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      Look on the bright side of Trump’s global tariffs | Letters

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      Although environmental considerations will not have been a motivation for Donald Trump, it is worth examining whether a comprehensive revision of global trade tariffs – notwithstanding the significant transitional economic and human costs – could generate substantial environmental benefits (Here’s one key thing you should know about Trump’s shock to the world economy: it could work, 7 April).The prevailing model of liberalised global trade facilitates the transoceanic movement of consumer goods, often to countries that possess the capacity to manufacture equivalent products domestically. The associated carbon emissions from maritime and air transport are considerable, particularly given the volume of low-cost, frequently low-durability goods entering developed markets.Restricting free trade to essential imports – goods that cannot be manufactured or grown locally – would materially reduce transport-related emissions. Additional benefits might include enhanced food system resilience, improved biosecurity and increased regulatory autonomy over quality and safety standards.Thus, albeit unintentionally, President Trump’s trade policies could contribute to environmental objectives that are traditionally pursued by other means.Patrick CosgroveChapel Lawn, Shropshire Donald Trump’s tariffs – why the fuss? As an ordinary UK citizen I see only upsides. First, it’s the Americans paying the tariffs, not us. The resulting fall in the price of oil and the value of the dollar should reduce the cost of my petrol. As Americans switch to bourbon and Californian wine, the price of my scotch whisky and French wine should come down. If other countries send more of their goods to the UK to avoid the tariffs, this will force UK producers to become more competitive to the benefit of ordinary people like me.I believe that US citizens rich enough to buy Range Rovers and the like will not balk at paying a bit more, especially as the US equivalents are so clunky. If the steel tariff forces us to nationalise British Steel, good. As for the global economic system, this is structured for the benefit of big corporations and shareholders. Perhaps it is overdue for a change.Christopher WoodageCamberley, Surrey I have long believed that the way we choose to spend our money is a political act. With an overcautious Labour government in power, spending power remains an important act of resistance. Now more than ever, I urge readers to think carefully about what they purchase and, in particular, to boycott American goods. I have lived happily without an Amazon product for over 15 years, for instance, and with the added pleasure of knowing that my spending in local shops is benefiting the local economy. If we can’t rely on our government to stand firm, let’s do it for ourselves.Prof Mark DoelSheffield “I am telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass,” Trump said during a speech at the National Republican Congressional Committee dinner in Washington on Tuesday evening. Please let the UK not be one of the countries. Surely we have more self-respect than that.Ann ClewerCanterbury Looking at recent events, it seems Donald Trump is the most successful anti-capitalist since Lenin.Keith FlettTottenham, London More

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      Thursday briefing: Trump puts global tariffs on pause – but hikes them for China

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      Good morning. Two main pieces of news from Donald Trump yesterday: he has rolled back water efficiency standards to “make America’s showers great again”, because he likes “to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair”; and he has rolled back the exorbitant tariffs he applied to many countries last week to 10% – but increased them for China. “No longer will showerheads be weak and worthless,” the White House said. This will come as welcome news for the many investors who have recently been taking a bath.It was a pretty chaotic change, all told: there were contradictory messages from Trump’s advisers on which countries would be affected, why he did it, and what Beijing should expect to happen next. Still, the markets breathed a large sigh of relief, and the S&P 500 had one of the strongest days of its postwar history. This morning, share indices in Asia have jumped in turn.But that still isn’t enough to undo the full damage that Trump’s hot-and-cold tariff policy has inflicted on the American and global economy – and only a fool would presume that a more settled approach is now a given. For the very latest, head to the business live blog; today’s newsletter explains what’s going on, and whether the reversal is a sign of strength or weakness. Here are the headlines.Five big stories

      Gaza | Israeli aircraft struck a residential block in war-ravaged northern Gaza on Wednesday, killing at least 23 people, including eight women and eight children health officials said, as the Israeli military is reportedly preparing to seize the entire city of Rafah.

      Trade | The UK and India have agreed 90% of their free trade agreement, businesses were told on a call with negotiators this week. There are hopes the UK government will succeed in finalising a highly coveted trade deal with India, a booming economy of 1.4 billion people, this year.

