crash

“Golden age of America?” Markets plummet after Trump announces tariffs

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 2, 2025

Just five months ago, on October 19, 2024, The Economist ran a special report on America’s economy. That economy was, the magazine said, “the envy of the world.” Today, stock market futures plummeted after President Donald J. Trump announced that he will impose a 10% tariff on all imports to the United States, with higher rates on about 60 countries he claims engage in unfair trade practices, including China, Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea, as well as the European Union.

Dow Jones Industrial Average futures lost more than 1,000 points upon the news, falling by 2.5%; the S&P 500 dropped 3.6%.

Trump’s erratic approach to the economy had already rattled markets, which dropped significantly in the first quarter of this year, and consumer confidence, which recently hit a twelve-year low. Trump waited until the stock market had closed today before he announced the new tariffs. Then, in a speech in the White House Rose Garden, he said: “For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike. But it is not going to happen anymore.” Instead, he said, tariffs would create “the golden age of America.”

“Never before has an hour of Presidential rhetoric cost so many people so much,” former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers posted. “The best estimate of the loss from tariff policy is now [close] to $30 trillion or $300,000 per family of four.” “The Trump Tariff Tax is the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history,” posted former vice president Mike Pence.

Trump claims he is imposing “reciprocal tariffs” and says they are about half of what other countries levy on U.S. goods. In fact, the numbers he is using for his claim that other countries are imposing high tariffs on U.S. goods are bonkers. Economist Paul Krugman points out that the European Union places tariffs of less than 3% on average on U.S. goods, while Trump maintained its tariffs are 39%.

Krugman said he had no idea where that number had come from, but financial journalist James Surowiecki figured out that the White House “just took our trade deficit with [each] country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.” He called it “extraordinary nonsense.” Washington Post economic writer Catherine Rampell posted that she was reluctant to amplify Surowiecki’s theory that the tariff rates were based on such a “dumb calculation,” but then the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative confirmed it.

Certain observers in business had apparently persuaded themselves that Trump didn’t really intend to raise tariffs very much and that his many vows to do so were simply rhetoric, since economists agree that tariffs are a tax on consumers and will raise inflation and slow down growth. Today’s tariffs are higher than expected, and business leaders are alarmed.

JPMorgan tonight said that they “view the full implementation of these policies as a substantial macro economic shock not currently incorporated in our forecasts” and that “these policies, if sustained, would likely push the US and global economy into recession this year.”

Economist Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations agreed. He told David J. Lynch and Jeff Stein of the Washington Post: “In the short run, the effect is probably a recession. It’s going to raise the price of so many goods that can’t be made in the United States…. In the long run, it’s a vision of the U.S. that is very isolated from the world.”

But not from every other country. While Trump imposed tariffs on Australia’s remote Heard and McDonald Islands, which are uninhabited except by wildlife like seals and penguins, it did not put tariffs on Russia. A different financial shift lifted sanctions against senior Russian negotiator Kirill Dmitriev, to permit him to travel to Washington, D.C., today to meet with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff for what Alex Marquardt, Jennifer Hansler, and Alayna Treene of CNN refer to as “talks on strengthening relations between the two countries as they seek to end the war in Ukraine.”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted tonight that the tariffs make no economic sense because “[t]hey aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool.” Murphy suggests they are a way to make private industry dependent on the president the same way he has tried to make law firms and universities dependent on him. Industries and companies “will need to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief.”

Murphy warns that “[t]he tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship…[s]o that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry. As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears.”

There is also Trump’s apparent fascination with President William McKinley, who held office from 1897 to 1901, at a time when high tariffs concentrated wealth in the hands of industrialists while workers and farmers, as well as their families, faced injury, hunger, and homelessness from dangerous working conditions, low wages and commodity prices, and seasonal factory closings.

