They gave Trump a menu of tariffs to choose from and he picked his good buddy Pete’s special recipe:

Not long after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the administration’s economic staff went to work on a daunting task: determining tariff rates for dozens of countries to fulfill the president’s campaign pledge of imposing “reciprocal” trade barriers.

After weeks of work, aides from several government agencies produced a menu of options meant to account for a wide range of trading practices, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Instead, Trump personally selected a formula that was based on two simple variables — the trade deficit with each country and the total value of its U.S. exports, said two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount internal talks. While precisely who proposed that option remains unclear, it bears some striking similarities to a methodology published during Trump’s first administration by Peter Navarro, now the president’s hard-charging economic adviser. After its debut in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, the crude math drew mockery from economists as Trump’s new global trade war prompted a sharp drop in markets.

Look, it could have been worse. He could have asked Laura Loomer to pick some numbers. Maybe Kanye West or Libs of TikTok.

Inside and outside the White House, advisers say Trump is unbowed even as the world reels from the biggest increase in trade hostilities in a century. They say Trump is unperturbed by negative headlines or criticism from foreign leaders. He is determined to listen to a single voice — his own — to secure what he views as his political legacy.

“He’s at the peak of just not giving a f— anymore,” said a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f—. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”

Speaking of a bad story:

4000 PTS DROP IN TWO DAYS.

$6 TRILLION GONE IN 48 HOURS

And he doesn’t give a fuck.

Donald Trump had a couple of mentors growing up. His father, Fred, taught him how to evade taxes. Attorney Roy Cohn taught him how to be an apex predator. Rev. Norman Vincent Peale taught young Donald to worship himself and “The Power of Positive Thinking” (1952). Peale officiated at Trump’s first wedding.

Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends & Influence People” (1936) seems not to be a Trump ur-text. Winning friends is not a self-loving, tax-cheating predator’s goal.

The Atlantic‘s Stephanie Bai examines how quickly Canadians unified to oppose a neighbor it once called friend until Donald Trump’s second term. They seem to have found their footing faster than Trump opponents south of the 49th parallel:

On the other side of the border, Americans who oppose Trump have struggled to come up with a unified response to his presidency. In part because of the speed and scale of his directives, it’s been hard to develop a protest message or strategy that is as ubiquitous as the “Buy Canadian” movement. Since January 22, the number of street protests in the U.S. has more than doubled compared with the same period at the start of Trump’s first presidency—but they also tend to be smaller in scale, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium. Jeremy Pressman, a co-director of the organization, told me that disorientation could be a factor affecting protests. Since taking office, Trump has signed off on a flurry of actions that empower ICE to detain and deport people without due process, pave the way for Elon Musk’s shadow presidency, gut the federal government, and grant mass pardons for January 6ers (while also floating the idea of compensating them for their prison time). What should the next protest focus on when so much of American life is under attack?

But bigger protests are not necessarily better, especially when the man living inside the White House’s perimeter fence would like nothing better than to turn a protest that gridlocks D.C. into a live-fire exercise for federal troops. (His SecDef seems open to it.) Thousands of regular, smaller actions across the country may bring neighbors’ defiance closer to Joe Average in Jefferson City, Missouri. They might send a signal that this is what “people like me” do without making protesters easy targets.

Protesting conditions in the U.S. are more fraught than they are in Canada:

Protesters also face an environment especially hostile to dissent. When Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist on a green card, was arrested in New York last month, the government did not provide evidence of illegal activity. And when Rümeysa Öztürk, a graduate student who co-authored an op-ed urging her university to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” had her visa revoked without her knowledge and was confronted by six masked federal agents last week, the Department of Homeland Security stated vaguely that she had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” Their stories are a warning from the Trump administration: Defiance can come at a steep price.

So be careful out there at today’s National Day of Action. Maybe leave your phone at home or turn it off before arriving. Review Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense. Be aware of your surroundings.

They’re coming for Medicare and Medicaid. Talking Points Memo reports:

On March 31st, CMS COO Amy Brandt sent out instructions for major cuts that had to take place across CMS. As she explained, HHS had been assigned a total amount of savings from canceled contracts. And of that total amount CMS was responsible for just over $2.7 billion. That amounted to 35% of CMS’s average total spend on contracts from the years FY2023 and 2024. So in technical terms, a shit-ton of money and a huge percentage of the overall budget.