      Smartphones | Almost all schools in England have banned mobile phone use by pupils, according to a survey run by Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner for England. Among 15,000 schools, 99.8% of primaries and 90% of secondaries have some form of ban.

      Defence | Hot weather is expected to bring highs of 24C to the UK as fire services continue to warn of wildfires across the country. The Met Office said temperatures would peak on Friday in London and south-east England, which could make it the hottest day of the year so far, while temperatures could hit 23C on Thursday.

      BBC | A controversial sculpture outside the BBC’s headquarters has been restored and put back on display behind a screen after being vandalised, with the corporation saying it in no way condoned the “abusive behaviour” of its creator, Eric Gill. There have long been calls for Gill’s works to be removed since his diaries revealed he had sexually abused his two eldest daughters.
      In depth: ‘THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!’View image in fullscreenAt 9.37am Eastern Time, Donald Trump advised his followers with an appetite for speculation: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” Less than four hours later, in what Treasury secretary Scott Bessent magnificently described as “one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his Presidency,” he announced the rollback of his tariff policy, and the market duly soared. Is it insider trading if your source is the president?Anyway, as the dust settled, traders kept buying. That was claimed as a major victory by Trump: “It’s up almost 2,500 points,” he said. “Nobody’s ever heard of it. It’s got to be a record.” But the reality is that the mood of uncertainty he has created will not easily be dispelled.What does the US tariff regime look like now?With the caveat that this is liable to change at any moment even though everyone in the White House is now asleep, here’s where things now stand: China’s tariff was raised to 125%, which means – given an existing 25% tariff – that some goods are now subject to an additional 150% rate. That is massively up on the 34% Trump announced last week. With a new 84% tariff in response yesterday, Trump again said that Beijing has been “ripping off the USA”. Every other country which saw its tariff raised above the baseline 10% in Trump’s “liberation day” announcement has seen the rate dialled back to that 10%. So no change for the UK; a very significant change for Vietnam (46%), India (26%), the European Union (20%), and the Falkland Islands (41%), whose 3,600 residents can now resume selling Americans frozen fish. Trump initially claimed that this was because more than 75 countries, of 190 affected, had sought to negotiate a deal without retaliating. The higher tariffs are paused for 90 days, and could be reimposed or increased again. There was some confusion over what would happen to Mexico and Canada, whose tariffs were not included in the announcement last week because they had already been set as high as 25% on a large proportion of their exports. Scott Bessent said the 10% rate would apply to them too; the White House later contradicted him and said that their tariffs would remain unchanged.Where does this leave China?In truth, the new announcement doesn’t change much. With tariffs that high, Trump might as well set them to a gazillion per cent and demand every import comes with a free Fabergé egg: the additional rate will make a minimal difference, because hardly anyone will be exporting anything from China to the US. The World Trade Organization forecast yesterday that trade between the two countries could drop by 80%, or $466bn a year.So is the goal to tank the Chinese economy, or to force China to negotiate? That was unclear yesterday. Bessent praised Trump for “goading China into a bad position” so that they “showed themselves to the world to be the bad actor”. That would seem to imply the tank strategy. But Trump himself took a much sunnier line later on: he told reporters that president Xi Jinping “is a smart guy and we’ll end up making a very good deal.”It is certainly plausible that the two sides will eventually arrive at some figure that both can present as a victory domestically. But as Amy Hawkins writes in this piece, that is unlikely to be on the basis of a major Chinese retreat. That is partly because Chinese exports to the US are largely consumer goods, badly exposed to eye-watering price increases, while the goods going the other way are commodities whose expense can be at least somewhat absorbed before they reach the consumer market.What about the UK?In one sense, the UK is exactly where it started: because it was already on the lowest 10% rate, nothing has changed. On the other hand, the fact that 10% is now the same rate as almost everyone else erases the comparative advantage that has been presented as a bright side.Speaking to ITV before the latest announcement, Keir Starmer reiterated that “a trade war is in nobody’s interest” but that retaliatory measures remained on the table. He also acknowledged that it was impossible to know if the 10% will ever be removed. In this piece, Rowena Mason reports that Whitehall sources are “increasingly downbeat” about striking a deal to reduce the tariffs.Why did Trump do it?That depends on who you ask. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt implied that the change was part of a long-term strategy, saying that reporters had “clearly missed the art of the deal” and “failed to see what President Trump is doing here”. Bessent claimed similarly that this had been Trump’s “strategy all along”. And Trump advisor Stephen Miller claimed it was “the greatest economic master strategy from an American president in history”.But those confident assertions looked a bit shakier when Trump himself emerged to speak to reporters and said that he was acting in a “flexible” way, and that he reacted because “people … were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid”. He also said that “A lot of times it’s not a negotiation until it is”, so make of that what you will. As for what he does next: that will be based on “instinct”, he said.The economist Mohamed El-Erian suggested that Trump was responding above all to a major sell-off in US government debt, a dangerous sign of investor scepticism of the US since its bonds are generally viewed as a safe harbour in an economic storm. The New York Times reports that Bessent and other advisors emphasised the issue in a meeting with Trump yesterday morning. But if you concluded that Trump may just as easily have made a capricious choice based on no serious rationale at all, you wouldn’t sound like an idiot.Where does this leave the markets – and the wider global economic outlook?In the context of the last week, this was a euphoric day for traders. The S&P 500 rose 9.5%, its biggest single-day climb since 2008; 494 of the 500 stocks covered ended higher than they began. One index of the improving mood was Goldman Sachs’ decision to rescind their recession forecast within hours of making it. Overnight, Asian markets have also climbed, and futures – a way to bet on prices ahead of markets opening – were up for European stocks and the FTSE 100.On the other hand, the S&P 500 is still down a significant 11.2% on where it was in February – and 10% universal tariffs are still a really big deal. Bob Elliott, a prominent hedge fund manager, said the market response was “likely far too positive” and noted that when taken alongside the Chinese rate and sector-specific rates elsewhere, the effective overall rate on imports is closer to 20%. That is only down 5% on where it stood before Trump’s announcement, and higher than it has been since the 1930s.The China tariffs alone could lead to a long term reduction in global GDP by nearly 7%, the WTO estimated. And when the dust settles, many companies will still be deeply sceptical that they can count on the kind of stability that tends to promote investment, new hiring, and economic growth.For now, the next questions are whether deals start to be struck, and whether improving share prices are the start of a sustained recovery or merely a “relief rally”. Jake Schurmeier, a portfolio manager at Harbor Capital Advisors, told Bloomberg: “Good news doesn’t eliminate the overarching uncertainty. We [will] likely go higher for a few days, but I think permanent damage has been done.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat else we’ve been readingView image in fullscreen

