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      Republicans join Democrats in Senate vote to rescind Trump Canada tariffs

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      Several Republican senators joined Democrats to pass a resolution that would block Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada, a rare rebuke of the president’s trade policy just hours after he announced plans for sweeping import taxes on some of the country’s largest trading partners.In a 51-48 vote, four Republicans – Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and both Kentucky senators, the former majority leader Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul – defied Trump’s pressure campaign and supported the measure. Democrats used a procedural maneuver to force a vote on the resolution, which would terminate the national emergency on fentanyl Trump is using to justify tariffs on Canada.While Trump’s sweeping new tariffs, introduced in a White House Rose Garden ceremony on Wednesday, did not include additional levies on Canada, the Senate vote amounted to a significant bipartisan condemnation of the president’s escalating global trade war with allies and enemies alike.“Tariffs will hurt our families. Canada is not an enemy,” the Democratic senator Tim Kaine, the bill’s sponsor, said in a floor speech on Wednesday. “Let’s not label an ally as an enemy. Let’s not impose punishing costs on American families at a time they can’t afford it. Let’s not hurt American small businesses. Let’s not make our national security investments in ships and subs more expensive.”Republicans have expressed varying degrees of unease over Trump’s clampdown on free trade – once a pillar of conservative orthodoxy – but few were willing to cross him, and many GOP leaders and supporters, including the House speaker Mike Johnson, were in the Rose Garden on Wednesday – a day dubbed “liberation day” by the president – as a way of championing the historic barrage of tariffs on goods from overseas he believes will boost American manufacturing.The Senate’s legislation has practically no chance of passing the Republican-controlled House and being signed by Trump, but it showed the limits of Republican support for Trump’s vision of remaking the US economy by restricting free trade. Many economists are warning that the plan could cause an economic contraction, and GOP senators are already watching with unease as Trump upends the United States’ relationship with the rest of the world.Before the vote, the Senate majority leader John Thune of South Dakota urged Republicans to oppose the resolution, arguing that the tariffs were needed to “ensure that President Trump has the tools to combat the flow of fentanyl from all directions”.In a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, sent just before 1am ET on Wednesday, Trump assailed the four GOP senators who had expressed opposition to his tariffs, imploring them to “get on the Republican bandwagon, for a change, and fight the Democrats wild and flagrant push to not penalize Canada for the sale, into our Country, of large amounts of Fentanyl”.He vowed not to sign the measure if it reached his desk.Defending her vote, Collins said that the tariffs would hurt working families in her state of Maine, which shares a long border with Canada.“The price hikes that will happen for Maine families, every time they go to the grocery store, they fill their gas tank, they fill their heating oil tank, if these tariffs go into effect, will be so harmful,” she said in a Wednesday floor speech. “And as price hikes always do, they will hurt those the most who can afford them the least.”She also argued that fentanyl from Canada was not a major threat to the US, as Trump’s national emergency claims. “The fact is the vast majority of fentanyl in America comes from the southern border,” she said.Democrats argued that Americans were turning against Trump’s agenda, pointing to a string of strong performances by their party in recent special elections that included a consequential victory in a Wisconsin state supreme court race on Tuesday night.“The American people are seeing how bad Trump is,” the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said in a floor speech. “Tariffs is a good part of it. And they are not supporting people like Elon Musk and those who support Donald Trump.”Earlier on Wednesday, the representative Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House foreign affairs committee, said he would also force a similar vote in the House on the tariffs.“Republicans can’t keep ducking this – it’s time they show whether they support the economic pain Trump is inflicting on their constituents,” he wrote on X. More

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      Trump goes full gameshow host to push his tariff plan – and nobody’s a winner

