Preview: • Fox-Dominion trial delay 'is not unusual,' judge says • Fox News' defamation battle isn't stopping Trump's election lies

Preview: The judge just announced in court that a settlement has been reached in the historic defamation case between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems.

Preview: A settlement has been reached in Dominion Voting Systems' defamation case against Fox News, the judge for the case announced. The network will pay more than $787 million to Dominion, a lawyer for the company said.

Preview: • DeSantis goes to Washington, a place he once despised, looking for support to take on Trump • Opinion: For the GOP to win, it must ditch Trump • Chris Christie mulling 2024 White House bid • Analysis: The fire next time has begun burning in Tennessee

Preview: • 'A major part of Ralph died': Aunt of teen shot after ringing wrong doorbell speaks • 20-year-old woman shot after friend turned into the wrong driveway in upstate New York, officials say

Preview: Newly released body camera footage shows firefighters and sheriff's deputies rushing to help actor Jeremy Renner after a near-fatal snowplow accident in January. The "Avengers" actor broke more than 30 bones and suffered other severe injuries. CNN's Chloe Melas has more.

Preview: It's sourdough bread and handstands for Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Preview: A tiny intruder infiltrated White House grounds Tuesday, prompting a swift response from the US Secret Service.

Preview: Inside President Trump’s whirlwind decision to upend global trade  The Washington Post Reciprocal Tariff Calculations  United States Trade Representative (.gov) Why Small Changes Meant Big Differences in Tariff Rates, From Bermuda to Switzerland  The New York Times Trump says he’s punishing foreign countries. He’s mostly punishing Americans  CNN President Trump’s Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It’s Also Based on an Error.  American Enterprise Institute

Preview: Senate Wades Into All-Night Vote-a-Thon as Republicans Seek to Pass Budget Plan  The New York Times Senate up late voting on GOP tax breaks and spending cuts plan that's central to Trump agenda  AP News Senate begins ‘vote-a-rama’ as GOP takes first step to advance Trump agenda  CNN Democrats peel away some Republicans on Trump budget bill amendment votes  The Hill Opinion | The GOP has an Orwellian solution to pay for Trump’s tax cuts  The Washington Post

Preview: Maryland man illegally deported to El Salvador must be returned to US, judge rules  Politico Judge orders US government to return man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador by end of Monday  CNN Trump Admin Dismisses Judge’s Order to Bring Back Man Accidentally Sent to El Salvador  Rolling Stone Outrage grows over Maryland man’s mistaken deportation to El Salvador prison  AP News My comment is that according to the court document you apparently didn’t read he was a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here. My further comment is that it’s gross to get fired up about gang members getting deported while ignoring citiz  x.com

Preview: 'Bad faith': Judges rip Trump administration for litigation tactics  NBC News Judge says US government may have 'acted in bad faith' as he weighs contempt over deportation order  AP News Judge considering whether to hold Trump officials in contempt for violating court orders on deportation flights  CNN ‘Fair Likelihood’ Trump Administration Violated Court Order, Judge Says  The New York Times The Trump DOJ Is Barreling Toward Contempt of Court. There’s Still One Way Out.  Slate

Preview: Trump’s aggressive push to roll back globalisation  Financial Times Trump may have just ended globalization as we know it  The Washington Post The real reason Trump is destroying the economy  Vox The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s tariff ultimatum: tribute for access to America’s empire | Editorial  The Guardian Opinion | Tariffs Destroy What Makes America Great  The New York Times

Preview: ‘Justice For Karmelo’ GoFundMe claims Austin Metcalf suspect is a ‘well mannered man’  Hindustan Times Texas track meet stabbing suspect told responding officer he 'did it': docs  Fox News ​​Grief mounts at Frisco’s Memorial High after third student killing this school year  Dallas News 'Touch me and see what happens' | New details emerge surrounding Frisco track meet stabbing in arrest affidavit  WFAA Attorney of track meet murder suspect to seek lower bond; victim's family prepares burial services  NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth

Preview: Dow down 2,200 points as $6.4 trillion is wiped out in two-day bloodbath as China declares trade war over Trump tariffs  New York Post Donald Trump's tariffs have shaken the markets - how worried should we be?  BBC China says 'market has spoken' after US tariffs spark selloff  Reuters China slaps a 34% tax on all US imports in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs  AP News How Trump’s latest tariffs could affect your personal spending  PBS

Preview: Appeals Court Orders Thousands of Voters to Verify Information in Contested N.C. Election  The New York Times North Carolina judges back Republican colleague in bid to toss votes and overturn election  The Guardian NC Court of Appeals gives over 60,000 challenged voters 15 days to prove eligibility  Raleigh News & Observer New court decision in a disputed North Carolina race means 65,000 votes are a step closer to be being thrown out  NBC News NC Court of Appeals rules in favor of Griffin in case to dismiss over 65,000 votes  CBS17.com

Preview: Supreme Court allows Trump officials to freeze teacher training grants over DEI  The Washington Post 5-4 Supreme Court allows Trump to freeze roughly $65 million in teacher training grants  CNN Supreme Court Lets Trump Suspend Grants to Teachers  The New York Times Supreme Court sides with administration over Education Department grants  NPR John Roberts Sides With Supreme Court Liberals Against Donald Trump  Newsweek

Preview: Tufts graduate student’s detention case to be transferred to Vermont  VTDigger Judge Orders Tufts Student’s Detention Case Moved to Vermont  The New York Times Detained Turkish Tufts student's lawyers demand her case remain in Mass.  NBC Boston Attorneys for Rümeysa Öztürk and government argue before district judge  WGBH Tufts University declares support for student detained by ICE, seeks immediate release  CBS News

Preview: Two words came back to haunt Donald Trump's onetime adviser.

Preview: The president's critics urged reporters to ignore the demand and keep bringing it up.

Preview: The Texas senator made a rare questioning of the president.

Preview: The former president said he's "deeply concerned" about these Trump administration moves in remarks at an Upstate New York college.

Preview: The "Late Show" host launched an urgent appeal to "the cabal" after Trump's tariffs caused the stock market to crash.

Preview: The president offered a first look at a card with his face on it that looks to grant wealthy buyers with a pathway to American citizenship.

Preview: Columnist Eugene Robinson wrote that the billionaire's plans "spurred" his departure after over four decades at the newspaper.

Preview: "They cratered the damn stock market and gave us nothing," the longtime CNBC host said.

Preview: The former vice president spoke at the Leading Women Defined Summit in California on Thursday.

Preview: David Kessler warned time is running out before the Trump administration's cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services become "beyond fixable."

Preview: Maine Gov. Janet Mills apparently hurt Donald Trump's feelings in February. The result has been a multifaceted offensive against the Democrat's home state.

Preview: The New York Times reported Thursday that the European Union may soon levy penalties against Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, under an E.U. law aimed at curbing disinformation, hate speech and other harmful content.

Preview: We didn’t get March Madness as much as we got March predictability. In the men’s and women’s tournaments, there have been few surprises or upsets.

Preview: “You can’t really watch the stock market,” Donald Trump said last month. As retirement accounts take a severe hit, it's a little late for that.

Preview: After President Donald Trump “liberated” Americans from a strong economy Wednesday, the Senate held an extraordinary vote.

Preview: Florida police recently arrested a transgender woman for using the women’s restroom in the state Capitol in Tallahassee, in what is believed to be the first such arrest in a state with an anti-trans bathroom ban.

Preview: The Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration Friday in litigation over education-related grants, splitting 5-4 with Republican appointees in the majority.

Preview: President Trump is using war powers to stifle freedom of speech and due process for immigrants. It's only logical to fear that U.S. citizens could be next.

Preview: It doesn’t look great for Donald Trump to take a golf trip after setting much of the economy — and your retirement account — on fire, but he’s doing it anyway.

Preview: Some of those fired by the Department of Health and Human Services have been rehired. Amid layoffs throughout the Trump administration, this keeps happening.

Preview: Stocks hadn’t fallen this far this fast since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. A 9.1 percent drop in the S&P 500 is the steepest weekly decline since March 2020.

Preview: After China announced new retaliatory measures against the United States, President Trump responded that Beijing “PLAYED IT WRONG.”

Preview: A census of Costco carts on Thursday revealed little fear. Tariffs could go as fast as they’re coming, and our columnist is not stuffing his pantry.

Preview: Administration officials reversed a decision made during the Biden presidency that would have given millions of people access to weight-loss drugs paid for Medicare and Medicaid.

Preview: President Trump has always solicited information from dubious sources. But now, in his second term, he has fewer people around him who try to keep those voices away.

Preview: The justices allowed the Trump administration to temporarily suspend $65 million in teacher-training grants, which helped place teachers in poor and rural areas.