      Richard Wright (above) once painted 47,000 stars on the ceiling of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Charlotte Higgins talks to the Turner prize-winning artist about his gorgeous, insanely intricate work – which he describes as “torture”. Alex Needham, acting head of newsletters

      Amazon’s prestige drama about Jesus Christ, The Chosen, claims to have reached 280 million viewers – and it’s just the tip of the holy iceberg. Steve Rose has a great piece about how the Messiah became TV and box office gold. Archie

      Could New York ever have a democratic socialist mayor? The city’s residents could, in the unlikely event they vote for Zohran Mamdani. He’s offering a rent freeze, free buses and universal childcare. For Interview magazine, 18 New Yorkers grill him. Alex

      Alice Wilkinson has lived in eight houseshares, and has the stories to show for it. They are compulsively readable, especially the one about the housemate who stole all the cutlery. Archie

      The speed of Trump’s transformation (or degradation) of America has been breathtaking. Osita Nwanevu steps back and surveys the epic scale of the damage: “Humiliation, immiseration, chaos and more of all to come.” Alex
      SportView image in fullscreenFootball | A late goal for Nuno Mendes (above) gave Paris St-Germain a two-goal cushion in their Champions League quarter-final tie against Aston Villa. The 3-1 victory in the first leg came despite Morgan Rogers’ 35th minute opener for the visitors. In the night’s other first leg match, Barcelona beat Dortmund 4-0.Football | Liverpool are increasingly confident Mohamed Salah will sign a contract extension beyond this summer after progress in talks over recent weeks. It is a significant boost with the captain, Virgil van Dijk, also likely to extend his stay beyond June.The boat race | The bad blood between Oxford and Cambridge continues to fester in the buildup to Sunday’s University Boat Race, with fallout from the row over a ban on PGCE students competing leading to the abandonment of the women’s trial race on Wednesday morning.The front pagesView image in fullscreenTrump’s 90-day pause on tariffs dominate the front pages today. The Guardian splashes on “Trump pauses global trade war but hits China with 125% tariffs”, the Times leads with “Trump puts the brakes on tariffs for 90 days” and the Daily Telegraph has “Trump blinks first in trade war”. The FT is going with “Stocks soar as Trump presses tariffs pause button and hits China harder”, the Mail leads with “Trump blinks … but doubles down on China” and the Metro has “Trump risks the great maul of China”. In the Mirror, it’s “Great War of China”.In the Express, it’s “Kemi: PM must make more of our Brexit freedoms.” And the Sun runs with a story about Chelsea footballer Moises Caicedo allegedly driving without a licence, and “Police in swoop on £115m Chelsea ace”.Today in FocusView image in fullscreenRats, rubbish and rising taxes: why Birmingham stinks right nowWhy have the city’s bin collectors gone on strike? Jessica Murray reportsCartoon of the day | Ben JenningsView image in fullscreenThe UpsideA bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all badView image in fullscreenMetuktire, a village in the Indigenous Capoto-Jarina territory in the Brazilian Amazon , stands as a stronghold against logging and mining in the rainforest. The village has preserved its traditional ways while embracing sustainable energy through solar panels.The community actively resists illegal intrusion by patrolling their territory and educating younger generations on environmental protection. They maintain their customs, such as harvesting cassava, while adopting modern conveniences such as mobile phones and solar panels (pictured above).Chief Beptok Metuktire remains a beacon of resilience fiercely defending the local heritage. “We have had goldminers and outsiders who wanted to occupy our lands,” he says. “We show them that this is our territory.”Bored at work?And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.

      Quick crossword

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      Full list of Trump’s tariffs: a country by country look after the 90-day pause

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      Donald Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs for most countries except China, whose tariffs he raised to 125% on Wednesday.After insisting for days that he would hold firm on his aggressive trade strategy, Trump announced that all countries that had not retaliated against US tariffs would receive a reprieve – and only face a blanket US tariff of 10% – until July.The White House’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Trump had raised tariffs against China because “when you punch at the United States of America, President Trump is going to punch back harder.”Here is a look at the full list of tariffs Trump originally threatened – and the new updated rate country by country: More

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      Two visions within Trump world are battling for primacy. Which will win? | Ben Davis

