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Here’s how the Very Stable Genius reacted to what he perceives to be the cool kids inviting Narendi Modi to their table:
The leaders’ brotherly encounter in the city of Tianjin did not go unnoticed in the Oval Office. Hours after the meeting, Trump went on another tirade against India, calling trade with the country a “one-sided disaster”, while his trade adviser Peter Navarro said in a social media post: “It is a shame to see Modi getting in bed with Xi Jinping and Putin. I’m not sure what he’s thinking.”
Not sure what he’s thinking? Just spitballing here, but it could be the 50 percent tariffs on good imported from India. And Modi was pretty offended that the VSG took credit for India and Pakistan stepping back from the brink a few months ago.
Ah, but the federal appeals court has declared most of the VSG’s tariffs illegal.
A couple of things about that. One, I don’t think he should count on the Supreme Court reversing that ruling. Most of the justices, certainly including the three he appointed, are originalists with a history of seeing things differently than he does. Two, with a stay on the decision until October 14, the uncertainty has global supply chains relying on front-loading to hedge against it. Not exactly just-in-time delivery.
Tariffs also have the effect of souring feelings toward the United States in the countries on which they’re imposed. That’s happening in “nasty to deal with” Canada, and it’s affecting tourism:
Joe Koenen has not seen a single Toronto Blue Jays baseball hat all summer.
Typically, Canadians will flood the streets of Seattle during the summer, but Koenen, who runs Seattle Free Walking Tours (where people pay what they can), said Canadian tourists are almost gone. Streets look emptier to him.
Canadians calling to cancel their tours “explicitly told me that it was because of the policies and the behavior of our current president,” he said.
As a result of seeing 30% fewer customers this year overall, Koenen has been paying his employees but not himself. This is also the first year since he took over the tour company in 2021 that he has had to put his own savings into the business to keep it afloat.
“I am super-duper angry. I’m also disappointed, but I’m more sad … it’s such a self-inflicted injury,” Koenen said.
Another Seattle tour operator, John Brink, said “usually you kill it that weekend,” referring to the annual May series between the Toronto Blue Jays and Seattle Mariners. But the foot traffic wasn’t there this year. The Blue Jays are Canada’s only Major League Baseball team, so while the team is based in Toronto, many fans from Western Canada passionately sport their Blue Jays gear when they come to Seattle each summer.
Brink’s company, Tasty Tours, which guides visitors through food stalls in the historic Pike Place Market, has seen a 50% drop in Canadian customers.
Here’s some American exceptionalism for ya:
The World Travel and Tourism Council, a global tourism advocacy organization, projected in May that the United States will lose $12.5 billion in international visitor spending in 2025, the only country out of 184 economies the council analyzed that will see a decline this year.
The health of post-Americans? In an open letter to the New York Times, heads of the CDC going back to 1977 say that what is happening under Kenedy at Health and Human Services is disastrous:
We have each had the honor and privilege of serving as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, either in a permanent or an acting capacity, dating back to 1977. Collectively, we spent more than 100 years working at the C.D.C., the world’s pre-eminent public health agency. We served under multiple Republican and Democratic administrations — every president from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump — alongside thousands of dedicated staff members who shared our commitment to saving lives and improving health.
What the health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has done to the C.D.C. and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months — culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as C.D.C. director days ago — is unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced.
Mr. Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage. Firing Dr. Monarez — which led to the resignations of top C.D.C. officials — adds considerable fuel to this raging fire.
On the subject of Trumpism’s unalloyed socialism component, I cede the floor to Alvaro Vargas Llosa:
As a native Peruvian who has spent more than three decades writing about Latin American economics and politics, I'm familiar with heavy-handed politicians exerting control over private businesses.
Never in my wildest nightmares, however, could I have imagined that the United States would follow suit: going from the big-government, tax-and-spend, woke Democrats to a command economy of sorts under the supposedly free-market Republicans. Yet, that is what President Donald Trump's recent actions unequivocally represent.
The White House strong-armed chipmakers Nvidia and AMD into giving the U.S. government 15 percent of the money obtained from selling chips in China. It was either that or saying goodbye to any hope of getting an export license.
First, the Commerce Department restricted the sale of chips to China in the name of "national and economic security." Then it eased those restrictions in exchange for China allowing the export of rare earth minerals (national and economic security considerations suddenly went out the window). Finally, the government told Nvidia and AMD that it wanted a 15 percent cut on the sales of H20 and MI308 chips to China.
The same government that in July reported a deficit some $50 billion higher than this time last year and owes more than $37 trillion wants a piece of the action, of course.
Several weeks ago, Apple was threatened with high tariffs on chip imports—an indispensable component of its AI strategy, where it faces extremely tough competition. Apple was told that the only way to be spared "punishment" for its insufficient domestic manufacturing would be to make a massive commitment to invest in the U.S. Soon thereafter, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced the company's American Manufacturing Program, with plans to invest $600 billion in the United States over the next few years.
In case that wasn't enough to placate the president, Cook also presented the president with a gold-mounted engraved plaque commemorating the occasion.
Another prominent CEO also had to go through the ritual of trying to placate the president by meekly visiting the White House and paying his respects. Lip-Bu Tan, the recently appointed CEO of Intel, had been singled out by the president as an undesirable head of that struggling company. Trump had accused Tan, an American citizen, of being in cahoots with Beijing.
Highly respected in Silicon Valley, Tan has invested in Chinese semiconductor companies—but he has also proven his multiple talents in the U.S.
As head of Cadence, a computer software company, Tan rescued a business that was in dire straits, tripling its revenue to almost $3 billion in 12 years. The company's stock price grew by more than 3,200 percent. He has now taken on a monumentally difficult task—reviving Intel, a company that is losing money and in recent decades has been displaced by other semiconductor companies, among them Nvidia and Taiwan's TSMC.
One would think that an "America First" government would appreciate Tan's effort to make a moribund American company competitive against a Taiwan-based rival. Instead, the president publicly called for the Intel board to remove Tan, and then, after turning up the pressure, convinced Tan to give the federal government a 10 percent stake in the company.
The list goes on. Recently, Japan's Nippon Steel bought U.S. Steel for $14.9 billion. The condition for approval by the U.S. government? A "golden share" that will give the White House the power to influence corporate decisions.
We now know what that entails—a few days ago the president called on Goldman Sachs to fire its chief economist because he dislikes tariffs and thinks they won't be good for the economy.
In a move worthy of Kim Jong-un, the VSG had a giant banner unfurled on the front of the Labor Department building that showed a photo of him with that scowl that’s supposed to make him look fearless, and the slogan “American workers first.”
There’s a good piece right now at Washington Monthly by Bill Scher imploring somebody, anybody in the Republican Party to stand up to the VSG and begin a return to the party’s free-market, limited government orientation. He convincingly argues that such a Republican faction would be better positioned than the Democrats, beset as they are by disarray and an inability to let go of woke-ism, to really confront Trump.
But I wouldn’t hold my breath, Bill. The number of Republicans who are office-holders, office-seekers, party chairs on various levels, consultants and pundits and aren’t cowards, nuts or sycophants is too small to mount an attack.
So Trumpism holds sway right now. But the country is not winning on any level.