Social Security

State Terror: A brief guide for Americans

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By Timothy Snyder 4/15/2025

Yesterday the president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man who was mistakenly sent to a gulag in another country, celebrated the suffering of this innocent person, and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps.

This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped.

So let’s begin with language, because language is very important. When the state carries out criminal terror against its own people, it calls them the “criminals” or the the “terrorists.” During the 1930s, this was the normal practice. Looking back, we refer to Stalin’s “Great Terror,” but at the time it was the Stalinists who controlled the language. Today in Berlin stands an important museum called “Topography of Terror”; during the era it documents, it was the Jews and the chosen enemies of the regime who were called “terrorists.” Yesterday in the White House, the Salvadoran president showed the way, referring to Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a “terrorist” without any basis whatsoever. The Americans treated him as a criminal, even though he was charged with no crime.

The first part of controlling the language is inverting the meaning: whatever the government does is good, because by definition the its victims are the “criminals” and the “terrorists.” The second part is deterring the press, or anyone else, from challenging the perversion by associating anyone who objects with crime and terror. This was the role Stephen Miller played when he said yesterday in the White House that reporters “want foreign terrorists in the country who kidnap women and children.”

The control of language is necessary to undermine a legal or constitutional order. Our rule of law begins with notions such as the people and their rights. If politicians shift the framework to “criminals” and “terrorism,” then they are shifting the purpose of the state.

In the United States, we are governed by a Constitution. Basic to the Constitution is habeas corpus, the notion that the government cannot seize your body without a legal justification for doing so. If that does not hold, then nothing else does. If we have the law, then violence may not be committed by one person against another on the basis of namecalling or strong feelings. This applies to everyone, above all to the president, whose constitutional function is to enforce the laws.

Trump spoke of asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to find legal ways to abduct Americans and leave them in foreign concentration camps. But by “legal” what is meant are ways of escaping law, not applying it.

It is that anti-constitutional escapism that enables abuse. State terror involves not just the malignant development of state organs of oppression, such as masked men in black vans, but also the withdrawal of the state from its role as a guardian of law. What aspiring tyrants present as “strength,” the ability to terrorize innocent people, rests on what might be seen as a more fundamental weakness, which is the withdrawal of the state from the principle of the rule of law. When we have law, we are all stronger; when we lack law, everyone is weaker except for the very few who can direct the coercive power of the state against the rest of us.

In the history of state terror, the escape from law into coercion takes three forms, all of which were on display, incipiently, in the White House yesterday: the leader principle; the state of exception; and the zone of statelessness.

The leader principle, or in German Führerprinzip, is the idea that a single individual directly represents the people, and that therefore all of his actions are by definition legal and proper. In discussions in the White House and thereafter, we see this notion being advanced. Trump’s advisors claim that what he is doing is popular. The claim (as in legal filings) that the president is acting from a personal “mandate” from the people has the same problem. Asked on Fox News about the abduction of Americans and their transfer to foreign gulags, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that “these are Americans he is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country.” If it comes down to what “he is saying,” then he is a dictator and the U.S. is a dictatorship. Trump spoke of the need to deport people who “hate our country” or who are “stupid.”

The second escape from law is the state of exception. In principle, the Soviet Union was governed by law. Before its greatest exercises of terror, however, the Soviet authorities declared for themselves states of exception. This meant that, on the territory of the Soviet Union itself, it was “legal” (in Bondi’s and in Trump’s sense) to abduct people and send them to concentration camps: authorities claimed that there was some sort of threat, and so protections could be withdrawn and procedures set aside. People could be abducted in black vans and executed or sent to a camp, “legally,” in the sense that the law had been set aside. The notion of the state of exception, important to Soviet practice, was at the center of Nazi theory. As the leading Nazi thinker Carl Schmitt argued, the sovereign is the person who can make an exception. If we are living in normal times, then we think we should be governed by law. But if politicians can use words to make us think that these are exceptional times, then we might accept their lawlessness.

A simple way to escape from law is to move people bodily into a physical zone of exception in which the law (it is claimed) does not apply. Other methods take more time. It is possible to pass laws that deprive people of their rights in their own country. It is possible to carve out spaces on one’s own territory where the law does not function. These spaces are concentration camps. In the end, authorities can choose, as in Nazi Germany, to physically remove their citizens into zones beyond their own countries in which they can simply declare that the law does not matter.