Trump has frequently claimed those years were the nation’s wealthiest, and today he helped to explain his focus on that era when he referred to the 1913 Revenue Act, a law that has angered the right wing for decades. That act began the process of replacing the high tariffs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with an income tax, thus shifting the burden of funding the treasury from ordinary Americans through tariffs to wealthier Americans through the income tax. At least some of Trump’s tariff plans seem tied to his enthusiasm for tax cuts on wealthy individuals and corporations.

But in trying to reestablish the financial patterns of the late nineteenth century—patterns that led to profound economic instability in the U.S., including economic crashes—Trump is undermining the system of global trade that has fostered international cooperation since World War II. CNN global economic analyst Rana Foroohar told CNN’s John Vause: “This is Trump saying…I am going to overturn globalization as we’ve known it.” She added: “I’m hoping it doesn’t push the U.S. and the world into recession.”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo makes the important point that “Presidents have no inherent power over tariffs whatsoever.” The Constitution gives to Congress, not the president, the power to impose tariffs. But the International Emergency Economic Powers Act allows the president to impose tariffs if he declares a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act, which Trump did today, declaring a “national emergency to increase our competitive edge, protect our sovereignty, and strengthen our national and economic security.”

That same law allows Congress to end such a declaration of emergency, but so far, Republicans have declined to do so. Today the Senate rebuked Trump by passing a resolution to block his tariffs on Canadian products, with four Republicans—Susan Collins (ME), Mitch McConnell (KY), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Rand Paul (KY)—joining Democrats to pass the resolution. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is unlikely to take the measure up.

Cory Booker makes history

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 1, 2025

Today Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) made history.

For more than 25 hours he held the floor of the Senate, not reading from the phone book or children’s literature, as some of his predecessors have done, but delivering a coherent, powerful speech about the meaning of America and the ways in which the Trump regime is destroying our democracy.

On the same day that John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that members of Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including national security advisor Michael Waltz, have been skirting presidential records laws and exposing national security by using Gmail accounts to conduct government business, and the same day that mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Booker launched a full-throated defense of the United States of America.

Booker began his marathon speech at 7:00 on the evening of March 31 with little fanfare. In a video recorded before he began, he said that he had “been hearing from people from all over my state and indeed all over the nation calling upon folks in Congress to do more, to do things that recognize the urgency—the crisis—of the moment. And so we all have a responsibility, I believe to do something different to cause, as John Lewis said, good trouble, and that includes me.”

On the floor of the Senate, Booker again invoked the late Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who had been one of the original Freedom Riders challenging racial segregation in 1961 and whose skull law enforcement officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 as Lewis joined the marchers on their way to Montgomery to demand their voting rights be protected.

Booker reminded listeners that Lewis was famous for telling people to “get in good trouble, necessary trouble. Help redeem the soul of America.” Booker said that in the years since Trump took office, he has been asking himself, “[H]ow am I living up to his words?”

“Tonight I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis and I believe that not in a partisan sense,” he said, “because so many of the people that have been reaching out to my office in pain, in fear, having their lives upended—so many of them identify themselves as Republicans.”

Standing for the next 25 hours and 5 minutes, without a break to use the restroom and pausing only when colleagues asked questions to enable him to rest his voice, Booker called out the Trump administration’s violations of the Constitution and detailed the ways in which the administration is hurting Americans. Farmers have lost government contracts, putting them in a financial crisis. Cuts to environmental protections that protect clean air and water are affecting Americans’ health. Housing is unaffordable, and the administration is making things worse. Cuts to education and medical research and national security breaches have made Americans less safe. The regime accidentally deported a legal resident because of “administrative error” and now says it cannot get him back.

“These are not normal times in America, and they should not be treated as such,” he said. “This is our moral moment. This is when the most precious ideas of our country are being tested…. Where does the Constitution live, on paper or in our hearts?”

Throughout his speech, Booker emphasized the power of the American people. He told their stories and read their letters. And he urged them to stand up for the country. “In this democracy,” he said, “the power of people is greater than the people in power.”