Preview: The firms signed a legal brief supporting Perkins Coie, calling the president’s actions a threat “to the rule of law.” The largest firms declined to sign.

Preview: The settlement, which still needs formal approval, covers more than 6,800 claims of abuse, some of which date back to 1959.

Preview: New York’s stance differed from the muted and deferential responses from other major institutions to the administration’s threats.

Preview: As the Trump administration threatens universities, the former president suggested schools shouldn’t be intimidated. But he also offered a critique of campus culture, saying it had too often shut out opposing voices.

Preview: Minecraft has been turned into a film starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa.

Preview: The federal courts can’t let Republicans get away with this.

Preview: The Supreme Court’s next big abortion decision might barely mention the word abortion.

Preview: I can’t take it anymore!

Preview: For a show about a woman who has Stage 4 cancer, FX’s Dying for Sex is fantastically horny.

Preview: Like watching NCAA basketball? What if you couldn’t, because schools went on strike?

Preview: They’re trying to use a clever accounting trick to pretend that their new tax legislation is costless.

Preview: Test your knowledge of this week’s big stories.

Preview: Take a quick break with our daily 5x5 grid.

Preview: Ready for some wordplay? Sharpen your skills with Slate’s puzzle for April 4, 2025.

Preview: It was a big week for the global economy — and for gamers. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump unveiled sweeping tariffs that have sent markets spiraling worldwide. On the same day, Nintendo also announced its much-anticipated handheld gaming console, the Switch 2.  It would be priced at $450, or $500 for a bundle including the latest Mario Kart game, the company said. Preorders on the Nintendo website would open in early May to only the most dedicated users of the first-generation Switch, with a June 5 release date.  By Friday, however, Nintendo had scrapped those plans.  The company said in a statement that it needed to “assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions,” leaving open the possibility of a price hike and delaying the preorder date.  More than 46 million Switch consoles have been sold in the US as of November 30, 2024, and the backlash has been swift. Gamers were already complaining about how expensive the Switch 2 was before the possibility of a price hike. By Friday, some suggested in a Discord chat for Switch users that they might go across the border to Canada to avoid even higher US prices for the next-generation system.  Ultimately, the Switch 2 is a luxury item. It shouldn’t be anyone’s first priority, given that Trump’s tariffs are expected to increase prices even for basic necessities and upend global supply chains broadly.  However, it’s an example of how Trump’s tariffs are wreaking havoc in an economy where Americans are accustomed to relatively low prices for imported goods, especially consumer electronics.  “It’s a pricing issue that is a direct response to the tariffs,” said Shihoko Goto, a senior fellow at the Mansfield Foundation specializing in trade and economic interests across the Indo-Pacific. “This is just one example of one product from one company being hit by tariffs, and we’re going to see price increases all across the board.” Why Nintendo might increase its prices Nintendo, a Japanese company, took preemptive steps to avoid tariffs during the first Trump administration. In 2019, it started moving some of its Switch production from China to Vietnam as the US imposed tariffs on Chinese imports.  Now, the US is effectively punishing companies like Nintendo that took Trump’s incentives to leave China for friendlier partners like Vietnam, which is a large producer of consumer electronics, shoes, and clothes.   Vietnam was hit with 46 percent tariffs, one of the highest rates on the schedule that the White House unveiled Wednesday. That’s because Trump has sought to target Vietnam and other countries that have a high trade surplus with the US, believing that they’re “cheating” America.  However, he ignores the reason why Vietnam has a trade surplus with the US: It is relatively poor and cannot afford to buy many American-made goods. Trade analysts have also argued that Vietnam’s exports benefit both the country itself and its trading partners. At a lower cost, it has produced high-demand goods that were traditionally made in China.  “One of the reasons why we can have fairly affordable shoes and textiles is because they are imported from places in South and Southeast Asia,” Goto said. In slapping tariffs on goods from Vietnam and other manufacturing hubs, the cost of producing and exporting goods to the American market will go up. Companies like Nintendo are expected to pass that on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. As a result, consumers may ultimately decide they can no longer afford optional goods like the Switch 2. “There’s going to be a lot of belt tightening on optional consumer goods, especially on consumer electronics,” Goto said. Why the onshoring promised probably won’t happen Trump’s plan is that, in the long run, companies will want access to the American market and move their production to the US, reviving domestic manufacturing. However, that doesn’t seem likely to occur in many industries, including consumer electronics.  Daniel Ahmad, a gaming industry analyst, posted on X that Nintendo would “need to spend billions to open a factory in the US.” Getting a factory up and running would likely take four to five years, by which time there could be another US president who rolls back the tariffs. But if they remain in place, source components for the Switch, such as GPUs, are made outside the US and are subject to tariffs, leading to increased costs. Labor costs would also be as much as 15 times higher in the US than in Vietnam.  Add all that up, and the cost of the Switch becomes much higher than $450. Americans aren’t likely to accept those kinds of price increases, especially given that they were already struggling to keep up with higher prices post-pandemic. “We want high-quality, low-cost goods, and it’s going to be difficult to make that in the United States,” Goto said.

Preview: Laura Loomer shows up in support of President Donald Trump in 2023 when he was scheduled to appear in federal court for his arraignment on charges including possession of national security documents after leaving office, obstruction, and making false statements.  | Stephanie Keith/Getty Images This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump’s tariffs, and the economic havoc they’re wreaking, are still dominating the headlines. But today I want to focus on a story I worry is going under the radar: the president outsourcing national security staffing decisions to a far-right conspiracy theorist. What’s the latest? Trump fired Gen. Timothy Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, on Thursday. Haugh and several other high-ranking national security officials were booted after Trump met with Laura Loomer, who urged him to purge “disloyal” figures from his national security team. Loomer took credit for the firings, while Trump denied she was involved. Who is Laura Loomer? She’s a far-right activist and social media personality known for her embrace of conspiracy theories, her self-described Islamophobia, and her loyalty to Trump. She has claimed 9/11 was an inside job, that Joe Biden was behind the July attempt to assassinate Trump, and that multiple school shootings were staged. Who is Haugh? He’s a four-star general whom Joe Biden nominated to lead NSA. The Senate confirmed him in 2023 with overwhelming bipartisan support. Before that, he co-led a 2018 effort to prevent Russian interference in the midterms. Why does it matter who directs the NSA? The agency has extraordinary power to wiretap Americans and engage in cyber espionage, and its leader has great influence over whether that power is abused. Is this legal? Yes. The NSA director serves at the pleasure of the president. So what’s the big picture? Trump says Loomer was not involved in the firings, but that’s not credible, given their timing and his track record with the truth. So it appears that a conspiracy theorist was given significant influence over leadership of agencies that have the power to infringe on civil liberties. And with that, it’s time to log off… I hate being bored. I’m not great at sitting still, and I get anxious when I have to do so. At even a hint of boredom, I reflexively reach for my phone, which too often ends in time wasted on games or passive scrolling, and that somehow only makes me more bored. So I was really grateful for this article about how boredom isn’t a punishment — it’s a tool. Boredom, my colleague Allie Volpe writes, can help you know “when you’ve gone off track from what you value and what you care about and what you can give to the world.” Take good care this weekend, and I’ll see you back here on Monday.

