Adam Gopnik’s latest essay for The New Yorker explores how Adolf Hitler was able to rise to power in Nazi Germany—which happened largely because people believed they would be able to control him.
Gopnik tells The New Abnormal co-host Danielle Moodie that the same could be said for Donald Trump leading into the 2024 election.
“You had this character who was regarded as a chaotic clown by everyone around him. The conservative minister of defense called him a psychopath,” he said. “Yet all of those people, the media moguls, the respectable conservatives, ended up aiding and abetting him in every way in his search for power and they did it in a way that is, yes, disconcertingly familiar to us.”
“They all thought they could manage him. They all thought they could control him. They all thought that they could take advantage of his movement for their own ends. And that on the day when it all blew up, because it had to blow up because he was a psychopath and clearly not capable of exercising power, they would be there to inherit,” he said.
Gopnik says that those who propped up Hitler believed they could “control the beast” and that they would “end up the ultimate victors.” However, as history shows, that wasn’t the case.
“Those patterns are frightening to see emerging again and again throughout history.”
In this article, we are going to discuss the top 20 tobacco growing countries in the world. You can skip our detailed analysis of the global tobacco market, the heavy investments in marketing by tobacco companies, and the rising popularity of flavored tobacco, and go directly to the Top 5 Tobacco Growing Countries in the World.
Tobacco was first used by the people of pre-Columbian Americas. Archeological studies suggest that the Maya people of Central America started using tobacco leaves as far back as the 1st century BC, mainly for smoking in sacred and religious ceremonies. By the time Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492, the Native Americans were already cultivating and smoking tobacco in pipes, cigars, and snuff. Although Cristopher Columbus brought with him a few tobacco leaves and seeds back to Europe, most Europeans didn’t get their first taste of the plant until the mid-16th century, when adventurers and diplomats like France’s Jean Nicot – for whom nicotine is named – began to popularize its use. Tobacco was introduced to France in 1556, Portugal in 1558, Spain in 1559, and finally England in 1565. By the early 17th century, smoking was common in all of Europe’s maritime nations, and their colonial empires soon carried tobacco all over the world.
Global Tobacco Market:
As we mentioned in our article – Top 20 Most Valuable Tobacco Companies in the World – the global tobacco market is expected to reach $1.049 trillion by 2030, with a CAGR of 2.1% during the forecast period. The market is fuelled by a growing demand from developing nations, coupled with the rising proliferation of next-generation products (NGPs) across the globe. The high marketing expenditure and discounting of products undertaken by major tobacco companies is also adding to the growth of the industry.
While tobacco consumption is leveling off and even decreasing in some countries, the number of people smoking is still increasing globally, and smokers are smoking more than before. An estimated 1.3 billion people worldwide use tobacco products, 80% of whom are in low- and middle-income countries.
Heavy Investments in Marketing:
The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) has led to widespread restrictions on tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship around the world. This, coupled with the evidence of the causal role of marketing in the tobacco epidemic, has inspired more than half the countries worldwide to ban some forms of tobacco marketing.
Yet, tobacco companies have found creative ways to maneuver their way around these barriers, using a variety of marketing strategies to create demand for cigarettes and other tobacco products by urging the youth to experiment, reducing smokers’ motivation to quit, and encouraging former smokers to take it up again. According to the Federal Trade Commission, in 2020 alone, the American tobacco industry spent over $8.4 billion on marketing for cigarettes and smokeless tobacco, spending more at the point-of-sale than anywhere else. They spent nearly $66 million on advertisements at the point of sale alone.
However, this hasn’t been without consequences. In September 2023, the e-cigarette company Juul, which at the height of its success dominated the market with its sweet flavors, agreed to pay $438.5 million in a settlement with 33 states and one territory over marketing its product to teens. The case ends major litigation over claims about the marketing of e-cigarettes to adolescents, resolving thousands of lawsuits and amounting to billions of dollars in payouts to states, cities, and people.
Sales of Juul products were sky high a few years ago and the company was even eyeing a market valuation of around $38 billion. However, it was discovered that Juul use among teens and young adults spiked heavily from 2018 to 2019. An estimated 27.5% of high schoolers reported using e-cigarettes during the period, with more than half naming Juul as their brand of choice. To add to the company’s woes, the FDA banned Juul products on U.S. shelves last summer, citing a lack of evidence demonstrating their overall safety. The regulator also noted Juul’s ‘disproportionate role in the rise in youth vaping.’
The Rising Popularity of Flavored Tobacco:
Flavors improve the taste and mask the harshness of tobacco, making flavored tobacco products more appealing and easier to smoke for beginners, who are often young. In 2022, cigars were the second most commonly used tobacco product among U.S. middle and high school students. The availability of flavors in cigars that are prohibited in cigarettes (such as cherry), and the fact that they are commonly sold as a single stick, has raised concerns that these products may be especially appealing to youth. According to a 2021 survey by the CDC, among middle and high school students who smoked cigars in the previous 30 days, 44.4% reported using a flavored cigar during that time.
A popular name among the machine made, flavored cigars is Middleton’s Black and Mild. Designed for the occasional smoker, these pipe tobacco cigars boast a smoke smooth enough to satisfy an aficionado in a pinch. Owned by Altria Group, Inc. (NYSE:MO), Black & Mild cigars are available in a variety of flavors like apple, cherry, cream, and more.
The John Middleton Co., a famous name in the pipe tobacco and machine cigars industry, was acquired by the Richmond-based Altria Group, Inc. (NYSE:MO) in 2007 in a deal worth $2.9 billion, thus enabling the tobacco giant to break into the growing American cigar business as it tried to expand beyond the shrinking U.S. cigarette market. The net cost of the acquisition of Middleton, maker of Black & Mild cigars, from the privately held Bradford Holdings was $2.2 billion, after deducting $700 million in tax benefits arising from the deal.
With that said, here are the Largest Tobacco Growing Countries in the World.
Top 20 Tobacco Growing Countries in the World
Methodology:
To collect data for this article, we have referred to FAOSTAT, looking for the Countries that Grow the Most Tobacco. The following countries have been ranked by their respective land areas dedicated to tobacco production (measured in hectares) in 2021.
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20. Ivory Coast
Total Area Dedicated to Tobacco Production: 15,979 ha
Ivory Coast is a significant producer and consumer of tobacco in Africa, with an estimated 9.4% of the adult population classified as smokers. However, the West African nation has taken significant steps to reduce the smoking rate among its people. In fact, Côte d’Ivoire became the first country in Africa to require plain packaging on tobacco products in 2022.
