Editorial Roundup: United States
Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
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April 7
The Washington Post says Trump’s tariff’s are freezing the economy
Klarna, StubHub and Medline have put on hold their initial public offerings. Jaguar Land Rover has paused all car shipments to the United States. Nintendo has delayed taking preorders for its new game console, the Switch 2, to assess the effect of tariffs on prices.
President Donald Trump is freezing the U.S. economy, intentionally or not, and the damage worsens with every day he stays his course. His 10 percent across-the-board tariffs went into effect Saturday, and the next round of higher levies for individual countries is set to snap into place Wednesday. Without congressional approval ( something the Constitution requires ), Trump is imposing the highest U.S. taxes on trade since 1909 — effectively the largest U.S. tax increase since 1968.
On Wall Street, traders are more frightened than they have been since the 2008 financial crisis. In Europe, analysts flash back to the aftershocks of Brexit in 2016. In Asia, this feels like the 1997 financial crisis all over again. What happens in the next few days will decide how deep a now-seemingly-inevitable recession will become in the U.S. and beyond.
It remains unknown how most other countries will retaliate and whether the White House will negotiate deals to lessen the fallout. As markets fell on Monday, Trump threatened additional 50 percent tariffs on China, while Taiwan and three other countries offered to end all their tariffs on the United States. (Peter Navarro, the president’s trade adviser, said this will not be enough.) Every country has its own domestic considerations when gauging how to react.
Meanwhile, businesses will stall big investment decisions until they have an idea of where tariffs will be in the days, weeks and months ahead. Junk bonds have had their biggest sell-off since the covid crisis of 2020. Small businesses, unable to absorb cost increases or push for price concessions from suppliers, might start to default. And the tariffs threaten to disrupt complex supply chains, leading to potential shortages.
In a frozen economy, companies feel compelled to lay off workers, because this is the cost they can most easily control. Unemployment stands to rise.
Joblessness will, in turn, weaken consumer confidence. Like companies, households, whose spending accounts for 70 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, hunger for clarity as they contemplate purchasing decisions. Booking an expensive summer vacation right now would take bravery — or a big bank account. Many families will be inclined to postpone. Over the past weekend, many people stockpiled wine, shampoo and other imported goods before the tariffs hit.
Panic like this easily becomes self-fulfilling. Stagflation — inflation and unemployment without growth — seems a distinct possibility. Selling equities as markets tank is historically a bad idea, but buying stocks right now is like trying to catch a falling knife. Market vitality also shapes short-term economic behavior: People spend more when they feel richer, and less when they feel poorer. And, of course, once prices go up, they rarely come down.
Many variables could modulate today’s tariff shock. It would help, for instance, if the courts would step in to temporarily block Trump from abusing his emergency authorities in order to impose tariffs — as a promising test lawsuit in Florida is requesting. It would also help if Republicans on Capitol Hill would pass legislation to stay Trump’s hand.
The U.S. economy proved resilient through the pandemic, but this was in part because the government injected trillions of dollars in liquidity via fiscal and monetary policy. This time, such a rescue seems unlikely. The Federal Reserve finds itself in a pickle, balancing dual mandates to fight both inflation and unemployment. Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell said Friday that it will be difficult to assess what to do with interest rates until there’s more certainty about how much will be subject to tariffs, at what levels and for how long. And then there’s the question of how much the pain might be made worse if, in the next few months, Congress extends — or possibly expands — the 2017 tax cuts.
Mixed messaging from White House surrogates has only confused matters. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said tariffs have maximized Trump’s leverage, but he added: “It’s not the kind of thing you can negotiate away in days or weeks.” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said more than 50 countries “are burning the phone lines into the White House,” in some cases “desperate” to cut a deal with Trump. But Navarro insists this is not a negotiation.
Their messaging is mixed up because their strategy is unclear — no one, not even Trump, seems to know the endgame. Is it to maintain high tariffs to bring in revenue, or is it to force negotiations to lower tariffs on U.S. goods and thus increase exports? The president’s answer so far has been: Yes.
And so the markets keep falling. Unless Trump de-escalates, the effects on the economy threaten to become catastrophic.
ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/07/tariffs-frozen-economy-uncertainty/
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April 6
New York Times says it has a plan for resistance, rather than capitulation, to Trump
In his attacks on law firms, universities and other American institutions, President Trump is relying on an illusion. The illusion is that the institutions are powerless to fight back and that they face a choice between principle and survival.
These institutions do not have to capitulate to Mr. Trump. They have a realistic path to defeating his intimidation. Some law firms and others have begun to fight. In doing so, they have provided the beginnings of a playbook for standing up to his attempts to weaken core tenets of American democracy, including due process, free speech and the constitutional system of checks and balances.