Preview: President Donald Trump gestures while speaking during an executive order signing event in the Oval Office of the White House on March 31, 2025, in Washington, DC. Donald Trump’s tariffs were at once predictable and shocking. Predictable, in the sense that Trump had been crystal-clear about wanting across-the-board tariffs during the campaign. Shocking, because they have been implemented in a manner that appears extreme and incompetent even by previous Trump standards. As a result, the world is historically unsettled: One metric of global economic uncertainty shows higher levels of concern than at any point in the 21st century, worse than the 2008 financial crisis and even the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. It turns out that this combination, both predictable and shocking, has become a bit of a theme for the Trump team lately. Consider two other news stories, both of which would be headline-grabbing scandals if it weren’t for the tariffs. First, Trump has empowered Laura Loomer, a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and self-described “proud Islamophobe,” to purge top government officials. The head of the National Security Agency, his top deputy, and six staffers on the National Security Council have all been fired this week — seemingly at Loomer’s behest. Second, the Department of Health and Human Services started layoffs on Tuesday that are expected to hit about 10,000 workers. By the end of it, about a quarter of the department’s staff will have been cut amid a worrying measles outbreak and the real risk of a bird flu pandemic. Trump telegraphed these moves during the campaign — promising to root out the “the deep state” and vowing to let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild” at HHS. But they are shocking, nonetheless. Putting Laura Loomer, of all people, in charge of sensitive national security decisions is nothing short of astonishing. And the sheer scope of the HHS cuts, given the current public health challenges, led my colleague Dylan Scott to describe the situation as an “unfolding catastrophe.” This, it seems, is the week where we saw the Trump administration’s true and unvarnished face. It’s not that what happened this week was necessarily worse than what came before it, though the tariffs might well prove to be. Rather, it’s that the week revealed the true scope and nature of our Trump problem — with even some of his supporters starting to openly worry that things have gone badly wrong. Put differently, the last week has shown, in no uncertain terms, that Trump is acting like a mad king.  What we just learned Trump had done shocking and surprising things pretty much since he entered office on January 20. His blatantly political assault on universities, his decision to send innocent Venezuelans to a Salvadoran gulag, his bizarre crusade to make Canada “the 51st state,” his unlawful efforts to shut down entire federal agencies like USAID — all of this made clear that we were in for an unhinged approach to governance. But even after all that, some people thought there still might be constraints.  Previous rounds of tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada did not lead Wall Street to panic — partly because they were moderated or walked back after implementation. Many conservatives alarmed by Trump’s policies reassured themselves that his national security team, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz, hailed from the GOP’s more traditional internationalist wing. Now, there is panic even in these quarters. Wall Street is horrified; the S&P 500 lost more value this week in absolute terms than it did during the entire 2008 financial crisis. Republican stalwarts like Ben Shapiro and Erick Erickson are warning of dire economic and political consequences if Trump stays the course on tariffs. And the notion that the GOP national security “professionals” might check any of this is no longer credible: This week, Waltz was made to sit in an Oval Office meeting during which Loomer listed off staff members of his to be fired. Even Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said that the tariffs could well be “terrible for America.” The point is not merely to mock these people or say, “I told you so.” Rather, it’s to illustrate that even those who wore blinders about Trump are starting to see what’s happening.  And what’s happening is this: government by mad king.  The phrase “mad king” has been tossed around a lot in the past few weeks, but I think it’s worth offering a more precise definition. A mad king, in my sense, is not merely a leader who makes bad decisions. Nor is it a literal king who assumed office through heredity rather than, say, free and fair elections. Instead, it’s one who makes them based on reasons that are out of touch with reality, making sense only in their own mind. And it’s one who is able to do so with little-to-no constraint — thanks, in our case, to the dangerous concentration of power in the executive branch. The events of this week show conclusively that the president fits the definition. Trump decided to detonate the global economy because of his decades-old belief, in defiance of a consensus of economists, that tariffs are the key to American prosperity. No one, not even his previously demonstrated concern for the stock market, could stop him from acting on it. A mad king economic policy. Trump has given partial control over the national security bureaucracy of the world’s greatest military power to a demonstrably unstable conspiracy theorist who once chained herself outside of Twitter’s headquarters. The people who were supposed to keep Trump in bounds were proven powerless, and (in Waltz’s case) outright humiliated. A mad king national security policy. Trump has outsourced public health decisions to an unqualified nepo baby who has embraced nearly every unfounded health theory out there. He then allowed that man to decimate the ranks of our public health bureaucracy in the midst of at least two serious public health crises. The traditionally credentialed individuals in Trump’s health team, like NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, have proven no constraint at all. A mad king public health policy. When I say this is “the week that Trump became unglued,” I thus do not mean that this is the first week where we could see that things are bad — or even that we had a mad king problem. Rather, I mean that this is the week where the full scope of the mad king problem so undeniable that even some of Trump’s allies on the right began to see it. The only question now is how the country — and particularly key members of the Trump coalition — will react.

Preview: President Donald Trump speaks to reporters and signs an executive order about enforcement in the concert and entertainment industry on March 31, 2025. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images On Thursday, one day after President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs, what appears to be the first lawsuit challenging those tariffs was filed in a federal court in Florida. That alone isn’t particularly surprising. The tariffs are expected to drive up the costs of goods in the United States, and have already sent the stock market into a nose dive. That means that a lot of aggrieved potential plaintiffs have standing to challenge the tariffs in court. What is surprising is that the plaintiff in this particular case, known as Emily Ley Paper v. Trump, is represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a right-wing legal shop that previously backed Trump’s efforts to expand executive power. NCLA is part of what appears to be a growing effort among prominent right-leaning intellectuals and commentators to challenge Trump’s tariffs.  At the Volokh Conspiracy, an influential right-libertarian legal blog, George Mason law professor Ilya Somin is actively recruiting plaintiffs to file a similar lawsuit challenging the tariffs (Somin has long been a principled libertarian critic of Trump). Ben Shapiro, the one-time Breitbart writer who is also a lawyer, criticized Trump’s tariffs as a “massive tax increase on American consumers,” and has gently advocated for Trump to change course. Richard Hanania, a writer best known for his baroque criticisms of “wokeness,” responded to a pro-Trump member of Congress’ praise of the tariffs with “we’re ruled by morons.” All of this matters because conservative-minded judges, including the six Republicans who dominate the Supreme Court, are often highly responsive to public statements from conservative legal and media elites. During President Barack Obama’s first term, for example, liberal lawyers and legal scholars were often flabbergasted by how quickly conservative judges rallied behind a weak legal case against the Affordable Care Act — eventually persuading four Republican justices to vote to repeal the law altogether. Their mistake — one I made as well — was assuming that judges would be persuaded by the kind of careful, precedent-focused legal reasoning that earns you top grades in law school, rather than by what they were hearing from legal and political elites that they viewed as ideological allies. As Yale law professor Jack Balkin wrote about that error, a legal argument can “move from off the wall to on the wall because people and institutions are willing to put their reputations on the line and state that an argument formerly thought beyond the pale is not crazy at all.” In the end, many judges cared more about what they heard on Fox News or at an event hosted by the Federalist Society, than they did about what the Supreme Court said in Gonzales v. Raich (2005). If you take the Court’s recent precedents seriously, there is a very strong legal argument against the tariffs At least on the surface, anyone who wants to challenge Trump’s tariffs faces a far more favorable legal landscape than Obamacare opponents faced in 2010. During the Obama and Biden administrations, Republican justices fabricated novel new legal doctrines, such as the so-called major questions doctrine, in order to strike down Democratic policies they deemed too ambitious. They also threatened to revive old, once-discredited ideas like the “nondelegation doctrine,” which was used to frustrate President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Both of these doctrines are grounded in the idea that the judiciary has broad power to strike down policies established by the executive branch of the federal government, even if the executive can point to an act of Congress that explicitly gives them the power to do what they want to do. The primary reason to be skeptical that the Supreme Court will actually apply one of these doctrines to strike down Trump’s tariffs is that the Republican justices’ rollout of their new approach to executive power has been so partisan that it is hard not to suspect that they are acting in bad faith.  The same six Republican justices who said that Democratic President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program was an egregious power grab, despite the fact that that program was authorized by a federal statute empowering the executive to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs,” also said that Republican President Donald Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. Similarly, the best legal argument against Trump’s tariffs is rooted in the Court’s major questions doctrine, which holds that judges should cast a skeptical eye on executive branch actions “of vast ‘economic and political significance’” According to the Budget Lab at Yale, the tariffs are expected to reduce the average American household’s real annual income by nearly $3,800. That seems like a matter of vast economic and political significance. But the short history of this major questions doctrine would give any serious legal scholar great pause. The idea that programs of “vast economic and political significance” are suspect was first articulated in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA (2014), in order to criticize a hypothetical Environmental Protection Agency regulation that was never enacted, that no one ever proposed, and that likely would have shut down all construction of hotels in the United States if it had ever actually existed. A year later, the Court used the major questions doctrine again to repudiate an imaginary health regulation that would have collapsed the individual health insurance markets in most states. Having used these strawmen to invent a completely new legal doctrine that appears nowhere in the Constitution or in any statute, the Court let this major questions doctrine lay dormant for Trump’s entire first term — only to revive it with a vengeance once a Democrat became president. To date, the doctrine has only been used to strike down actual, rather than theoretical, policies during the Biden administration. One of the most important questions looming over Trump’s second term is whether a Republican Supreme Court will apply the same rules it invented to thwart Democratic administrations to Trump and his subordinates. We do not know yet how the justices will answer this question. But, as Balkin writes, the answer is likely to be shaped by how elite conservatives in the legal profession, the media, and in elected office urge the justices to behave. One of the most important questions is whether elected Republicans join groups like NCLA or commentators like Shapiro in criticizing the tariffs. “What really accelerates the movement of constitutional arguments from off the wall to on the wall is neither intellectuals nor social movements,” Balkin wrote about the Obamacare fight. Instead, the most important factor is often what Republicans in political office want the courts to do.  “When establishment politicians — who, after all, have to stand for election and don’t want to be thought out-of-touch to their constituents — get behind a constitutional argument, they often help move it forward quickly,” Balkin wrote. For now, it remains to be seen whether members of Congress, governors, and other top elected Republicans will speak out against the tariffs once their constituents start to experience the pain of higher prices. But if you are hoping to see these tariffs go away, you should take the fact that the first spear targeting the tariffs was thrown by a prominent right-wing legal shop as a very positive sign.