19. North Macedonia
Total Area Dedicated to Tobacco Production: 16,617 ha
North Macedonia has a long tradition of cultivating and exporting oriental tobacco, mainly of the types Prilep, Jaka, and Basma. Due to the large number of families working in tobacco agriculture, it also receives the largest share of crop subsidies, comprising on average a quarter of total agricultural subsidies for the period 2008 – 2019.
18. Cuba
Total Area Dedicated to Tobacco Production: 16,682 ha
Cuban cigars have long been a symbol of luxury and prestige, and the country produces some of the Most Expensive Cigars in the World. Due to consistently warm temperatures, high humidity, and regular rainfall, Cuba has excellent conditions for growing tobacco and it has been a mainstay crop for thousands of years.
Total Area Dedicated to Tobacco Production: 21,059 ha
Tobacco leaves are produced in 20 provinces in the North and Northeast of Thailand and last year, around 50% of Thai tobacco farmers grew burley, while 26% grew turkish leaf, and 24% grew virginia leaf. Most of this produce supplies the local market, monopolized by the Tobacco Authority of Thailand under government supervision for setting quotas and producing cigarettes.
Thailand is included among the Top Producers of Tobacco in Asia.
16. Uganda
Total Area Dedicated to Tobacco Production: 21,998 ha
Tobacco growing and manufacturing in Uganda was introduced in the 1920s by British American Tobacco, and around 75,000 of the nation’s farmers are now involved in tobacco agriculture, based mainly in the northwest and southwest of the country.
15. Philippines
Total Area Dedicated to Tobacco Production: 28,380 ha
First introduced in the 1950’s, tobacco is widely grown in various provinces in the Philippines, with the industry supporting over 2 million jobs nationwide. The country exported 53% of its total tobacco produced in 2022, while 47% was supplied to local tobacco manufacturers.
14. Pakistan
Total Area Dedicated to Tobacco Production: 47,332 ha
Although tobacco is grown on only about 0.23% of total irrigated land of Pakistan, the crop plays an important role in the country’s economy by generating income and employment for over 50,000 farmers in all four provinces. However, the total land area under tobacco cultivation has been rapidly decreasing over the last decade, mainly due to climate change and negligence by the government authorities.
13. Bangladesh
Total Area Dedicated to Tobacco Production: 47,523 ha
The cultivation of tobacco is increasing alarmingly in Bangladesh, with the crop now being grown in every part of the country. Farmers are encouraged to continue and expand tobacco cultivation with various incentives, including loans and buyback guarantees.
12. Argentina
Total Area Dedicated to Tobacco Production: 53,840 ha
Argentina stands among the Largest Tobacco Producers in South America, with the country producing 95.6 thousand tons in 2022, representing approximately 1.7% of the global production of tobacco of 5.8 million tons. Most of the tobacco cultivation happens in the north, with the provinces of Jujuy, Salta, and Misiones taking the lead.
11. North Korea
Total Area Dedicated to Tobacco Production: 56,995 ha
The tobacco industry plays a significant role in the North Korean economy, with around 2.3% of the country’s total arable land dedicated to cultivating the cash crop. North Korea’s counterfeit cigarette production capacity is estimated to exceed two billion packs a year, and is a major source of income for the regime.
10. Tanzania
Total Area Dedicated to Tobacco Production: 80,678 ha
Tobacco has been grown in Tanzania since the 1950s and is an important source of foreign exchange for the country. Tanzania produced 125 million kg of tobacco in 2023 and for the first
time, more than 50% of this produce was bought and sold abroad by local companies.
9. Turkey
Total Area Dedicated to Tobacco Production: 83,166 ha
Tobacco was introduced to the Ottomans by the Spanish in the 17th century, and the country is now the world’s largest producer of aromatic oriental tobacco – a small-leafed variety which is sun-cured. Around 400,000 Turks are dependent on the tobacco industry for their livelihood.
8. Mozambique
Total Area Dedicated to Tobacco Production: 91,469 ha
Tobacco cultivation has been considered a mainstay of Mozambique’s economy and the country exported $49.4 million of it in the first nine months of 2023, a quarter less than in the previous year. Most of this tobacco is grown in the regions of Tete and Niassa, representing over 89% of the country’s total production.
7. United States of America
Total Area Dedicated to Tobacco Production: 95,730 ha
Although America has significantly decreased cultivating tobacco since the 1980s, it still ranks among the largest producers of the crop. North Carolina and Kentucky are the States that Grow the Most Tobacco in America.
Total Area Dedicated to Tobacco Production: 100,962 ha
Tobacco is the backbone of the Malawian economy, historically generating about 70% of the country’s export revenue and now accounting for over 50%. In 2015, tobacco farming took up more than 5% of all of Malawi’s farming land – the highest percentage anywhere in the world at that time.
Malawi ranks among the Largest Producers of Burley Tobacco in the World.
Conservative Judges Sound Alarm: Trump Will Shred Our Justice System
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling – March 29, 2024
Donald Trump’s attacks on the judges and court staff overseeing his criminal trials have much deeper legal implications than petty fines. Instead, the attacks—and the responding “passivity, acquiescence, and submissiveness by the nation”—are actively undermining the entire judicial system, prominent conservative judges are warning.
In a CNN interview Thursday evening, Republican-appointed federal District Judge Reggie B. Walton felt compelled to announce that Trump’s continued attacks could result in “tyranny.” Just hours later, former Appeals Court Judge J. Michael Luttig, also a conservative, issued his own warning cry, declaring that Trump is responsible for the “dismantling” of the nation’s “system of justice.”
“The Nation is witnessing the determined delegitimization of both its Federal and State judiciaries and the systematic dismantling of its system of justice and Rule of Law by a single man—the former President of the United States,” started Luttig in a multipart thread on X.
“In the months ahead, the former president can only be expected to ramp up his unprecedented efforts to delegitimize the courts of the United States, the nation’s state courts, and America’s system of justice, through his vicious, disgraceful, and unforgivable attacks and threats on the Federal and State Judiciaries and the individual Judges of these courts.”
“Never in American history has any person, let alone a President of the United States, leveled such threatening attacks against the federal and state courts and federal and state judicial officers of the kind the former president has leveled continually now for years.”
Luttig also warned that Trump isn’t accomplishing the task alone. It’s the complicit Supreme Court—and the American people—that are letting Trump get away with it.
“It is the responsibility of the Supreme Court of the United States in the first instance to protect the federal courts, the federal judges, and all participants in the justice system from the reprehensible spectacle of the former president’s inexcusable, threatening attacks, just as it is the responsibility of the respective State Supreme Courts in the first instance to protect their courts and their state judges from the same,” he added. “Ultimately, however, it is the responsibility of the entire nation to protect its courts and judges, its Constitution, its Rule of Law, and America’s Democracy from vicious attack, threat, undermine, and deliberate delegitimization at the hands of anyone so determined.”
