Inside Trump's ultimate goal

Robert Reich

March 19, 2025
ALTERNET


Today I want to delve into the deepest, darkest, and perhaps most important question of our time — yet one that no one seems able to answer: What is Trumpreally after? What’s his ultimate goal?

I’ve heard at least four theories.

1. He wants to become dictator of the United States. According to this view, Trump is intent on ridding America of our democratic institutions and substituting himself as dictator. He has openly envied Putin, Xi, Kim Jong Un, and other dictators because they have no opposition and can remain in their positions for as long as they wish. So he’s aggressively breaking laws and practically daring the federal courts to stop him.

2. He wants to rule the world. A second view holds that he wants to dominate the entire world. He’s using the richest man in the world to help him and is on the way to creating an alliance with Putin to carve up the world into two giant spheres of influence (if that’s ever accomplished, he’d presumably find a way to get rid of Putin). According to this view, Trump will be satisfied only when the entire world bows down to his authority.

3. He wants to be the richest person in the world. A third view is that he’s not really interested in power for the sake of power. He’s really focused on what that power can bring him — specifically, extraordinary wealth. His goal is to make even Elon Musk look like a pauper. His aim is to use the office of the presidency to make him and his family the wealthiest oligarchic dynasty in history.





The video player is currently playing an ad.

4. He wants to be worshipped. A fourth view is that power and wealth are only means for Trump to get what he really wants: to be worshipped. His ultimate goal is to transcend the mere trappings of formal authority and extend his MAGA religious cult to all of America and then to the far corners of the world. He wants to be revered through history as a supreme being especially blessed by God.

So today’s Office Hours question: What do you think is Trump’s ultimate goal?

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

Trump's deranged purge of American history is the story of white supremacy

: Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, larger.jpeg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77823832

Michael Signorile, 

The Signorile Report

March 20, 2025

The iconic photograph from 1945 by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press of U.S. Marines of the 28th Regiment, 5th Division, raising the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, sat for years on a Pentagon web page honoring the contributions of Native Americans who served in World War II.

One of the six Marines in the photo was Pfc. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian. The page is now gone, targeted in the Trump purge of DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—which has also removed other pages focused on the contributions of other Native Americans, women, Black Americans, LGBTQ service members and others.

How deranged is this? How can anyone not see the censorship and the erasure of history, and note that this is exactly what Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did while trying to control public discourse by revising German history?

The Washington Post uncovered the newest missing pages:
Multiple articles about the Navajo code talkers, who were critical to America’s victory at Iwo Jima and the wider Pacific theater of the Second World War, were also removed, along with a profile of a Tonawanda Seneca officer who drafted the terms of the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox toward the end of the Civil War.
The purge, which also targeted multiple webpages about women and LGBTQ+ service members, highlights how aggressively military leaders are pursuing President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI mandate. Their actions mean that some of the most authoritative sources of public information about the achievements of minority service members decades before government DEI programs existed have disappeared.

First, let’s be clear that DEI initiatives in hiring or any other programs are meant to make sure that a qualified pool of people of every race and background is reached out to via various channels.

They’re not about giving jobs to marginalized groups over others; they’re simply about making sure all groups know about a specific position or program and can apply, so that there is a big, diverse pool of qualified candidates. We like diversity. It’s what America is about—or was about.

But whatever you think of DEI, how it got distorted to where it’s now about removing images and documentation about people who already performed jobs—people who made enormous contributions to our country—is the story of bigotry and hate.

More to the point, it’s the story of white supremacy. There is simply no excuse for taking away aspects of history because you don’t like who made the history. That’s pure censorship, wanting to hold up only certain Americans as true Americans while erasing others. And that’s about an attempt to reshape Americans’ views, control their thinking, and suppress truths deemed threatening to a white supremacist worldview.

We saw it begin on day one of Trump’s presidency, when mentions of “lesbian,” “bisexual,” “gay,” “transgender,” “sexual orientation,” and “gender identity,” were expunged from the White House website. The Health and Human Services Department then removed all references to HIV and groups affected, such as transgender people.

Then we saw the Stonewall Monument page on the National Park Service website altered to take out the word “transgender”—when transgender people were at the forefront of the Stonewall riots.

