Donald Trump's latest Liberation Day means another dark day for America
It is, sadly, easier to see why Canada got whacked with a 35 per cent levy on some of its exports – and Donald Trump's tariff tactics do have a hint of the mob about them. Mr Trump suggested that Canada's decision to recognise the state of Palestine as a sovereign nation would make it harder to achieve a trade deal, and he also mentioned the scourge of fentanyl. But then again, Mexico, which has also recognised Palestine and is by far the more important source of the drug, has been granted a 90-day tariff reprieve.
Ever since the opening salvo in the Trump tariff war on 2 April – so-called Liberation Day – the shifting schedules and random pauses have lacked both rhyme and reason. Even at the time, their supposed 'reciprocity' was ridiculed. They have generated huge uncertainty, and, for a time, did so much damage to the dollar and US Treasuries on the capital markets that even Mr Trump had to make a tactical retreat.
In fact, the US president's observed tendency to cave in whenever a trading 'partner' showed any sign of resistance led to the unwelcome 'Taco' sobriquet – 'Trump Always Chickens Out'.
Some countries, such as the UK, Japan and the EU member states, have breathed a sigh of relief that they have escaped the worst, while others – often impoverished ones with no diplomatic leverage, such as Bangladesh and Lesotho – will find it difficult to cope with tariffs that are now considered moderate, but would have seemed shocking even a few years ago.
Yet the game, even now, is not over. China – the second-largest economy in the world, and America's most formidable rival – has been left out of this supposedly final list of tariff increases. The trade talks between the two economic giants in Stockholm are dragging on, the prohibitive mutual tariffs having been abandoned, and they may well be extended past the next deadline of 12 August.
President Trump met his match in Xi Jinping, and will not be imposing any further punitive trade sanctions on China for fear of another tit-for-tat escalation. Thus far, the markets have received the latest news of tariffs with some equanimity, but a collapse in trade between the world's two greatest economies would generate the kind of turmoil Mr Trump doesn't need right now.
Even assuming that the eventual trade truce with China avoids disaster, these US tariffs are, in broad terms, the highest since 1934 and the era of the notorious Smoot-Hawley Act, which helped to strangle world trade and exacerbated the Great Depression. The Trump tariffs are no less damaging to world trade, and thus to economic growth, including that of the United States.
But these restrictions on trade are what Mr Trump's Maga 'base' voted for, the folk memory of the previous disastrous experiment with tariffs having faded. The president's winning slogan was 'America First', epitomising a zero-sum, nationalistic view of the world, and unfortunately, he has proved as good as his word on inauguration day: 'Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.' Words that were both misguided and economically illiterate, naturally – but a promise kept.
Many of the worst fears of America's friends and allies are coming true in these early months of Mr Trump's second term. With far more preparation than took place prior to his first term (which followed an election that, reputedly, he never expected to win), the US president has pressed on with his protectionist, isolationist, natalist agenda with speed and determination, surrounded by mostly underqualified, grotesquely sycophantic cronies.
The judiciary is increasingly cowed, and Congress is listless in defending the constitution. The tendency to Caesarism is apparent in everything from the theatrical executive orders to the grandiose golden remodelling of the White House, and the contempt for the chair of the US Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell – a 'moron', apparently.
Mr Trump thinks he can, with a stroke of a Sharpie, abolish the birthright to citizenship enshrined in the 14th amendment, passed in 1868. His conception of 'America First' is more America Alone, yet everything he does weakens American power and prosperity. It is an inward-looking, selfish, exclusionary approach. Undoubtedly it enjoys a political constituency, but ultimately it will prove self-defeating.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
2 minutes ago
- The Independent
Blow for Trump's ICE raids as court upholds ban on snatching people based on appearance or job
The Trump administration suffered another blow to its mass deportation agenda on Friday after an appeals court upheld a lower court's ruling that prevents Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from detaining a person based on their appearance, native language, or job. A three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Los Angeles said the plaintiffs, a cohort of five individuals and three immigration advocacy organizations, were likely to succeed on their claim that ICE agents violated the Fourth Amendment by relying on four factors to form reasonable suspicion to support detention stops. Those four factors include apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or English with an accent, presence at a particular location such as a laborer pick-up site, and the type of work a person does. Three plaintiffs who are day laborers said in their original lawsuit against Trump administration officials that they were waiting to be picked up to go to a construction site job when ICE agents swooped in and intimidated them. The plaintiffs said the immigration law enforcement officers never identified themselves, stated they had arrest warrants, nor informed the plaintiffs of the bases for the arrests. The Ninth Circuit panel upheld a previous temporary injunction set by District Court Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong in June. In keeping with Trump's mass deportation agenda, immigration law enforcement officers were deployed throughout Southern California to begin conducting sweeping raids. Many of those raids, according to the lawsuit, were conducted at 'certain types of businesses' such as car washes, because immigration law enforcement officials determined those businesses were more likely to hire people without legal documentation. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit referred to those as 'roving patrols' and said they were being detained without reasonable suspicion. The Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable search and seizures. The raids, which led to protests in downtown Los Angeles back in May, have been challenged by multiple individuals and immigration advocacy groups. One plaintiff, Jason Brian Gavidia, said ICE agents stopped him in June after he stepped onto the sidewalk outside of a tow yard in Montebello, California. Gavidia, who is an American citizen, identifies as Latino and said ICE agents pushed him up against a chain-link fence and interrogated him. Even after Gavidia gave ICE agents his Real ID, they seemingly did not believe him. In her earlier ruling, Frimpong said Gavidia and other plaintiffs were likely to succeed 'in proving that the federal government is indeed conducting roving patrols without reasonable suspicion and denying access to lawyers.' Frimpong ordered immigration law enforcement not to rely solely on the four factors 'except as permitted by law.' While the appeals court panel upheld much of Frimpong's ruling, they did strike the 'except as permitted by law,' saying that language was too vague.