Here was Walton’s own dire warning:
Senior Judge Reggie Walton: “We do these jobs because we’re committed to the rule of law & we believe in the rule of law & the rule of law can only function effectively when we have judges who are prepared to carry out their duties without the threat of potential physical harm.” pic.twitter.com/V1GC7LVD2g
‘Humbling, and a bit worrying’: Scientists fail to fully explain record global heat
Hayley Smith – March 27, 2024
The sun sets over Huntington Beach at the end of a hot December day in 2023. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Deadly heat in the Southwest. Hot-tub temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean. Sweltering conditions in Europe, Asia and South America.
That 2023 was Earth’s hottest year on record was in some ways no surprise. For decades, scientists have been sounding the alarm about rapidly rising temperatures driven by humanity’s relentless burning of fossil fuels.
But last year’s sudden spike in global temperatures blew far beyond what statistical climate models had predicted, leading one noted climate scientist to warn that the world may be entering “uncharted territory.”
“It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has,” wrote Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a recent article in the journal Nature.
Now, he and other researchers are scrambling to explain why 2023 was so anomalously hot. Many theories have been proposed, but “as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened,” Schmidt wrote.
Misters spray water on a young boy at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City, Mo., as as temperatures approached 100 degrees in June 2023. (Charlie Riedel / Associated Press)
Last year’s global average temperature of 58.96 degrees Fahrenheit was about a third of a degree warmer than the previous hottest year in 2016, and about 2.67 degrees warmer than the late 1800s pre-industrial period against which global warming is measured.
While human-caused climate change and El Niño can account for much of that warming, Schmidt and other experts say the extra three or four tenths of a degree is harder to account for.
Theories for the increase include a 2020 change in aerosol shipping regulations designed to help improve air quality around ports and coastal areas, which may have had the unintended consequence of enabling more sunlight to reach the planet.
The 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai volcano also shot millions of tons of water vapor into the stratosphere, which scientists say helped to trap some heat. What’s more, a recent uptick in the 11-year solar cycle may have contributed about a tenth of a degree of additional warning.
But these factors alone cannot explain what’s happening, Schmidt said.
“Even after taking all plausible explanations into account, the divergence between expected and observed annual mean temperatures in 2023 remains about 0.2 °C — roughly the gap between the previous and current annual record,” he wrote in his report.
Heat ripples from hot asphalt in downtown Phoenix in July 2023. (Matt York / Associated Press)
Reached by phone, Schmidt said he thinks one of three things could be going on.
It’s possible that 2023 was a “blip” — a perfect storm of natural variables and Earth cycles lining up to create one freakishly hot year. Should that prove to be the case, “it won’t have huge implications for what we’re going to see in the future, because it would have been just such a rare and unlikely thing that is not going to happen again anytime soon,” he said.
However, he indicated that’s unlikely, as those elements “have never lined up to give us a blip this large.”
Another possibility is that scientists have misunderstood the driving forces of climate change. While greenhouse gases, volcanic eruptions and aerosols are known to affect global temperatures, perhaps the full extent of their effects have been underestimated or miscalibrated. Should that be the case, he said, research and data sets will hopefully catch up soon.
The last explanation he offered is that the system itself is changing — and changing in ways that are faster and less predictable than previously understood.
“That would be worrying because science is really all about taking information from the past, looking at what’s going on, and making predictions about the future,” Schmidt said. “If we can’t really trust the past, then we have no idea what’s going to happen.”
Not everyone agrees with his assessment, however. Michael Mann, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, said the premise that 2023’s warmth cannot be explained — or that it is inconsistent with model simulations — is “simply wrong.”
“The situation is extremely similar to what we saw during the 2014-2016 period as we transitioned from several years of La Niña conditions to a major El Niño event, and then back to La Niña,” Mann said in an email.
In fact, he said some recent modeling shows the global temperature spike in 2016 was even more of an outlier than that of 2023.
“The plot shows that the surface warming of the planet is proceeding almost precisely as predicted,” Mann said. “And the models show that the warming will continue apace as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels and generate carbon pollution.”
When asked about this interpretation, Schmidt said it’s true that the 2014 to 2016 period was similarly anomalous. But there is a key difference between then and now, he said.
The 2016 temperature spike came on the heels of an El Niño event, with the biggest anomalies in February, March and April of the year following its peak, he said. He noted that similar patterns occurred after previous El Niños in 1998 and 1942.
Conversely, last year’s spike arrived in August, September, October and November — before the peak of El Niño — “and that has never happened before,” Schmidt said. “It never happened in the temperature record that we have. It doesn’t happen in the climate models.”
Alex Hall, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UCLA, said he largely agrees with Schmidt’s assessment that the hypothesized factors alone can’t account for the large temperature anomaly experienced in 2023 and early 2024. He likened it to the emergence of megafires, or extreme wildfires, in the last decade, which wasn’t entirely foreseen.
“What we’ve learned is that there’s an aspect of this that isn’t fully predictable — that we don’t fully understand — and that we are tempting fate here a little bit by continuing to interfere with the climate system,” Hall said. “It’s going to do things that we don’t understand, that we don’t anticipate, and those are going to have potentially big impacts.”
Hall said the rapid transition from a persistent La Niña to a strong El Niño last summer likely played a role, as did the change in aerosol regulations.
He also posited that the rapid loss of Antarctic sea ice in 2023 — itself an outcome of the warmer planet and oceans — could have created a kind of feedback loop that contributed to more warming. Ice and snow are reflective, so when they melt, it can result in a darker ocean that absorbs more heat and sunlight. (Antarctic sea ice coverage dropped to a record low in 2023, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.)
“It’s sort of a planetary emergency for us to figure out what’s going on when we see these types of changes,” Hall said. “There should be large teams of people working on it to try to understand it, and we don’t really have those kinds of efforts, so I think there’s lessons, too, for the need for focus on this particular topic.”
Tourists seek shade and water while visiting the Acropolis of Athens during a heat wave in July 2023. (Petros Giannakouris / Associated Press)
While he and other scientists may not agree on just how extraordinary 2023 was — or what was behind its exceptional warmth — they all acknowledged the clear signs of a planet being pushed to its limits.
“I think it’s unfortunate that so much has been made of the El Niño-spiked 2023 global temperatures, where in my view there is nothing surprising, or inconsistent with model predictions, there,” said Mann. “There are much better, scientifically-sound reasons to be concerned about the unfolding climate crisis — particularly the onslaught of devastating weather extremes, heat waves, wildfires, floods, drought, which by some measures are indeed exceeding model predictions.”