As career CMS people have explained to me, CMS’s work is almost entirely contracted out. So this isn’t a case where you have most stuff done in house and some subset of the work is contracted out. It’s almost entirely contracted out. I further learned that the IT component is responsible for at least $750 million of that. The request came down on March 31st with responses due on April 3rd, i.e., today. So four days to decide how to cut more than a quarter of the CMS budget.

I’m told by knowledgable sources that there’s no way to cut this much without some parts of the system simply ceasing to function. So they’ll come up with a proposed plan, warn about what will break and wait to hear back. The Brandt memo says those recommendations will be reviewed and the final decision on cuts will go into effect on April 18th.

Don’t worry they’re confirming Dr. Oz to run this so I’m sure it will be fine. Maybe his friend Oprah can help.

I don’t even want to think about what happens when they fuck with Medicare. The people who have it use it . A lot. That’s what happens when you get old. If they break this one it’s going to lead directly to people dying. And a whole lot of very angry people who vote.

But then Trump oversaw hundreds of thousands of deaths of elderly people in the pandemic and didn’t blink an eye. Since people restored him to office despite his appalling performance in that crisis, why would anything be different this time?

After a little over a year at market, sales of the 6,600-pound vehicle, priced from $82,000, are laughably below what Musk predicted. Its lousy reputation for quality–with eight recalls in the past 13 months, the latest for body panels that fall off–and polarizing look made it a punchline for comedians. Unlike past auto flops that just looked ridiculous or sold badly, Musk’s truck is also a focal point for global Tesla protests spurred by the billionaire’s job-slashing DOGE role and MAGA politics.

“It’s right up there with Edsel,” said Eric Noble, president of consultancy CARLAB and a professor at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California (Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen, who styled Cybertruck for Musk, is a graduate of its famed transportation design program). “It’s a huge swing and a huge miss.”

They offer a quote from Elon Musk in 2019: “I do zero market research whatsoever.”

He’s like his BFF Trump in that regard:

[Trump]said in a series of interviews that he does not need to read extensively because he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I already had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”

Trump said he is skeptical of experts because “they can’t see the forest for the trees.” He believes that when he makes decisions, people see that he instinctively knows the right thing to do: “A lot of people said, ‘Man, he was more accurate than guys who have studied it all the time.’ ”

Trump said reading long documents is a waste of time because he absorbs the gist of an issue very quickly. “I’m a very efficient guy,” he said. “Now, I could also do it verbally, which is fine. I’d always rather have — I want it short. There’s no reason to do hundreds of pages because I know exactly what it is.”

Trump claimed he never read any market research for his real estate deals either. He and Elon are two peas in a pod in more ways than one.

What he did, says the son, was terrible. And he would do it again.

He didn’t do anything wrong, says the father. He has no regrets.

Maybe, says the mother, everything will be okay again one day, with the family again sitting together under the Christmas tree or sharing a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving.

But it’s not going to be easy.

"I love my son,” says the mother. "And I stand by my husband.”

Father, mother, son and two daughters. This is the story of the Reffitt family from Texas.

. . .

In a new study published in ACM Transactions on the Web, researchers from Queen Mary University of London have unveiled the intricate mechanisms behind one of the most dramatic collapses in the cryptocurrency world: the downfall of the TerraUSD stablecoin and its associated currency, LUNA. Using advanced mathematical techniques and cutting-edge software, the team has identified suspicious trading patterns that suggest a coordinated attack on the ecosystem, leading to a catastrophic loss of $3.5 billion in value virtually overnight.

The study, led by Dr. Richard Clegg and his team, employs temporal multilayer graph analysis—a sophisticated method for examining complex, interconnected systems over time. This approach allowed the researchers to map the relationships between different cryptocurrencies traded on the Ethereum blockchain, revealing how the TerraUSD stablecoin was destabilized by a series of deliberate, large-scale trades.