This exploitation of purported stateless zones was the main line of the history of the Holocaust. Under Hitler, the Germans did have concentration camps on their own territory, and they did reduce Jews to second-class citizenship, and they did live under a permanent state of exception. But, in the main, the mass murder of German Jews was achieved by their abduction and forced rendition to sites beyond prewar German territory where, German authorities claimed, there was no law.

A probing of this statelessness approach was on display yesterday, as Trump and his advisors claimed that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal resident of the United States whom US authorities abducted by mistake and sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador, was now beyond the reach of American law. This is state terror: the state is presented as “strong” in its oppression of a person, but as weak in its ability to respect or enforce law. The idea that the United States can send you to places from which it cannot bring you back is the theoretical basis for a doctrine of statelessness. Call it the Rubio Doctrine: in the words of the secretary of state, “the foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the President of the United States, not by a court.” But what that implies is that people forcibly transported beyond the boundaries of the United States can be incarcerated or killed for no reason. That would be “foreign policy.”

Will citizenship save people? Obviously it is better to be a citizen than not. Citizenship provides some protection, at least by comparison with its absence, or with statelessness. The problem, though, is that citizens can find themselves borne along with the rationales applied to non-citizens. If we accept that Trump exercises power because of the Führerprinzip, then what is to stop him from saying that the people want to see the forcible rendition of “homegrowns,” of “really bad people, every bit as bad as the ones coming in.” If citizens accept that we are living in a state of exception, then they are also accepting that they too can be treated exceptionally. Perhaps worst of all, if citizens accept the notion of stateless zones, of law that only functions as the servant of power, they are inviting their own deportation to places from which we will never return.

If citizens endorse the idea that people named by authorities as “criminals” or “terrorists” have no right to due process, then they are accepting that they themselves have no right to due process. It is due process, and due process alone, that allows you to demonstrate that you are a citizen. Without it, the masked men in the black vans can simply claim that you are a foreign terrorist and disappear you.

Horrible though all of this is, it is still state terror in outline, a test of how Americans will react. We can react by seeing all of this for what it is, and naming it by name: incipient state terror. We can react by associating ourselves with others are repressed before we are. Only in solidarity do we affirm law. We can remind the other branches of government that their functions are being taken over by the executive. Citizens cannot do this alone; they have to remind the rest of the government of its constitutional functions.

The president is claiming core congressional responsibilities when he asserts personal control of immigration policy, criminal law, and the funding of forcible renditions. Congress could very easily pass laws, if a few Republicans found the courage. The president is claiming core judicial functions when he defines himself as judge, jury, and, in the case for forcible renditions to El Salvador, de facto executioner. The phrase “contempt of court” took on vivid life in the White House yesterday.

Even these most basic institutions, the ones defined by our Constitution, do not act on their own. To a very sad degree, Supreme Court justices and members of Congress are already complicit in this experiment in state terror. They might find their way back to an America in which their offices have meaning, but only with the help of we the people.

© 2025 Timothy Snyder
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

Trump is claiming the power to ignore the due process of the law guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 13, 2025

This evening, lawyers for the Department of Justice told a federal court that the administration does not believe it has a legal obligation to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States, despite a court order to do so.

The 29-year-old Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. about 2011 when he was 16 to escape threats from a gang that was terrorizing his family. He settled in Maryland with his older brother, a U.S. citizen, and lived there until in 2019 he was picked up by police as he waited at a Home Depot to be picked up for work as a day laborer. Police transferred him to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After a hearing, an immigration judge rejected his claim for asylum but said he could not be sent back to El Salvador, finding it credible that the Barrio 18 gang had been “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”

Ever since, Abrego Garcia has checked in annually with ICE as directed. He lives with his wife and their three children, and has never been charged with any crime. The Department of Homeland Security issued him a work permit, and he joined a union, working full time as a sheet metal apprentice.

On March 12, ICE agents pulled his car over, told his wife to come pick up their disabled son, and incarcerated Abrego Garcia, pressing him to say he was a member of MS-13. On March 15 the government rendered Abrego Garcia to the infamous CECOT prison for terrorists in El Salvador, alleged to be the site of human rights abuses, torture, extrajudicial killings. The U.S. government is paying El Salvador $6 million a year to incarcerate the individuals it sends there.

On March 24, Abrego Garcia’s family sued the administration over his removal.

On March 31 the government admitted that its arrest and rendition of Abrego Garcia happened because of “administrative error” but said he couldn’t be brought back because, in El Salvador, he is outside the jurisdiction of the United States. It also accused him of being a member of the MS-13 gang and said that bringing him back to the U.S. would threaten the public.

