Lazy Caturday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

I didn’t think there would be much to write about today after Dakinikat’s post last night, but there actually are a whole lot of things happening–far more than I can cover here. With Trump, it’s always maximum chaos every day of the week. Here are some of the stories that captured my interest this morning.

The effects of Trump’s tariffs

We’ve seen the last of the ships without massive tariffs arriving in U.S. ports, and now we’re seeing the results of Trump’s insane policies.

CNN: Zero ships from China are bound for California’s top ports. Officials haven’t seen that since the pandemic.

On Friday morning, West Coast port officials told CNN about a startling sight: Not a single cargo vessel had left China with goods for the two major West Coast ports in the past 12 hours. That hasn’t happened since the pandemic.

Six days ago, 41 vessels were scheduled to depart China for the San Pedro Bay Complex, which encompasses both the Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach in California. On Friday, it was zero.

President Donald Trump’s trade war imposed massive tariffs on most Chinese imports last month. That’s led to fewer ships at sea carrying less cargo to America’s ports. For many businesses, it is now too expensive to do business with China, one of America’s most important trading partners.

Officials are concerned not just about the lack of vessels leaving China, but the speed at which that number dropped.

“That’s cause for alarm,” said Mario Cordero, the CEO of the Port of Long Beach. “We are now seeing numbers in excess of what we witnessed in the pandemic” for cancellations and fewer vessel arrivals.

The busiest ports in the country are experiencing steep declines in cargo. The Port of Long Beach is seeing a 35-40% drop compared to normal cargo volume. The Port of Los Angeles had a 31% drop in volume this week, and the Port of New York and Jersey says it’s also bracing for a slowdown. On Wednesday, the Port of Seattle said it had zero container ships in the port, another anomaly that hasn’t happened since the pandemic….

“If things don’t change quickly, I’m talking about the uncertainty that we’re seeing, then we may be seeing empty products on the shelves. This is now going to be felt by the consumer in the coming 30 days,” said Cordero….

That doesn’t sound good to me, but Trump thinks it’s great.

Fortune, via Yahoo News: Trump calls emptying U.S. ports a ‘good thing’ despite supply-chain panic because ‘that means we lose less money.’

As logistics professionals sound the alarms on emptying U.S. ports as a result of steep tariffs, President Donald Trump said those major import slowdowns are actually a boon.

Following Trump’s introduction of sweeping tariffs, shipping volumes have fallen considerably, according to data from container-tracking software company Vizion. In the period between the five weeks before and five weeks after Trump introduced and implemented his tariff plan, virtually all major U.S. ports saw a decline in the number of container books. The Port of Portland in Oregon saw a 50% drop in exports, and the Port of Los Angeles, the U.S.’s largest outpost, had 17% lower exports. From the week ending April 28, Vizion reported a 43% week-over-week decrease in containers.

By Yayoi Kusama

Port of Los Angeles executive director Gene Seroka warned last month of a “precipitous drop” in shipping volumes, saying American retailers will have fully stocked shelves for only about another six weeks.

Trump not only acknowledged the shipping slowdown in a Thursday press briefing announcing a trade deal with the UK; he seemed heartened by it.

“We’re seeing as a result that ports here in the U.S., the traffic has really slowed and now thousands of dockworkers and truck drivers are worried about their jobs,” a reporter said in the press briefing.

“That means we lose less money,” Trump said. “When you say it slowed down, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”

He really is the stupidest president in the 250-year history of this country. He thinks it’s a good that longshore workers, truck drivers, and workers at package delivery companies like UPS and Amazon are going lose their jobs? That store shelves will be empty? That small businesses will quickly go bankrupt? He’s a fucking moron.

The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania release an analysis of the economic effects of the Trump’s tariffs. Here’s the introductory summary:

Summary: Many trade models fail to capture the full harm of tariffs. PWBM projects Trump’s tariffs (April 8, 2025) will reduce long-run GDP by about 6% and wages by 5%. A middle-income household faces a $22K lifetime loss. These losses are twice as large as a revenue-equivalent corporate tax increase from 21% to 36%, an otherwise highly distorting tax.