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      The start of the second Trump administration has been chaotic, to put it mildly. It is difficult for Americans to understand what exactly the administration is trying to do and how it will affect them. It has been simultaneously a colossal remaking of the US state and the entire global order, but also seemingly haphazard, with significant policy decisions such as spending cuts and tariff rates clearly made with little thought or preparation. Analysts and commentators of all stripes have speculated on the motives and strategy behind the Trump administration’s huge overhaul of society. But what is the Trump administration’s plan for the US?The primary moves the administration has made are major cuts to federal government capacity through the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and now an unprecedented tariff regime that has sent financial markets into a free fall. Some view these changes as part of a grand overarching strategy to rebuild some version of an imagined past America: globally hegemonic and able to exercise power nakedly over other countries, economically self-sufficient with a large manufacturing base, and a reassertion of the previous social norms and order around gender, race, and sexuality. But a deeper dive into the Trump administration’s explanation of their policies and vision reveals that rather than a single, coherent ideological project, the Trump administration is sclerotic and being used as a vehicle for more than one competing ideological project.While the first Trump administration had no real ideological project, with Donald Trump’s surprise win being based on a personalist coalition without the backing of an organized movement, and different factions within the administration battling for control over policy and favor from the president, the second Trump administration was backed and is staffed by two major ideological projects, representing different segments of capital: the oft-discussed “national conservatism” of the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, and tech capital, which has used Trump as a vehicle for its own priorities.These two overarching political projects and visions both see Trump as able to advance their goals, but these projects are competing with each other. Both have accepted that Republicans will lose the midterms in 2026, as the president’s party nearly always does, and are thus trying to radically reshape society in that time in ways that can’t easily be reversed. They have deeply different visions for the future, and whether one wins out or both of their incompatible sets of policies are carried out will have enormous implications for the lives of Americans and people around the globe.On tariffs, the administration has offered multiple, mutually exclusive visions: with some viewing tariffs as primarily a way to rebuild US manufacturing by incentivizing producers to build in the US; some viewing tariffs as primarily a way to raise revenue, cut the deficit, and in the long-term replace the income tax entirely; and some viewing tariffs primarily as a negotiating tool to force countries to make concessions to the US on a variety of issues.Trump personally has suggested that the US become an autarky, with no trade of any kind with the outside world. It’s unclear which of these will be the plan because they each have dramatically different implications for how the tariffs are structured in the long-term, how long they will last, and their effects on US workers.In the first two views, the tariffs are a part of the national conservative project of returning the US to a previous social order. They view the nation-state as the primary actor in a zero-sum anarchic global order of competing nation-states seeking to dominate each other. Tariffs are then a way of reasserting US national power relative to other states. This fits in with Trump’s rhetoric about the US, taking the country back and reasserting American nationhood, and is the primary way analysts and commentators have viewed the administration.The tech capital that oversees Doge, however, has a different project entirely. Elon Musk, who has personally overseen the large-scale slashing of the federal government, rejects tariffs entirely. The Doge project and the tariff project are at odds. The Doge project is cloaked in the rhetoric of retro America First nationalism that would seem on its face (and is understood as by its supporters) to be precisely the opposite of what it is in practice: the outmoding of the nation-state entirely.It’s notable that the first target for Doge’s cuts were not the New Deal programs conservatives have long wanted to cut, but instead the cold war-era nodes of American state power: scientific research, funding for education and the arts, foreign aid, and other programs that were created to allow the US to outcompete the Soviet Union and other countries. Musk does not care about American great power competition, such as with China, as Trump does. Indeed, Musk has close ties with the Chinese state.For Musk and his cohorts, the US must progress past the nation state model – where the state exist to project power against other nation states and part of this bargain is keeping a certain social compact of living standard with citizens – to the vendor state model where international firms are paramount and states exist instead to compete for their favor. The Doge project of Silicon Valley technolibertarianism aims to sublimate the state to capital entirely and to outsource state capacity to transnational tech firms. This is, rather than an end of globalization as the national conservatives want, the final conclusion of globalization, where international capital exists above and beyond the bounds of the nation-state.This is the reason large swathes of tech capital reversed course on Trump during the Biden administration and became his biggest financial backers. For them, Trump exists as a vehicle for their overall project.Both of these projects are disastrous for the American people on their own, but both being partially implemented in opposing ways is even worse and will lead to disaster for US workers and our society’s basic capacity to function.While the tariffs by themselves are devastating to US consumers and could lead to a major economic crisis, the Doge cuts strip state capacity that would be needed to implement the most positive vision of tariffs returning manufacturing jobs. While tariffs drive up prices on things like semiconductors or electric vehicles, the government is simultaneously slashing the programs designed to encourage these goods to be manufactured domestically. And while the Doge cuts have slashed the state and led to the direct capture of swathes of the state by tech capital, their overall project of global tech hegemony cannot progress in a world where international trade has broken down completely.Trump and the national conservative’s dream of a return to a pre-financialization manufacturing-based economy, where the US has security through economic self-reliance, and the tech right’s commitment to creating shareholder value at all costs, and whose entire model is based entirely on the result of financialization, are incompatible and on a collision course. Different sections of capital – tech on the one hand, and the revanchist small capital class who form national conservatism’s base on the other – have different and competing interests and control of different sections of administration policy. The consequences of this intranecine competition are enormous, but either way, the next four years look dire for the American working class. The damage may take generations to fix.

      Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign More

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      Trump’s tariffs come into full effect after he signs executive orders boosting coal production – US politics live

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      Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you all the latest news over the next few hours.We start with news that president Donald Trump’s new tariffs have gone into full effect today.When Trump announced the latest round of tariffs on 2 April, he declared that the US would now tax nearly all of America’s trading partners at a minimum of 10% – and impose steeper rates for countries that he says run trade surpluses with the US.The 10% baseline had already gone into effect on Saturday. Trump’s higher import tax rates on dozens of countries and territories took hold at midnight, Washington DC time, AP reported.The steeper levies run as high as 50% – with that biggest rate landing on small economies that trade little with the US, including the African kingdom of Lesotho.Some other rates include a tax of 47% on imports from Madagascar, 46% on Vietnam, 32% on Taiwan, 25% on South Korea, 24% on Japan and 20% on the European Union. Some of these new tariffs build on previous trade measures.Trump last week announced a tariff of 34% on China, for example, which would come on top of 20% levies he imposed on the country earlier this year. He has since threatened to add an another 50% levy on Chinese goods in response to Beijing’s recently promised retaliation. That would bring the combined total to 104% against China.China said it will take “resolute measures” to defend its trading rights, but gave no details on how it will respond.In other news:

      Donald Trump signed four executive orders boosting coal production yesterday. The orders direct government agencies to “end all discriminatory policies against the coal industry,” including by ending the leasing moratorium on coal on federal land, accelerating all permitted funding for coal projects, protecting coal power plants scheduled to be shuttered, and investigating state or local governments that “discriminate against coal”.

      During his executive order ceremony, Trump tried to assuage fears of a recession, saying that tariffs are bringing in $2bn a day. The White House has also said that nearly 70 countries have reached out looking to begin negotiations to lower or postpone their tariffs.

      A federal judge ruled that the White House’s decision to block the Associated Press from its press pool is unconstitutional. The ruling comes nearly two months after the White House first barred an AP reporter from the Oval Office over the outlet’s decision to continue using the term “Gulf of Mexico” after Donald Trump issued an executive order renaming the body of water the “Gulf of America.”

      The US will take back the Panama canal from Chinese influence, US defense secretary Pete Hegseth said during a rare visit to the nation still unsettled by Trump’s threats to take back the canal. Just hours after his visit, the Chinese embassy in Panama issued a statement calling Hegseth’s comments part of “a sensationalistic campaign” to “sabotage Chinese-Panamanian cooperation”.

      A New York judge will hear arguments tomorrow about the legality of Donald Trump’s deportations of Venezuelan immigrants, one day after the supreme court issued a ruling saying immigrant rights advocates had filed their case in the wrong state. After the supreme court issued its ruling yesterday, the American Civil Liberties Union re-filed its case in Manhattan.

      Hours after the Internal Revenue Service formalized an agreement to share tax information of undocumented immigrants with Homeland Security, the acting head of the Irs has decided to step down. The acting Irs commissioner, Melanie Krause, is the third person to lead the tax agency since Donald Trump took office in January. More

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      Trump’s very beautiful tariffs will fix America, masculinity and the family. It said so on Fox News | Arwa Mahdawi