On April 4, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. no later than 11:59 pm on April 7.

In her opinion, filed April 6, Judge Xinis wrote that “[a]lthough the legal basis for the mass removal of hundreds of individuals to El Salvador remains disturbingly unclear, Abrego Garcia’s case is categorically different—there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal.…. [H]is detention appears wholly lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” And yet administration officials “cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person—migrant and U.S. citizen alike—to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the ‘custodian,’ and the Court thus lacks jurisdiction.”

The administration had already appealed her April 4 order to the Supreme Court, which handed down a 9–0 decision on Thursday, April 10, requiring the Trump administration “to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador,” but asking the district court to clarify what it meant by “effectuate,” that release, noting that it must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

The Supreme Court also ordered that “the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.” Judge Xinis ordered the government to file an update by 9:30 a.m. on April 11 explaining where Abrego Garcia is, what the government is doing to get him back, and what more it will do. She planned an in-person hearing at 1:00 p.m.

But the administration evidently does not intend to comply. On April 11, the lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, said he did not have information about where Abrego Garcia is and ignored her order to provide information about what the government was doing to bring him back. Saturday, it said Abrego Garcia is “alive and secure” in CECOT. Today, it said it had no new information about him, but said that Abrego Garcia is no longer eligible for the immigration judge’s order not to send him to El Salvador “because of his membership in MS-13 which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization.”

There is still no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.

Today, administration lawyers used the Supreme Court’s warning that the court must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs” to lay out a chilling argument. They ignored the Supreme Court’s agreement that the government must get Abrego Garcia out of El Salvador, as well as the court’s requirement that the administration explain what it’s doing to make that happen.

Instead, the lawyers argued that because Abrego Garcia is now outside the country, any attempt to get him back would intrude on the president’s power to conduct foreign affairs. Similarly, they argue that the president cannot be ordered to do anything but remove domestic obstacles from Abrego Garcia’s return. Because Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, is currently in the U.S. for a visit with Trump, they suggest they will not share any more updates about Abrego Garcia and the court should not ask for them because it would intrude on “sensitive” foreign policy issues.

Let’s be very clear about exactly what’s happening here: President Donald J. Trump is claiming the power to ignore the due process of the law guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, declare someone is a criminal, kidnap them, send them to prison in a third country, and then claim that there is no way to get that person back.

All people in the United States are entitled to due process, but Trump and his officers have tried to convince Americans that noncitizens are not. They have also pushed the idea that those they are offshoring are criminals, but a Bloomberg investigation showed that of the 238 men sent to CECOT in the first group, only five of them had been charged with or convicted of felony assault or gun violations. Three had been charged with misdemeanors like petty theft. Two were charged with human smuggling. In any case, in the U.S., criminals are entitled to due process.

Make no mistake: as Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson recently warned, if the administration can take noncitizens off the streets, render them to prison in another country, and then claim it is helpless to correct the error either because the person is out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction, it could do the same thing to citizens.

Trump has said he would “love” to do exactly that, and would even be “honored” to, and Bukele has been offering to hold U.S. citizens. Dasha Burns and Myah Ward of Politico reported Friday that former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince is pitching a plan to expand renditions to El Salvador to at least 100,000 criminal offenders from U.S. prisons and to avoid legal challenges by making part of CECOT American territory, then leasing it back to El Salvador to run.

When White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says, “The president’s idea for American citizens to potentially be deported, these would be heinous violent criminals who have broken our nation’s laws repeatedly,” remember that just days ago, Trump suggested that a former government employee was guilty of treason for writing a book about his time in the first Trump administration that Trump claimed was “designed to sow chaos and distrust” in the government.

Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.

At least some people understand this. The president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, Sean McGarvey, received a standing ovation when he said to a room full of his fellow union workers: “We need to make our voices heard. We’re not red, we’re not blue. We’re the building trades, the backbone of America. You want to build a $5 billion data center? Want more six-figure careers with health care, retirement, and no college debt? You don’t call Elon Musk, you call us!… And yeah, that means all of us. All of us. Including our brother [International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers] apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who we demand to be returned to us and his family now! Bring him home!”

“I know what the hell I’m doing,” Trump tells Republicans, as trillions in stock values evaporate.

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 12, 2025

It was just 20 days ago—on March 24—that editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg reported that the most senior members of the Trump administration discussed a military strike on the Houthis in Yemen on an unsecure commercial messaging app and that they included him on the chat.