Last Week the Arlington Cemetery page was altered to remove all references to Black, Latino and female veterans, with the claim, again, that they were doing to so to stop practices that “promote” DEI, which is nonsensical:
On these pages, users could read short biographies about the people buried in the cemetery, including Gen. Colin L. Powell, the youngest and first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff;
Hector Santa Anna, a World War II B-17 bomber pilot, Berlin Airlift pilot and career military leader;
members of the Tuskegee Airmen, the country’s first Black military airmen whose accomplishments include completing more than 1,800 missions during World War II;
and members of the6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only all-Black, all-female Women’s Army Corps unit to serve overseas during World War II.
Users could also read about Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black person to sit on the high court, and JusticeRuth Bader Ginsburg, who is buried alongside her husband, Martin Ginsburg, an Army veteran.

But now they’re gone. So far, war heroes are among 26,000 images purged from government websites, all in the name of eradicating the dreaded DEI.

The twisting of DEI—and the expansive way attacks on it are weaponized to censor and discriminate—has now extended to the Trump administration no longer explicitly prohibiting businesses from having segregated facilities as NPR reported today:

After a recent change by the Trump administration, the federal government no longer explicitly prohibits contractors from having segregated restaurants, waiting rooms and drinking fountains.
The segregation clause is one of several identified in a public memo issued by the General Services Administration last month, affecting all civil federal agencies. The memo explains that it is making changes prompted by President Trump's executive order on diversity, equity and inclusion, which repealed an executive order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 regarding federal contractors and nondiscrimination. The memo also addresses Trump's executive order on gender identity.

To be clear, there are federal civil rights laws and state civil rights laws that ban such discrimination. So no businesses, whether or not they are federal contractors, can have segregated drinking fountains. But the fact that the federal government no longer explicitly restates to federal contractors that they cannot engage in discrimination—and actually took the action of changing text—raises a red flag about where this administration wants to go.

And it’s all under the cover of ending “DEI,” which is now just another term for installing fascism.

Robert Reich

What's behind Trump's attack on the American mind?

Robert Reich

March 20, 2025

ALTERNET

Today, Trump is dismantling the Department of Education. He’s ordering wrestling executive-turned-Education Secretary Linda McMahon to shut her department.

His executive order will effectively destroy a $100 billion-a-year executive department created by Congress under President Jimmy Carter 45 years ago.

But there’s a much larger plan here.

Combine this with Trump’s attacks on higher education — his gutting the funding of the National Institutes of Health (which provides a large portion of biomedical research) and the National Science Foundation (engineering and computer research), and his effective closure of USAID (which underwrites research in global diseases).

Put this together with Trump’s (and RFK Jr.’s) attacks on vaccine science,

Combine this with Trump’s attacks on the freedom of speech of university students and professors.

And Trump’s and rightwing governors’ attacks on teaching the truth in our schools about America’s history of slavery and Native American genocide.

Put this together with Trump’s attack on America’s libraries — last week’s executive order mandating cuts in the funding of libraries around the country — which will jeopardize literacy development and reading programs, reliable internet access for those without it at home, and homework help and other resources for students and educators.

Combine this with his attacks on America’s museums (the same executive order cut their funding, too). And his attack on the arts, as illustrated by Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center (last month, he announced himself its new chair, replaced 13 board members, and inserted a new interim president).

What’s the larger picture? What’s the overall purpose?

Not to mount an “attack on the liberal state,” as I keep reading. Not “a culmination of Trump’s culture wars.” Or that Trump seeking “small government” over “big government,” or is advancing traditional conservatism over traditional liberalism.

What’s really occurring is an attack on the American mind.

Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited slaves from learning to read. Nazi’s burned books.

Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.

Those who believe in democracy, on the other hand, have been at the forefront of the movement for free, universal public education; and for public libraries, museums, and the arts. They understand that democracy depends on people knowing what’s occurring around them and having the capacity to deliberate critically about it.

Trump is only the frontman in this attack on the American mind.

The attack is really coming from the anti-democracy movement: From JD Vance; and from Vance’s major financial backer, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who staked $15 million on Vance’s Ohio senatorial election in 2022 and helped convince Trump to make Vance vice president; and from Thiel’s early business partner, Elon Musk.

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.

Behind Vance and Musk is a libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.

Curtis Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being their intellectual godfather. He has written that political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream media whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding America’s social order.