He emphasized the power of the people by calling out South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who until today held the record for the longest Senate speech: a filibuster he launched in 1957 to try to stop the passage of that year’s Civil Rights Act. Thurmond spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes, but unlike Booker, who used his time to make a powerful and coherent case for reclaiming American democracy, Thurmond filled time with tactics like reading from an encyclopedia.

But, Booker noted, Thurmond’s attempt to stop racial equality failed. After he ended his filibuster, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and Black Americans and their allies used it to demand the equal protection of the law, including the right to vote. “I’m not here…because of his speech,” Booker said. “I’m here despite his speech. I’m here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.”

“It is time to heed the words of the man I began this whole thing with: John Lewis. I beg folks to take his example of his early days when he made himself determined to show his love for his country at a time the country didn’t love him, to love this country so much, to be such a patriot that he endured beatings, savagely, on the Edmund Pettus bridge, at lunch counters, on freedom rides. He said he had to do something. He would not normalize a moment like this. He would not just go along with business as usual. He wouldn’t know how to solve it, but there’s one thing that he would do, that I hope we all can do, that I think I did a little bit of tonight.

“He said for us to go out and cause some good trouble, necessary trouble, to redeem the soul of our nation. I want you to redeem the dream…. Let’s be bolder in America with a vision that inspires with hope. It starts with the people of the United States of America—that’s how this country started: ‘We the people.’ Let’s get back to the ideals that others are threatening, let’s get back to our founding documents…. Those imperfect geniuses had some very special words at the end of the Declaration of Independence…when our founders said we must mutually pledge, pledge to each other ‘our lives, our fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.’ We need that now from all Americans. This is a moral moment. It’s not left or right, it’s right or wrong.

“Let’s get in good trouble.

“My friend, madam president, I yield the floor.”

According to Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell, before he was through, Booker’s speech had been liked on TikTok 400 million times.

The people spoke today in special elections. Republican candidates in Florida won by about 14 points in each of two U.S. House races, but just five months ago, Republicans won those seats by 30 and 37 points. It appears that voters are angry at the Republican Party.

In Wisconsin, the state supreme court race showed a similar dynamic. The candidate endorsed by President Trump and backed by more than $20 million from Elon Musk, lost the race to his opponent, circuit court judge Susan Crawford. Musk had campaigned in the state for Crawford’s opponent, handing out two $1 million checks and saying that the election could determine “the future of America and Western Civilization.”

Crawford won by about 10 points.

“As a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls,” Crawford said in her victory speech, “I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin. And we won.”

Trump tells NBC News that he is considering a third presidential term

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

March 30, 2025

On the Fox News Channel this morning, Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett said: “President Trump has a long run vision of a golden age of America and we’re working really, really hard to get it out there in time. But I can’t give you any forward-looking guidance on what’s gonna happen this week. The president has got a heck of a lot of analysis before him, and he’s gonna make the right choice, I’m sure.”

The National Economic Council is the primary group the president uses to develop domestic and international economic policy, so the fact that Hassett appears to have no idea what’s coming is concerning. Trump has declared April 2 “Liberation Day” because he will announce big new tariffs, posting on his social media site on March 21: “For DECADES we have been ripped off and abused by every nation in the World, both friend and foe. Now it is finally time for the Good Ol’ USA to get some of that MONEY and RESPECT, BACK. GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!”

Other Trump regime officials appear similarly uninformed about Trump’s plans. Fox News Channel personality Shannon Bream asked Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, what to say to consumers who worry that tariffs are going to raise prices, he answered: “Trust in Trump.” He then claimed that “tariffs are tax cuts,” which makes sense only if he means that tariffs, which raise prices on consumers, might provide enough revenue for the government to enable Republicans to justify tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations.

Trump campaigned on the promise to “immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One,” but his tariffs have already helped to push inflation upward. Josh Dawsey and Ryan Felton of the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Trump warned the chief executive officers of “some of the country’s top auto manufacturers not to raise prices because of the 25% tariffs he has just put on cars and car parts, telling them that the tariffs are good for them.