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      It was Jeopardy!, or The Price Is Right, come to Washington.On an unseasonably chilly day in the White House Rose Garden, Donald Trump stood with a giant chart listing which reciprocal tariffs he would impose on China, the European Union, the United Kingdom and other hapless contestants.The winner?Trump, of course, the maestro of fake populism, watched by a crowd that included men in hard hats and fluorescent construction worker vests.The losers?Everybody else.Sensing a bad headline, Trump hadn’t wanted his “liberation day” to coincide with April Fools’ Day, so he waited until 2 April to enter his fool’s paradise. It turned out to be liberation for his decades-old grievances about the US getting ripped off as Trump stuck two fingers up at the world.“For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far – both friend and foe alike,” the president said against a backdrop of nine giant US flags on the White House colonnade. “Foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream.”He nodded to American steelworkers, car-workers, farmers and craftspeople in the audience. These blue-collar workers have been central to Trump’s political rise. Their industrial towns in the midwest and elsewhere were hollowed out by the trade policies of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, which sent thousands of jobs abroad where labour was cheaper.Trump couldn’t quite bring himself to say that “liberation day” represents a final repudiation of Reagan, still a god in Republican circles. But he did drive a stake through the heart of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, or Nafta, describing it as “the worst trade deal ever made”.In 2016’s great revolt against globalization, the forgotten workers could have voted for the leftwing populism of Bernie Sanders, but he lost the Democratic party nomination to Hillary Clinton.Instead, enough went for Trump to make him president, believing his promises that he alone could fix it, end American carnage and get the factories throbbing again. As it turned out, he delivered a $1.5tn bill that slashed taxes for corporations and the wealthy.Many workers duly switched back to the Democrats, with Joe Biden in 2020. He did pour money into manufacturing – for example, with the Chips and Science Act, a bipartisan bill investing $52bn to revitalize the semiconductor industry.Yet in 2024 the pendulum swung again.Somehow a Manhattan billionaire with a criminal record again persuaded blue-collar workers that he was on their side. He claimed he could wave tariffs (taxes on foreign imports), which he has described as the most beautiful word in the English language, like a magic wand.In reality, experts say, it will result in higher prices and slower growth. The Ontario premier Doug Ford called this not liberation day but termination day because of all the jobs that will be lost. Trump playing with tariffs is like a child playing with matches.As he prepared to sign an executive order imposing reciprocal tariffs on about 60 countries, he mused that it was payback time: “Reciprocal: that means they do it to us and we do it to them. Very simple. Can’t get any simpler than that. This is one of the most important days, in my opinion, in American history. It’s our declaration of economic independence.”It was a strange message to hear from the leader of the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world as he slapped tariffs on the likes of Ethiopia, Haiti and Lesotho.“For years, hardworking American citizens were forced to sit on the sidelines as other nations got rich and powerful, much of it at our expense. But now it’s our turn to prosper … Today we’re standing up for the American worker and we are finally putting America first,” he said.View image in fullscreenEven then, Trump claimed he was being kind by not going “full reciprocal”. He summoned his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, to bring the chart to the podium and, as if it were a gameshow, began running through the scores on the doors:“China, first row. China, 67%. That’s tariffs charged to the USA, including currency manipulation and trade barriers. So 67%, so we’re going to be charging a discounted reciprocal tariff of 34%. I think in other words, they charge us, we charge them, we charge them less. So how can anybody be upset?“European Union, they’re very tough – very, very tough traders. You know, you think of the European Union, very friendly. They rip us off. It’s so sad to say, it’s so pathetic. Thirty-nine percent. We’re going to charge them 20%, so we’re charging them essentially half.“Vietnam: great negotiators, great people, they like me. I like them. The problem is they charge us 90%. We’re going to charge them 46% tariff.”And so on to Taiwan, Japan (“very, very tough, great people”), Switzerland, Indonesia, Malaysia and Cambodia: “United Kingdom, 10%, and we’ll go 10%, so we’ll do the same thing.”Once he’d gone through the figures, Trump rambled, as he tends to do, as if at a campaign rally: “The price of eggs dropped now 59%, and they’re going down more, and the availability is fantastic. They were saying that for Easter, please don’t use eggs. Could you use plastic eggs? I said, we don’t want to do that.”And: “It’s such an old-fashioned term but a beautiful term: groceries. It sort of says a bag with different things in it. Groceries went through the roof and I campaigned on that. I talked about the word ‘groceries’ for a lot, and energy costs now are down. Groceries are down.”In other words, everything is going great despite Signalgate, despite disappointing election results on Tuesday, despite a falling stock market and sapping consumer confidence. Now, a global trade war, too. The US is about to discover the one thing more dangerous than a politician who believes in nothing is a politician who believes in something stupid. More