Last year was marked by extreme weather events, with more billion-dollar disasters in the United States than any other year, according to NOAA. Among them were the Lahaina wildfire in Hawaii in August; Hurricane Idalia in Florida that same month; and severe flooding in New York in September.
Already this year, January and February have continued the global hot streak, marking nine consecutive months of a record-breaking temperatures.
In his Nature article, Schmidt said the inexplicable elements of the recent warming have revealed an “unprecedented knowledge gap” in today’s climate monitoring, which drives home the need for more nimble data collection that can keep up with the pace of change.
He noted it may take researchers months or even years to unpack all the factors that could have played a part in the sizzling conditions.
“We need answers for why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the past 100,000 years,” he wrote. “And we need them quickly.”
Though El Niño is expected to wane this summer, there is still a 45% chance that this year will be warmer than 2023, according to NOAA.
It is a near certainty however that 2024 will rank among the five hottest years on record — so far.
The surprising reasons why Big Oil may not want a second Trump term
Maxine Joselow, The Washington Post – March 26, 2024
Active pump jacks increase pressure to draw oil toward the surface at the South Belridge Oil Field on February 26, 2022, in unincorporated Kern County, California, approximately 141 miles (227 km) northwest of Los Angeles, California. – From rural areas of the eastern states where modern oil production began to cities in southern California where pumpjacks loom not far from homes, lax regulations and the petroleum industrys boom and busts cycles have left the US pockmarked with perhaps hundreds of thousands of oil wells that are unsealed and haven’t produced in decades. In a first, Washington is making a concerted effort to plug these wells by allocating $4.7 billion in federal infrastructure dollars to plug the wells in an effort to lessen the negative health and environmental impact of the disused wells. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP) (Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images) (ROBYN BECK via Getty Images)More
HOUSTON – As president, Donald Trump vowed to unleash American “energy dominance,” while on the campaign trail, he has summarized his energy policies with the slogan “drill, baby, drill.”
Yet a possible Trump victory in the 2024 election is not delighting oil and gas executives as much as one might expect, according to interviews with several industry leaders at a recent energy conference in Houston.
Fossil fuel firms have found a lot to like in President Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, which Trump has vowed to unravel. The law offers lucrative tax credits for companies to capture and store carbon dioxide – subsidies that several oil giants are eager to exploit, even as they pump record amounts of crude oil and post near-record profits.
In addition, Trump has championed an “America First” approach to trade policy that prioritizes steep tariffs on imported goods. The approach could hike the costs of building new pipelines and other energy infrastructure, and it could heighten anxieties about a global trade war.
Still, fossil fuel executives have slammed Biden’s decision to pause approvals of new liquefied natural gas exports. And during the GOP presidential primary, oil barons filled Trump’s campaign coffers far more than those of his competitors.
If a poll were conducted among energy executives about the 2024 election, the results “would be a little more balanced than people might expect,” Alan Armstrong, president and CEO of the gas pipeline company Williams, said in an interview at CERAWeek by S&P Global.
Armstrong said many fossil fuel executives feel the Biden administration has unfairly demonized their industry because of its role in causing climate change. But that’s a personal sentiment, not a professional one, he said.
“If you’re asking people personally, they’re probably tired of being told they’re bad people by the current administration,” Armstrong said. “But from a business objective standpoint, it would be a much more balanced perspective.”
Trump plans to gut the Inflation Reduction Act, including its generous tax credits for clean energy and electric vehicles, should he return to the White House, according to senior campaign officials and advisers to the former president.
Yet several oil industry executives have praised the Inflation Reduction Act – the IRA for short – for helping their companies pursue still-unproven green technologies such as carbon capture and clean hydrogen. The subsidy for carbon capture has especially benefited ExxonMobil, CEO Darren Woods acknowledged at CERAWeek.
“I was very supportive of the IRA – I am very supportive of the IRA – because as legislated the IRA focuses on carbon intensity and in theory is technology-agnostic,” Woods said. “They’re not trying to pick a particular technology.”
Vijay Swarup, Exxon’s senior director of climate strategy and technology, added that the IRA is “getting projects to advance.” Exxon has signed contracts to store the carbon captured from an ammonia plant and a steel plant in Louisiana, as well as a yet-to-be-built hydrogen plant in Texas, Swarup said in an interview.
Of course, Trump could not unilaterally repeal the IRA subsidies. He would need Congress to pass legislation, meaning Republicans would need to maintain control of the House and retake the Senate, in addition to clinching the White House.
In that scenario, Mike Sommers, president and chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute, said the trade group would aggressively lobby against any proposals to scrap green subsidies that have helped the industry.
“I suspect that when there is an attempt to repeal the IRA – and there will be – it will end up looking more like a scalpel-like approach rather than a butcher knife,” Sommers said. “And we’ll advocate for the provisions that we support.”
While in the White House, Trump proclaimed himself a “Tariff Man” – and he has no intention of abandoning that self-appointed title if reelected.
Publicly, Trump has floated the idea of imposing a 10 percent tariff on every good coming into the United States. Privately, he has discussed with advisers the possibility of imposing a flat 60 percent tariff on all Chinese imports, The Washington Post previously reported.
At a rally in Ohio this month, Trump also pledged to slap a 100 percent tariff on Chinese vehicle imports – part of a broader tirade in which he warned of a “bloodbath” for the U.S. auto industry if he is not reelected.
Sommers said such proposals, which are widely viewed as likely to spark a global trade war, carry “risks” for his sector.
“Particularly for the products that are produced here in the United States, we need free trade for these goods to flow,” he said. “I think we are concerned about kind of a retrenchment to a more nationalistic approach on trade policy. So that’s one example of an area where we’re not going to be aligned with a potential President Trump.”
But Dan Eberhart, chief executive of the oil-field services company Canary and a Trump supporter, said he isn’t worried about the former president’s trade policies. He said any adverse impact of tariffs would be canceled out by other pro-fossil-fuel policies, such as more offshore oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico.
“In general, I don’t like protectionist policy,” Eberhart said. “But I really think that the Trump administration will be more pro-oil and gas than the Biden administration.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to specific questions for this story. In an emailed statement, spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said that “on day one, President Trump will unleash American Energy to lower inflation for all Americans, pay down debt, strengthen national security, and establish the United States as the manufacturing superpower of the world.”
The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Just three weapons will turn the Ukraine war back around. And the USA is back in the fight
David Axe – March 27, 2024
A Ukrainian artillery piece fires on Russian positions. Artillery, and supplies of artillery shells, have been crucial factors in the Ukrainian fighting – Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty
Six months after blocking US president Joe Biden’s proposal to spend another $61 billion on aid to Ukraine, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson – who alone can schedule votes in the narrowly Republican-controlled legislative body – seems to have reversed his opposition to Ukraine’s war effort.