Their Signal chat, which Goldberg published later in response to the administration’s insistence that there was nothing classified in the chat, showed that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had posted precise details of the munitions and planes involved in the strikes. It showed that neither President Donald Trump nor the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—a Biden appointee—was on the chat, and that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller apparently made the decision to strike based on his interpretation of what President Donald Trump wanted. In violation of the Presidential Records Act, the app was set to delete the messages. There was apparently no larger strategy or diplomatic plan other than to strike, and participants greeted news of the collapse of an apartment building into which a Houthi leader had allegedly walked with emojis of fists, fire, and a U.S. flag.

This extraordinary lapse in national security protections would normally have defined an administration and caused a number of resignations, but the White House called the case “closed” on March 31. And there was more: On April 2, Dasha Burns of Politico reported that the team working with national security advisor Mike Waltz regularly used the unsecure Signal app to communicate about issues involving Ukraine, China, Gaza, the Middle East, the U.S., and Europe. The officials to whom Burns spoke said they had personal knowledge of at least 20 such chats.

That story has been almost completely driven out of the news by President Donald Trump’s tariff machinations since April 2. On that day, after teasing the idea of what he called “Liberation Day,” Trump announced that at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, April 9, he would be imposing a 10% tariff on all imports to the United States, with significantly higher rates on countries he claims engage in unfair trade practices. By the next day it had been established that his team, led by trade advisor Peter Navarro, arrived at the tariff rates with a nonsensical formula that simply took the U.S. trade deficit with a country, divided it by the value of that country’s exports to the U.S., and cut the resulting number in half.

For the next week, the stock market plummeted, jumping only with rumors that Trump would back off on the tariffs, while economists and financial analysts revised the chances of inflation and recession upward, and economic growth downward. News coming out of the White House was contradictory: one advisor would say that Trump would not negotiate over tariffs and they were here to stay, while another would say he intended to negotiate and they were just starting points.

Meanwhile, as predicted, other countries began to put tariffs on goods from the United States or pause exports, and global markets fell. Americans from business leaders to small business owners to consumers and wage workers called out the “stupidity” of Trump’s trade war. Others noted that the tariffs appeared to be intended as a shakedown as countries or businesses who offered Trump the right price could get exemptions.

As trillions of dollars in stock values evaporated, Trump insisted the tariffs were here to stay. “I know what the hell I’m doing,” Trump told Republicans on Tuesday, April 8. He boasted that global leaders were “kissing my ass.” On Wednesday, April 9, at 9:33 a.m, he posted: “BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!” At 9:37, he posted “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT”

But, as Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Ana Swanson, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported, Trump’s team, led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, was worried about setting off a financial panic that could not be stopped. Driving their concern was a broad sell-off of U.S. government bonds, which in the past investors had seen as a safe haven during times of market turmoil, and the rise in popularity of the government bonds of other countries.

Former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers noted that global financial markets were backing away from U.S. assets. Fund manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management George Cipolloni told Bernard Condon and Stan Choe of the Associated Press: “The fear is the U.S. is losing its standing as the safe haven. Our bond market is the biggest and most stable in the world, but when you add instability, bad things can happen.”

On April 8, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer defended Trump’s tariffs to the Senate Finance Committee. He was offering similar testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee at 1:18 p.m. the following day when a social media post from Trump pulled the rug out from under him. Trump paused most of the highest tariffs for 90 days and instituted an across-the-board tariff of 10% in their place. But, perhaps unwilling to look weak, he announced that he was raising tariffs on goods from China to 125% effective immediately, “[b]ased on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets.”

With Trump’s tariff pause, stocks jumped upward in one of the biggest single-day gains since World War II. Hedge fund manager Spencer Hakimian posted a graph showing that Nasdaq call volume—bets that stock values would rise—spiked minutes before Trump’s announcement. He commented: “Not a good look at all.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) reposted Hakimian’s post and added: “Any member of Congress who purchased stocks in the last 48 hours should probably disclose that now. I’ve been hearing some interesting chatter on the floor. Disclosure deadline is May 15th. We’re about to learn a few things. It’s time to ban insider trading in Congress.”