Preview: A man walks past a screen showing stock movements at a securities office in Beijing on April 3, 2025. | Adek Berry/AFP via Getty Images President Donald Trump’s new tariff chart, which he unveiled Wednesday at the Rose Garden, had a mixture of surprising and predictable countries on the list. A high tariff on China? Not so surprising. But among the top 10 countries on his chart, eight are in Asia. Many close US allies like South Korea and Japan were stunned by the steep rate increases applied to their exports.  Since the announcement, markets in Asia have tumbled. Japan’s chief cabinet secretary has called the tariffs “extremely regrettable.” South Korea’s acting president called an emergency meeting to strategize a response.  As stunned as these US allies were at the steep increase in tariffs levied against them, they weren’t caught totally offguard. Just a few days before Trump’s tariff announcement, Japan, China, and South Korea’s trade ministers met in Seoul for the first time in five years to discuss coordinating a response.  Mike Bird, Wall Street editor at The Economist and a former correspondent based in Asia, talked with Today, Explained’s Noel King how US allies in Asia are responding to the tariffs and how China may be poised to lead new alliances on the continent. Click the link below to hear the whole conversation. The following is a transcript edited for length and clarity. We’ve got China, Taiwan, Japan, India, South Korea, Thailand. What are we hearing today from leaders of those countries? Anything notable? There’s a big range of reactions, and I think that reflects the difference in both relationships with the US and some different strategies going on. So the Chinese government reaction, to note that the tariffs are deeply unreasonable, that it’s a sort of attack on the rest of the world, is probably the least surprising. I think it’s more interesting to break down the countries that are much closer diplomatically to the US. So Taiwan called the Trump tariffs “deeply unreasonable” and “highly regrettable.” South Korea said that they were studying what was happening. The Japanese trade minister called the move “extremely regrettable.“  But a lot of these countries are a little bit more circumspect and a little bit quieter, precisely because they have these very tight security relationships with the US and they’re very, very keen not to upset DC. So when Trump held up his chart, it showed that Vietnam, for example, levies a 90 percent tariff on goods coming from the US. South Korea, 50 percent tariff. Donald Trump is saying these countries put tariffs on American goods and I’m going to fix it. Is he right? And if so, why was this going on? So to be clear, we should start by saying there are trade restrictions that other countries put on the US. In some cases, they’re steeper than the ones going in the other direction. That is a reasonable thing for US policymakers to be upset about.  But what became very clear in the immediate aftermath of the announcement is that the figures being used weren’t drawn from any meaningful measure of, for example, the rates that Vietnam tariffs US goods. There was no relationship with that data. What seems to have happened is there’s been a reverse engineering of a figure via the trade deficits and surpluses that individual countries have with the US.  Basically, they’ve taken the trade surplus that Vietnam has with the US and they’ve divided it by the figure for Vietnamese exports to the US. It’s a sort of Excel spreadsheet job. And it bears almost no relationship to how these countries actually limit US trade. It’s a very strange measure to have used to decide which countries have been hit hardest.  Trump put big tariffs on Japan and South Korea. Do you think that this move forces them to rethink how they deal with the United States? I think it will change the attitude quite a bit. One thing that the US government has tried to do a lot in the past few years is get cooperation from the Japanese and Korean governments in particular on things like export controls of semiconductors to China. That’s going to be a lot more difficult to execute if you are putting really, really steep tariffs on them.  I was reading over the weekend that Japan, South Korea, and China met for the first time in about five years to talk about trade. Do we know what goes on in a meeting like that? Does a meeting like that make America nervous? This question of closer trilateral cooperation between China, Korea, and Japan has been going on for a long time, and it’s always been frustrated to some degree by the fact that these are three countries where usually, at any given time, someone’s upset with someone else. Whether that’s Japan and South Korea — they have a very fractious relationship — or whether it’s South Korea and China, whether it’s Japan and China, there’s usually someone that’s upset about something, and it’s limited the trilateral cooperation.  There’s always been discussion of a potential Japan, South Korea, China free trade area, and it’s never really come to fruition. Now, if you wanted to make it come to fruition, what you would want is an external threat that was common to all of those countries. Huh. I’m not sure there’ll be a trade agreement of that nature, but if I wanted to force one through, these are exactly the circumstances which I’d create to try and do that.  If China becomes a more trusted trade partner to American allies than America is right now, what? What are the long-term implications of this for China? One thing the Chinese government has really struggled with in the past, and for good reason, is that they don’t really have a lot of natural allies or friends, even in Asia. I think the US seriously damaging its own relationships in the region does make things easier on that front.  If you listen to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they will tell you, and they have done for decades, that the US is a country that bullies smaller countries — it talks a high and mighty game about these lofty ideals of freedom and democracy and human rights, but in reality it’s just looking out for itself. I think these tariffs make that argument a lot easier to make in large parts of Asia. It’s a huge opportunity for them. You couldn’t have drafted these conditions better if you were a Chinese diplomat.

Preview: President Donald Trump delivers remarks on reciprocal tariffs during an event in the Rose Garden entitled “Make America Wealthy Again” at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 2, 2025. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images President Donald Trump’s tariffs are already wreaking economic chaos in the US and abroad.  On Wednesday, he announced a minimum 10 percent tariff on almost all imports, with dozens of countries facing even higher rates.  The stock market plunged in response when trading opened on Thursday, with the S&P 500 down more than 4 percent by the afternoon.  Some countries, including China, have promised retaliatory measures. Other US trading partners, including Japan, are seeking to negotiate with the Trump administration. But if the tariffs stay in place, US consumers are expected to soon pay more for everything from cars to sneakers to groceries as a result. Industries from car manufacturing to pharmaceuticals have been scrambling to respond. A producer of the Chrysler Pacifica minivan and Dodge’s electric Charger Daytona has already temporarily closed one of its factories in Canada, just across the border from Detroit. Whirlpool also announced layoffs Thursday of more than 650 American workers in Iowa, citing economic conditions in the US. Amid the economic uncertainty created by the tariffs, what is clear is that a global trade war may be just beginning. Here are some of your key questions about the tariffs, answered. What does Trump actually hope to achieve by this?  Trump celebrated April 2, the day that the tariffs were implemented, as “Liberation Day.” That’s because he sees the tariffs as a “declaration of economic independence” and a means of reviving American manufacturing, as he said during a Rose Garden event on Wednesday. “Our country and its taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years, but this is not going to happen anymore,” he said. “We are finally putting America first.”  His hope is that, in making it more expensive to import foreign goods, companies will seek to invest in bringing their production to the US, therefore bringing prices down for American consumers in the long run. He also claims that the tariffs will stop other countries from “cheating” America with trade imbalances. Economists don’t think that the tariffs will achieve those goals. The Economist called the tariffs the “most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era,” based on an “utterly deluded” understanding of economics and history.  For one, the formula used to determine the “reciprocal” tariffs involves dividing a country’s trade surplus with the US by its total exports. That number was then divided in half to arrive at the tariff rate.  That’s not the more tailored approach that the administration had previously floated, which would have taken into account a complex array of factors. It also ignores the fact that many nations have a trade surplus with the US because they are relatively poor and cannot afford to buy American-made goods.  Do Americans support this move? Trump’s approval ratings have fallen to their lowest point since he assumed office amid the tariff furor. While Trump’s immigration policies remain relatively popular, buoying his overall approval ratings, that’s not the case when it comes to his economic policies.  Polls conducted over the last month indicate that between 37 percent and 45 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s performance on the economy. A majority of Americans said in a March 27 CBS News/YouGov poll that Trump is focusing too much on tariffs and not enough on reducing prices. A separate YouGov poll conducted shortly after Trump’s tariff announcement found that a majority of Americans disapproved of the tariffs, 40 percent strongly so. What products will be most affected? Perhaps a more apt question is what products won’t be affected, given that even many US manufacturers rely on imported goods and are expected to pass on increased costs to American consumers. Trump has announced a 25 percent tariff on all foreign-assembled cars and plans to introduce additional tariffs on certain car parts, including engines and transmissions.  Prices of consumer electronics are also expected to increase significantly, given that countries hit hard by the tariffs — China, Taiwan, and South Korea — are major producers of TVs, cellphones, and more.  Clothing and shoes will also likely become more expensive since China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh — all major exporters — now face steep tariffs.  What does this mean for the US and global economy? The White House had warned that Trump’s tariffs would inflict short-term pain — and that’s what America is getting, without any assurance that there will be a payoff in the long run.  The US dollar has declined in value against other benchmark currencies. Economists project that the tariffs will lead to a $3,789 decline in disposable income for the average US household, as well as a 0.87 percent decline in American economic growth in 2025. J.P. Morgan raised its odds of a recession from 30 percent to 40 percent between the beginning of the year and March 31 amid concerns about the impact of tariffs. The global economy is also reeling, with stock indices dropping worldwide on Thursday. Few countries will suffer as much as Cambodia and Vietnam, where many American companies, from Nike to Apple, have moved manufacturing. Notably, Trump did not hit Mexico or Canada with additional tariffs beyond those announced earlier this year.  Why were Russia and North Korea exempted? Russia and North Korea were also not on the list of countries facing additional tariffs, and exactly why is a bit of a mystery. The White House has reportedly argued that they are “already facing extremely high tariffs, and our previously imposed sanctions preclude any meaningful trade with these countries.” However, other countries facing significant US sanctions, including Venezuela, were hit with additional tariffs. Also, the US still trades significantly more with Russia than with other countries that were not spared, some of which are remote islands. After Russia’s 2021 invasion of Ukraine, the US imposed economic sanctions on Russia that caused trade between the two countries to fall from about $35 billion to $3.5 billion last year. Russia is currently in talks to lift those sanctions as part of an agreement to end the war in Ukraine.