Daily Mail
3 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Top Democrat eats his words as he makes staggering admission about Trump's tariffs
Senator John Fetterman broke with the Democrat party over President Donald Trump 's tariffs to admit the policy is 'going well'. Since winning his seat in 2023, the Pennsylvanian has become a loud voice on Capitol Hill. In March, he previously disagreed with Trump's policy, telling The Hill he didn't understand why the US leader was 'picking all of these kind of tariffs with our allies', especially with the US and Mexico. 'There might be issues like fentanyl or some of those, but that doesn't mean we have to punch them in the mouth, because that's not making America great.' But now he has praised the president's sweeping tariffs, as well as liberal comedian Bill Maher who also recently came to the same conclusion. 'I'm a huge fan of Bill Maher, and I mean, I think he's really one of the oracles for my party, and he acknowledged it. It's like, hey, he thought that the tariffs were going to tank the economy, and then he acknowledged that it didn't,' Fetterman told Fox News Digital. 'So, for me, it seems like the EU thing has been going well, and I guess we'll see how it happens with China.' Maher, a comedian and host of HBO Real Time, acknowledged he jumped the gun in his most recent episode of his Club Random podcast, where he cited his own estimation that the tariffs would have destroyed the US economy 'by July'. 'I remember I, along with probably most people, were saying at the beginning, "Oh, you know, by the 4th of July",' Maher recalled. 'The economy was going to be tanked by then. 'But that didn't happen,' Maher, who met Trump at the White House in April, said. Many Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren, have balked at Trump's tariff policy and many said it would lead to increased consumer prices. Fetterman's comments came as Trump signed an executive order Thursday that would have new tariffs on dozens of US trading partners to go into effect in seven days. Trump imposed a 35 percent tariff on all Canadian goods not covered by the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. Trump's 35 percent tariff was announced amidst a string of surprise modifications to his reciprocal tariffs on Thursday. His executive order was issued shortly after 7pm. It came after a flurry of tariff-related activity in recent days, as the White House announced agreements with various nations and blocs ahead of Trump's self-imposed Aug. 1 deadline. Trump had already secured about a dozen deals, with a mix between formal signed agreements and announced frameworks. Fetterman's comments as Trump signed an executive order Thursday that would have new tariffs on dozens of US trading partners to go into effect in seven days But it was still far short of the '90 deals in 90 days' touted by Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro back in April. He has been using changing deadlines – and the threats of high US tariffs he has announced publicly – to try to leverage the opening of foreign markets while bringing down the tariffs paid on imports. To sell the push to Americans, he has been touting new tariff revenues, with $150 billion collected in July, while floating new rebate checks. As per the new levies, Switzerland has been hit with a 39 percent tariff, Syria was lobbed a 41 percent tariff, Laos and Myanmar each received a 40 percent tariff and Iraq and Serbia joined Canada with a 35 percent tariff. Algeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Libya and South Africa all were handed 30 percent tariffs.