For anybody who is skeptical of this idea and sees Mr. Trump as all-powerful, it is worth recognizing that law firms have already won court rulings that block Mr. Trump’s executive orders against them. Many legal analysts believe that higher courts will likewise reject the orders as illegal. It is also worth remembering the many legal defeats of Mr. Trump’s first term. Courts, including the Supreme Court, rejected his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election result; prevented him from adding a citizenship question to the census; and blocked his family-separation policy at the southern border. A grass-roots political movement helped defeat his effort to repeal Obamacare even though Republicans controlled both the House and Senate.
Yes, Mr. Trump has adopted a more extreme approach to executive power in his second term. He has won some early policy victories, and he will win more. Nonetheless, he faces real constraints on his power. Indeed, the most likely path to American autocracy depends on not only a power-hungry president but also the voluntary capitulation of a cowed civil society. It depends on the mistaken belief that a president is invincible. Anybody who has dealt with a schoolyard bully should recognize this principle: The illusion of invincibility is often his greatest asset.
We understand why the leaders of major institutions are nervous. Taking on the president of the United States requires courage. This is a moment for courage.
The playbook begins with a recognition that capitulation is doomed. Some law firms and corporations, as well as Columbia University, have made a different bet, obviously. But the example of law firms demonstrates the problems with capitulation.
Mr. Trump has signed executive orders punishing several firms that have done nothing wrong. They have merely employed lawyers who represented Democrats, defended liberal causes or participated in investigations into Mr. Trump. The orders lack any meaningful legal argument and yet contain severe punishments. They seek to bar the firms’ lawyers from entering federal buildings and meeting with federal officials, provisions that would prevent the firms from representing many clients.
One firm that was subject to an executive order — Paul, Weiss — surrendered and promised concessions, including $40 million in pro bono work for Trump-friendly causes. Three other firms — Milbank; Skadden, Arps; and Willkie Farr & Gallagher — proactively agreed to deals with the White House and made their own concessions.
A crucial fact about these agreements is that they include no binding promises from the White House. Mr. Trump can threaten the firms again whenever he chooses and demand further concessions. These firms are in virtual receivership to Mr. Trump. So is Columbia, which yielded to Mr. Trump after he threatened its federal funding. The university did not even win the restoration of that funding when it agreed to his demands; it won merely permission to begin negotiating with the administration.
Mr. Trump’s influence over the compliant law firms should be especially chilling to their clients. The firms have just signaled their willingness to abandon clients that have fallen into disfavor with the federal government. That does not seem like a quality one would want in an attorney. “Once you make concessions once, it’s hard not to make them again,” Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University and a legal scholar by training, said when discussing the attacks on higher education.
The second item in the playbook is an insistence on due process. The American legal system has procedures to deal with Mr. Trump’s various allegations against these institutions. If law firms are behaving inappropriately, courts can punish them. If a university is violating students’ civil rights — by tolerating antisemitism, for instance — the Justice Department can file charges. These processes allow each side to present evidence. They prevent abuse of power and establish ground rules that other organizations can follow.
Mr. Trump may well win some cases that follow due process, and that is OK. Some universities have indeed allowed their Jewish students to be menaced. But the appropriate remedy is not the arbitrary cancellation of unrelated research funding, potentially slowing cures for cancer, heart disease, childhood illnesses and more. Columbia managed to adopt the wrong strategy in both directions. It was too slow to fix its problems and then prostrated itself to Mr. Trump. Other universities should both get their houses in order and stand ready to sue the administration.
The three law firms that have filed suits to block Mr. Trump’s executive orders — Jenner & Block, Perkins Coie and WilmerHale — provide a model. So far, they are winning in court. Importantly, they have won the backing of many conservatives. As our counterparts on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote, Mr. Trump’s campaign against law firms “breaks a cornerstone principle of American justice.”
Paul Clement, perhaps the most successful living Republican advocate at the Supreme Court, represents WilmerHale and wrote a thundering brief on its behalf. “It is thus a core principle of our legal system that ‘one should not be penalized for merely defending or prosecuting a lawsuit,’” Mr. Clement wrote, quoting a 1974 Supreme Court ruling. He described Mr. Trump’s orders as “an unprecedented assault on that bedrock principle.” Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, granted Mr. Clement’s request for a temporary restraining order.
This pattern should give law firms confidence that they will continue to prevail, so long as they fight. The Supreme Court is deeply conservative on many issues and favors an expansive definition of executive power. But it has defied Mr. Trump before, and conservative legal experts who share the court’s outlook are aghast at his assault on the legal system.
