given — through their employees — anything from tens of thousands to a few million dollars each, with similar spending in direct lobbying. (Mountaire, it should be noted, doesn’t spend on lobbying at all.) The only company that comes close is Tyson Foods, which has spent $35 million on lobbying since 1998 and whose employees have given approximately $7.7 million to political candidates and organizations since 1990.”
Scopes reports on another deportation to El Salvador and the country’s very profitable private prison network.
“A confidential police source claimed he was an MS-13 gang member — but other cited "evidence" consisted of wearing a hoodie and Chicago Bulls hat.”
7. At Last! A Good Analysis of Mexico’s Fourth Transformation
It’s hard to get accurate news about Mexico, but the below-linked article is a fine start, and a good primer on what’s going on in Mexico.
8. Canadians Wary and Weary of Visiting the U.S.
For some reason, a lot of Canadians don’t want to visit the U.S.A.
“Driving the news: Advance bookings for Canada-U.S. flights in April-September are down over 70% compared to this time last year, per aviation data firm OAG.”
Canadians' demand for U.S. travel is cratering
It seems that Canadians not only do not want to be the 51st state, but that they don’t even want to visit the 50 states. At least lately.
“Canadians are hurrying to sell their U.S. homes as tensions between the two neighbors and historic allies mount, exacerbated by President Donald Trump’s push to impose tariffs on the country, Axios reports. Canadian property owners in states like Florida—which are popular with ‘snowbirds’ escaping harsh winters—are ‘worried,’ said broker Alexandra DuPont. She said she’s working with some 35 Canadian sellers, but no buyers. ‘They feel like they have to take a break from the U.S. for now and see where it goes,’ DuPont said.”
Canadians Rush to Sell U.S. Homes as Trump Tensions Mount
9. Protests Across the U.S.A.
On Saturday, April 5, there were protests against the Trump Administration in over 1,200 locations across the U.S.A.
Angry protesters from New York to Alaska assail Trump and Musk in ‘Hands Off!’ rallies