On Saturday, Trump denied he had made such a request and told NBC News’s Kristen Welker that “I couldn’t care less if they raise prices, because people are going to start buying American cars.”

“I couldn’t care less,” he repeated. “I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are going to buy American-made cars. We have plenty.” A White House aide told NBC News that the president was referring to foreign car prices.

And then there is Friday’s story that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been taking not only his brother but also his wife along with him to “meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed.” Katherine Long, Max Colchester, Daniel Michaels, and Lindsay Wise of the Wall Street Journal note that her inclusion in such meetings is unusual. Jennifer Hegseth also accompanied Hegseth to his private meetings with senators during the process of his Senate confirmation, “making it awkward to ask questions about allegations related to infidelity and sexual misconduct.”

Both Trump and Hegseth have made it their goal to purge the United States of what they call “Marxism” and what Hegseth calls “woke sh*t”: that is, the racial, gender, and religious diversity that Americans have embraced since World War II. That means taking the government the country has built over the past 80 years down to the ground and rebuilding it as they imagine it was before, with men like them in charge.

The Trump regime is the result of at least 45 years of Republican rhetoric that undermined the idea of a government that worked for the good of everyone by claiming that such a government was “socialism” or “Marxism.” That argument had nothing to do with actual Marxism, which called for the people to take over farms and factories, and everything to do with America’s peculiar history.

During the Civil War of the 1860s, the Republicans in Congress both ended human enslavement in the U.S. except as punishment for crime and invented the nation’s first system of national taxation, including the income tax. After the war, racist former Confederates in the South refused to accept the idea that Black Americans were equal to their white neighbors and tried to force formerly enslaved people into subservience. To stop that from happening, Americans in 1868 added the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, putting the weight of the federal government behind equal rights. In 1870, Americans added to the Constitution the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing the right of Black men to vote. Also in 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to prosecute those in the South who continued to persecute their Black neighbors on grounds of race.

In response, former Confederates in 1871 began to maintain—falsely—that they had never objected to Black rights on racial grounds. What they opposed, they said, was that poor Black men, impoverished because of their time in slavery, had the right to vote. Those men would, they said, vote for services like roads and schools and hospitals, and such services could be paid for only through tax levies on propertied Americans who overwhelmingly were white men. Thus, permitting Black men to vote meant “socialism” that would destroy the United States. To restore true American values, former Confederates and their northern counterparts insisted, Black Americans must be shut out of a voice in government.

That rhetoric resurfaced after World War II. In that era, the vast majority of Americans embraced a government that worked for everyone by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights. But those Republicans eager to avoid regulation and taxation reached back to Reconstruction to insist that a government that worked in the interest of all Americans was redistributing wealth from hardworking Americans to undeserving minorities and women. Restoring true American values, they said, meant making sure that “Marxists” and minorities could not influence politics, especially after the 1965 Voting Rights Act restored voting rights to Black Americans and people of color.

That rhetoric that tied racism and taxes elected Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980, and it has since metastasized until the top seven donors to the 2024 political cycle together gave almost a billion dollars to Republicans, with Elon Musk alone contributing more than $291 million. The list, compiled by Open Secrets, shows that Democratic donors don’t kick in until number eight on the list, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who gave slightly more than $64 million to Democrats. George Soros, the Republicans’ supervillain, didn’t make the top 25. As those wealthy donors wish, the Trump administration is shredding the post–World War II government and has prioritized tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

Trump’s government is also firing women, Black and Brown Americans, and gender minorities from public positions and working to erase them from our history. MAGA Republicans have fired up their base against immigrants they claim are “invading” the United States, an exaggerated vision in which White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, for example, claims that “[w]e were invaded and occupied. Entire neighborhoods were conquered. Entire towns were subjugated. Our treasury was in the plundered. [sic]”

That wildly exaggerated vision has enabled Republicans to justify throwing overboard the due process on which American rights are based. On Friday, Representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN) told booing constituents: “You violated the rules, you are not entitled to due process.” In fact, in the United States, the due process of law is what establishes whether someone has violated the “rules,” otherwise known as the law.