Any institution that stands up to Mr. Trump should be prepared to make sacrifices. Universities may have to spend more of their endowments, as they do during economic downturns. Law-firm partners may lose some income. But they can afford it; partners at Paul, Weiss made $6.6 million on average in 2023. One mistake that the submissive law firms made was imagining they had any chance of emerging unscathed once Mr. Trump targeted them. Fighting him has costs, and surrendering has costs. Already, some students at top law schools say they will no longer interview with firms like Skadden. “We’re not looking to sacrifice our moral values,” one student at Georgetown University said.
Finally, the playbook calls for solidarity, especially for institutions that Mr. Trump has not (yet) targeted. The initial response to his executive orders from many other law firms has been the opposite of solidarity. They reportedly tried to steal clients and hire lawyers from the threatened firms. Most big firms also refused to sign a legal brief in defense of their industry. Their meekness is ultimately self-defeating. The campaign to subdue law firms will either be defeated or it will expand.
We are glad to see that other firms have spoken up. Even better, a few firms — Williams & Connolly, Cooley and Clement & Murphy — are representing the three fighting the executive orders. Corporate executives can also make a difference by making clear, even privately, that they will not abandon any law firm that Mr. Trump attacks. The business world has much at stake. The United States is home to an outsize share of financial and corporate activity partly because investors have confidence that the rule of law prevails here. If political power instead supersedes signed contracts and the rule of law, American business will suffer.
Standing up to the abuse of power is inherently difficult. It can also be inspiring. People who do so often look back proudly on their actions and are justly celebrated for it after a crisis has passed. But crises usually do not end on their own. Resolving them requires courage and action.
ONLINE: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/opinion/trump-law-firms-universities.html
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April 6
The Wall Street Journal says Trump’s tariff’s are likely to cause future economic trouble
Futures markets on Sunday were signaling more market carnage on Monday after two days of extraordinary declines. Normally you’d expect some rebound, even if it’s a dead-cat bounce, after such a huge selloff. But there are canaries in the tariff mine that are warning of economic trouble ahead.
One canary is the biggest selloff in the junk bond market since 2020, the pandemic year. The premium that investors demand for holding high-risk corporate debt rose a full percentage point to 4.5% late last week after Mr. Trump’s tariff assault, according to the ICE BofA index.
At a minimum this is a sign that investors are hedging their bets on the economy. At worst it is a signal of fear that the tariffs and their consequences could trigger defaults. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wanted a lower yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which he now has. But that yield can fall in anticipation of slower growth as much as from lower inflation. We hope someone at Treasury is paying attention to the corporate debt market.
A second canary is the flight from the U.S. dollar. Typically times of uncertainty lead to a flight to safety, which usually means U.S. dollar assets. This time the dollar has fallen against the euro, the yen and British pound. The dollar rebounded some on Friday, but further dollar weakness would be another bad omen.
A third canary is the shift across Wall Street on recession risks. Our friends at Evercore ISI see the tariffs as a “substantial drag” on growth. They’ve reduced their GDP growth estimate for the year to 1% and raised the probability of recession this year to 40%.
JPMorgan ’s economists now predict a recession, albeit a mild one, at minus-0.3%, with the jobless rate rising to 5.3% from 4.2% in March. More or less every economist not working for Peter Navarro in the White House has lowered estimates of growth in the wake of the Trump tariffs. This isn’t the boom Mr. Trump promised working-class voters.
The Wall Street consensus has been wrong before, and nothing is foreordained. Trade retaliation could be less than feared, and Mr. Trump could change course. But policy makers ignore market signals at their peril.
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April 3
The Guardian says Israel’s impunity will lead to more killings of Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers
After 18 months of slaughter, it is still possible to be shocked by events in Gaza. More than 50,000 people have been killed, according to Palestinian health authorities. More are starving because Israel has cut off aid. The offensive is intensifying again – with 100 children killed or maimed each day since Israel resumed heavy strikes last month, the UN reports.
Even so, Israel’s killing of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers is particularly chilling. Though they died on 23 March, it took days for Israel to grant access to the site, the UN said. Another man was last seen in Israeli custody. Two grounds for seeing this not only as tragic but as a war crime stand out. The first is that the UN says the men were shot “one by one”, and a forensic expert said that preliminary evidence “suggests they were executed, not from a distant range”, given the “specific and intentional” locations of bullet wounds. Two witnesses said some of the bodies had their hands or legs tied. Prisoners are protected by the Geneva conventions. The second is that medics also enjoy specific protections.