Preview: US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taking the agency in a radical new direction. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sought to be confirmed as Donald Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), he had to overcome a long record of fringe anti-science beliefs. He had indulged in conspiracies about chem trails, questioned whether HIV was the actual cause of AIDS, and, most notably, spread the repeatedly debunked theory that childhood vaccinations could lead to autism. In private meetings with senators and public confirmation hearings, he downplayed that record and claimed he wasn’t anti-vaccine: “I am pro-safety,” Kennedy said in his opening statement at one hearing. “I believe vaccines have a critical role in health care.” He gave assurances to Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, an MD and one of the last Republican holdouts on his nomination, that he would not change federal vaccine guidance  But less than two months into his term, Kennedy is blocking the release of pro-vaccine data amid a widening measles outbreak even as he puts into motion long-term projects that seem set to further erode Americans’ wobbly trust in childhood vaccination. Coupled with the massive staff cuts at HHS, a weakened federal health department is being remade in Kennedy’s anti-vax, anti-science image — an overhaul that could have dangerous consequences for Americans’ health for years to come. On Tuesday, the Trump administration began to lay off 10,000 workers across HHS, which includes the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health. Combined with workers who had already departed or were laid off earlier, the department’s overall headcount is expected to shrink from 82,000 to 62,000 people.  Many rank-and-file staff were simply let go; some senior leaders were offered reassignment in different roles, sometimes in a different part of the country, according to the New York Times. Subagencies focused on substance abuse and environmental health that were previously allowed some independence are being brought under HHS’s direct supervision. Top deputies who might have clashed with Kennedy — such as the FDA’s senior vaccine official, Peter Marks, one of the architects of the highly successful Operation Warp Speed in Trump’s first term — are being forced out. HHS touches the lives of Americans from birth to death: It oversees Medicaid and Medicare, which cover one in three Americans, it sets the standards for medical care across the health system, including vaccine schedules; and it is the biggest funder of the kind of vital medical research in the country that leads to new medical treatments.  Trump promised during the 2024 campaign to let Kennedy “go wild”; now he and his subordinates have the means to execute his vision. Some of the effects are being seen immediately as a massive measles outbreak spreads. Other reverberations in public health and medical research may not be fully felt for years. Former federal officials say the overhaul represents a fundamental reimagining of what HHS should be, a withdrawal from an active government role in the safeguarding of America’s health. We could be living with the consequences of these changes for a long time. “This is not a so-called restructuring. These are reckless, thoughtless cuts that will only make American communities less healthy and less safe,” Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting CDC director, said in a statement. “They represent an abdication of the department’s essential responsibility to promote and protect health.” More than an abdication, Kennedy’s new regime is steering the department in a radically new direction — one that seems poised to send American health backward.  The immediate dangers of RFK Jr.’s health care overhaul Kennedy’s leadership is already making the biggest US measles outbreak since 2019 worse. The number of cases across five states is nearing 500, twice as many as the United States saw in all of 2024, and two people, including an unvaccinated child, have died. Some experts believe it may take up to a year for the disease’s spread to be brought under control. Epidemiologist Michael Mina wrote this week in the New York Times that the US could see tens of thousands of cases. More people would die, and many of the ones who survived could be more vulnerable to other viruses in the future after the measles virus wipes out many of their preexisting antibodies. The response to the current measles outbreak is a good measurement of just how much Kennedy has changed things. During Trump’s first term, the president himself urged people to get vaccinated to stop a measles outbreak. Now, Kennedy, as the nation’s top health official, is instead using his enormous platform to undermine the importance of the measles vaccine while the virus rapidly spreads. (Measles vaccination is the best way to protect yourself against the virus, and health officials even encourage unvaccinated people who have already been exposed to get a shot because it could reduce their symptoms.) Kennedy has extolled vitamin A and cod liver oil as treatment options, but doctors caution that, while vitamin A could benefit someone who is vitamin-deficient when they contract the measles, almost no one in the US has a vitamin A deficiency.. A Texas doctor hawking those remedies to patients skeptical of vaccines said he has been in direct contact with the HHS secretary during the outbreak. Kennedy isn’t just using the bully pulpit to pitch pseudoscience. His department is now actively suppressing information about the value of the measles vaccine during the outbreak, according to ProPublica. A CDC forecast that would have shown the risk of catching measles is higher in less vaccinated areas was shelved, after the agency originally planned to release it as encouragement for people to get the measles shot. The CDC justified its scrapping of the report by claiming the data “does not say anything that the public doesn’t already know.” Even as the emergency grows more serious, Kennedy is reducing his own infectious disease staff: One workgroup focused on vaccinating underserved communities was eliminated as part of the layoffs. HHS has also pulled back grants that support the state and local health workers who are frontline responders. According to Reuters, health officials in Lubbock County, Texas, near the epicenter of the crisis, had their funding halted for several grants that were being used to support work on the outbreak. At the same time, Kennedy is launching a systemic analysis of any supposed links between childhood vaccines and autism — a link that has already been refuted by previous scientific analyses. He has placed a long-discredited anti-vaccine researcher in charge of it. Americans’ trust in vaccines had been slipping before the pandemic, and then widespread conspiracies about the Covid shots helped make those views even more mainstream. A federal probe that seems designed to sow distrust could drive vaccination rates lower.  The national measles vaccination rate has already slipped just below the 95 percent target that experts say is necessary to maintain population-level immunity. The speed of that decline has been alarming: In the 2019–2020 school year, 20 states were above the 95 percent vaccination rate threshold, and just three had dropped below 90 percent. But by the 2023–2024 school year, only 11 states had more than 95 percent of schoolchildren vaccinated against the disease, and 14 states had fallen under 90 percent. In individual communities, rates have slipped even lower, which creates the right conditions for an outbreak to explode; measles, after all, is one of the most contagious diseases known to humanity. In the Texas school district most affected by the current measles outbreak, the vaccination rate is under 50 percent.  What this means is that measles outbreaks could again become a recurring public health nuisance, 25 years after the US declared the virus was no longer spreading within the country.  At the same time measles is spreading, a potential H5N1 bird flu pandemic is brewing: The virus has been found in nearly 170 million birds and 1,000 livestock herds; 70 humans have been infected. On that disease, too, Kennedy is signaling a more hands-off approach: He has suggested allowing the virus to spread unchecked through factory farms, and the department is threatening to end a recent contract to develop a universal pandemic flu vaccine. One of the groups laid off this week were scientists testing pet foods for any trace of the virus. The long-term implications of RFK’s MAHA agenda Other long-running health campaigns will be jeopardized by the combination of HHS cuts and Kennedy’s fringe beliefs. In a 2021 book, Kennedy favorably presented the discredited theory that drug use, not HIV, was responsible for the development of AIDS. Now, despite Trump’s previous pledge to eradicate HIV completely, Kennedy’s department is pulling back on one of the defining health crises of the modern era.  Staff at the CDC Division of HIV Prevention office was cut in half as part of the mass layoffs. They had made great strides thanks to a muscular government approach: New HIV infections declined by 12 percent since 2010, aided by public health campaigns and direct subsidization of HIV treatment. Deaths have steadily fallen as better disease management allowed doctors to turn HIV into a chronic condition patients could live with, rather than a death sentence. Now the programs and medical research grants on the HIV crisis that made that progress possible are being cut. One analysis projected there would be 143,000 more HIV cases and 14,000 more deaths in the US by 2030 as a result, according to Anna Person, an HIV physician at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “Many people who have been living with HIV for decades are afraid we are returning to the 1980s era of HIV, when many buried countless friends and loved ones,” Person said in a media briefing this week. “They ask how it makes sense to cut prevention funds or endanger access to HIV medications? My answer: It doesn’t. These actions are inefficient and will lead to increases in health care costs.” The prospects for future drug development could also grow dimmer given the massive funding cuts at NIH. The federal government does not manufacture drugs itself, but the basic research supported by NIH is critical for identifying possible targets for pharmaceutical interventions that private companies then work to develop. The vast majority of prescription drugs approved in the US benefited from the kind of federal medical research funding that will be reduced by billions of dollars in the second Trump term. Other changes could further slow down drug approvals: Some of the FDA staff who were laid off had been dedicated to approving new medications. He could even reorient substance abuse treatment, just as the US is finally making progress in reducing the long-running scourge of fentanyl deaths. Kennedy, who is in recovery himself, has endorsed some unusual ideas for addiction care, such as sending people to so-called wellness farms where they would attempt to break their habit while participating in. It’s a concept that has failed in the past, and experts remain skeptical of its value today versus other more mainstream harm reduction strategies. Public health is often slow and steady work, except when there is an emergency. We saw the consequences of an ill-equipped federal government during Covid, and the measles outbreak will test what happens when federal authorities are disinterested in an ongoing public health threat. But it is in these longer-term trends, a lack of new scientific advances or the warping of public attitudes toward vaccines, where the department’s death by a thousand cuts may be felt most.