With retirements and special elections having reduced his majority to just two votes out of 438, and with a small contingent of far-right Republican extremists refusing to vote on any bill that has bipartisan support, Johnson increasingly relies on Democrats to enact budgets and other legislation.
And that means he answers more to the Democratic agenda than the Republican one. And strong support for Ukraine is a Democratic priority. The US House is on vacation until the first week of April. But once it reconvenes, Johnson will call a vote on fresh aid to Ukraine, according to some of his House colleagues.
With tens of billions of dollars in fresh funding, the US Defence Department could send a lot of weapons to Ukraine – and soon. Some could come straight from existing US stocks, with the new funding paying for newly-built weapons to replenish these stocks. Others could come from new commercial contracts brokered by the Pentagon.
It’s obvious what the priorities should be.
First and foremost, Ukraine needs artillery shells. For the first 18 months of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, the United States was the main supplier of artillery ammo to Ukrainian batteries. In total, the Americans donated around two million shells. Half came straight from American magazine stockpiles. The other half, America quietly bought from South Korea.
These shells, along with additional ammo from other sources, kept Ukrainian guns blasting away at a rate of around 10,000 rounds a day for much of the war’s first year and a half. That was enough to match Russian batteries once the Russians burned through much of their ammo stockpile in the wider war’s first few weeks.
The Republican funding blockade, and the subsequent run down of US supplied munitions through the end of last year, cut by two-thirds the Ukrainians’ daily allotment of shells. In some of the darkest days of the war in February, as a pair of Russian field armies closed in on the Ukrainian stronghold in the eastern city of Avdiivka, Russian guns were firing five times as many rounds as Ukrainian guns were – and demolishing Ukrainian defence s without fear of return fire.
The US Army has been building a new shell factory in Texas to complement its existing factory in Pennsylvania. Soon, the Army should be capable of producing around 70,000 shells a month – a sixfold increase over its 2022 production rate.
There’s no reason most of the shells can’t go to Ukraine, once there’s funding to pay for each $5,000 round. Combined with shells from the European Union as well as a separate Czech initiative, urgent shipments of shells from the United States could give Ukraine an enduring artillery advantage for the first time in the wider war.
Once the shells are shipping, the Americans can address Ukraine’s second-greatest need: Patriot air-defence batteries and missiles for these batteries. The US-made Patriot is Ukraine’s best air-defence system. Its 90-mile-range missiles can reliably shoot down all but the fastest Russian missiles – and swat down Russian warplanes like flies.
When the Ukrainian air force shot down 13 Russian fighter-bombers in 13 days last month, it was apparently a mobile Patriot battery that did most of the shooting.
But Ukraine has just three Patriot batteries with around three dozen launchers – and lost a pair of those launchers in a devastating rocket ambush in early March. The batteries are spread thin. One normally protects Kyiv. Another protects Odesa, Ukraine’s strategic port on the Black Sea. The third battery apparently travels the front line in order to engage Russian jets.
Ideally, Ukraine would place a $1-billion Patriot battery in each of its half-dozen biggest cities and also assign one each to the eastern and southern fronts. And these batteries should be free to fire away at their fastest rate – meaning they’ll need a steady supply of missiles, each of which costs around $3 million.
Doubling or tripling Ukraine’s Patriot force could help the Ukrainians wrest back control of the air over the front line – and also reverse the disturbing trend toward bigger and bloodier Russian missile-strikes on Ukrainian cities.
Having replenished Ukraine’s artillery and air-defences, the United States should rescue one of the Ukrainian army’s best brigades. The 47th Mechanized Brigade is the main operator of American-made armoured vehicles, including M-1 Abrams tanks and M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles.
The 69-ton M-1 and 42-ton M-2 – thickly armoured and armed with a 120-millimetre cannon and a 25-millimetre autocannon, respectively – are some of the best armoured vehicles in the world, and the 47th Brigade has put them to good use. Counterattacking Russian assault groups west of Avdiivka, the M-1 and M-2s have blunted Russia’s winter offensive – and minimized Ukraine’s territorial losses as its artillery supplies bottomed out.
But the Americans shipped just 31 M-1s and around 200 M-2s before Republicans cut off aid. Four of the M-1s and more than 30 of the M-2s have been destroyed and others damaged. The 47th Brigade is running out of vehicles.
The US Army has thousands of older M-1s and M-2s in storage. They’d need overhaul before going to war in Ukraine, but a billion dollars should be enough to pay for the work as well as expedited shipping.
Once Speaker of the House Johnson bends to Americans’ overwhelming support for a free Ukraine and finally brings aid to a vote, the Pentagon could speed hundreds of tanks and fighting vehicles to the Ukrainian army.
Here’s who could be responsible for paying for the Baltimore bridge disaster
Erin Snodgrass – March 26, 2024
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The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed after a container ship collided with it.
Several entities will likely be on the hook to foot the bill in the aftermath of the disaster.
The maritime insurance industry will be saddled with the highest costs.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed on Tuesday after a large container ship ran into it, leading to six presumed deaths and millions of dollars in possible damage.
It’s still too early to estimate the total economic impact of the disaster, but between the cost of rebuilding the decades-old bridge, compensating the victims’ families, and paying out damages for disruptions to the supply chain, the eventual cost of the disaster is expected to be significant.
Who will pay to rebuild the bridge?
President Joe Biden said on Tuesday the federal government should be responsible for paying to reconstruct the damaged Francis Scott Key Bridge.
“It is my intention that the federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge, and I expect Congress to support my effort,” Biden said.
The bridge was built in the 1970s for about $60 million, but the cost of rebuilding it could be 10 times its original price tag, an engineering expert told Sky News.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge, named for Francis Scott Key, the author of the Star Spangled Banner.WilliamSherman via Getty Images
Baltimore is among the busiest ports in the nation, seeing more than a million shipping containers pass through each year. The collapse — which closed the port to all maritime and most road traffic until further notice — is already beginning to wreak havoc on the supply chain.
The cost of building the bridge back fast enough to offset diversions as much as possible could saddle the government with a more than $600 million bill, David MacKenzie, chair of engineering and architecture consultancy COWIfonden, told Sky News.
Who will pay for damages to the ship and its cargo?
The container ship, the Dali, is owned by a Singapore-based firm. The ship’s charterer, Maersk, confirmed to Business Insider that vessel company Synergy Group operates the ship.
However, the companies with cargo aboard the Dali will ultimately be responsible for the ship’s damages and cargo costs.