Though the vehicles were clearly marked, the Israel Defense Forces claim that they were “advancing suspiciously” without headlights or emergency signals, a claim disputed by the sole located survivor. They also allege, without providing evidence, that Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants were among those killed. What is indisputable is the broader pattern of attacks on rescue and health workers. More than 1,000 medics have been killed across Gaza, according to a Guardian investigation, and hospitals reduced to ruins. The World Health Organization says about 300 medical staff have been detained. Several have subsequently described torture, beatings, starvation and humiliation. Doctors who have volunteered in Gaza see a systematic assault upon healthcare and the respected community figures working in the sector.
None of this appears of great concern to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. The international criminal court (ICC) has issued a warrant for his arrest on war crimes charges, but as he visited Hungary on Thursday, Budapest announced it was withdrawing from the court. Donald Trump has emboldened all of those who see the ICC as an enemy and law itself as optional.
The president’s plan for the US to “take over” Gaza, dependent on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, made it all the easier for Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, to say that it will “seize large areas” of the territory. The right has long wanted a land grab. Israel has already extended buffer zones dramatically since the murderous Hamas raids of October 2023 triggered this war.
That Mr Katz’s warning came in a week where Mr Netanyahu testified again in his corruption trial, and gave evidence to police (though not as a suspect) over a separate scandal involving alleged links between his aides and Qatar, was striking. The prime minister’s political survival remains linked to an endless war, to the despair of the families of the remaining Israeli hostages, as well as Palestinians.
The Israeli military says it is investigating the 23 March killings, but only an independent inquiry will suffice. David Lammy, the foreign secretary, described Gaza as the deadliest place on Earth for humanitarian workers and rightly said that those responsible must be held accountable. In an age where impunity flourishes, crimes will multiply. Those who believe in justice must redouble their support for the embattled international institutions seeking to uphold it.
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April 6
The Philadelphia Inquirer says Trump is making elections less secure
It’s been fewer than 100 days since Donald Trump returned to the White House, and in that short time, the president, his ultra-MAGA cabinet, and tech mogul Elon Musk have taken a sledgehammer to the institutions, values, and norms that hold together American society.
The Trump administration has gutted foreign aid, fired thousands of government workers, detained people for political speech, challenged the power of the judiciary, embraced strongmen like Vladimir Putin, shutdown medical research, and upended the stock market by unilaterally imposing what appears to be the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history. Even programs to plant trees and weatherize homes in Philadelphia have not been spared.
Now, the president and his cadre of GOP sycophants are coming for the most important institution of them all: free and fair elections.
For years, Trump has falsely claimed the American election system is unreliable and vulnerable to malign influence — back in office, he wants to make his Big Lie a reality.
His administration has announced cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which aids states in safeguarding our election systems. According to election administrators, these cuts have meant the end of federal programs intended to safeguard critical election systems and detect threats.
States are now on their own, forced to build redundant infrastructure from the ground up. Even foreign threats, which states lack the capacity to handle on their own, are now left to local leaders.
Pennsylvania’s secretary of the commonwealth, Al Schmidt, was among the first to sound the alarm. In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Schmidt, who is not known for rhetorical exaggeration, wrote, “I have seen firsthand how CISA’s work has helped prevent and address security incidents, and I worry about the serious consequences of removing this support for our local elections officials without an adequate substitute.”
Schmidt identified specific examples of CISA’s essential support, including dealing with bomb threats, manufactured videos of election fraud, white powder in envelopes, and text message scams. Without CISA, local officials will be responsible for dealing with these incidents alone.
In place of CISA, Trump has instructed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a group controlled by billionaire Musk, to undertake a review of the country’s voting machines. No doubt in search of evidence of the long-debunked theory that Joe Biden was able to rig the 2020 election.
The Trump administration is also pushing a new federal voter ID requirement called the SAVE Act.
The bill, which echoes a Trump executive order, would require voters to produce either a passport or a birth certificate to cast their ballot. This would potentially remove millions of voters from the rolls, including women who have changed their last names to match their husbands’, or anyone who can’t find their original birth certificate in a timely manner.
The Brennan Center for Justice has said the proposed legislation would be the “ most significant voter suppression bill ever passed by Congress.”
Meanwhile, Musk has been engaged in his own questionable election campaigning. In the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, the Tesla owner used million-dollar lottery tickets to financially reward voters who supported the Republican candidate. Additionally, Musk’s America PAC offered canvassers a bounty for each voter they brought to the polls, a bounty promised to the voters, as well.
These tactics take the country back a hundred years to the days of party bosses like Matthew Quay, who at least bothered to hold public office before looting the public coffers.
The threat is clear. Trump and Musk aren’t just coming for Americans’ retirement savings, immigrant neighbors, and the cancer treatments of tomorrow. They are coming for the right to vote in a free and fair election.
It is up to the free and fairly elected members of Congress to stop them.