In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure.Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

Make no mistake: Trump’s attack on the American mind — on education, science, libraries, and museums — is an attack on the capacity of Americans for self-government.


It is coming from the oligarchs of the techno-state who believe democracy is inefficient, and want to replace it with an authoritarian regime replete with technologies they control.

Be warned.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Watch: Republican drowned out by 'tax the rich' chant at town hall in deep-red district

Woman shouting with a megaphone (Shutterstock)

Julia Conley

Common Dreams

March 19, 2025

A small Nebraska city where U.S. President Donald Trump easily won the 2024 election was the site of the latest chaotic Republican town hall on Tuesday evening, with Rep. Mike Flood facing a roomful of about 200 voters, many of whom refused to accept his excuses for the Trump administration's drastic cuts to the federal government.

Flood came to the Columbus High School auditorium prepared with a graphic showing the national debt, with a giant screen showing the sum ticking up to $36 trillion—evidently confident that the number would help explain to voters why Republicans are pushing for hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid and Social Security while backing billionaire Elon Musk's massive cuts to the federal workforce.

But when he displayed the number and told one voter who asked about cuts to the National Institutes of Health that, "ultimately, where we need to go is to a balanced budget," he was met with loud booing.

"How can you be against a balanced budget?" Flood asked the room—which prompted the reply, "tax the rich!" to ring out across the auditorium.

Flood was meeting with voters in Nebraska's deep-red 2nd District for the first time since Trump took office. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) recently advised GOP lawmakers to avoid town halls and claimed protesters who have shown up to numerous meetings with Republican representatives are "Democrat activists who don't live in the district," but he and other critics have presented no evidence that the anger directed at Trump's allies in Congress is coming from anywhere but their constituents.

Flood also faced questions about Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with one attendee asking, "What makes Elon Musk a better person to audit our government for waste, fraud, and abuse than the inspectors general that Donald Trump fired?"

"Elon Musk gets $40 billion a year in funding from the federal government. What makes you think he has no conflict of interest?" asked the voter. "Do you think he would cut that before he would cut our Medicare, or our Social Security, or our jobs?"

Flood replied that he supports both Musk and DOGE, prompting more loud booing and thumbs-down gestures.

With Republican lawmakers facing angry voters, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in recent weeks has toured states including Iowa, Nebraska, and Michigan, speaking to large crowds in Republican districts. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is scheduled to join him this week, while Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has also been holding town halls.

Watch the clip below or at this link:

'I hear you pivoting': CNN host battles MAGA schools chief accusing her of 'gaslighting'

CNN host Brianna Keilar (L) and Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters (R) on March 20, 2025 (Image: Screengrab via CNN / YouTube)

Carl Gibson

March 20, 2025
ALTERNET

Editor's note: This headline has been updated.

An exchange between CNN host Brianna Keilar and Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters got heated when the latter was confronted over his management of federal funds.

During the Thursday segment, Keilar hosted Walters to discuss how President Donald Trump's executive order intended to shut down the Department of Education in his state would impact public school students in the Sooner State. The two soon began cutting each other off, with Walters railing against Oklahoma's "radical left-wing teachers' union" and "woke administrators," while Keilar repeatedly steered the conversation back to Walters' widely criticized management of Oklahoma's public schools.

"I took on the worst, one of the worst education systems in the country and have embrace these reforms. so we have continued to see the improvement—"

"But overall you've had issues, sir," Keilar responded.

"No I haven't," Walters said, insisting that the only people complaining about his leadership were his political opponents.

Keilar reminded Walters that "Republican lawmakers as well as superintendents of schools who do not seem ideologically opposed to you" have been some of his most prominent critics. As the Oklahoma Voice reported last fall, Republican state representative Tammy West suggested that Walters' office was not providing appropriate "transparency, accountability and communication" when it came to how taxpayer dollars were spent.

"Superintendent, for instance, this whole business in the spring of not getting proper estimates to schools so that they could figure out how to plan for their federal funds that they were getting. You had them running right up into August," Keilar said. "Obviously, you know, in spring, you need to know, 'can I hire new teachers with Title I funds especially?' You're talking about impoverished students. Let's talk about them. That was something that you had Republicans in your state, superintendents in your state, very frustrated with because they were not able to plan. It seems like a miscarriage of just basic duties of how you handle funds."