The Dali was carrying 330 containers, which now must be re-routed, according to Ryan Petersen, CEO of supply chain logistics company Flexport, which had two containers on the ship.
An ancient maritime law known as “general average” dictates that companies with even a single container aboard a ship have to split the damages pro rata based on the number of containers, ensuring all the stakeholders benefiting from the voyage are splitting the risk, Petersen said.
Drone footage shows aftermath of the Dali container ship’s collision into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 26, 2024.Anadolu Agency via Reuters
The principle dates back hundreds of years and was originally meant to ensure sailors on board a ship weren’t worried about specific cargo if a disaster required them to start throwing containers overboard, according to Petersen.
Who will pay for everything else?
The majority of the financial fallout is likely to lay primarily with the insurance industry, according to media reports.
Industry experts told FT that insurers could pay out losses for bridge damage, port disruption, and any loss of life.
The collapse could drive “one of the largest claims ever to hit the marine (re)insurance market,” John Miklus, president of the American Institute of Marine Underwriters, told Insurance Business.
He told the outlet that the loss of revenue from tolls while the bridge is being rebuilt will be expensive, as will any liability claims from deaths or injuries.
The Dali is covered by the Britannia Steam Ship Insurance Association Ltd., known as Britannia P&I Club, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Britannia did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider but told FT it was “working closely with the ship manager and relevant authorities to establish the facts and to help ensure that this situation is dealt with quickly and professionally.”
Britannia is one of 12 mutual insurers included in the International Group of P&I Clubs, which maintains more than $3 billion of reinsurance cover, sources familiar with the matter told Insurance Business.
Britannia itself is liable for the first $10 million in damages, both FT and Insurance Business reported. Whatever remains is dealt with by the wider mutual insurance group and Lloyd’s of London, a reinsurance market in the UK, according to FT.
Mumbai becomes Asian capital with most billionaires, bumping Shanghai: Report
Filip Timotija – March 27, 2024
The city of Mumbai has officially surpassed Shanghai as Asia’s capital with the most billionaires, according to a new Hurun Global Rich List 2024 report.
Mumbai, India’s financial powerhouse, now has 92 billionaires, closely edging out Beijing’s 91 and Shanghai with 87.
This year’s list marked Mumbai’s first time in the world’s top three, according to the report.
Globally, the Big Apple still leads the way. New York City has the most billionaires with 119. London was second with 97. Beijing, which was ranked first last year, dropped to fourth place.
China has the most billionaires out of any country with 814, although it lost 155 of them. The U.S. was second with 800 billionaires. India was third with 271.
“Wealth creation in China has gone through deep changes these last few years, with the wealth of billionaires from real estate and renewables down,” the research firm said in the report.
“Whilst as many as 40% of the Hurun Global Rich List from the high water mark two years ago have lost their billionaires status, China has added a 120 new faces to the list. Despite the large drop in the number of billionaires, China still has more known billionaires than the US.”
Zhong Shanshan, chair of bottled water giant Nongfu Spring, kept his spot as the richest person in China.
Globally, the number of billionaires increased — now at 3,279 billionaires, up 167 from last year, according to the report.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has helped generate new ultra-wealthy individuals.
“AI has been the major driver for wealth growth, generating over half of all the new wealth this year,” the research firm said. “The billionaires behind Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle and Meta have seen significant surges in their wealth as investors bet on the value generated by AI.”
India’s Income Inequality Is Now Worse Than Under British Rule, New Report Says
Astha Rajvanshi – March 27, 2024
A fisherman colony alongside commercial buildings in the Indian city of Mumbai, now Asia’s billionaire capital. Credit – Dhiraj Singh—Bloomberg/Getty Images
A new study from the World Inequality Lab finds that the present-day golden era of Indian billionaires has produced soaring income inequality in India—now among the highest in the world and starker than in the U.S., Brazil, and South Africa. The gap between India’s rich and poor is now so wide that by some measures, the distribution of income in India was more equitable under British colonial rule than it is now, according to the group of economists who co-authored the study, including the renowned French economist Thomas Piketty.
The current total number of billionaires in India is peaking at 271, with 94 new billionaires added in 2023 alone, according to Hurun Research Institute’s 2024 global rich list published Tuesday. That’s more new billionaires than in any country other than the U.S., with a collective wealth that amounts to nearly $1 trillion—or 7% of the world’s total wealth. A handful of Indian tycoons, such as Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, and Sajjan Jindal, are now mingling in the same circles as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, some of the world’s richest people.
“The Billionaire Raj headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonialist forces,” the authors write.
The observation is particularly stark when considering India is now hailed as an 8% GDP growth economy, according to Barclays Research, with some projecting that India is poised to surpass Japan and Germany to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2027.
But the authors of the World Inequality Lab study reached this conclusion by tracking how much of India’s total income, as well as wealth, is held by the country’s top 1%. While income refers to the sum of earnings, interest on savings, investments and other sources, wealth (or net worth) is the total value of assets owned by an individual or group. The authors combined national income accounts, wealth aggregates, tax tabulations, rich lists, and surveys on income, consumption, and wealth to present the study’s findings.
For income, the economists looked at annual tax tabulations released by both the British and Indian governments since 1922. They found that even during the highest recorded period of inequality in India, which occurred during the inter-war colonial period from the 1930s until India’s independence in 1947, the top 1% held around 20 to 21% of the country’s national income. Today, the 1% holds 22.6% of the country’s income.
Similarly, the economists also tracked the dynamics of wealth inequality, beginning in 1961, when the Indian government first began conducting large-scale household surveys on wealth, debt and assets. By combining this research with information from the Forbes Billionaire Index, the authors found that India’s top 1% had access to a staggering 40.1% of national wealth.
Because the number of Indian billionaires shot up from one in 1991 to 162 in 2022, the total net wealth of these individuals over this period as a share of India’s net national income “boomed from under 1% in 1991 to a whopping 25% in 2022,” the authors said.
The report also found that the rise in inequality had been particularly pronounced since the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party first came to power in 2014. Over the last decade, major political and economic reforms have led to “an authoritarian government with centralization of decision-making power, coupled with a growing nexus between big business and government,” the report states. This, they say, was likely to “facilitate disproportionate influence” on society and government.
They added that average Indians, and not just the Indian elite, could still stand to gain from globalization if the government made more public investments in health, education, and nutrition. Moreover, a “super tax” of 2% on the net wealth of the 167 wealthiest Indian families in 2022-23 would result in 0.5% of national income in revenues, and “create valuable fiscal space to facilitate such investments,” the authors argued.