Key Points

• Revenue Impact: President Trump’s tariff plan (as of April 8, 2025) is projected to raise significant revenue—over $5.2 trillion over 10 years on a conventional basis (with micro-elastic responses) and $4.5 trillion on a dynamic basis (with economic effects). This revenue could be used to reduce federal debt, thereby encouraging private investment.
• Comparison with a Corporate Tax Increase: Tariffs are estimated to raise about the same amount of revenue as increasing the corporate income tax from 21 to 36 percent, in the absence of these recent tariffs. While raising the corporate tax rate is generally seen as highly economically distorting, tariffs would reduce GDP and wages by more than twice as much. All future households are worse off. The estimated economic declines are likely lower bounds, with actual declines potentially even larger.
• Broader Economic Impact: Many existing trade and macroeconomic models fail to capture the full harm caused by tariffs. Larger tariffs reduce the openness of the economy, including international capital flows. This is especially costly under the nation’s current baseline debt path, which is increasing faster than GDP, that is generally excluded from trade models or treated as neutral (Ricardian). U.S. households would need to purchase more bonds, requiring bond prices to fall (yields increase), domestic capital investment prices to fall (the marginal product of capital increases), or both. Even conservatively assuming only domestic capital investment prices fall, the reduction in economic activity is more than twice as large as a tax increase on capital returns that raises the same amount of revenue.

I’m sure Trump hasn’t seen this report and wouldn’t understand it if he did.

China is poised to profit from Trump’s tariff obsession. David Pierson at The New York Times: This Is the Trade Conflict Xi Jinping Has Been Waiting For.

Xi Jinping has been preparing for this moment for years.

In April 2020, long before President Trump launched a trade war that would shake the global economy, China’s top leader held a meeting with senior Communist Party officials and laid out his vision for turning the tables on the United States in a confrontation.

Tensions between his government and the first Trump administration had been simmering over an earlier round of tariffs and technology restrictions. Things got worse after the emergence of Covid, which ground global trade to a halt and exposed how much the United States, and the rest of the world, needed China for everything from surgical masks to pain medicines.

Cat catching mouse, by Koson Ohara

Faced with Washington’s concerns about the trade imbalance, China could have opened its economy to more foreign companies, as it had pledged to do decades ago. It could have bought more American airplanes, crude oil and soybeans, as its officials had promised Mr. Trump during trade talks. It could have stopped subsidizing factories and state-owned companies that made steel and solar panels so cheaply that many American manufacturers went out of business.

Instead, Mr. Xi chose an aggressive course of action.

Chinese leaders must “tighten international production chains’ dependence on our country, forming a powerful capacity to counter and deter foreign parties from artificially disrupting supplies” to China, Mr. Xi said in his speech to the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission in 2020.

Put simply: China should dominate supplies of things the world needs, to make its adversaries think twice about using tariffs or trying to cut China off.

A bit more:

Mr. Xi has ramped up exports and deepened China’s position as the world’s leading base for manufacturing, in part by directing the state-controlled commercial banking system to lend an extra $2 trillion to industrial borrowers over the past four years, according to data from China’s central bank. He has also introduced new weapons of economic warfare to the country’s arsenal: export controls, antimonopoly laws and blacklists for hitting back at American companies.

So when the current Trump administration slapped huge tariffs on Chinese goods, China was able to go on the offensive. Besides retaliating with its own taxes, it imposed export restrictions on a wide range of critical minerals and magnets, the global supply of which China had cornered. Such minerals are essential for assembling everything from cars and drones to robots and missiles.

In the United States, the looming threat of empty store shelves and higher consumer prices is putting pressure on the Trump administration. The prices of some critical minerals have tripled since China unveiled its curbs, according to Argus Media, a London commodities research firm.

“It’s about flipping the leverage so that the world is reliant on China, and China is reliant on no one. It is a reversal of what Xi has been so irritated about, which is that China was so dependent on the West,” said Kirsten Asdal, a former intelligence adviser at the U.S. Department of Defense who now heads a China-focused consultancy firm, Asdal Advisory.

Trump’s attitude toward natural disasters

We’re approaching hurricane season, and it looks like states are going to be on their own when such disasters hit. Here’s the latest on Trump’s plans for FEMA.

CNN: Trump’s acting FEMA chief fired a day after breaking from the administration.

The acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been fired one day after he broke with fellow members of the administration when he told lawmakers he does not support dismantling the agency, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed to CNN.

Cameron Hamilton, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, was escorted out of FEMA’s headquarters on Thursday, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.

“It’s at the discretion of (Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem) to have the personnel she prefers,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told CNN, confirming that DHS official David Richardson will take over for Hamilton effective immediately. McLaughlin declined to explain why Hamilton was removed from the post.

The move comes one day after Hamilton defended FEMA during testimony in front of the House Appropriations Committee.

