People notice getting kicked off Medicaid

Republicans released their plan to dramatically slash Medicaid on Sunday night, a sure sign that they hope to hide the whole thing from the public. It’s reminiscent of the way Trump’s team believes they can trick voters into supporting tariffs by lying about inflation or pretending to cut “deals” that offer no price relief to consumers. 

After all, Republicans have successfully bamboozled voters into believing that cities are burned down by Black Lives Matter or kids are pooping in litter boxes. They’ve become overconfident about their skills in lying. But it’s one thing to deceive elderly Fox viewers about what’s happening in places they never go, such as cities or public schools. It’s quite another entirely to B.S. swing voters about grocery prices or whether they still have Medicaid coverage. Let’s hope these cuts get derailed — Sen. Josh Hawley already opposes the defunding — but either way, I expect Republicans will take a bath in the midterm elections. 

Trump’s “immunity” voids the Constitution

Most of us instinctively understood why it was both wrong and damaging for the Supreme Court to grant Trump almost unlimited “immunity” for crimes committed while president, even if the obtuse legal arguments were hard to understand. It just makes no sense that the founders would have wanted that, since the whole point was that the president is a citizen, not a king. 

Now we have a classic example of why you don’t need a law degree to see that “immunity” is unconstitutional: Qatar wants to give Trump a $400 million luxury Boeing 747-8, a plane so fancy it’s called a “flying palace.” Attorney General Pam Bondi is pretending this is a gift is to the U.S. government and not to Trump, but that excuse doesn’t fly, since it will be transferred to Trump’s presidential “library” — i.e. to him — after he leaves office. 

The Constitution forbids officeholders in the federal government to “accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Trump got away with loads of corruption in his first term by funneling the bribes through his properties. And also because Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, was too cowardly to launch the necessary investigations once Trump left office. 

Now the Supreme Court has invented presidential “immunity,” which no fair reading could possibly create — and means, in turn, that the actual words of the actual Constitution that constrain the president are null and void. I don’t think Chief Justice John Roberts realized what he was doing; he wanted to find a way to make the pesky problem of Trump’s criminality go away, and possibly isn’t smart enough to understand how what would go down. But his “reading” of the Constitution renders the document’s limitations on power pretty much irrelevant, at least when it comes to Trump. 

The stock market is buoyed by faith in Trump’s lying 

One reason I worry that social media is making much Americans dumber is its tendency to convince people they never need to read past a headline to “know” what’s in a news story. And boy, are we getting evidence of that with the stock market reaction to misleading headlines like “U.S. and China agree to slash reciprocal tariffs in major step toward easing trade war.” The stock market roared upward, behaving as if Trump had actually called off his stupid trade war. 

He is not. If investors had read past the headlines, they might have noticed there’s actually no “deal.” This is only a 90-day delay on Trump’s 145% tariff, and we’re still facing a 30% tariff for the next three months. Prices will still soar, causing an economic slowdown. The uncertainty will also continue to slow business expansion.

But stock market investors are optimistic, because they believe, even after all this, that Trump is just kidding about the tariffs. Trump lies about everything, all the time, and in a perverse sense that helps him, by allowing highly motivated people to tell themselves that Trump secretly agrees with their views. Some pro-choice Trump voters told themselves he wasn’t “really” anti-abortion. Others decided his overt racism was “just” trolling, and that he wasn’t going to deport the people in their lives. 

Similar wishful thinking is buoying the stock market. People have convinced themselves Trump isn’t serious about tariffs. They just don’t want to believe that President Drink Bleach could be as dumb as he sounds when he talks about tariff policy. But he is precisely that dumb. 

Maybe his staff can lure him into backing down by making him believe that he’s cutting “deals.” But even if they do, his childish behavior will cause serious economic damage. There’s no good news here: It’s just hoping for less-bad news at this point.

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What we're reading this week

• “Trump’s Surgeon General Pick Is Tearing the MAHA Movement Apart,” David Gilbert, Wired

• “The many big things Trump ‘didn’t know’ about,” Aaron Blake, Washington Post

• “When an Arsonist Poses as a Firefighter,” Paul Krugman, Substack

• “Behind Miller’s Threat to Suspend Habeas Corpus Is the Fact That They’re Losing,” David Firestone, New York Times

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