Tariff Nation
Plus: NPR/PBS funding possibly threatened, Trump's "war authorities," and more...
New tariffs imposed: Yesterday, President Donald Trump announced he would impose a 25 percent tariff on all imported cars starting April 3, and car parts starting May 3.
Half of the cars sold in the United States are imported, and every car built in the U.S. last year contained foreign-made parts—the industry average is about 60 percent.*
"Shares of Toyota Motor Corp. dropped 2% in Tokyo," reports Bloomberg. "In Europe, Stellantis NV fell 4.1%, Valeo SE sank 5.1%, Porsche AG declined 4.3% and Mercedes-Benz Group AG dipped 3.5%. Shares of General Motors Co. were down 6.5% in pre-market trading, while Ford Motor Co. was down 2.6% while Tesla Inc. inched 0.4% higher. The MSCI World Automobiles Index has tumbled 22% so far this year." Markets don't love tariffs, and they sure as hell haven't been loving Trump since he's taken office.
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United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain says the tariffs "end the free-trade disaster that has devastated working class communities for decades." Not really. They will instead make it extremely hard for normal people to afford new cars while lining government coffers a bit.
Trump envisions these tariffs as permanent, not mere negotiating tools, and he's not stopping there: "Other industry-specific tariffs are also in the works, with Trump threatening levies on lumber, semiconductors and pharmaceutical drugs," reports Bloomberg.
"If the European Union works with Canada in order to do economic harm to the USA, large scale Tariffs, far larger than currently planned, will be placed on them both in order to protect the best friend that each of those two countries has ever had!" wrote Trump on Truth Social in the middle of the night. Again, it's not clear what economic harm he's referring to, or how he believes jacking up car prices for middle-class Americans already struggling with inflation will help. (I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that a pretty scathing Trump tariffs episode—in which I repeatedly attempt to steelman Vice President J.D. Vance's economic policy preferences and can't quite get to something cogent—will be dropped on the Just Asking Questions channel later today, just in time for your evening commute home.)
One last thing. Those paying close attention might notice that the most American-made car, with its price least affected by these policies, just happens to be a Tesla Model 3. Fascinating. Wild that the head of that company just so happens to be a very special government employee.
No more tote bags? Dragged before a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee, NPR and PBS heads were forced to grapple with the bias present at their partially government-funded institutions. NPR President Katherine Maher—yes, the "truth might be a distraction" lady—"said the radio network was wrong to dismiss what was on Hunter Biden's laptop as a non-story," reports the Associated Press. Better late than never, I guess. "After they were repeatedly referenced by Republicans on the committee, Maher said she regretted posting some anti-Trump tweets before she began working for NPR."
Here's a full, hilarious clip of lawmakers reading Maher's own tweets back to her—including those praising author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates and reflecting on how white supremacy manifests in her own life—and her claiming she no longer believes these things:
It really is amazing watching people like Katherine Maher hear things she's said and posted, and be so stunned at how absurd and ridiculous they sound that they deny saying what they've already said
pic.twitter.com/nP2IKv3VtN— Ian Miller (@ianmSC) March 26, 2025
Reason's been hitting this for a long time—the idea that NPR and PBS don't need to be funded by the taxpayers of Burlington, Iowa, or Odessa, Texas (or even by the taxpayers in the coastal-elite metropolises whose worldviews these outlets perhaps better represent). It's all a bad use of taxpayer dollars, a relic of an earlier era (58 years ago!) in which there wasn't nearly as much news selection from which to choose. "The idea that we have an inalienable right to Car Talk or Sesame Street to be piped in over tax-supported airwaves strikes me as a stretch," said Reason's Nick Gillespie back in 2010.
"It's time for the federal government to kick NPR and PBS out of the nest," I argued in 2023. "Your taxpayer dollars should never have been subsidizing Big Bird, Tiny Desk concerts, or those insufferable tote bags in the first place, and they certainly shouldn't now in the era of audiovisual abundance."
Scenes from New York: Employees with the U.S. Postal Service have been charged with kidnapping a colleague and attempting sex acts in the back of a mail track after a party in Manhattan in 2023. A dark story, and a reminder that our country has a long history of Postal Service employees going literally insane and committing terrible crimes (thus the origin of the phrase going postal).
QUICK HITS
- Plainclothes, masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers took a Tufts University student accused of supporting pro-Palestine/pro-Hamas protests into custody, shipping her off to Louisiana. It took her lawyer almost an entire day to locate her. "A visa is a privilege not a right. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated," said a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. Rumeysa Ozturk "was transferred to Louisiana despite a federal judge ordering US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tuesday night not to remove Ozturk from Massachusetts without prior notice," reports The Boston Globe.
- Deportations now indiscriminately targeting…people with ink:
NEW: @MotherJones reports that one of the men renditioned to El Salvador is Neri Alvarado, who was working in Dallas as a baker. An ICE agent told him they were questioning all men with tattoos.
Neri has an AUTISM AWARENESS TATTOO in honor of his 15-year-old brother with autism. pic.twitter.com/eufotQrax2
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) March 26, 2025
- "A government watchdog group is suing national security leaders for their use of Signal to discuss military actions, saying the move violated the Federal Records Act (FRA)," reports The Hill. Meanwhile, Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, told a House Intelligence Committee that "it was a mistake that a reporter was inadvertently added." More on the continuing fallout here.
- "The Democrats will not save colleges and universities," writes Musa al-Gharbi at The Guardian. "They have been key partners and pioneers for all of the actions currently being undertaken by the Trump administration in this domain."
- Fair point:
The correct position, held by almost no one, is that voter ID laws are eminently reasonable, and also will make almost no difference to election outcomes. https://t.co/29C1pA2A4s
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) March 26, 2025
- Wild:
So President Trump is "using war authorities" in the absence of a declared war when he deports Venezuelans, but it's not "war plans" (just "attack plans") to bomb the Houthis because there is no declared war. pic.twitter.com/mNMk2ybDEo
— Ed Whelan (@EdWhelanEPPC) March 26, 2025
*CORRECTION: The original version of this article misstated the percentage of cars built in the U.S. that use foreign components.