Preview: Pat McAfee is seen on the set of The Pat McAfee Show on February 5, 2025. In February, a group of men on a sports talk show casually spread a salacious and untrue rumor about the sex life of a teenage girl on national television, resulting in her being humiliated and relentlessly harassed. It felt as though it were 2007 again, and the talk show banter was a brief pause before our nation’s busy schedule of making fun of Britney Spears’s breakdown. On ESPN’s bro-y The Pat McAfee Show, the titular McAfee introduced a segment on NFL draft picks by gossiping about an undergraduate rumor he’d heard: that a sorority girl at the University of Mississippi had cheated on her fraternity boyfriend with his father. McAfee didn’t mention the young woman or her boyfriend by name, but later shared the clip on X to his 3.2 million followers (the post is still up, as of April 3). Barstool Sports personality Jack Mac then promoted a meme coin named after the girl in question: Mary Kate Cornett, a first-year college student. Cornett denies the rumor, but that hasn’t stopped it from spreading like wildfire.  As reported on the New York Times’ The Athletic, as the rumor spread, the harassment Cornett experienced ratcheted up. She had to leave her college dorm and move into emergency housing after campus police said she was at risk. Someone sent in a false tip to the police to have a SWAT team sent to her mother’s home. Cornett’s voicemail and text message filled up with degrading messages from strangers calling her a whore and telling her to kill herself; similar messages have also reached her 89-year-old grandfather. Cornett now says she intends to pursue legal action against McAfee and ESPN. ESPN and McAfee have declined to comment to The Athletic and other news outlets.  There’s something so 2000s about this story — the kind of thing you would read about on a feminist blog at the time. It has all the beats of a classic aughts slut-shaming: an anonymous teenage girl, the men on a talk show using her humiliation as idle chit-chat, the way that chit-chat picks up and runs rampant until the girl is getting anonymous threats from strangers. It’s very Swiffer Girl, in which a graphic tape an eighth-grader made for the boy she had a crush on went viral. It’s very Vanessa Hudgens in 2007, when she was forced to apologize to fans and scramble to save her Disney career when private nude photos of her were leaked. It’s basically all the episodes that the talk show hosts of the 2000s have by now apologized for. The only part that’s really new is the memecoin and the right-wing ecosystem of X that allows such gossip to flourish. Surely, a person might think, we have moved past this kind of national slut-shaming by now. We live in a post-MeToo world. The culture must have moved past the sexual humiliation of teen girls. Yet in a way, the Ole Miss story is the kind of thing that’s been a long time coming. The right has been interested in reviving Bush-era raunch (think Girls Gone Wild) and purity culture (think: the obsession with Britney Spears’s virginity) for years now. Purity culture and raunch culture walk hand in hand. The sexual objectification of raunch is enforced by the rigid shaming of purity. Both are united by the compulsory objectification and humiliation of women, whose bodies within this system are always controlled by men.  As sociologist Bernadette Barton showed in her 2021 book The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining Our Society, raunch has become fundamental to the self-conception of the post-Trump right. Barton notes the number of pro-Trump memes that “explicitly link provocative female bodies with Trump paraphernalia,” or that “contrast ‘sexy’ conservative women with ‘ugly, unfeminine’ liberal ones.”  “No longer are misogynists confined to the old dichotomy framing women as virgins or whores,” Barton observes. “Raunch culture has facilitated a new sexist dichotomy: hot or not.” The ideology claims all hot girls as their own and demands that they place themselves at the service of men, for their amusement. Taking on this position allows a woman a certain amount of cultural currency, which is why the right likes to crow that hot girls vote for Trump and only ugly girls are liberal. Yet being a hot girl also opens her up to the possibility of the kind of vicious, highly sexualized humiliation and harassment that Cornett is facing. That is the ideology that allowed the right to claim an apolitical figure like Hawk Tuah Girl as a MAGA symbol, and at the same time to smear Kamala Harris as “the original Hawk Tuah Girl.”  The point of it is to degrade, to dominate, to make it clear that sex exists to gratify men. Humiliating an anonymous teenager for fun is the natural endpoint of this ideology. It was always what was lurking under the hot girls for Trump jokes.