Walters grew visibly frustrated, and pushed back on Keilar and the network itself, saying: "I know you're trying to railroad me here and gaslight here on CNN ... So what you continue to see is CNN here fighting for a status quo, instead of saying our education system has to get better, we should all agree on that ... No amount of gaslighting is going to change that."

Keilar reminded Walters that the Department of Education gave Walters' office a failing grade on 32 out of 52 indicators for how the state managed federal funding. She also pointed out that those failing marks were specifically about "how you are meeting the needs of students who are low income, the most at risk students in your state."

"The same department within a week also told us we had to allow boys in girls' sports and boys in girls' bathrooms, or they would take all of our funding away from us," Walters said. "The Biden administration Department of Education was constantly attacking conservative reforms, attacking school choice, sending the FBI and the DOJ to investigate parents —"

"What about you, superintendent, and your management here?" Keiler responded. "I hear you pivoting to talk about bathrooms, but your management of these funds — because what we're talking about now, Joe Biden's not president — but you're talking about getting this money in block grants. so let's talk about you and how you manage those funds because you're asking for it with fewer restrictions. That's what a block grant is. And there are serious questions about how you handle that."

Watch the segment below, or by clicking this link.

OKLAHOMA PUBLIC SCHOOLS BEING FORCED TO HAVE BIBLES, 1O COMMANDMENTS AND BIBLE STUDY

'We’re against it': Fox host says the quiet part out loud in segment about disabled kids

"The Five" panelists Jessica Tarlov (L) and Greg Gutfeld (R) on March 20, 2025

 (Image: Screengrab via Fox News / Bluesky / @nikkimcr.bsky.social)

Carl Gibson

March 21, 2025

ALTERNET

One primetime host on Fox News recently uttered a remark about public education and disabled students that visibly shocked one of his co-panelists.

On Thursday, Rolling Stone reporter Nikki McCann Ramirez posted a video clip to Bluesky of a segment from Fox News' "The Five." In the segment, liberal panelist Jessica Tarlov was commenting on President Donald Trump's executive order aimed at shuttering the Department of Education, and her fears that it would negatively impact the quality of education that disabled children receive.

"When I hear Republicans out there talking about their plan for education in America, I don't hear them talking about making sure disabled kids have access to a public education," Tarlov said. "I don't hear them talking about empowering—"


"—Because we're against it," Gutfeld said matter-of-factly.

"I know you are! And thank you for admitting it in such a public forum," Tarlov responded. "They want to end up privatizing [education], they want to end up with a voucher system which means kids who can't get to those schools, don't have enough money to or frankly don't want to go to public schools don't have access."

"They want to make [schools] private, they want to make them religious institutions, and that goes against what you're supposed to do in America," she added.

Historian Kevin Kruse responded to the clip, opining that "the contempt [Republicans] have for disabled children is rooted in a mistaken belief that there aren't too may of them," and added that anywhere from one in eight to one in five students suffer from some form of learning disability.

That assessment isn't too far off: As the National Center for Education Statistics found in May of 2024, roughly 15% of all public school students in the United States benefited from special education services made possible by the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act. And among those students, 32% identified a specific learning disability.

"There are an awful lot of SPED [special education] families out here, and we will *fight* this s---," Kruse wrote.

In a subsequent skeet (the term used for Bluesky posts), Kruse wrote that parents of special education students are "acutely aware of their children's rights and the gov't role securing them" and are "fiercely protective" of their kids. And he added that parents can be "deceptively polite when they're dealing with local officials."

"But if *national* leaders mess with their kids? The gloves will come off and they will destroy them," the historian wrote.

Watch the clip below, or by clicking this link.

'Brink of recession': This 'ominous' MAGA proposal could 'devastate the country’s economy'

President Donald Trump with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on February 21, 2025 (Wikimedia Commons)

Alex Henderson

March 20, 2025
ALTERNET

Liberal economists Paul Krugman and Robert Reich and other critics of President Donald Trump are warning that a variety of his policies — including steep new tariffs, mass deportations and deep cuts to the federal workforce — could push the United States into a full-fledged recession.

One MAGA proposal that isn't being talked about as much is repealing or gutting the Inflation Reduction Act. But according to The New Republic's Malcolm Ferguson, that is yet another thing that could help tank the economy.

