This Is The Bad Place Pt. 2

On the economy, democracy, national security, the rule of law, foreign aid and public health the Trump administration is hitting rock bottom. Plus a hopeful musical interlude.

I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.

If money is tight or you’re already up to eyeballs in subscriptions, here’s another idea — share this article. Email it to a friend (or even an enemy). Post it on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Text or email it to your wife, husband, mother, father, brother, sister, or even your creepy second cousin who lives in Terrible Flat, Montana. Word of mouth is often the best way to build support for a creative endeavor, so if everyone here sends it to just one person … it would be much appreciated.

The day after the January 20 inauguration of President Trump, I wrote a piece titled “This Is The Bad Place” and predicted that “the next four years will be a non-stop shit show, with little brake on Trump’s worst instincts.”

In retrospect, it’s possible I undersold how bad things would get.

We’re seventy days into Trump’s second term in office … let’s see how things are going (keep in mind, in this post, I hit nine areas of badness, and I almost certainly forget a ton of other terrible things he’s done. But I was focused mainly on just the last 72 hours).

Shutterstock

The Pro-Life Party

On Friday, the Trump Administration officially shut down the US Agency for International Development — an act that is not only illegal but will have disastrous consequences around the world. For example:

Already, more than 11,000 additional TB patients are estimated to have died in the two months since almost all USAID funding froze on January 24, according to a model built by UN-affiliated organization Stop TB Partnership.

TB infections are also expected to increase by 28-32% globally this year as a result of the cuts, according to a memo issued by a top USAID official, Nicholas Enrich, who was placed on administrative leave.

What about the fight against HIV/AIDS?

Proposed cuts to global foreign aid, including slashing programs in the United States, could lead to millions of HIV deaths and soaring rates of infections around the world in the coming years, according to a new study.

Published Wednesday in The Lancet HIV journal, the modeling study estimates that by 2030, there could be between 4.4 million to 10.8 million additional new HIV infections in low- and middle-income countries and 770,000 to 2.9 million HIV-related deaths in children and adults. To estimate the impacts, the authors examined 26 countries that used foreign aid for HIV resources, including Albania, Cambodia, Colombia, Côte d'Ivoire, South Africa and Sri Lanka.

Here’s a tweet from the House Foreign Affairs Committee celebrating the deaths of potentially millions of people around the world.

Corruption Is Now Legal in America

Shutterstock

Meanwhile …

A Los Angeles-based federal prosecutor was reportedly fired Friday on instruction of the White House, with sources saying that it was likely due to his part in a case involving one of Trump’s top donors.

Citing several sources familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the Los Angeles Times reports that prosecutor Adam Schleifer was fired Friday morning at around 11 a.m. via an email that read “on behalf of President Donald J. Trump.”

Carley Palmer, a former Los Angeles federal prosecutor, told the outlet that Schleifer received his termination from a “one line email and it came from a White House staff account.”

His former colleagues helped him pack up his office belongings swiftly after the email came through.

The Times’ sources also said that they suspect Schleifer’s termination was caused in part by one case in particular: a probe of Andrew Wiederhorn, the former CEO of restaurant operator Fat Brands Inc. which owns fast-food chains like Fatburger and Johnny Rockets.

… And So Is Intimidating Lawyers

Another major DC law firm, Skadden Apps, made a deal with the White House to avoid being targeted by a White House executive order restricting its access to the executive branch. This time, however, the EO wasn’t even issued. Skadden Apps surrendered in advance — agreeing to provide $100 million in free legal work for causes supported by the White House.

Why is the White House targeting major law firms? The Trump administration is not shying away from the assumption that this is about revenge, as the firms targeted are ones that employed lawyers who worked to prosecute Trump when he was out of office. But the New York Times has another, more chilling theory:

Mr. Trump and his administration’s lawyers are fighting in court, but they are also pursuing a much more ambitious and consequential goal: deterring lawyers from suing his administration in the first place.

And it’s already having an effect.

Deepak Gupta, the founder of the law firm Gupta Wessler, said he knew of lawyers at top corporate law firms who recently informed some pro bono clients that they could no longer represent them because their firms were scared by Mr. Trump’s executive orders and memo.

Economics 101

Shutterstock

The president is preparing to impose new tariff rules unilaterally on April 2, a day the White House calls “Liberation Day.”

Meanwhile, no one, not even the president’s economic advisors, has any idea what he will announce:

The only thing clear at this point is that a dizzying array of options remain on the table for what Trump calls "Liberation Day."

The vastness of possibilities appears to be widening after Trump recently teased that he "may give a lot of countries breaks" and said Sunday night he could be "generous" even as he quickly added that "all countries" could be impacted.

A campaign trail idea of blanket 20% across-the-board tariffs also appears to have reemerged as at least an option.

The developments also made clear that a single person — Trump himself — will be the one determining the final decision with even his close advisers publicly and privately able to only offer guesses about what he would do.

"I can't give you any forward-looking guidance on what's going to happen this week," National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett offered in a Fox News appearance on Sunday. "The president has got a heck of a lot of analysis before him, and he's going to make the right choice I'm sure."

I’m not an expert on economics, but this is certifiably insane. One person has complete control over US tariff policy, which could upend not just the US economy but also the global economy for hundreds of millions of people, and he has no idea what he will do or, as Jason Furman writes today in the New York Times, any idea how trade or tariffs work.

Mr. Trump has cycled through numerous rationales for tariffs: They will raise revenues, with foreigners footing the bill. They will help American manufacturers and national security. They will provide leverage against Mexican fentanyl and Canadian sovereignty. In all of these cases there is a bit of truth and a lot of falsehood.

But the one argument Mr. Trump has returned to again and again is that other countries are taking advantage of the United States. He measures the degree to which they are doing so by the magnitude of our trade deficit with them — that is, how much more money we spend on another country’s goods and services than we get from selling it our goods and services.

In this reckoning, the reason those deficits arise is that other countries erect tariffs and other trade barriers against the United States. It follows from this analysis that the solution is to reciprocate by erecting our own tariffs, which will either protect the United States or else get other countries to lower their barriers, either way reducing or eliminating the trade deficits.

Every step in this chain of reasoning is wrong.

To make matters even worse, another of the president’s key economic advisors, Peter Navarro, says that tariffs are “tax cuts.” In fact, they are tax increases.

According to Furman, the effect of the tariffs “will be lower economic growth, higher inflation, higher unemployment, the destruction of wealth and a tax increase on American families. It will deal a blow to the rules underlying the global trading system and further empower China.”

Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

But apparently, the president is considering a multi-billion bailout of American farmers, who will likely be harmed by the emerging tariff war. Of course, this completely contradicts Trump’s claim that tariffs are a win-win for the American economy.

Nice Democracy … Shame if Something Happened To It

Over the weekend, President Trump said he wouldn’t rule out running for a third term and that “there were methods for doing so and clarifying that he was ‘not joking.’”