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      There’s been a lot of doom-mongering about tariffs recently, hasn’t there? Oh no, my life savings are going to get wiped out and I’m never going to be able to retire! Oh no, grocery prices are going to triple! Oh no, it looks suspiciously as if Donald Trump has used ChatGPT to guide his fiscal policy and now we’re going to see another Great Depression! Moan, moan, moan.While it might be true that much of these predictions are coming from highly credentialed economists and people who tend to know what they’re talking about, I’d like to remind you that there are two sides to every story – and it’s always worth looking at both of them. You’ve already heard from voices who reckon Trump’s tariffs are misguided and dangerous. Now it’s time to focus on the people who support the president’s assessment that tariffs are a “very beautiful thing” that will usher in a new golden age.Where do we find such people? Fox News, of course. The place where up is down, left is right, and Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia if King Trump says that’s the case. As the stock market plunges, Fox News has wheeled out a bunch of pundits and anchors to explain how your savings getting obliterated is a good thing, actually.First, there’s Fox News host Jesse Watters, who is known for making thoughtful and nuanced statements such as: “When a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman”; and announcing that men shouldn’t eat soup in public because it isn’t “manly”. In a recent segment, Watters said that these tariffs – which will make life more expensive – are actually “going to make it easier for people to start families”. He added: “These tariffs are for the children.” I polled my own child, who is three, on this, and she would rather have an Elsa doll than a tariff, but what does she know, eh?While Watters believes the children are our future, and tariffs will help them lead the way, Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon reckons Trump’s economic policy is going to fix the “crisis of masculinity”. On Sunday, Ungar-Sargon told Fox News that the US had “shipped jobs that gave men who work with their hands for a living, and rely on brawn and physicality, off to other countries … and imported millions and millions of illegals to work in construction, manufacturing, landscaping, janitorial services – jobs that used to give men access to the American dream.”Ah yes, as the old adage goes: if you’ve got nothing intelligent to say, go on Fox News and demonise immigrants. There are in fact plenty of jobs available in the US that rely on “brawn and physicality”; the problem is many of them wreck your body and don’t pay a living wage. You know the workers who cut quartz slabs for kitchen countertops, for example? They’re predominantly young Latino men who are said to be suffering from lung disease because of the silica dust created by cutting said slabs. Meanwhile, construction workers are more likely to die of a drug overdose than those in any other occupation because the physical nature of the work results in an increased likelihood of injury and the subsequent prescription of addictive opioids. Romanticising these sorts of jobs – particularly when your own job consists of typing on a computer – does absolutely nothing to help men.As I said, it’s always important to look at both sides, even if one side of an argument appears completely demented. Still, I’m squinting very hard and I’m afraid that, despite Ungar-Sagon and Watters’s very persuasive arguments, I can’t see an upside to tariffs. Let’s say that more manufacturing jobs do open up in the US (a process that would take years). It seems unlikely Trump would fight for them to come with decent wages – he recently rescinded one of Joe Biden’s executive orders that raised the minimum wage for federal contractors. I’m not sure doing hard labour for a low salary gives you access to the American dream, unless your dream is going bankrupt from medical bills.But look at me: moan, moan, moan. You know what I’ve just realised my problem is? I think I need to watch more Fox News. And, if you’re feeling down about the state of the world, then you may need to, too. Now that Trump has started posturing over Iran, I can’t wait for Fox pundits to explain how accidentally inviting a nuclear war is going to be great, actually. Nothing like a little bit of radiation poisoning to fix the crisis of masculinity. More

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      Rightwing group backed by Koch and Leo sues to stop Trump tariffs