"Repealing the Inflation Reduction Act — something President Trump is currently trying very hard to do — could result in a $160 billion hit to the gross domestic product, according to Semafor," Ferguson explains. "A complete IRA repeal would devastate the country's economy. It could lead to 790,000 lost job losses by 2030, while household energy bills would reach $370 per year, on average, by 2035."

Ferguson adds, "This is ominous news for an economy already on the brink of recession."

Ferguson warns that economic damage from tariffs and economic damage from a repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act could be a painful combination.

"That recession is being driven by Trump's ongoing trade war with America's closest allies — 25 percent levies are currently being placed on many imports from Mexico and Canada — which Fed Chair Jerome Powell just admitted was making inflation worse," Ferguson notes. "Cuts to the IRA would have a massive negative impact on American manufacturing, delivering a devastating blow to a sector that those tariffs are theoretically intended to boost. Slashing the IRA would also particularly harm red states, which have received a whopping 77 percent of clean energy manufacturing and deployment investment since the third quarter of 2022."

Ferguson continues, "A full repeal of the IRA is not expected, of course, but Speaker Mike Johnson did describe his vision for the cuts as 'somewhere between a scalpel and a sledgehammer.' Even if the bill is not repealed — or curtailed — by Congress, agency cuts made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have likely already affected its implementation."

READ MORE: Busted: Report exposes Musk operatives who infiltrated Social Security Agency

According to Semafor's Mizy Clifton, red states and swing states could suffer the most damage from a repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Clifton, in an article also published on March 20, reports, "With the exception of California, Republican-controlled states — Texas, Georgia, Florida, and Pennsylvania — stand out as the biggest losers, according to projections by think tank Energy Innovation: Annual household energy bills in Texas, for example, could increase $370 per year on average in 2035 as reduced investment in renewables drives up the share of electricity coming from fossil fuels and utilities pass on their higher costs to consumers, according to Energy Innovation projections."

Read The New Republic's full article at this link and Semafor's reporting here.

Inside Trump's economic plan: A massive transfer of wealth

Robert Reich

March 20, 2025
ALTERNET

Donald Trump believes his tariffs will bring so much money to the U.S. treasury that the U.S. will be able to afford another giant Trump tax cut.

But Trump’s tariffs — and the retaliatory tariffs already being imposed on American exports by the nation’s trading partners — will be paid largely by the American working class and poor.

And the people who will benefit most from another giant Trump tax cut are America’s wealthy.

It will be a giant upward transfer of wealth.

Trump has made astronomical estimates about how much money tariffs can raise.

“We will take in trillions and trillions of dollars and create jobs like we have never seen before,” he said during his recent joint address to Congress. “Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again.”

Last Sunday on Air Force One, Trump was even more ebullient. “We’re going to become so rich, you’re not going to know where to spend all that money,” he said.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that if Trump’s already-announced tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada went into effect, they’d bring about $120 billion a year into the U.S. treasury, and $1.3 trillion over the course of 10 years.
by Taboola

Among Trump’s first actions at the outset of his second term was to order the treasury to establish an “External Revenue Service” to collect tariff revenue that would enable the U.S. to pay down its debt and reduce taxes.

Howard Lutnick, Trump’s secretary of commerce, said on Fox News in late February that the goal of the External Revenue Service “is very simple: to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and let all the outsiders pay.”

In other words: The U.S. will raise so much money from Trump’s tariffs that Americans will no longer need to pay income taxes.

The first problem with this is mathematical. America raises about $3 trillion each year from income taxes. The nation also imports about $3 trillion worth of goods each year.

So to replace income taxes, tariffs would have to be at least 100 percent on all imported goods. Also, Americans would have to continue to import $3 trillion worth of goods every year. Neither of these is remotely plausible.

The second problem is who pays.

Trump keeps saying other countries pay for tariffs. That’s not how they work.


Tariffs are effectively taxes on imported products. They’re paid by Americans.

Say there’s a 60 percent tariff on Chinese imports. When Walmart imports “Mr. Coffee” machines from China (where they’re made), China doesn’t pay the 60 percent tariff to the U.S. government. Walmart does.