The Guardian
9 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Reopen Alcatraz? Indigenous people say it's more than madness – it's historical erasure
When Donald Trump pledged to reopen the notorious Alcatraz prison as a detention center for immigrants and violent offenders, the idea was met with contempt and mockery. San Francisco leaders have called it Trump's 'stupidest idea yet' and threatened to cut off the island's sewage and garbage services if the president acts on his carceral ambitions. But for the Indigenous people of the San Francisco Bay Area, the idea was more than just laughable. It was an affront to their identity, and an attempt to erase the island's history as a site of Indigenous resistance. After the federal prison shut down in 1963, the island took on a second life as the scene of one of the most important acts of Native American resistance in modern history. Between November 1969 and June 1971, Indigenous activists occupied Alcatraz for 19 months, demanding rights and resources for Native people. Now, as Trump appears set on pushing ahead despite the extraordinary costs and logistical hurdles, tribal members are fighting to preserve a history that is still little-known beyond Indigenous circles. Alcatraz has always loomed large for April McGill. Growing up in Mishewal Wappo territory in California's Sonoma county, McGill, who is a member of the Yuki and Wappo tribes, frequently heard stories from the veterans of the occupation who lived in her community. Her aunt even babysat the children of Richard and Annie Oakes, who led the movement. When she moved to San Francisco as a teenager, the island's shadow grew – especially as McGill, who is now executive director of the city's American Indian cultural center, became increasingly involved in activism herself, and learned about the pivotal role the occupation played in maintaining Native sovereignty in California and nationwide. 'It holds a really personal, deep place to me,' McGill said. 'It symbolizes so much of our history.' McGill and other Indigenous leaders from the San Francisco Bay Area were appalled when the Trump administration confirmed its plans to reopen the island, even sending a delegation out to tour the shuttered facilities in July. Beyond erasing the historical significance the island holds for Native peoples, McGill says that the notion of using the site to pursue the president's anti-immigrant agenda hearkens back to the state's history of violence against Indigenous groups – and that any actions the administration takes will be met with pushback from the community. '[They want to use it as a] place to commit inhumane violence against people who are here trying to escape violence,' McGill said. 'It's very retraumatizing. It wasn't that long ago that we were violently displaced and put in camps. We see this as a repeat of that history.' Most of these criticisms of Trump's plan focuses on the cost of refurbishing the site, which was shuttered more than 60 years ago – instead becoming a historical landmark and tourist destination run by the National Parks Service since 1972 – precisely because the infrastructure had become too expensive to maintain. Estimates put the cost of modernizing the facility at as much as $2bn, to which San Francisco's Mayor Daniel Lurie responded that the city 'could use that funding to keep our streets safe and clean'. But for Indigenous leaders, the proposal's audacity goes beyond its hefty price tag. According to Virginia Hedrick, executive director of the California Consortium for Urban Indian Health, Trump's aims undermine Alcatraz's status as a 'beacon of resistance' for Indigenous people in California and nationwide. That's because the 1969 occupation was more than a symbolic act of defiance – it spurred meaningful changes in federal policy with regards to Native sovereignty and support for tribal nations. 'What came out of the occupation were tangible things,' Hedrick said, pointing to the development of California's Indian health delivery system, which she says was floundering before protesters on Alcatraz demanded better healthcare. 'This movement was about honoring the treaties, making the federal government make good on its promises.' It was in response to the occupation that President Richard Nixon shifted the federal policy on Native treaties from 'termination' to one of 'self-determination' for Native peoples, echoed the writer and film-maker Julian Brave NoiseCat, who grew up in the Bay Area and descends from British Columbia's Tsq'escen and Lil'Wat First Nations. As a teenager, NoiseCat spent Thursday evenings at East Oakland's Intertribal Friendship House practicing powwow drum and dance. At the end of the night, he said, participants would gather and sing the American Indian Movement song. 'We would sing that song to carry forward the movement that had begun at Alcatraz and that endures to this day,' he said. To NoiseCat and others, the lack of acknowledgment of these histories in current discussions about Alcatraz's future illuminates broader issues of Indigenous erasure. 'For me, Alcatraz represents the starting point of the Native rights movement,' he said, calling the occupation the 'Montgomery bus boycott of Indigenous rights', in reference to the seminal civil rights protest. That erasure extends to discussions of how federal dollars could be better spent. Core goals of the Alcatraz occupation included establishing an Indigenous cultural center and college, explained McGill. Today, the cultural center she runs can't afford a brick-and-mortar homebase in San Francisco, forcing it to operate virtually. 'Give that money to American Indian people so that we can have a cultural center, so we can create housing,' she said, adding that Indigenous people have among the highest rates of homelessness, health disparities, and incarceration in San Francisco. 'And yet, we're always the last at the table,' she said. For Hedrick, a member of California's Yurok tribe, that repeated dismissal is 'par for the course' considering the Ohlone people – the tribe indigenous to the lands of the Bay Area, including the island of Alcatraz – remain federally unrecognized. 'The federal government is proposing rebuilding, resurrecting a prison, estimated to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, while continuing to overlook the Ohlone people,' Hedrick said. 'That is complete Indigenous erasure right there.' Hedrick is committed to ensuring that the Indigenous ties to Alcatraz are central to the island's public perception. She makes a point of visiting the island at least a few times every year to teach about the American Indian Movement. And she emphasizes that the island is home to important cultural events, including a sunrise gathering that takes place every October for Indigenous Peoples Day. She says that if the administration moves forward with reopening the island as a prison, the community is prepared to fight back. 'We'll see communities gather again,' she said. 'We have attorneys, we movement-building organizations in California who will organize and work in lockstep. 'We've come a long way.'