Just how profoundly the administration is violating civil rights came through today when news broke of an “Alien Enemies Act Validation Guide” obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The guide lays out a point system by which officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can determine if an immigrant is eligible for rendition to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador. The guide tags people as members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang if they reach 8 points on a point system in which officers determine what seems to them a “gang tattoo” or a gang sign, or interact with those ICE says are gang members.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that nearly all of the criteria on the list are subjective, which helps to explain why so many people who are apparently unaffiliated with TdA were swept up in the rendition. “With this checklist,” Reichlin-Melnick writes, “ICE can declare any Venezuelan an ‘Alien Enemy’ without ANY concrete evidence—based solely on an ICE officer’s interpretation of tattoos and hand signs which may be completely innocent or the bad luck of having a roommate ICE thinks is TDA.”

The MAGA Republicans’ worldview is the same as that of the Confederates who preceded them: some people are better than others and have the right to rule. It is no coincidence that Trump recently called for the restoration of Confederate statues. But if that worldview is correct, then getting rid of President Joe Biden’s inclusive economy and hiring practices and putting white men in charge of everything should mean exactly what Trump is promising: a golden age of America.

Instead, the strong economy the Biden administration created is tumbling, and Trump administration officials seem to have no plan to stop it except to “Trust in Trump.” The officers in charge of keeping the nation safe have instead broken the law in an epic fail demonstrating that they have no foreign policy plan except military strikes highlighted with emojis. They appear to disdain national security procedures.

And the Signal scandal appears to have been just the tip of the iceberg. Tonight, Alexander Ward, Josh Dawsey, and Meridith McGraw of the Wall Street Journal reported that two U.S. officials told them that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz “has created and hosted multiple other sensitive national-security conversations on Signal with cabinet members.”

When the former Confederates called for cutting Black men out of the vote in the 1870s by insisting their votes would usher in socialism, Americans didn’t know whether a government elected by a wider range of Americans than in the past would thrive. In 2025 we have experienced not only 80 years of a government that created a strong economy and a stable world as it worked for all Americans. We have also experienced the four years recently past, in which the Biden administration demonstrated that such a government worked. It left us with a booming economy and strong national security that the Trump regime is now mangling.

Nonetheless, Trump is digging into the position that some people are better than others and have the right to rule. Today he told NBC News that he is considering a third presidential term, although that is explicitly unconstitutional. “I’m not joking,” he said, “There are methods which you could do it.”

“Have some pride, America. We are so much better than this guy thinks we are.”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

March 28, 2025 (Thursday)

“Another wipeout walloped Wall Street Friday,” Stan Choe of the Associated Press wrote today. The S&P 500 had one of its worst days in two years, dropping 2%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 715 points, losing 1.7% of its value. The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.7%. On Tuesday, news dropped that the administration’s blanket firings and wildly shifting tariff policies have dropped consumer confidence to a low it has not hit since January 2021. Today’s stock market tumble started after the Commerce Department released data showing that consumer prices are rising faster than economists expected.

AIG chief international economist James Knightley said: “We are moving in the wrong direction and the concern is that tariffs threaten higher prices, which means the inflation prints are going to remain hot.” Business leaders like lower interest rates, which reduce borrowing costs and make it cheaper to finance business initiatives, but with rising inflation, the Federal Reserve will be less likely to cut interest rates.

Makena Kelly of Wired reported today that billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) is planning to move the computer system of the Social Security Administration (SSA) off the old programming language it uses, COBOL, to a new system. In 2017, the SSA estimated that such a migration would take about five years. DOGE is planning for the migration to take just a few months, using artificial intelligence to complete the change.