If Walmart had bought the coffee machine for $20 before the tariff, the 60 percent tariff requires Walmart to pay an extra $12 — bringing the total cost of each coffee machine to $32.

Walmart doesn’t want that extra $12 to cut into its profit margin, so it will try not to absorb that cost. Instead, it will pass the extra $12 on to its customers.


Walmart’s CEO has already said it expects to raise prices in response to Trump’s tariffs in order to protect its profits.

Targeted tariffscan be used to protect industries critical to national security.

This is what the Biden administration did when it levied tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, solar panels, computer chips, and batteries after making massive domestic investments in these technologies.

But Trump has proposed across-the-board tariffs on almost all imports — particularly from America’s largest trading partners.


While Americans will pay more for imported goods due to tariffs, countries that export the products to America are also harmed. American consumers presumably will buy fewer of their products, since they cost more. These countries are retaliating by raising tariffs on American exports.

On Monday, China began imposing tariffs on a range of American farm products, including a 15 percent levy on chicken, wheat, and corn.

These retaliatory tariffs will hurt America’s Farm Belt — mostly Republican states and Trump voters.

On Wednesday, after Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on all aluminum and steel imports coming into the United States from the rest of the world, the European Union announced retaliatory tariffs on about $28 billion worth of American exports, including beef and whiskey.

Not incidentally, Europe’s retaliatory tariffs are on goods mostly produced by Republican states (think Kentucky bourbon). Europe is also slapping tariffs on Harley-Davidson motorcycles, made in America’s Rust Belt.

On Thursday, in response to Europe’s tariffs, Trump threatened a 200 percent tariff on all alcoholic products from European Union member states. If he follows through, Trump voters will be paying more for much of the alcohol they consume.

Canada also announced new tariffs on about $21 billion worth of U.S. products.

This is called a trade war. There are no winners in such a war.

One of the biggest global trade wars started with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930. After the 1929 stock market crash, President Herbert Hoover and Republicans thought sweeping tariffs would help the economy.

They didn’t. Import prices surged, and exports plummeted because of other nations’ retaliatory tariffs. Global trade fell by 66 percent, worsening the Great Depression.

Smoot-Hawley seemed to prove that across-the-board tariffs don’t work. Then came Trump’s first term and his sweeping tariffs, largely on China.

Higher prices from Trump’s first-term tariffs on thousands of Chinese imports are estimated to have cost American families close to $80 billion.

This cost took a larger chunk out of the incomes of poorer families than richer ones.

If you make $50,000 a year, the cost of a coffee maker that rises due to tariffs affects you more than it does someone making $1 million a year who can better afford the price increase.

To put it another way, tariffs are a highly regressive tax.

Following Trump’s first-term tariffs on China, China retaliated with its own tariffs on American exports. This led China to import less from America.

In the U.S. agriculture industry alone, the result was a $27 billion loss in exports from mid-2018 to the end of 2019. Even though the government increased aid to affected farmers, farm bankruptcies shot up 20 percent.

Another consequence of Trump’s first-term trade war was that American manufacturing shrank, as demand for exports slumped and raw materials used in manufacturing became more expensive.

One study estimates that Trump’s first-term trade war cost nearly 300,000 American jobs.

Instead of learning a lesson from this fiasco, Trump is now promising even bigger tariffs — more tariff hikes on China and, starting on April 2, 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico.

These new tariffs would cost the typical American household an additional $1,200 this year. If Trump makes good on previous pledges to slap more tariffs on imports from around the world in addition to aluminum and steel, American families can expect to spend as much as $4,000 more.

Trump says he’ll use the revenue from tariffs to “offset” more of his big pending tax cut.

That tax cut will disproportionately benefit wealthy Americans and big corporations, as did Trump’s first-term tax cut. But revenue raised from such tariffs will be coming disproportionately from average working people and the poor.

Hence, it will be a massive transfer of wealth from most Americans to the super wealthy and giant corporations.

Will most Americans know that the higher prices they’ll pay for groceries, gas, housing, and all sorts of other things will be going into the pockets of the wealthy? Will they know whom to blame?

Trump was able to fool most Americans during his first term into believing he had created a marvelous economy for them and that they benefited from his tariffs and tax cuts.

It was a lie, of course. But he tells lots of lies that many Americans believe. Will he be able to do it again, on a much larger scale?