Until the government makes such investments, however, the authors caution against the possibility of India’s slide toward plutocracy. The country was once a role model among post-colonial nations for upholding the integrity of various key institutions, the authors say, and they point out that even the standard of economic data in India to study inequality has declined recently.
“If only for this reason, income and wealth inequality in India must be closely tracked and challenged,” the authors say.
It is an overcast, unseasonably warm morning on Wednesday, Nov. 6, and the world has woken up in shock as Donald Trump has emerged as the winner of the U.S. presidential election. America’s cities are once again full of mute, stunned liberals avoiding eye contact with one another on the morning commute, as the grim reality of what Trump might do with this power begins to set in. At his victory speech just after 2 a.m., when the networks called Wisconsin, and thus the election for him, Trump took the stage and declared, “Judgment Day is coming for America’s enemies, and no Marxist, Harvard leftist, gender-radical, illegal, or criminal thug in our great country will be safe come January.” And in some ways that bleak morning might represent the high point of the next four—or 40—years, given what Trump and his allies have in store for us.
This is a worst-case scenario. But it’s far from impossible. A Trump restoration is in the works—and it should feel like an existential threat to everyone who cares about liberal democracy and the incomplete but tangible social, racial, and economic progress that has been made since the New Deal era.
And yet, President Joe Biden’s manifest flaws are dangerously obscuring the scale of the threat of a second Trump term. There is no sense in denying it: Biden looks and sounds very old, and his speaking style, never particularly inspirational, has deteriorated to the point that he is a clear political liability. While he brought what passes for his A-game to the State of the Union, he will need to sustain that level of energy and coherence through an eight-month-long slog to the election to improve his chances of winning.
His decision to run for a second term has not only jeopardized his many achievements but put the very existence of U.S. democracy at much more serious risk. His administration’s staunch support of Israel, a defensible posture in the aftermath of the unconscionable Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, has become a genuinely baffling study in Biden’s inability to pivot or use America’s considerable leverage to do the right thing. The White House hasn’t settled on a winning strategy to address the lingering consequences of post-pandemic inflation, preferring to boast about the very real low unemployment numbers and robust GDP growth that simply have not moved the needle politically. And the Biden administration has remained curiously inert in the face of growing public frustration with the migrant crisis, preferring to blame Congress for refusing to fix it.
Nevertheless, allowing Donald Trump and his friends to plunge our country into a dystopian nightmare of authoritarianism will not help anyone in Gaza, in the grocery store, or at the border. It will worsen, not rectify, America’s history of writing blank checks to far-right governments in Israel. It will not lead to humane policy options for asylum-seekers but instead deliver them into the hands of morally bankrupt demagogues. Electing Trump would merely add more considerable suffering and trauma to theirs, and deprive us all of the ability to do anything about it.
Much has been made of the far-right Project 2025—a blueprint for radically restructuring and reorienting executive-branch policymaking, created by a network of right-wing think tanks and pressure groups—and its terrifying implications for U.S. democracy. But that document concerns only the threats Trump’s reelection poses to executive-branch agencies (and contains many unresolvable contradictions between dismantling and wielding the “administrative state”). Myriad public dangers emanating from the Trump and GOP legislative agenda, as well as the possibility of an even harder-right Supreme Court, are getting far less attention. That needs to change.
Let’s start with the court. That Sonia Sotomayor, who will turn 70 this year, is still sitting on the Supreme Court means that Democrats have yet to grasp how strategic retirements work in the new hyperpartisan political order. Unlike Democrats, who still seem to view a Supreme Court seat as a personal sinecure bestowed upon the righteous for a lifetime of achievement, the leaders of the far-right judicial movement understand the stakes and will place enormous pressure on the oldest Republican appointees to retire under a second Trump term. Clarence Thomas, who has been on the court since 1991, turns 76 this year, and Samuel Alito turns 74. Even John Roberts, who would turn 70 just after Trump’s inauguration, might go.
Think about it this way: If Republicans replace this trio with three early-middle-age ideologues like Amy Coney Barrett, the court will be in the GOP’s hands until everyone reading this article is dead or nearing retirement. If Trump gets to replace Sotomayor, who suffers from a health problem (Type 1 diabetes) that significantly reduces life expectancy, the far right would have an unassailable 7–2 majority with which to remake American society for a generation.
Very little that liberals or progressives care about is likely to survive another 20 or 30 years of reactionary control of the Supreme Court. Although much of the focus has justifiably been on Dobbs, and the looming threat to Obergefell, birth control, and IVF, a conservative supermajority would also likely gut a century of jurisprudence around taken-for-granted features of the American political and economic order, including bargaining rights for organized labor, the constitutionality of federal programs like Social Security and Medicare, and—it nearly goes without saying—the Affordable Care Act. We will effectively return to the early 20th century’s Lochner era, when the Supreme Court repeatedly struck down worker protections and rights for more than 30 years until FDR threatened it with court packing.
Sure, “Vote for Biden so the conservative supermajority can’t get younger and larger” is tough to fit on a bumper sticker, and no one in the party from Biden on down seems to have the stomach for the necessary escalation or a political vision for the court that can be communicated to voters. But unless you want to spend the rest of your lives watching Brett Kavanaugh and his friends upend your lives one right and benefit at a time, you have to hold the line here.
SCOTUS is, of course, also right now at the very center of Trump’s threat to American democracy. The court’s galling decision to repeatedly delay Trump’s trial for the 2020 post-election coup attempt and the Jan. 6 insurrection means that he probably won’t face justice until after he could conceivably win reelection. Most concerningly, this off-the-rails Supreme Court has bafflingly decided to take up the question of a president’s absolute immunity after Trump’s team argued that he should be free from any consequences of anything he did as president. Though cooler heads may in the end prevail over the Thomas-Alito wing, the fact that this is up for debate at all is incredibly alarming.
Much has been made of reports that Trump plans to deploy the military to quell post-election protests under the Insurrection Act. But a Trump unchained from any conceivable repercussions for his decisions in his office is a far worse threat than just that. Imagine for a moment what would happen if the Supreme Court ruled in Trump’s favor: First of all, the effort to hold him accountable for trying to overthrow the American system of government would be over—instantly. Even more problematically, what conceivable limits would there be on a President Trump beginning in 2025 if SCOTUS has just ruled that his efforts to perpetrate a coup in broad daylight were well within the ambit of his presidential authority?
Who or what exactly would stop Trump from, say, creating a new security apparatus, abducting leftists and political enemies—as he has pledged—and dropping them out of helicopters over the Pacific like the Latin American dictators the far right still worshipsonce did? He could order the hits, then preemptively pardon the people who carry out his orders. That might seem melodramatic and far-fetched. But if the Supreme Court grants him immunity as president, no one could touch him for it legally. And if Republicans simultaneously controlled both chambers of Congress, there would be no impeachment option either. We’ve learned the hard way, far too many times, that a critical mass of elected Republicans will do Trump’s bidding no matter how grotesque his actions.