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      Donald Trump builds a wall made of tariffs, enclosing the whole US

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      Donald Trump is finally making good on his campaign promises to “build that wall” – but instead of steel fencing along the Mexican border, it will be constructed from tariffs, and will enclose the entire United States.In his pugnacious and typically rambling speech on the White House lawn on Wednesday, Trump set out plans for across-the-board import taxes, ranging from 10% to more than 40%.The president promised “liberation”, yet the immediate impact is more likely to be rising prices for US shoppers and corrosive uncertainty for firms, exacerbating an economic slowdown that may already be under way.Outside the wall, countries will be affected according to how dependent their economies are on exports to the US – and how exposed they are to the global trading system. For some, it is likely to be devastating.The UK will be relieved to be slapped with “only” the 10% minimum, after Keir Starmer’s charm offensive, and the EU may have feared worse than 20%. But for some countries Trump outlined much higher rates: 46% for Vietnam, 49% for Cambodia and 29% for Pakistan, for example.The precise effects of sweeping tariffs on this historic scale are very hard to predict. One factor is how rival economies will respond – with retaliatory tariffs tending to make a bad situation worse, though they may make short-term political sense (see Mark Carney’s poll ratings in Canada).Another question is whether the dollar may appreciate, somewhat softening the blow for US importers. That may limit the pass-through to prices, which would otherwise be expected to rise as the cost of importing products and materials increases.The main challenge in assessing the exact impact of the plans, though, is that Trump’s statement did not mark the end of the period of profound economic uncertainty that began when he arrived in the White House – quite the opposite.Instead, he has fired the starting gun on a new and inherently unpredictable scramble, in which governments will fire back with their own punitive tariffs – at the same time as negotiating hard to try to secure exemptions.As in the UK, where ministers hope to secure an “economic agreement”, which appears to involve sweeteners for US big tech and lower tariffs on food imports, these talks are likely to have economic consequences of their own.And it remains unclear, to say the least, how amenable Trump is likely to be to persuasion. On one hand, he appears to enjoy the theatre of using tariffs to exact policy concessions, which he can then portray as a winning deal.Trump-watchers have also sometimes argued that a dramatic slide in stock prices might lead the president to pull back from the harshest version of the policy.His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, insisted on Tuesday that “Wall Street will be just fine” as a result of the tariff package.But in other moments, Trump has appeared to suggest a bit of market turbulence might be part of the plan.“There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big,” he said in a recent Fox News interview – in which he also declined to rule out a recession.There is also the small matter of the revenues the administration hopes to raise from tariffs, which it wants to use to fund tax cuts.White House trade adviser Peter Navarro has suggested the levies could raise an extraordinary $600bn (£460bn) a year: hardly consistent with offering carve-outs to every major economy that comes knocking.Caving in would also undermine another of Trump’s sometimes-contradictory aims: persuading firms to create new manufacturing jobs, inside the shelter of the tariff wall.As bewildered trade experts repeatedly said in the run-up to what Trump has called “liberation day”, and are likely to continue to say after Trump’s outing in the Rose Garden, guessing what happens next is all but impossible.All this makes for an alarming level of uncertainty – and what economists are very clear about is that consumers and businesses hate that.Consumer confidence measures in the US have already been sliding sharply. Alongside weeks of headlines about the ambiguous tariff plans, the tens of thousands of abrupt government job losses made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) seem unlikely to have helped the mood.And in boardrooms, baffled executives may be extremely reluctant to press ahead with significant investments – bringing manufacturing back into the US as Trump hopes, for example – when it is unclear how long the tariffs will endure.Whatever the medium-term prospects of “jobs and factories” coming “roaring back” to the US, as Trump predicted, for now what some had already dubbed a “Trumpcession” appears significantly more likely to happen, than the “golden age” he has promised. More

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      Trump announces sweeping new tariffs, upending decades of US trade policy