Woman and Cat, by Ukiyo-e Kuniyoshi

“As the senior advisor to the President on disasters and emergency management, and to the Secretary of Homeland Security, I do not believe it is in the best interest the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” Hamilton told the committee Wednesday. “Having said that, I am not in a position to make decisions and impact outcomes on whether or not a determination as consequential as that should be made. That is a conversation that should be had between the President of the United States and this governing body.”

For months, both Trump and Noem, whose Department of Homeland Security oversees FEMA, have called for the agency to be “eliminated.” On Tuesday, Noem reaffirmed that stance when she took questions from the same House committee.

“President Trump has been very clear since the beginning that he believes that FEMA and its response in many, many circumstances has failed the American people, and that FEMA, as it exists today, should be eliminated in empowering states to respond to disasters with federal government support.” Noem told the committee.

The Associated Press reports on the new FEMA boss: ‘Don’t get in my way,’ the new acting head of federal disaster agency warns in call with staff.

The new head of the federal agency tasked with responding to disasters across the country warned staff in a meeting Friday not to try to impede upcoming changes, saying that “I will run right over you” while also suggesting policy changes that would push more responsibilities to the states.

David Richardson, a former Marine Corps officer who served in Afghanistan, Iraq and Africa, was named acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Thursday just after Cameron Hamilton, who’d been leading the agency, also in an acting role, was fired.

Richardson has been the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for countering weapons of mass destruction. He does not appear to have any experience in managing natural disasters, but in an early morning call with the entire agency staff he said that the agency would stick to its mission and said he’d be the one interpreting any guidance from President Donald Trump.

Prefacing his comments with the words “Now this is the tough part,” Richardson said during the call with staffers across the thousands-strong agency that he understands people can be nervous during times of change. But he had a warning for those who might not like the changes — a group he estimated to be about 20% of any organization.

“Don’t get in my way if you’re those 20% of the people,” he said. “I know all the tricks.”

“Obfuscation. Delay. Undermining. If you’re one of those 20% of the people and you think those tactics and techniques are going to help you, they will not because I will run right over you,” he said. “I will achieve the president’s intent. I am as bent on achieving the president’s intent as I was on making sure that I did my duty when I took my Marines to Iraq.”

He sounds nice. On his plans for the future:

In a preview of what might be coming in terms of changes in policy, Richardson also said there would be more “cost-sharing with the states.”

“We’re going to find out how to do things better, and we’re going find out how to push things down to the states that should be done at the state level. Also going to find out how we can do more cost sharing with the states,” he said.

This issue — how much states, as opposed to the federal government, should pay for disaster recovery — has been a growing concern, especially at a time of an increasing number of natural disasters that often require Congress to repeatedly replenish the federal fund that pays for recovery.

But states often argue that they are already paying for most disaster recoveries on their own and are only going to the federal government for those events truly outside of their ability to respond.

Read more at the AP link.

Trump’s latest Surgeon General appointment

Supposedly, Trump appointed a woman who is not a doctor at the behest of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but allies of Kennedy argue that she’s not radical enough.

The Washington Post: Uproar over surgeon general pick exposes MAHA factions among RFK Jr. allies.

The backlash to President Donald Trump’s new surgeon general nominee, an ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has exposed divisions in the nascent “Make America Healthy Again” movement as it gains political power.

By Katzuaki Horitomo Kitamura

Casey Means, the nominee, has been a central figure in the movement and key Kennedy ally. She promotes diet as a root cause of illness and chronic disease, echoing Kennedy’s focus on nutrition.

Trump praised Means as someone who holds “impeccable MAHA credentials,” but influential people in Kennedy’s orbit countered that she is insufficiently devoted to opposing vaccines, criticizing Means within hours of the announcement and describing her as unqualified.

In posts on X, the primary social media platform for the anti-vaccine movement, some vocal allies of Kennedy’s said the selection shows he lacks influence in the Trump administration.

“The new Surgeon General has never called for the COVID shots to be pulled off the market. That’s why she was picked,” Mary Talley Bowden, founder of the anti-coronavirus vaccine group Americans for Health Freedom, posted on X. “Kennedy is powerless.”

Good grief! This is worse than I ever imagined.

The conflict over the nominee for a lower-profile federal office reflects broader tensions over who wields influence in developing administration health policy and how far Kennedy must go to satisfy the demands of his MAHA movement. The surgeon general’s main role is as the nation’s family doctor, using a bully pulpit to dispense advice on smoking, loneliness, gun violence, alcohol and other health matters. It is a powerful platform, one that can help shape Americans’ views on important medical questions.