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

'Disappointing and devastating': US Steel manufacturer fires workers and blames Trump tariffs

A worker welds a steel tube at HCC, a company that uses parts to make combines, at the factory in Mendota, Illinois, U.S., February 21, 2025. REUTERS/Vincent Alban

Carl Gibson

March 20, 2025

ALTERNET

One steel manufacturer in the Midwest has announced it will be laying off hundreds of workers as a result of President Donald Trump's tariffs.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported Thursday that 630 steelworkers in Minnesota are about to lose their jobs. Steel manufacturer Cleveland-Cliffs, which is based in Ohio, announced that the layoffs will be at the company's operations in the Minnesota towns of Hibbing and Virginia. Those facilities specialize in steel pellets used in auto manufacturing, and Cleveland-Cliffs said they will be subjected to "temporary idles" in order to "rebalance working capital needs and consume excess pellet inventory produced in 2024."

Earlier this month, Trump announced he would be imposing new 25% tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. The Star-Tribune reported that while steelmakers like Cleveland-Cliffs expect a boost to their business as a result of the higher prices on their foreign competitors, the auto industry is still largely unprepared to shift production to the United States with new tariffs on imports from Canada, China and Mexico fast approaching in April.

Larry Cuffe Jr., who is the mayor of Virginia, Minnesota, told the Star-Tribune that the news of the layoffs was "disappointing and devastating." He added that he was unable to get a direct answer on when Cleveland-Cliiffs would resume operations at the idled facilities beyond "when the steel prices get better."

The layoffs have prompted a strong response from Minnesota lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. State senator Grant Hauschild, who is a member of the Democratic-Farm Labor Party (Minnesota's version of the Democratic Party) said that while he believes "strategic, smart tariffs on critical industries" like steel can protect American jobs, Trump's approach is too broad.

“My fear is that, while I do support tariffs on targeted areas, perhaps what we are doing is having reverberations that go far beyond what we were thinking," Hauschild said.

Republican state representative Cal Warwas promised that the laid-off workers would have a safety net, saying he was "working on a bill for extended unemployment." Warwas added that he would "do everything in my power to mitigate the pain of this situation and work toward any solution that gets people back to work."

Trump is ignoring the power of nationalism at his own peril: expert

Justin Tang/The Canadian Press/AP

The Conversation

March 20, 2025

US President Donald Trump has exploited American nationalism as effectively as anyone in living memory. What sets him apart is his use of national humiliation as a political emotion. Any presidential candidate can talk their country up, but Trump knows how to talk his country down.

Trump’s consistent message has been that American problems – trade deficits, job losses, illegal immigration, crime and even drug addiction – are the result of deliberate acts by other countries. The really humiliating part is that American politicians let it happen.

Many Americans have welcomed Trump’s message that their country’s problems can be solved by reestablishing international dominance. They see this nationalist approach as an overdue corrective to the “globalist” foreign policies of the post-second world war era.

But people in other countries also have feelings of national pride and aspire to be free from foreign domination. This should be obvious, but so far Trump is ignoring the power of nationalism in other countries even as he harnesses it in his own. This makes his foreign policy job a lot harder.

How Canadians have rallied against Trump

Take the example of Canada.

When Trump was elected to his second term in November 2024, it seemed certain there would soon be a Canadian prime minister who was more aligned with him than Justin Trudeau. Trudeau’s unpopularity had dragged the Liberal Party down, and the populist Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre looked set to win the this year’s election.

As he prepared for a trade war with Canada, Trump could have concentrated his fire on his enemies in the doomed Liberal government. Instead, he spent months insulting Canada’s national identity. He repeatedly said Canada should be the “51st state of the US”, calling Trudeau “governor”.Trump says ‘Canada was meant to be our 51st state’ in a Fox News interview.

Americans can dismiss Trump’s talk of annexing Canada as a joke, but Canadians can’t. Regardless of whether Trump would ever follow through with attempting an annexation, his language is an attack on Canadian sovereignty. No one with any sense of national pride would tolerate it.

An Angus Reid poll found the number of people saying they had a “deep emotional attachment” to Canada rose from 49% to 59% from December 2024 to February 2025. That emotional attachment is visible in everything from “buy Canadian” campaigns to Canadians booing the US national anthem at hockey games.