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      Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on some of its largest trading partners on Wednesday, upending decades of US trade policy and threatening to unleash a global trade war on what he has dubbed “liberation day”.Trump said he will impose a 10% universal tariff on all imported foreign goods in addition to “reciprocal tariffs” on a few dozen countries, charging additional duties onto countries that Trump claims have “cheated” America.The 10% universal tariff will go into effect on 5 April while the reciprocal tariffs will begin on 9 April.“This is one of the most important days, in my opinion, in American history,” Trump said, in a long-winded speech on the White House lawn. For decades America had been “looted, pillaged and raped” by its trading partners, he said. “In many cases, the friend is worse than the foe.”Over the past few months, Trump has rattled global stock markets, alarmed corporate executives and economists, and triggered heated rows with the US’s largest trading partners by announcing and delaying plans to impose tariffs on foreign imports several times since taking office.But for the start of what appears to be a dramatic shift in American trade policy, one that could cause ricochets in the global economy, Trump tried to sell the tariffs with a celebratory tone.Nine giant US flags flanked Trump onstage in the Rose Garden, as the president spoke in front of his cabinet and a crowd of union workers wearing hard hats and fluorescent construction worker vests. Before Trump came onstage, a marine band played celebratory music to excite the crowd.At one point, Trump paused his speech to throw a Maga hat into the crowd. In the next breath, he announced the 10% universal baseline tariff.In the middle of his hour-long speech, the president displayed a chart that showed the “unfair” fees that countries placed on the US, alongside the new “USA Discounted Reciprocal Tariffs”. China charged the US 67% in “unfair” fees, and said the US would now levy a 34% fee. The EU charges 39% on imports, according to the White House, and will now be levied at 20%. Trump said the UK would be charged 10% – the baseline tariff – equal to the Trump administration’s calculations of the UK’s fees on US imports.Special exceptions were made for Canada and Mexico, though the countries were previously targets of proposed broad tariffs. The White House said that goods covered by an existing trade deal with Canada and Mexico will continue to see no tariffs.Trump said the tariff calculations also include “currency manipulation and trade barriers”, though the White House has not elaborated on how it calculated the new tariffs.It appears Trump has zeroed in on the industry-specific tariffs the countries have placed on American exports. In his speech, Trump criticized policies like the EU’s ban on imported chicken, Canadian tariffs on dairy and Japan’s levies on rice.Trump said the US would charge half of the fees he feels trading partners unfairly impose on the US because the US people are “very kind”. The countries have “placed massive tariffs on [US] products and created non-monetary tariffs to decimate our industries”, Trump said, calling them “common sense reciprocal tariffs”.“Reciprocal: that means they do it to us and we do it to them. Very simple, can’t get any more simple than that,” he said. “This indeed will be the golden age of America,” he said.Trump was ultimately following through with a promise he made during the election: on the campaign trail, Trump floated the idea of a 10% universal tariff on all imported goods.The new tariffs come on top of a lineup of levies that Trump has already implemented: an additional 20% tariff on all Chinese imports and a 25% tariff on all steel and aluminum imports. There is also a 10% tariff on energy imports from Canada.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump also announced in March a 25% tariff on all imported vehicles and, eventually, imported auto parts, which will start going into effect on Thursday.“These tariffs are going to give us growth like you’ve never seen before, and it’ll be something very special to watch,” Trump said.Trump has made clear the goals he wants to accomplish through his tariffs: bring manufacturing back to the US; respond to unfair trade policies from other countries; increase tax revenue; and incentivize crackdowns on migration and drug trafficking. But the implementation of his tariffs has so far have been haphazard, with multiple rollbacks and delays, and vague promises that have yet to come to fruitionBut the threats have soured US relations with its largest trading partners. Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, has called them “unjustified” and pledged to retaliate. The European Union has said it has a “strong plan” to retaliate. Other retaliatory tariffs could eventually lead to higher prices that would hurt American exporters.The US stock market closed slightly up on Wednesday, ahead of Trump’s announcement, with a slight boost from news that Elon Musk may step away from his role in the White House soon to focus on his businesses.Even with the slight upswing, two of the three major stock exchanges saw their worst quarter in over two years after Monday marked the end of the first quarter.In March, consumer confidence plunged to its lowest level in over four years. Polls have shown that tariffs are unpopular with Americans, including Republicans. Only 28% of people in a poll from Marquette Law School released Wednesday said that tariffs help the economy.The uncertainty around Trump’s tariff policies have increased the likelihood of a recession, according to recent forecasts from economists at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and other banks. More