Experts have expressed concern. Dan Hon, who runs a technology strategy company that helps the government modernize its services, told Kelly: “If you weren’t worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead.” More than 65 million Americans currently receive Social Security benefits. Today Representative Don Beyer (D-VA) recorded himself calling the SSA and being told by a recording that the wait times were more than two hours and that he should call back. And then the system hung up on him.

Musk told the Fox News Channel today that he plans to step down from DOGE in May, apparently at the end of the 130-day cap for the “special government employee” designation that enables him to avoid financial disclosures. In February, White House staffers suggested Musk would stay despite the limit.

Today the State Department told Congress it is shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) altogether by July 1. Whatever agency functions the administration approves will move into the State Department. Founded by President John F. Kennedy and enjoying bipartisan support, USAID administers programs for global health, disaster relief, long-term economic development, education, environmental protection, and democracy. It is widely perceived to be a key element of U.S. “soft power.”

USAID was created by Congress, and its funds are appropriated by Congress. Congress and the courts have established that the executive branch—the branch of government overseen by the president—cannot kill an agency Congress has created and cannot withhold appropriations Congress has made. The authors of Project 2025 want to challenge that principle and consolidate government power in the hands of the president. It appears they have chosen USAID as the test case.

As Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shatters science and health agencies, the nation’s top vaccine regulator, Dr. Peter Marks, submitted his resignation today after being given the choice to resign or be fired. Dan Diamond of the Washington Post noted that Marks has been at the Food and Drug Administration since 2012 and has been at the head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research since 2016.

In his resignation letter, Diamond says, Marks expressed his deep concern over the ongoing measles outbreak in the Southwest—now more than 450 cases—and warned that the outbreak “reminds us of what happens when confidence in well-established science underlying public health and well-being is undermined.” Marks said that although he was willing to work with Kennedy on his plan to review vaccine safety, “it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”

On Tuesday, news broke that Kennedy has tapped anti-vaccine activist David Geier to lead a study looking to link autism to vaccines, although that alleged link has been heavily studied and thoroughly debunked. Infectious disease journalist Helen Branswell notes that Geier does not have a medical degree and was disciplined in Maryland for practicing medicine without a license.

British investigative journalist Brian Deer, who has written about the hoax that vaccines cause autism, told Branswell: “If you want an independent source,… [you] wouldn’t go to somebody with no qualifications and a long track record of impropriety and incompetence.” But, he said, “[i]f you wanted to get in anybody off the street who would come up with the result that Kennedy would like to see, this would be your man.”

Tara Copp of the Associated Press reported today that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has done some targeted staffing, too. His younger brother Phil Hegseth is traveling to the Indo-Pacific with the secretary in his role at the Pentagon as a liaison and senior advisor to the Department of Homeland Security. Hegseth also employed his brother when he ran the nonprofit Concerned Veterans for America, where the younger Hegseth’s salary was $108,000 for his media work. Copp notes that a 1967 law “prohibits government officials from hiring, promoting or recommending relatives to any civilian position over which they exercise control.”

Hegseth and his colleagues are still in the hot seat for uploading the military’s attack plans against the Houthis in Yemen to Signal, an unsecure commercially available messaging app. Yesterday, Nancy A. Youssef, Alexander Ward, and Michael R. Gordon of the Wall Street Journal reported that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz identified a Houthi missile expert whose identity Israel had provided from a human source in Yemen, angering Israeli officials.

Americans, especially those with ties to the military, aren’t happy either. Military, the leading news website for service members, veterans, and their families, titled a story about the scandal “‘Different spanks for different ranks’: Hegseth’s Signal scandal would put regular troops in the brig.” Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that the story had “angered and bewildered” fighter pilots, who say “they can no longer be certain that the Pentagon is focused on their safety when they strap into cockpits.”

At a raucous town hall held today by Republican representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN), the crowd booed Spartz loudly when she said she would not call for the resignations of Waltz, Hegseth, and the rest of the people on the group chat.