The Liberals, under new leader Mark Carney, are also experiencing a remarkable bounce-back in the polls.

Another Angus Reid poll shows that voting intention for the Liberals has surged from 16% in December to 42% now. They are now leading the Conservatives, who have 37% support. Some are now anticipating a snap election could be called in days.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has sometimes been likened to Trump, has also led a ferocious pro-Canadian resistance to American tariffs, getting his own re-election boost.

Trump’s defenders often claim his chaotic bluster is simply a negotiating tactic, a way of spooking others into accepting terms more favourable to him. If so, this tactic is backfiring in Canada.

Trade wars require sacrifices. Citizens must pay more for the sake of protecting their countries’ industries. Canadians seem a lot more willing to make that sacrifice than Americans, who are mostly confused that their friendly neighbour has suddenly been recast as an enemy.

The importance of national identity

Other countries have shown they will not cave easily, either, as Trump puts their national identity at stake.

Demanding to buy another country’s territory, as Trump keeps doing with Greenland, a self-governing territory under Danish control, may be even more insulting than threatening to take it, as he keeps doing with Panama. Each time Greenlanders, Danes and Panamanians refuse Trump, his credibility erodes further.

Trump talks about the territory of other countries in terms of “real estate”, even suggesting the United States should “redevelop” Gaza after evicting the Palestinians.

But sovereign land is not real estate. In a world of nation-states defined by territory, even sparsely inhabited territory has “sacred value”. This is particularly true for peoples seeking statehood on their land.

“Sacred values” are things people see as non-negotiable because they are linked to their sense of identity and moral order in the world. Researchers warn that offering money in exchange for sacred values is deeply offensive, and likely to harm, rather than help, negotiations.

There is a reason why governments hardly ever sell their territory to other countries anymore. Empires may have done in this in the past, but not nations. They view their lands, and the people who live on them, as inalienable from the nation.

Trump clearly doesn’t understand this concept. He has shown no empathy for Ukraine, a country whose territory actually has been invaded. He accused Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy of wanting to prolong the war so he could “keep the gravy train going”, as if harvesting US aid dollars was the real reason Ukrainians were fighting for their country’s existence.

Trump’s contempt for Ukraine, Canada, Greenland, Gaza, Denmark and Panama has reverberations far beyond these places. It signals that his brand of American nationalism has no place for anyone else’s national aspirations or sovereignty.

This will not promote the deal-making Trump wants because no one trusts an unstable, imperial power to stick to its agreements. It would be painful for many countries to reduce their dependence on the United States, but it would be more painful to give away their national dignity.

David Smith, Associate Professor in American Politics and Foreign Policy, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Top researchers ousted by Trump poised to be poached by Europe: report

Sarah K. Burris
March 19, 2025 

RAW STORY

(Photo: Shutterstock)

President Donald Trump's purge of U.S. government staff could soon pay dividends — for other countries.

According to Politico, a group of countries in the European Union have hatched a plan to poach ousted researchers from the United States.

"Twelve governments said the European Union needs an 'attractivity boom' to bring over talent from abroad 'who might suffer from research interference and ill-motivated and brutal funding cuts,'" Politico quoted from a letter sent to the commission.

The letter doesn't say the U.S. by name, however. The only reference is the sentence: "The current international context reminds us that freedom of science can be put at risk anywhere and at any time."

When he came into office, Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency by executive order. That initiative has been behind the upheaval and dismantling of government agencies. Websites, grants, programs, and employees have been cut or frozen under the promise that Trump will save taxpayers trillions.

Those staffing cuts came from the National Institutes of Health, Center for Disease Control, National Weather Service and other U.S. agencies that once employed top scientists and experts.

Politico listed the countries interested in such a program as France, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Spain, Slovenia, Germany, Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania.

"It is urgent ... to organize ourselves to welcome talents who would like or need to leave the United States," said French Research Minister Philippe Baptiste in a statement to the site.

The report also noted that several universities in Europe are also trying to recruit U.S. researchers.

"The Free University Brussels (VUB), on Monday announced 12 positions for international researchers 'with a specific focus on American scholars,'" the report cited.

The French Aix-Marseille University launched its own "safe space for the science program," said the report. According to the site, it said "some scientists in the United States may feel threatened or hindered in their research."

Read the full report here.