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      A libertarian group backed by Leonard Leo and Charles Koch has mounted a legal challenge against Donald Trump’s tariff regime, in a sign of spreading rightwing opposition to a policy that has sent international markets plummeting.The New Civil Liberties Alliance filed a suit against Trump’s imposition of import tariffs on exports from China, arguing that doing so under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) – which the president has invoked to justify the duties on nearly all countries – is unlawful.The group’s actions echo support given by four Republican senators last week for a Democratic amendment calling for the reversal of 25% tariffs imposed on Canada.Last Wednesday’s amendment passed with the support of Mitch McConnell, the former Republican Senate majority leader, and his fellow GOP members Rand Paul, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who argued that tariffs on Canada would be economically harmful.The action from the alliance has the potential to be even more emblematic, given its backing from Koch, a billionaire industrialist, and Leo, a wealthy legal activist who advised Trump on the nomination of three conservative supreme court justices during his first presidency, which has given the court a 6-3 rightwing majority. The group received money from organisations affiliated with Leo and Koch in 2022.The alliance has tabled its action on behalf of Simplified, a Florida-based home goods company whose business is heavily reliant on imports from China. It argues that the president has exceeded his powers in invoking the IEEPA to justify tariffs.“This statute authorizes specific emergency actions like imposing sanctions or freezing assets to protect the United States from foreign threats,” the alliance said in a statement. “It does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. In its nearly 50-year history, no other president – including President Trump in his first term – has ever tried to use the IEEPA to impose tariffs.”The alliance also argues that power to impose tariffs lies not with a sitting president, but with Congress, and warns that those imposed by Trump could run afoul of US supreme court rulings.“His attempt to use the IEEPA this way not only violates the law as written, but it also invites application of the supreme court’s major questions doctrine, which tells courts not to discern policies of ‘vast economic and political significance’ in a law without explicit congressional authorization,” its statement said.Mark Chenoweth, the alliance’s president, said the court in Pensacola – where the suit has been filed – would have to observe this legal precedent.“Reading this law [IEEPA] broadly enough to uphold the China tariff would transfer core legislative power,” he said. “To avoid that non-delegation pitfall, the court must construe the statute consistent with nearly 50 years of unbroken practice and decide it does not permit tariff setting.”The suit argues that there is no connection between the fentanyl epidemic – which Trump has cited as a reason for invoking the emergency powers – and the tariffs.“The means of an across-the-board tariff does not fit the end of stopping an influx of opioids, and is in no sense ‘necessary’ to that stated purpose,” the complaint filed on behalf of Simplified argues.“In fact, President Trump’s own statements reveal the real reason for the China tariff, which is to reduce American trade deficits while raising federal revenue.”The legal case adds to rumbling disquiet on tariffs among some of Trump’s usually vocal supporters, including the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman.Paul, a senator from Kentucky who has been one of the most consistent congressional anti-tariff voices, told the Washington Post that other Capitol Hill Republicans shared his concern.“They all see the stock market, and they’re all worried about it,” Paul said. “But they are putting on a stiff upper lip to try to act as if nothing’s happening and hoping it goes away.”Speaking in support of last week’s Democratic amendment, sponsored by the Virginia senator Tim Kaine, Paul said: “I don’t care if the president is a Republican or a Democrat. I don’t want to live under emergency rule. I don’t want to live where my representatives cannot speak for me and have a check and balance on power.”Trump attacked Paul and the three other Republican senators who backed the amendment and suggested they were driven by “Trump derangement syndrome”.In another sign of Republican concern, the GOP senator from Iowa Chuck Grassley – along with a Washington Democrat, Maria Cantrell – introduced a bill that would limit Trump’s ability to impose or increase tariffs by requiring Congress to approve them within 60 days. The White House budget office said on Monday that Trump would veto the bill. More