All the mayhem created by the administration has created enough backlash that the White House appears concerned about upcoming special elections on April 1. One is for the seat in Florida’s District 6 that Waltz vacated when he became national security advisor. In 2024, Trump won that district by 30 points, and Republicans considered their candidate, state senator Randy Fine, whom Trump has strongly endorsed, to be such a shoo-in that he barely campaigned. His website features pictures of him with Trump but has only bullet points to explain his stand on issues.

Democrat Josh Weil, a middle-school math teacher who has outraised Fine by almost 10 to one, is polling within the margin of error for a victory in a contest where even a 10- to 15-point loss would show a dramatic collapse in Republican support. Weil has tied Fine to Musk’s unpopular DOGE and to the president, as well as to cuts to Social Security and Medicaid.

Trump is now personally campaigning for Fine and for the Republican candidate to fill the seat vacated by former representative Matt Gaetz in Florida District 1. There, Democratic candidate Gay Valimont is running against Republican Jimmy Patronis in a district that elected Trump with about 68% of the vote. Like Fine, Patronis is strongly backed by Trump and wants more cuts to the federal government; Gay is a former state leader for Moms Demand Action and focuses on healthcare and veterans’ services. She has criticized DOGE’s cuts to VA hospitals. Like Weil, she has significantly outraised her opponent.

Republicans are concerned enough about holding the seats that billionaire Elon Musk, who poured more than $291 million into the 2024 election to help Republicans, has begun to contribute to Republicans in Florida. On Tuesday he spent more than $10,000 apiece for texting services for the Florida candidates.

Musk has contributed far more than that—more than $20 million—to the April 1 election for a ten-year seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Trump loyalist Brad Schimel is running against circuit court judge Susan Crawford in a contest that has national significance. Wisconsin is evenly split between the parties, but when Republicans control the legislature and the supreme court, they suppress voting and heavily gerrymander the state in their favor. When liberals hold the majority on the court, they ease election rules and uphold fair maps. Currently, the state gerrymander gives Republicans 75% of the state’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives although voting in 2024 was virtually dead even. The makeup of the court could well determine the congressional districts of Wisconsin through 2041, through the redistricting that will take place after the 2030 census.

Musk has told voters that if Crawford wins, “then the Democrats will attempt to redraw the districts and cause Wisconsin to lose two Republican seats.” Not only has Musk said he is going to Wisconsin to speak before the election, but also he is handing out checks to voters who sign a petition against “activist judges,” a suggestion that it would not be fair to unskew the Republican gerrymander. Last night, Musk advertised a contest that would award two voters a million dollars each, with the condition that the winners had to have already voted.

This morning, Wisconsin Democrats issued a press release noting that Musk had “committed a blatant felony,” directly violating the Wisconsin law that prohibits offering anyone anything worth more than $1 to get them to “vote or refrain from voting.” Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler said that if Schimel “does not immediately call on Musk to end this criminal activity, we can only assume he is complicit.”

Musk deleted the tweet and then, eliminating the language that said people had to have voted, posted that he would give the checks to spokespeople for his petition. Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul sued to stop Musk “from any further promotion of the million-dollar gifts” and “from making any payments to Wisconsin electors to vote.” “The Wisconsin Department of Justice is committed to ensuring that elections in Wisconsin are safe, secure, free, and fair,” Kaul said in a statement. “We are aware of the offer recently posted by Elon Musk to award a million dollars to two people at an event in Wisconsin this weekend. Based on our understanding of applicable Wisconsin law, we intend to take legal action today to seek a court order to stop this from happening.”

MeidasTouch reposted Musk’s offer to “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote” and noted: “No matter what side of the aisle you are on, you should be appalled that a billionaire thinks he has the right to buy elections like this.” Former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party David Pepper posted: “Have some pride, America. We are so much better than this guy thinks we are.”