Preview: President Donald Trump delivers remarks on tariffs during an event in the Rose Garden on April 2, 2025. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs on pretty much everything imported into the United States. Among other things, the tariffs include a 10 percent minimum tax of imports outside of North America, a hodgepodge of different tax rates on Canadian and Mexican goods, a 25 percent tax on cars manufactured outside the US, and a chaotic mix of country-specific tariffs ranging from 10 to 50 percent. Trump’s tariffs are likely to deal a significant self-inflicted blow to the US economy. As of this writing, the S&P 500 — a common index used to track US stock prices — is down about 4 percent. The Budget Lab at Yale predicts that the tariffs will cause enough inflation to effectively reduce the average US household’s annual income by $3,789 in 2024 dollars. A similar analysis by Auckland University of Technology economics professor Niven Winchester predicts a $3,487 blow to US households. Thus far, Trump’s second presidential term has been a series of staring contests between Trump and the courts. Trump’s tariffs could lead to yet another, though the answer to the question of whether a lawsuit challenging them might succeed is quite unclear. And not just because the Supreme Court has shown great solicitude for Trump in recent years. The federal laws governing tariffs give the president very broad authority over trade policy generally, and specifically over tariff rates. A court concerned solely with following the text of federal law is likely to uphold Trump’s tariffs. But the current Supreme Court is not such a court. During the Biden administration, the Court’s Republican majority frequently used a novel legal doctrine known as “major questions” to strike down executive branch actions they deemed too ambitious. Under the doctrine, the courts are supposed to cast a particularly skeptical eye on executive branch actions “of vast ‘economic and political significance” — like, say, a new tax policy that is likely to cost the average American household thousands of dollars a year. The major questions doctrine cannot be found somewhere in the Constitution or a federal statute. It is fairly new, the Court has never explained where it comes from, and it appears to be entirely made up by the Republican justices. So it is difficult to predict whether those justices will apply it to a Republican president, or whether they will deem Trump’s tariffs a violation of this entirely arbitrary doctrine. Still, the argument that Trump’s tariffs violate the major questions doctrine is sufficiently straightforward that it would be easy for a judge to write an opinion reaching this conclusion.  It might seem that Republican judges, especially those appointed by Trump, would hesitate to apply the doctrine in a manner that would harm him. Judicial politics, however, do not always align perfectly with the behavior of elected officials. Federal judges serve for life, so they do not need to fear electoral retaliation if they break with a president of the same party. And justices sometimes have ideological commitments that trump their loyalty to whatever transient agenda their party’s political leaders are pushing at any given moment. The major questions doctrine centralizes power in the judiciary, something that members of the judiciary may find attractive. And a decision applying this doctrine to a Republican president would help legitimize it, as it has previously only been used against Biden. There is a very real chance, in other words, that five justices would place their commitment to judicial supervision of the executive above their commitment to Trump — striking down his tariffs in the process. Federal law gives Trump a great deal of authority to set tariffs In his executive order announcing the latest round of tariffs, Trump claims the power to do so under a wide range of federal laws, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the Trade Act of 1974. Though these laws do impose some constraints on Trump and his subordinates, those constraints are largely procedural and impose few substantive limits on the scope and size of tariffs. Under one provision of the Trade Act, for example, the US Trade Representative, a Cabinet-level position currently held by Jamieson Greer, must make certain findings — such as a determination that a foreign country’s conduct “is unjustifiable and burdens or restricts United States commerce,” or that this country’s actions are “unreasonable or discriminatory and burdens or restricts United States commerce” — before the United States may impose new tariffs under this act. Once Greer does so, however, executive power to tax imports is quite broad. The government may “impose duties or other import restrictions on the goods of, and, notwithstanding any other provision of law, fees or restrictions on the services of, such foreign country for such time as the trade representative determines appropriate.” Trump’s latest executive order, meanwhile, appears to rely heavily on his power to regulate trade after declaring a national emergency — the order makes such a declaration in response to what he labels “the domestic economic policies of key trading partners and structural imbalances in the global trading system.” Notably, this law only permits the president to declare such an emergency “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States,” but the law does not define terms like “national emergency” or “usual and extraordinary threat.” Once a declaration of emergency is in place, the president’s powers are quite broad under the statute. Trump may regulate “any property in which any foreign country or any national thereof has or has had any interest.” The Court doesn’t pay much attention to the text of federal laws in its major questions decisions Though the text of the laws governing presidential authority over tariffs give Trump and his administration a great deal of authority, so did another law known as the Heroes Act. That law gives the education secretary sweeping power to “waive or modify” student loan obligations “as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency” such as the Covid pandemic. But the Court’s Republican majority paid no heed to this broad statutory language in Biden v. Nebraska (2023), which struck down a Biden administration program that would have forgiven $10,000 worth of student loans for most borrowers. Nebraska relied, at least in part, on the major questions doctrine, claiming that the student loan forgiveness program was illegal because it was simply too big. “The ‘economic and political significance’ of the Secretary’s action is staggering by any measure,” the six Republican justices claimed in that opinion, pointing to a University of Pennsylvania analysis that concluded that the student loan forgiveness program would cost “between $469 billion and $519 billion.” Trump’s tariffs, meanwhile, involve similarly eye-popping numbers. According to the Census Bureau, there are about 127 million households in the United States. If Yale’s Budget Lab is correct that the average household will lose $3,789 in real annual income because of Trump’s tariffs, that means that American consumers face a staggering loss of more than $480 billion in real income. In fairness, Nebraska also pointed to what it called the “unprecedented nature of the Secretary’s debt cancellation plan” to justify its conclusion, and Trump may be able to point to a precedent for the kind of sweeping tariffs he recently announced. In 1971, President Richard Nixon briefly imposed a 10 percent tariff on nearly all foreign goods, and a federal appeals court upheld this tariff. Notably, however, Congress has since amended some of the laws that Nixon relied upon more than half a century ago. Additionally, there appears to be a bit of a debate over whether the major questions doctrine applies to laws that delegate power directly to the president — as opposed to a statute like the Heroes Act, which empowers a cabinet secretary or other agency-level official.  In Nebraska v. Su (2024), for example, the Biden administration argued that this doctrine does not apply to the president. Though the federal appeals court which heard this case did not reach this question, Trump-appointed Judge Ryan Nelson argued that it does — in part because the separation of powers concerns that animated decisions like Nebraska apply equally regardless of whether executive power is exercised by the president or one of his subordinates. It’s impossible to guess whether the current slate of justices will rule that the Nixon precedent justifies setting aside the major questions doctrine, or whether they will conclude that this doctrine does not apply to Trump. Again, this doctrine is brand new, is not grounded in any constitutional or statutory text, and appears to be entirely made up by the Court’s Republican majority. So asking whether this fabricated doctrine applies to the president is a bit like asking your daughter if her imaginary friend likes to dance. The answer is whatever she wants it to be. Still, the case for applying the major questions doctrine to Trump’s tariff is at least as strong as the argument for applying it to Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. And, while this Court has been extraordinarily protective of Trump in the past, there are cynical partisan reasons why its Republican majority may want to apply the major questions doctrine to Trump in this case — Republicans would likely get crushed in the next election if Trump tanks the economy with his tariffs.