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      Mike Waltz’s team set up at least 20 Signal chats for national security work – report

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      Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and his team have created at least 20 different group chats on the encrypted messaging app Signal to coordinate sensitive national security work, sources tell Politico.The revelation, which cites four people with direct knowledge of the practice, follows heightened scrutiny of the administration’s handling of sensitive information after the Atlantic recently published messages from a chat that included the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, sharing operational details of deadly strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen.Those anonymous sources told Politico the Signal chats covered a wide range of policy areas, including Ukraine, China, Gaza, broader Middle East policy, Africa and Europe. All four individuals reported seeing “sensitive information” discussed in these forums, though none said they were aware of classified material being shared.Over the last few days, Waltz’s flippant nature over the protection of national security secrets has been exposed. The Washington Post reported on documents revealing that Waltz’s team had been conducting government business through personal Gmail accounts.The White House has again defended the practice, with a national security council spokesperson, Brian Hughes, telling Politico that Signal was “not banned from government devices” and was automatically installed on some agencies’ phones.“It is one of the approved methods of communicating but is not the primary or even secondary,” Hughes said, adding that any claim of classified information being shared was “100% untrue.”The insistence by administration officials that none of the messages were classified, including past remarks by the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, and Hegseth, fly in the face of the defense department’s own rulebook on what would count as classified.In the earlier chat, Hegseth shared specific operational details about military strikes in Yemen, including launch times for F-18 fighter jets and Tomahawk missiles. These details, according to the former state department attorney Brian Finucane, who advised on past strikes on Yemen, would typically be classified based on his experience.Others in the national security establishment have similarly warned that using a messaging app like Signal could potentially violate federal record-keeping laws if chats are automatically deleted, and could compromise operational security if a phone is seized.Despite the earlier controversies, Leavitt indicated on Monday that Trump stood firmly behind his national security adviser, and that an investigation into how Waltz accidentally added a journalist to a sensitive chat had been closed. More

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      The Guardian view on online safety: don’t let Trump dictate the terms of debate | Editorial

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      In 1858, when London could no longer tolerate the stench of raw effluent in the Thames, city authorities commissioned a system of sewers that operates to this day. A century later, when noxious fog choked the capital, parliament passed the first Clean Air Act, limiting coal fire emissions.When a dangerous toxin assails the senses, polluting public space to the detriment of all that use it, the case for legislation is self-evident. The argument is more complex when the poison has no chemical properties; when it exists in a virtual realm. This is the conceptual challenge for regulation of digital content. It is made all the more complex by conflation with arguments about free speech and censorship.The UK has a law that grapples with these questions. The 2023 Online Safety Act makes social media companies, websites and search engines responsible for harmful content published via their services. Offending material named in the statute is uncontroversially horrible – violent pornography, incitement to violence and terrorism. Such things are commonly proscribed even in very liberal jurisdictions on the basis that, with some types of communication, the state’s duty of public protection is paramount. No one argues that child abuse images, for example, are a legitimate expression of free speech.Yet implementation of the Online Safety Act is now in question because Donald Trump’s government has identified it as a symptom of wider European infringement of free expression. As the Guardian revealed this week, US state department officials expressed their concern in a meeting with Ofcom, the regulator responsible for enforcing new digital regulations.That intervention should be seen in the context of an aggressive trade policy that cannot tolerate any foreign restriction on the extension of American economic interests overseas. That explicitly includes regulation that “incentivises US companies to develop or use products and technology in ways that undermine free speech or foster censorship”.The invocation of liberal principle here is cynical and ideological. The Trump administration defines freedom of speech as the right to propagandise for the president. Any effort to correct wilful misinformation or conduct public discourse on a foundation of verifiable fact is liable to be denounced as censorship.Mr Trump’s power is bolstered by alliance with tech industry oligarchs. The unwritten deal is that the president’s cause is boosted on social media and the platforms’ commercial interests are driven by the president. That is why US trade policy is being deployed against European regulators that have tried to make the internet – or the part of it over which they have legal jurisdiction – less lawless.Yielding to that pressure would cede control of the digital information space to people who actively subvert it for the cause of American ultranationalism. It would mean accepting that a vital part of the digital infrastructure for a free society operates according to rules set by companies that are poisoning the wells of public discourse.There is a legitimate debate to be had about the boundary between safety online and censorship. The two issues are entangled because regulation of information space involves a distinction between permitted and intolerable content. But no European democracy can conduct that debate on terms dictated by a US administration that sees all digital space as its sovereign domain, and that holds tenets of liberal democracy in contempt. More