David Smith of The Guardian noted that the juxtaposition of Trump golfing, dining with donors, and meeting with race car drivers even as economic chaos tanked people’s retirement accounts prompted accusations that he has lost touch with reality. A widely circulated video that appears to be Trump bragging to NASCAR drivers visiting the White House that investor Charles Schwab made $2.5 billion on Wednesday and that another investor made $900 million has fed anger at Trump’s economic chaos. On Friday the University of Michigan released its well-respected consumer-sentiment index, showing that consumer sentiment about the economy and personal finances fell for the fourth straight month, dropping 11% from March. Consumers from all political affiliations fear recession, inflation, and unemployment.

This level of consumer sentiment is the second lowest since the index began in 1952. Chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics Samuel Tombs told the Wall Street Journal’s Harriet Torry: “Consumers have spiraled from anxious to petrified.” James Knightley, the chief international economist at the multinational banking and financial services company ING, noted that consumers appear to blame Trump for their concerns. While in January 44% of respondents told researchers that the government was doing a poor job of managing inflation and unemployment, now 67% say so.

The tariff change happened so quickly that White House officials could not tell reporters what the actual tariff rates were for different countries. When more information was available, Kevin Schaul of the Washington Post noted that Trump’s new tariff levies had actually increased tariffs rather than lowered them because he had dropped rates only on goods from countries that don’t export much to the U.S. He had raised them significantly—not just to 125% but to 145%—on China, a major trading partner.

On Friday, China imposed 125% tariffs on goods from the U.S. A spokesperson for the Chinese Finance Ministry said that Trump’s tariff machinations “will become a joke in the history of the world economy.” At 9:20 a.m. President Trump posted: “We are doing really well on our TARIFF POLICY. Very exciting for America, and the World!!! It is moving along quickly. DJT.” The new tariffs had badly threatened Apple Inc., and at 10:36 p.m. the U.S. Customs and Border Protection posted a notice that various electronics, including smartphone and computer monitors, are exempt from the tariffs.

When economist Justin Wolfers commented: “I just want to tip my hat to the crack team of White House economists who were able to discover—in just a few short days—that the U.S. is dependent on China for smartphones, computers and semiconductors,” Dr. Soumya Rangarajan noted that “a basic medicine we use 1000x per day in the hospital, heparin, is also dependent on China, and people will die without it.” As Sabrina Malhi of the Washington Post explained, about 12 million people hospitalized in the U.S. need heparin every year, and it is only one of the many medications that will be affected by Trump’s tariffs on goods from China.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted that a “[g]ood way to see the current tariffs, as of literally today, is no tariffs on high value add manufactured goods marketed to middle and upper middle classes. Massive tariffs for cheap consumer items” that benefit those lower on the economic ladder.

While the damage from the tariffs both to the domestic and global economy, as well as the USA’s standing in the world, is not yet clear—all the chaos has been about the prospect of Trump’s high tariff rates, not their actual effect—Trump appears to be trying to downplay that story in favor of demonstrating his power.

As the tariff saga played out on Wednesday, Trump signed a memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies informing them that they no longer need to let the public know when they get rid of regulations that they determine are obviously unlawful. Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo notes that “unlawful” appears to mean anything Trump doesn’t like.

In a breathtaking violation of the Constitution, on Wednesday Trump also went after two individuals: Christopher Krebs and Miles Taylor. Trump appointed Krebs to head the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), where in 2020 Krebs assured the American people that the presidential election had not been stolen. Trump now claims Krebs thus censored the speech of Trump loyalists.

As a Department of Homeland Security staffer, Taylor wrote an op-ed under the pseudonym “Anonymous” saying that members of the first Trump administration were pushing back against the president’s policies. Taylor later wrote a book about his time in the White House that Trump claims was “designed to sow chaos and distrust in Government” and thus “could properly be characterized as treasonous and as possibly violating the Espionage Act.” A grand jury believed Trump himself violated the Espionage Act by retaining classified documents.

Trump stripped security clearances from Krebs and Taylor and also from their employers. He ordered government officials to investigate the two men and to recommend “appropriate remedial or preventative actions to be taken to protect America’s interests.” Employees at CISA told Kevin Collier of NBC News they were disheartened by the attack on Krebs and noted that staffing cuts at CISA had “already severely degraded our capacity to defend critical infrastructure.”

Home Depot founder: “I don’t understand the goddamn formula.”

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 7, 2025

Major indexes on the stock market began down more than 3% today when, as Allison Morrow of CNN reported, a rumor that Trump was considering delaying his tariffs by three months sent stocks surging upward by almost 8%. The rumor was unfounded—it appeared to begin from a small account on X—but it indicated how desperate traders are to see an end to President Donald J. Trump’s trade war.