Maybe he’ll stop short of creating an American Stasi. But a president who is unbound by the law could order the DOJ to gin up investigations of leading journalists, prominent Democrats, professors, activists, and nonprofit leaders. Independent media outlets could be “acquired” by allies or buried under lawsuits and government harassment, as they have been in Trump’s favorite quasi-authoritarian regime in Hungary. Troops could be deployed to garrison blue cities, to not only find and deport immigrants but also chill and repress any dissident fervor that develops in the aftermath of his takeover. He would say he’s merely fighting crime, “illegals,” and election fraud, but Trump could conceivably place the cities he fears and despises, where his political adversaries wield most of their power and influence, under what amounts to an open-ended military occupation.
It gets worse. If Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, he is highly likely to do so while bringing Republican control of the House and Senate with him. With Mitch McConnell out of the way as party leader, there is a very good chance that the new GOP Senate leadership will nuke the filibuster and govern with a simple majority. And that means that the toxic, vengeful politics of Texas and Florida will go national. Trump showed time and again during his first term that he was not just willing but eager to subcontract his domestic policymaking to the right-wing think tanks that write most state-level legislation for Republicans. National Republicans no longer pretend to have a written or informal platform, but Trump has a campaign website with policy plans called “Agenda 47” that can be read alongside Project 2025, as well as the actual policy record of state Republicans, to give us a pretty clear sense of what they have planned.
Trump continues to spin and deflect, but under unified Republican control, Congress could obviously try to pass a national abortion ban, and he would sign it. House Republicans are already gunning for a nationwide ban on gender-affirming care, and electing a Republican trifecta this November will mean that, practically speaking, it could soon be either illegal or impossible to be transgender in the United States. The proof is in the hundreds of red-state anti-trans bills introduced and the dozens passed just since 2023, including Florida’s ban on gender reassignment surgery for minors, which also gives the state the right to kidnap children from parents who pursue gender-affirming care. Agenda 47 claims that the Trump administration will “investigate Big Pharma and the big hospital networks to determine whether they have deliberately covered up horrific long-term side-effects of ‘sex transitions’ in order to get rich at the expense of vulnerable patients.” As Masha Gessen once said, “Believe the autocrat.”
The enemies list doesn’t stop there. Trump’s promised militarized mass-deportation effort could be just the beginning of the crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration; we could also see an effort to end birthright citizenship, a move that, if it succeeds, would result in millions being suddenly stripped of their status as Americans. You will find this not in Project 2025 but in Trump’s online platform and the ugly words that frequently spill out of his mouth, like in May 2023, when he posted a video in which he argued, “I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.” Whether you believe the “going forward” part of that promise is up to you.
And get ready for a flurry of moves against the remaining redoubts of liberalism and democracy, particularly in secondary and higher education. Radicalized Republicans in Congress will try to bar federal loans and grants from being used at any universities with policies that support inclusion and diversity. This is not speculation: Rep. Dan Crenshaw introduced a bill in the House last year to prevent public funds from being used at schools with DEI policies, based on existing Texas legislation.
They won’t stop there. Republicans would eventually try to block funding for schools with any kind of race or gender studies programs, as the state of Florida tried to do last year, and before long every syllabus in the country could be scrutinized for evidence of anti-patriotic crimes, until anyone who isn’t a right-wing ideologue is driven from the academy altogether. Trump’s Agenda 47 promises to establish a new national “American Academy” by “by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments”—i.e., strip-mining them for cash. A Trump administration, in other words, would effectively end American higher education as we know it.
That’s to say nothing of how, under GOP rule, every public school librarian and schoolteacher in America could suddenly find themselves under siege by cranks and culture warriors like their counterparts today in Texas and Florida. Agenda 47 threatens to create a new “credentialing body” that would “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values,” to eliminate teacher tenure, and to rescind funding “for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content.” And like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Trump would surely relish the opportunity to sign legislation banning public school teachers from going on strike.
This radical agenda would surely be accompanied by an assault on Democrats’ ability to ever win another free and fair election. Congress would pursue a national voter ID law, a ban on ballot harvesting, harsh new restrictions on mail-in balloting, the elimination of same-day voter registration, and new ways to purge Democrats from voter lists—all plans that are already in the “American Confidence in Elections Act,” which has been introduced in the House. What’s left of the Voting Rights Act would be set aside or perhaps repealed. Maniacs exercising their “constitutional carry” rights would patrol outside polling stations across the country with AR-15s, and Democratic voters would be subjected to endless legal challenges. Any Democratic effort to retake a chamber of Congress in 2026 or win the presidency in 2028 would have to run through President Trump’s formidable election conspiracy machine, the army of aspiring petty autocrats who will be put in charge of the nation’s election machinery, and the elected leaders who will come under enormous pressure not to turn power over to Democrats should those Democrats win.
At that point, the vaunted separation of powers that some analysts still cling to as our last great hope won’t be of much help. With as many as seven Trump judges on the Supreme Court and a federal judiciary that will once again be stocked with his allies and true believers, even many of the brazenly unconstitutional orders and laws that are in the works will have a good chance of standing up in court. And all the while, demoralized Democrats will be pointing fingers at one another for their catastrophic loss, which—knowing Dems—could easily be pinned on Biden’s more progressive policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, whose historic climate provisions would also be reversed almost immediately. Efforts to highlight the contributions of his age and Gaza policies to this disaster would run straight into the same narrative-makers who pinned the disappointing scale of Democrats’ 2020 victory on progressive activists chanting “Defund the Police” rather than on Biden’s overcautious campaign and reliance on appealing to disenchanted Republicans.
It’s not hyperbole to say that the America that a second Trump term would create might be an almost unrecognizable realm of economic insecurity, political persecution, racist hatred, and gender tyranny, a Christian nationalist hellscape that would be virtually impossible to dismantle once it is put into place.
Joe Biden may not be the ideal man standing between us and this horror show, but he is a seasoned politician with a strong track record and a plenty competent team. (Plus, he’s all there is unless he decides to step aside.) He and every Democrat in the White House and Congress must do everything they can to shift the focus from Biden’s age and unpopularity to Trump’s very public laundry list of malevolent plans, and national media organizations must continue to do the relatively easy work of telling readers and viewers about Trump’s reactionary agenda. Readers may be completely burned out on learning about Trump’s crimes, but the alternative—that Trump gets into office and perpetrates more of them—is truly unthinkable.
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