Preview: Donald Trump speaks while holding a chart illustrating non-reciprocal tariff examples during a meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., Thursday, Jan. 24, 2019. President Donald Trump’s defenders often frame his trade policies as prioritizing economic development over the free market.  In their telling, America has an interest in manufacturing valuable goods domestically, even if producing such wares in the US is not maximally profitable right now. Our nation might not currently make semiconductors as well as Taiwan or electric vehicles as well as China. But if we protect our nascent chip and EV industries, they might eventually become globally competitive. And that could make America wealthier, as the international market for such technologies will be large and opportunities for productivity gains in those industries are significant.  This is a reasonable argument for the utility of tariffs in some contexts. But it doesn’t amount to a case for Donald Trump’s tariffs. On Wednesday, Trump announced that he will impose a 10 percent minimum tariff on all foreign imports, and much stiffer rates on most nations: 20 percent for goods made in the European Union, 46 percent for Vietnam, and 54 percent for China. In a sign of the policy’s intellectual caliber, the president also ordered a 10 percent tariff on all exports from two uninhabited Antarctic islands (perhaps on the assumption that penguins will soon develop opposable thumbs thumbs and heavy industry). Traditionally, countries use tariffs and industrial policy to climb the international “value chain” — to go from producing simple goods (like T-shirts) or basic commodities (like lumber) to making complex products that are more valuable. But Trump’s trade policies would move the United States down the value chain. His tariffs are not designed to foster domestic production of a few highly valuable, cutting-edge products. Rather, he aims to move more or less all forms of manufacturing to the United States. His tariffs apply to all imported goods, from kitchen mitts to airplanes.  As Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal notes, this would likely make the United States less competitive in the world’s most lucrative markets. If America lets poorer countries supply it with T-shirts and aluminum, it can dedicate more of its resources to producing semiconductors, airplanes, chemicals, medical equipment, software, and artificial intelligence.  The more capital and labor we must devote to providing ourselves with socks and aprons, the less we’ll have to expend on more fruitful enterprises.  Trump’s tariffs aren’t rooted in rational development aims. The president is not trying to dominate the industries of the future — he’s trying to bring back the economy of the past. Nostalgia is the point. America’s right-wing nationalists associate the manufacturing-heavy economy of the 1950s and 1960s with a favored set of social and material conditions. It was an era when rates of wage growth, marriage, and fertility were high, and regional inequality was low. And they believe that they can bend the arc of history back toward that golden age by dramatically increasing US manufacturing employment.  But this is a fantasy. America can only return to the mid-century industrial economy in the sense that it can return to subsistence farming: It is technically possible to embrace an anachronistic mode of production, but only at immense economic cost.  Why the right longs for the postwar industrial economy I don’t mean to assert that nostalgia is the driving force behind Trump’s trade agenda. Other motivations and intuitions are surely at play. For example, Trump seems to view trade as a zero-sum game, in which the loser is whichever country buys more goods than it sells. Nevertheless, nostalgia for the postwar industrial economy suffuses the nationalist right’s rhetoric about trade policy, and informs its fixation on manufacturing employment.  In the “America first” movement’s narrative of national decline, deindustrialization — which is to say, the economy’s shift away from manufacturing and toward services — is synonymous with economic devastation and moral rot.  The basic story goes like this: In a bygone, golden era, American workers made things in factories, formed stable families, and coalesced into tight-knit communities. But then corrupt, globalist elites shipped US manufacturing jobs overseas, devastating middle-class workers in general — and male ones in particular. Marriage rates collapsed, communities frayed, and moral standards declined. By reshoring production, America’s former greatness can be restored. As Trump explained in his first inaugural address, America’s fall from greatness began when “factories shuttered and left our shores” and the “wealth of our middle class” was “ripped from their homes,” leaving “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation” while “crime and gangs and drugs” festered in the ruins. In his speech to Congress this year, the president gestured at similar themes, arguing that “tariffs are not just about protecting American jobs.  They’re about protecting the soul of our country.” For the Trumpist right, the US economy’s shift away from manufacturing and toward services not only had ruinous economic effects, but destabilizing social implications.  The industrial economy put a premium on brute strength, which men are far more likely to possess than women. The post-industrial economy, by contrast, features somewhat less demand for brawn, and considerable need for soft skills commonly associated with women. Deindustrialization was therefore a crisis for men in particular.  “Over the last 30 years and more, government policy has helped destroy the kind of economy that gave meaning to generations of men,” Republican Sen. Josh Hawley argued in a 2021 speech. “Domestic manufacturing once supported millions of American men with good wages, who in turn started and supported families. Now that industry lies all but dead on the altar of globalism.” Some pro-Trump conservatives explicitly blame men’s declining economic advantage over women for falling marriage and birth rates. They argue that women tend to prefer singledom to partnering with a man who enjoys less economic status or earning potential than themselves. Therefore, to promote family formation, you need to improve men’s economic outcomes at women’s expense.  As one influential right-wing influencer mused on X, “you do not solve low birth rates by giving money to women, you solve low birth rates by taking money away from women.” National Review contributor Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry recently endorsed another X user’s sentiment that “fertility is a solved problem and tracks differential status between men and women.” It is unclear whether Trump and his allies consciously see reindustrialization as a strategy for shifting gender relations in men’s favor. But the broad sense that the industrial economy was good for male workers specifically — and thus, for family formation — permeates the nationalist right’s rhetoric. Deindustrialization really did lead to lower wages and marriage rates The right’s nostalgia for the industrial economy is understandable. From the end of World War II through the 1960s, more than one-quarter of US laborers worked in manufacturing (today, that figure is 9.7 percent). And those decades of high manufacturing employment witnessed exceptionally high rates of wage growth and economic mobility. Between 1948 and 1973, hourly compensation in the US climbed by 91.3 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Over the ensuing 50 years, by contrast, hourly wages grew by just 9.2 percent. Meanwhile, a child born into the bottom half of America’s income distribution in 1940 had a 93 percent chance of outearning their parents, according to economist Raj Chetty’s research. A child born into similar circumstances in 1980, by contrast, had just a 45 percent chance of doing so. What’s more, deindustrialization coincided with a profound shift in the relative economic power of men and women in the United States. Men bore the brunt of wage stagnation: From 1979 to 2019, the median male worker’s weekly earnings fell by roughly 3 percent, while the median female worker’s jumped by more than 30 percent. The correlation between all these economic developments and the decline of manufacturing employment is not coincidental.  In the postwar period, manufacturing workers earned significantly more than similarly skilled laborers in other occupations, enjoying a 12 percent wage premium in 1983, according to the Cleveland Federal Reserve. Thus, as the manufacturing sector hemorrhaged jobs, millions of (disproportionately male) workers transitioned into less remunerative employment. The manufacturing sector’s unusually high pay reflected two key characteristics of the industry. First, it is easier to achieve productivity gains in manufacturing than in many service-sector occupations. Increasing the number of widgets a factory worker can produce in an hour is a more straightforward engineering challenge than, say, increasing the number of children an individual daycare worker can nurture over the same period.  Second, the manufacturing sector was more heavily unionized than other parts of the economy. In 1980, 32.3 percent of manufacturing workers were organized, compared to 15 percent of all other private sector workers. The decline of manufacturing employment was therefore synonymous with the decline of unionization. And since unionized employers tend to pay higher wages than non-union ones, this likely contributed to wage stagnation. To be clear, the decline of manufacturing was not the sole — or even primary — driver of slowing wage growth or rising income inequality in the US over the past half-century. Productivity and GDP growth rates slowed during the past 50 years, which limited opportunities for wage gains. Meanwhile, pay inequality within all sectors of the economy grew, as high-skilled workers across industries saw their advantage over less-educated workers swell. Nevertheless, the decline of manufacturing explains about a quarter of the jump in US income inequality between the 1980s and 2000s, according to a 2019 IMF working paper. Deindustrialization also fed regional inequality, as localities that were economically dependent on manufacturing suffered wrenching economic decline while those dependent on the provision of high-end services such as finance or software development thrived. Some measures show a 40 percent increase in such inequality since 1980.  Finally, there is evidence that the decline of manufacturing did in fact lead to lower marriage and birth rates, as a result of men losing economic status relative to women. The economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson have found that trade shocks — in which localities suffer manufacturing job losses as a result of foreign competition — reduce the earnings of young men relative to young women, and consequently see lower marriage and fertility rates. All of which is to say, right-wing nationalists aren’t wrong to believe that deindustrialization contributed to many of the economic and social trends that they decry. But it does not follow that Trump can reverse these trends by imposing giant tariffs on Vietnam, Bangladesh, and floating chunks of ice in the sub-Antarctic Indian Ocean. Why America can’t tariff its way back to an industrial economy In the nationalist right’s account, the decline of manufacturing employment was the contingent result of bad trade policies: Were it not for the machinations of globalist elites, the past half-century of factory closures could have been averted. But this is false. America’s pursuit of free trade surely influenced the scale and speed of deindustrialization. With a different set of trade policies, manufacturing employment in the US could have been marginally higher today. Nevertheless, the United States was bound to see a massive reduction in manufacturing employment over the past 50 years, no matter what trade policy it pursued. The reasons are twofold: First, as consumers get wealthier, they spend less of their income on goods and more on services. Humanity’s appetite for appliances, cars, and other physical objects is more exhaustible than its desire for better health or higher investment returns. In 1960, Americans devoted more than 50 percent of their consumer spending to goods; by 2010, that figure had fallen to 33 percent. Thus, to keep up with shifts in consumer demand, advanced economies need to dedicate more labor to the provision of health care, financial advice, and other services, and less to the production of durable goods. Second, manufacturing is easier to automate than services. Goods production requires the performance of repetitive tasks in a controlled environment. This makes it easier to mechanize than medical care, education, or even food service: Robots are better at assembling standardized products (such as cars) than customizable ones (such as Chipotle burritos). For these reasons, manufacturing’s share of employment has been falling in all rich countries over the past 50 years. Even in Japan, which has promoted manufacturing through protectionist trade policy and government subsidies, the percentage of workers employed in manufacturing has fallen to just over 15 percent.  And this same trend is beginning to surface in China: Despite that nation’s massive trade surplus, its manufacturing sector went from employing 30.3 percent of all workers in 2013 to 29.1 percent in 2023. According to the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf, were the US to entirely eliminate its trade deficit in goods, manufacturing’s share of US employment would at most return to its level from two decades ago, leaving roughly 85 percent of US workers employed in other sectors.  There is little reason to believe that Trump’s tariffs will actually succeed in strengthening US manufacturing. To the contrary, they will massively increase the costs of producing goods in the United States, inspire foreign nations to erect new barriers to American exports, and make companies more reluctant to invest in new factories due to economic uncertainty, all of which will hurt domestic manufacturing.  But even if the president’s trade policies somehow proved exceptionally effective, they would not bring back the industrial economy of yesteryear.  We don’t need a time machine to raise working-class living standards None of this means that America must resign itself to low wage growth or high inequality. The decline of manufacturing may have been inevitable, but the rise of a more inegalitarian economic order was not. In social democratic Denmark, the decline of manufacturing employment coincided with falling inequality, according to the IMF. And although productivity gains have historically been higher in manufacturing than in services, this has become less true over time. Certain service sectors — such telecommunications and transport — have seen faster gains in output per worker hour than manufacturing in recent decades. America can build a more dynamic and egalitarian economy without reengineering mass manufacturing employment. Collective bargaining helped factory workers wield leverage over their employers in the postwar period. And it could help all workers do so today, if the US established a system of sectoral bargaining.  Demand for manufacturing labor may be inherently limited. But in other sectors, demand for blue-collar labor is artificially constrained by regulation. America has 4.5 million fewer homes than it needs. By eliminating restrictive zoning laws, and providing cheap financing to the housing sector, we can meet one of our nation’s most pressing economic needs while expanding opportunities for manual workers. And one can tell a similar story about promoting infrastructure construction or the green energy buildout. Increasing the affordability of college and trade schools can further help workers acquire the skills demanded by a modern, services-dominant economy. And a more comprehensive social welfare state can ease the burdens of future labor shocks, such as the one that artificial intelligence threatens to deliver to some white-collar workers.  The right’s desire to increase men’s economic leverage over women is morally objectionable, even if such inequality is conducive to higher marriage or birth rates. All Americans, regardless of gender, are equally deserving of opportunity. But reducing young men’s unemployment — and increasing their wages — would enhance their well-being, while shrinking the number of women who involuntarily forgo marriage and motherhood due to an absence of financially independent partners. But Trump’s policies are unlikely to advance any of his movement’s purported aims. His tariffs are poised to reduce real wages, depress housing construction, and increase unemployment. And his labor agenda aims to restrict collective bargaining rights, rather than expand them. Americans deserve an economy in which blue-collar work is more remunerative, opportunity is broadly shared, and material obstacles to family formation are less profound. But building that economy will require an unsentimental analysis of our economy’s present, not nostalgia-addled efforts to resurrect its past.

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