As soon as the rumor was discredited, the market began to fall again, although Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s announcement that he is opening trade negotiations with Japan and looking forward to talks with other countries appeared to reassure some traders that Trump’s tariffs will not last. The wild swings made the day one of the most volatile in stock market history. It ended with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down by 349 points and the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite staying relatively flat. Futures for tomorrow are up slightly.

Foreign markets fared badly today, suggesting that the reality of Trump’s tariffs is beginning to sink in. Sam Goldfarb of the Wall Street Journal notes that Hong Kong’s Hang Seng took its biggest dive since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, losing 13%, and that other markets also fell today.

Goldfarb reports that in the U.S., traders are deeply worried about losses but also anxious about missing a rebound if the administration changes its policies. Hence the extreme volatility of the market. Generally, values over 30 are considered indicators of increased risk and uncertainty in the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) Volatility Index, the so-called fear gauge. Today, it spiked to 60.

Business leaders are speaking out publicly against Trump’s tariffs. Today, Ken Langone, the co-founder of Home Depot and a major Republican donor, told the Financial Times: “I don’t understand the goddamn formula.”

Senate Republicans are also starting to push back. Seven Republican senators have now signed onto a bill that would limit Trump’s ability to impose tariffs. The power to levy tariffs belongs to Congress, but Congress has permitted a president to adjust tariffs on an emergency basis. Trump declared an emergency, and it is on that ground that he has upended more than 90 years of global economic policy.

Trump has threatened to veto any such legislation, but he will not need to if Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuse to bring the measure to a vote. Jordain Carney and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico report that while Republicans express concern about the tariffs in private, leaders will stand with the president because they must have the votes of MAGA lawmakers to pass any of their legislative agenda through Congress, and to get that they will need Trump’s support. Others are worried about incurring Trump’s wrath and, with it, a primary challenger.

“People are skittish. They’re all worried about it,” Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) told Carney and Hill. “But they are putting on a stiff upper lip to act as though nothing is happening and hoping it goes away.”

But so far, it does not look as if it’s going to go away. Today the European Commission has announced 25% countertariffs in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs.

Trump’s response to the crisis has been to double down on his tariff plan. This morning he wrote on his social media network that he will impose additional 50% tariffs on China effective on Wednesday unless it drops the retaliatory tariffs it has placed on U.S. products. Rather than backing down, China said it would “fight to the end.”

Today, in a press conference convened in the Oval Office, Trump explained his thinking behind why he has begun a global tariff war. “You know, our country was the strongest, believe it or not, from 1870 to 1913. You know why? It was all tariff based. We had no income tax,” he said. “Then in 1913, some genius came up with the idea of let’s charge the people of our country, not foreign countries that are ripping off our country, and the country was never, relatively, was never that kind of wealth. We had so much wealth we didn’t know what to do with our money. We had meetings, we had committees, and these committees worked tirelessly to study one subject: we have so much money, what are going to do with it, who are we going to give it to? And I hope we’re going to be in that position again.”

Aside from this complete misreading of American history—Civil War income taxes lasted until 1875, for example, tariffs are paid by consumers, the Panics of 1873 and 1893 devastated the economy, few Americans at the time thought the Gilded Age was a golden age, and I have no clue what he’s referring to with the talk about committees—Trump’s larger motivation is clear: he wants to get rid of income taxes.

Congress passed the 1913 Revenue Act imposing income taxes to shift the cost of supporting the government from ordinary Americans, especially the women who by then made up a significant portion of household consumers, to men of wealth. Tariffs were regressive because they fell disproportionately on working-class Americans through their everyday purchases. Income taxes spread costs more evenly, according to a man’s ability to pay. The switch from tariffs to income taxes helped to break the power of the so-called robber barons, the powerful industrialists who controlled the U.S. economy and government in the late nineteenth century.

To get rid of income taxes, Trump and his Republicans have backed the decimation of the government services that support ordinary Americans.

Today, in the Oval Office press conference, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested where they intend to put government money, promising a defense budget of $1 trillion, a significant jump from the current $892 defense budget. “[W]e have to be strong because you’ve got a lot of bad forces out there now,” Trump said.

Allison McCann, Alexandra Berzon, and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported today that the administration also intends to spend as much as $45 billion over the next two years on new detention facilities for immigrants. In the last fiscal year, the total amount of federal money allocated to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement was about $3.4 billion. The new facilities will be in private hands and will operate with lower standards and less oversight than current detention facilities.