Stablecoins like TerraUSD are designed to maintain a steady value, typically pegged to a fiat currency like the US dollar. However, in May 2022, TerraUSD and its sister currency, LUNA, experienced a catastrophic collapse. Dr. Clegg's research sheds light on how this happened, uncovering evidence of a coordinated attack by traders who were betting against the system, a practice known as "shorting."

"What we found was extraordinary," says Dr. Clegg. "On the days leading up to the collapse, we observed highly unnatural trading patterns. Instead of the usual spread of transactions across hundreds of traders, we saw a handful of individuals controlling almost the entire market. These patterns are smoking gun evidence of a deliberate attempt to destabilize the system."

. . .

Five months ago:


Now:




That scumbag ruins everything he touches.

In February, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired the Air Force’s and Army’s top judge advocates general (JAGs). Last month, he commissioned his personal lawyer as a Navy JAG. He is now reportedly paving the way to make major changes within the JAG Corps—including how military lawyers advise on the law of war and prosecute those who violate it. These moves raise concerns that the JAG Corps could be compromised by partisan appointments and bad faith interpretations of the law, with wide-ranging consequences for how the U.S. military conducts operations and disciplines personnel.

Secretary Hegseth and the JAGs

On the evening of Feb. 21, President Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, C.Q. Brown, the chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, and the vice chief of staff of the Air Force, Gen. Jim Slife. On the same night, without any notification, Secretary Hegseth cut the top two uniformed lawyers of the Air Force and Army (referred to as “TJAGs”), Lt. Gen. Charles L. Plummer and LTG Gen. Joseph B. Berger III, respectively—the Navy position, previously filled by Vice Admiral Christopher French (retired as Rear Admiral), is currently filled by Acting Judge Advocate General Rear Admiral Reynolds. In what was described as the Defense Department’s “Friday night massacre,” many commentators were more alarmed by Hegseth’s removal of the TJAGs than the president’s firing of the chairman. The actions taken were also unprecedented—no secretary of defense in recent memory has targeted JAGs in this way.

As described by experts, judge advocates, like other servicemembers, fill non-partisan roles. The thousands of lawyers serving in the JAG Corps are tasked with providing independent, neutral, and fact-based legal advice on domestic and international law across the rank and file, up to the highest-level commanders. Under 10 U.S.C, no officer or Department of Defense employee—political or career—may interfere with the ability of JAGs to give independent legal advice.

In firing the TJAGs, Hegseth did not point to any misconduct to justify his decision. His only stated reasons were that he considered the TJAGs not “well-suited” for the job, and he wanted to avoid “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” While troubling for him to imply that only loyalists to the president should be in these positions, the secretary’s public statements prior to assuming his post made plain that he views military lawyers as obstructionists and the laws they advise on, including the Geneva Conventions, as outdated and too restrictive. To illustrate his opinion of military lawyers, in his book he recalled a time during his military service when he used a degrading term—“jagoffs”—to describe them.

. . .

Ukraine's technology industry has held up during Russia's invasion, with activity falling markedly less than other industries and increasing as a proportion of national exports since 2019.

The Eastern European nation's economy suffered when Russia launched a full-scale military invasion in 2022, but after three years, the tech industry has more or less recovered while other sectors have not.

. . .

Ukrainian IT companies have raised almost $1.5 billion in venture capital over the past six years, the report added.

Kerry Hallard, CEO of the Global Sourcing Association (GSA) – which represents IT outsourcers – said members in Ukraine had not been immediately affected by the war. "It's not quite business as usual but they have got to continue; these companies have spent years building up their industry," she said at the time. ®

From world leaders, to the tiniest manufacturers thousands of miles away Washington, decision-makers across the global economy are racked with uncertainty as they scramble to come to terms with Donald Trump’s historic tariffs.

Experts are all but unanimous that the impact on global growth of Wednesday’s extraordinary Rose Garden press conference will be negative – but just how bad remains highly uncertain.

“In economic terms, it makes no sense at all,” said Jordi Gual, the former chair of CaixaBank, Spain’s largest domestic lender, who is now an economics professor at IESE business school in Barcelona. “It is hugely problematic, because we go back to a level we hadn’t seen since the 1930s.”

. . .



. . .