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      The Guardian view on Starmer’s choices: time to be bold | Editorial

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      In his speech to the Labour party conference in 2005, Tony Blair used a seasonal analogy to make the case for embracing disruptive but inevitable change. “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,” Mr Blair told delegates. “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”Twenty years on, to quote the billionaire US hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, it is the threat of a self-inflicted “economic nuclear winter” that haunts the global economy. Donald Trump’s imposition of swingeing US tariffs has unleashed mayhem on stock markets across the world, upending assumptions governing the world trade order since Bretton Woods. As Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, said at the weekend: “Globalisation as we’ve known it for the last couple of decades has come to an end.”What that means for the Labour government he serves and for Britain is both fraught with consequence and, to a significant degree, beyond Whitehall’s control. Second-guessing Mr Trump’s ultimate intentions – and the political and economic risks that he is willing to take, as consumers suffer the consequences of a trade war – is a futile exercise. But as the White House seeks to bully, intimidate and coerce its way to a new settlement between the US and the rest of the world, the risk of a global recession is clear.What Sir Keir Starmer described on Monday as a “new era” will require strategic boldness from an habitually cautious prime minister. Sir Keir should, for example, now go further and faster to reset relations with the EU, the UK’s biggest trading partner by far. That may involve an uneasy balancing act if EU countries decide to retaliate against Mr Trump, as the government seeks a trade deal with the White House and related tariff mitigation. But the alternative is unsplendid and impotent isolation, and a future “special relationship” with the US that approximates ever more closely to vassal status.Domestically, a reset is also required. Speaking in the West Midlands, Sir Keir announced modest measures to assist the UK car industry, hammered by 25% tariffs on exports at a time when it is also dealing with the pressures of the green transition. The prime minister described this as a “downpayment” on future support. But supply-side plans to relax electric vehicle targets for manufacturers send the wrong environmental message, when what is needed are radical measures to turbocharge consumer demand.The problem, paradoxically for a prime minister who defines himself as a pragmatist, is ideology. As the UK faces potentially huge economic headwinds, Labour’s industrial strategy will need to be bigger, more interventionist and less constrained by the redundant economic orthodoxies to which it continues to pay obeisance. Aspirations to drive significant growth through a combination of budgetary conservatism and deregulation were already looking doomed prior to Mr Trump’s act of sabotage last week. Following “liberation day”, Sir Keir’s ongoing insistence that the government will stubbornly persist with its fiscal rules begins to look like an act of national self-harm.Mr Blair’s old message on globalisation, addressed to post-industrial regions suffering the effects of unleashed market forces, used to be to adapt or face the consequences. As Mr Trump gambles on the fate of the world economy, making up the rules as he goes along, Labour will need to do precisely that, and at pace.

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