Sellouts and Selloffs

Plus: A deportation fight, pussy hats in, antagonizing Brown University, and more…

The new tariffs go into effect on Wednesday, and Trump signaled over the weekend that he will not back down. “We’re going to become a wealthy nation again—wealthy like never before,” he said Sunday. “We have all the advantages. Forget markets for a second—we have all the advantages.” You hear that, guys? Forget markets.

Sellouts: We’re now seeing a chorus of tech/VC Trump supporters who claim that what happens in the stock market is irrelevant to the “long term health of the economy.” (“The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” writes one Sequoia VC, intent on doubling down.)

“Which [stocks] suffered the biggest losses?” smartly counters Nate Silver at his Substack. It’s “largely consumer staples from the lower-middlebrow on up, or cyclical purchases—like autos and air travel—that Americans consume more of when they think good times are ahead and pull back from when they’re in the brace position preparing for a recession.” These are familiar patterns from our pandemic-era economic turmoil: In times of uncertainty, Americans are likely to delay travel, car replacement, and tech product replacement, to cook more at home and eat out less. Such patterns seem to suggest recession fears—they’re things people do when we know we must batten down the hatches to get through the rough waters ahead.

It’s possible, to steelman the tariff cheerleaders, that they believe Trump’s aggressive moves will result in negotiating down the tariffs that other countries impose on us—that our tariffs are merely a temporary measure to be done away with, that it’s actually a game of 4D chess to create a much more free-tradin’ world. Or that it’s a game of 4D chess to ensure supply-chain sturdiness when China invades Taiwan and we go to war with them. But this is supposed to be a targeted foreign policy tool, why on Earth are we hitting Sri Lankan coffee with a 44 percent tariff? Or sugar from Fiji with 32 percent? Right now it looks like a few influential folks in Silicon Valley—successful capitalists who know a thing or two about economics—have made a bad bet in Trump, and are either coping in public or attempting to figure out how to influence him.

Expect a showdown: Is it time for Congress to reassert its power? The Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley seems to thinks so. Sen. Grassley and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D–Wash.) introduced a bill Thursday to sharply curtail the executive’s power to impose tariffs, requiring a 48-hour notification of Congress prior to any presidential imposition and for Congress to “explicitly approve any new tariffs within 60 days,” per Politico. Congress would also be granted the ability to swat down the tariffs at any times. “Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon said he plans to introduce a companion bill to the bipartisan Senate legislation aimed at reclaiming Congress’ authority over tariffs, becoming the first House Republican to openly challenge the powers President Donald Trump is using to launch a massive global trade war,” Politico reports. 

Meanwhile, Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul of Kentucky—all Republicans—are allying with Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Va.) and other Democrats to “reject the national emergency Trump declared earlier this year to justify his plan to slap 25 percent tariffs on Canadian imports,” reports Politico. All of this comes together to paint a picture of congressfolk growing cojones. Might the threaten of economic ruin be all it takes to get Congress to reassert its power?

Follow-up: “A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to bring a Maryland man back to the U.S. by midnight Monday after concluding that he was unlawfully deported to his home country of El Salvador despite an immigration court order that he not be sent there,” reports Politico. “U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis issued the order Friday requiring the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia following an extraordinary hearing during which the government flatly admitted that he’d been deported in violation of federal law.”

The battle lines have been drawn and a clash looks imminent: The White House press secretary called Abrego Garcia part of the “brutal and vicious” MS-13 gang, saying he “will not be returning to our country.”

“I haven’t been given any evidence,” said Xinis. “In a court of law, when someone is accused of membership in such a violent and predatory organization, it comes in the form of an indictment, a complaint, a criminal proceeding that has robust process so we can assess the facts.”

More on Abrego Garcia’s story here. The man, who entered the country in 2012 and was apprehended in 2019, successfully petitioned the government for withholding of removal, which protects him from deportation back to El Salvador because he’s likely to be persecuted there. (He says his family owned a successful pupusa business back at home and had been extorted by the cartels.) He had no criminal record in the United States—he broke our laws by waiting nearly seven years to file his asylum paperwork, versus adhering to the one-year filing deadline, and was in sort of legal limbo for a while before receiving his legal protection from deportation—and is married to a U.S. citizen, with an American child and a job as a sheetmetal apprentice. Yet the Trump administration rounded him up and threw him in CECOT, El Salvador’s most notorious prison, meant for gang members.

QUICK HITS

• “It costs $93,064 to attend Brown University,” writes Alex Shieh for Pirate Wires. “The annual budget deficit is $46 million. I wanted to know where the hell all the money was going.” So Shieh built a model to try to figure it out: “Around 2 a.m. on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, I launched a public database mapping all 3,805 non-faculty employees of Brown University and sent each one a simple email: What do you do all day?” He made a database of all administrators using “retrieval-augmented generation and a custom GPT-4o pipeline” to rank them according to their “operational importance.” He asked his model to flag “DEI jobs, redundant jobs, and bullshit jobs.” One discovery: The school has roughly one administrator for every two undergraduates.
• They got us:

• In case you missed it last week, our Just Asking Questions episode with Batya Ungar-Sargon gets deep into both tariffs and deportation:

• RIP Larry Yurdin:

Associate Editor, Reason

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