“This is really the first big fracture,” said Tara C. Smith, professor of epidemiology at Kent State University College of Public Health, who monitors anti-vaccine activists.“The surgeon general is the one who is usually out there and the face of the administration.”

As Means came under online assault, Kennedy posted twice on X in her defense on Thursday, calling her a “juggernaut against the ossified medical conventions.” He said the attacks were driven by “entrenched interests” and “industry-funded social media gurus,” though much of the criticism came from his own supporters.

“The goal of MAHA is to reform the largest and most powerful industry in the United States,” Kennedy said in a lengthy afternoon post, referring to the movement he developed during his unsuccessful presidential campaign. “I have little doubt that these companies and their conflicted media outlets will continue to pay bloggers and other social media influencers to weaponize innuendo to slander and vilify Casey, the same way they try to defame me and President Donald Trump.

The insane people have truly taken over our government.

Trump’s crackdown on immigrants

The New York Times: Trump Calls for 20,000 Extra Officers to Help With Deportation Efforts.

President Trump ordered the Department of Homeland Security on Friday to increase the deportation force of the United States by 20,000 officers, a move that would lead to an enormous expansion of immigration enforcement if realized.

Japanese Girl with Cat, by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

In a provision tucked into a presidential proclamation focused on pushing undocumented immigrants to leave the country voluntarily, Mr. Trump called on the Department of Homeland Security to soon begin “deputizing and contracting with state and local law enforcement officers, former federal officers, officers and personnel within other federal agencies, and other individuals.”

It was unclear how such an effort would be funded, one of several major logistical hurdles to such a large operation. There are now around 6,000 officers focused on deportation efforts at Immigration and Custom Enforcement.

Mr. Trump has pushed to deputize state and local law enforcement officers for immigration enforcement before, and Department of Homeland Security officials have already signed a series of agreements with local law enforcement in the months since took office. Late last month, local law enforcement officials in Florida assisted ICE in an operation that led to the arrest of more than 1,100 migrants across the state.

The Trump administration has spent the past few months attempting to make good on the president’s promise of mass deportations by conducting sweeping raids in major cities, arresting international students and allowing officers more freedom where they make arrests, like in courthouses. But it has still struggled to reach the pace that would be necessary for Mr. Trump’s expansive deportation goals.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has turned to pushing for migrants to leave the country on their own accord, a concept known as “self-deportation.” Earlier this week, department officials said they would pay migrants $1,000 and the cost of their travel if they left the country voluntarily and used a government app to do so.

In his proclamation Friday, Mr. Trump repeated that call, labeling it “project homecoming.”

Read about Project Homecoming here.

Dakinikat wrote last night about Stephen Miller’s plan to revoke the right to due process for immigrants.

Kyle Cheney at Politico: Judges warn Trump’s mass deportations could lay groundwork to ensnare Americans.

A fundamental promise by America’s founders — that no one should be punished by the state without a fair hearing — is under threat, a growing chorus of federal judges say.

That concept of “due process under law,” borrowed from the Magna Carta and enshrined in the Bill of Rights, is most clearly imperiled for the immigrants President Donald Trump intends to summarily deport, they say, but U.S. citizens should be wary, too.

Little girl with umbrella and cat, by Ukiyo-E

Across the country, judges appointed by presidents of both parties — including Trump himself — are escalating warnings about what they see as an erosion of due process caused by the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. What started with a focus on people Trump has deemed “terrorists” and “gang members” — despite their fierce denials — could easily expand to other groups, including Americans, these judges warn.

“When the courts say due process is important, we’re not unhinged, we’re not radicals,” U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, a Washington, D.C.-based appointee of President Joe Biden, said at a recent hearing. “We are literally trying to enforce a process embodied in probably the most significant document with respect to peoples’ rights against tyrannical government oppression. That’s what we’re doing here. Okay?”

It’s a fight that judges are increasingly casting as existential, rooted in the 5th Amendment’s guarantee that “no person shall … be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” The word “person,” courts have noted, makes no distinction between citizens or noncitizens. The Supreme Court has long held that this fundamental promise extends to immigrants in deportation proceedings. In a 1993 opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia called that principle “well-established.” [….]

“If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” wondered J. Harvie Wilkinson, a Ronald Reagan appointee to the Richmond-based 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. Wilkinson described an “incipient crisis” but also an opportunity to rally around the rule of law.

That’s all I have for today. What stories are you following?