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      The Florida and Wisconsin election results are a warning for Trump and Republicans | Lloyd Green

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      Donald Trump and the Republicans ought to be wary of a possible blue wave in next year’s midterms. On Tuesday, voters in Florida and Wisconsin signaled dissatisfaction with Elon Musk, the GOP and the president. On the surface, the results spelled political equipoise. No seats changed hands.A closer look, however, reveals possible headaches for Donald Trump and his party.In a special election in Florida’s sixth congressional district to fill the vacancy left by Mike Waltz, Trump’s beleaguered national security adviser, voters elected Randy Fine, a Republican state senator, as Waltz’s replacement. Last November, Trump won the district by a whopping 30 points. By contrast, Fine’s margin was about 14 points.Beyond that, voter turnout was markedly lower than a half-year ago. Talk about underperforming.Then again, the closeness of the contest came as no surprise to the White House. A poll conducted by Tony Fabrizio, a pollster to the president, actually showed Fine down by four points less than two weeks before the election. Those figures gave Trump and Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, plenty to worry about.Fabrizio’s survey also triggered Trump’s decision to pull the nomination of Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the UN. Although she represented a so-called safe GOP district in upstate New York – “Mississippi with icicles”, in the words of one observer – the president was not prepared to take unnecessary chances.He made the right call, politically speaking. Turns out, Florida’s sixth congressional district was not the only storm cloud in the Sunshine state.The election to fill the seat vacated by Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first pick for attorney general, in the first congressional district experienced an even larger drop in GOP support. Back in November, Trump garnered a 37-point margin. On Tuesday, Republican Jimmy Patronis carried the district by about 13 points, a 24-point decline.In hindsight, Trump was right to end Stefanik’s dreams. The GOP dropoffs in Florida’s first and sixth congressional districts signaled that the battle to replace her would have been a nailbiter.Every vote counts, the saying goes. Quite possibly doubly so in the House. Mike Johnson maintains control by the thinnest of margins. On a good day, the Republicans will now hold 220 seats in the 435-member chamber. The results out of Florida are a warning that his tenure is in jeopardy come January 2027.Earlier on Tuesday, the House rejected an attempt to thwart an effort to enable new parents to vote remotely. Nine Republicans joined the Democrats to hand the speaker a humiliating loss. Johnson labeled the result “disappointing”. The headline at Axios blared: “Mike Johnson scraps his whole week after brutal defeat”. Apparently, being the party of “traditional family values” doesn’t necessarily translate into support for newborn babies and their moms.The results of the Tuesday’s House races also bear strong similarities to the special elections of 2017 and 2018. Back then, Democrats ran about 15 points ahead of Hillary Clinton’s performance on election day 2016.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOver in the midwest, voters stuck a finger in the eye of Musk, the king of Doge. Wisconsinites elected the liberal Susan Crawford to a seat on the state supreme court. With more than half the vote counted, she held an insurmountable double-digit lead. Musk’s expenditures of time and money in favor of Brad Schimel, her conservative opponent, were in vain.In the run-up to the election, Musk handed out $1m checks to voters. In the face of a legal challenge, Musk prevailed, claiming that efforts to restrain his expenditures constituted a violation of his rights under the first amendment.Just days before the election, Musk also appeared onstage wearing a giant yellow cheese hat. His nod to Wisconsin’s dairy industry and the state’s beloved Green Bay Packers amused the crowd and the denizens of X, the Musk-owned social media platform. Actual voters, however, not as much.Whether Musk steps back from the spotlight or whether Trump reels him in remains to be seen. Regardless, a Marquette poll shows his favorability ratings to be underwater, 38-60.With the stock market in the doldrums, stagflation a real possibility and tariffs on tap, Trump and his minions have a real problem. To add to their woes, estimates peg economic growth for the first quarter of 2025 to be in retrograde. Higher prices loom. The rationale for swing voters to cast their lot with Trump dwindle daily. More