New 30 Percent Tariff Threats
Plus: Clemency revelations, climate change law affects New York housing prices, Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship, and more...
What's his game plan? On Saturday, President Donald Trump threatened to impose 30 percent tariffs on Mexico and all European Union countries, for seemingly no reason whatsoever.
"Mexico has been helping me secure the border, BUT, what Mexico has done, is not enough," Trump wrote in a letter to Mexico's president. "Mexico still has not stopped the Cartels who are trying to turn all of North America into a Narco-Trafficking Playground." (I suppose that's a reason, but if his expectation was that Mexico could just stop cartels between April's tariff announcement and now, that seems like an unrealistic goal.)
Trump has told 25 different foreign nations that he will impose new tariff levels—some higher, but some lower—on August 1. Some of them are rather aggressive increases, such as Brazil's tariff level, which has gone from 10 percent to 50 percent. Others, such as Bangladesh's drop from 37 percent to 35 percent, are a slight reprieve.
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But Mexico and the European Union together account for a full third of U.S. imports. And even if Trump perceives tariff levels as a useful foreign policy instrument when negotiating with Mexico and trying to reduce drug flow into the United States, it's not clear why he'd be targeting Europe in much the same manner. What does he hope to get, exactly?
Trump's tariff approach seems basically to be "flood the zone." Flood the zone with chaos and constant changes, so nobody knows the current levels and so nobody can realistically plan for the future. The only certain thing is that the future will have less free trade: "Since Mr. Trump came into office in January, the average effective U.S. tariff rate has soared to 16.6 percent from 2.5 percent, according to tracking by the Budget Lab at Yale University, a nonpartisan research center," per the Times.
Clemency on autopilot: The Trump White House, Congress, and the Department of Justice are ramping up investigations into former President Joe Biden's aides, trying to suss out whether the former president was really in control toward the end of his term as his mental-acuity problems were becoming more of a political liability.
Toward the end of his presidency, Biden issued preemptive pardons for allies he believed could be targeted by Trump or otherwise find themselves in legal trouble—including, controversially, his son Hunter (who pleaded guilty to tax charges in September 2024, and was found guilty of being an illegal drug user in possession of a firearm earlier that year as well). He also reduced sentences for nearly 4,000 federal prisoners. But Biden was not signing each slip himself, and there's been lots of speculation about how much clemency decisionmaking was being delegated to aides.
"Biden did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons that applied to large numbers of people, he and aides confirmed," The New York Times reported yesterday. "Rather, after extensive discussion of different possible criteria, he signed off on the standards he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for a reduction in sentence.
"Even after Mr. Biden made that decision, one former aide said, the Bureau of Prisons kept providing additional information about specific inmates, resulting in small changes to the list," continued the Times. "Rather than ask Mr. Biden to keep signing revised versions, his staff waited and then ran the final version through the autopen, which they saw as a routine procedure, the aide said." But staffers saw lots of covering-for-Biden as routine procedure, and at times they took great license simply to make decisions for him, so these assurances don't really make clear who was making the decisions.
Scenes from New York: Unfortunately for landlords—and anyone who wants to rent housing at a semi-reasonable price in New York City—mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary last month, absolutely loves Local Law 97.
This is a climate-related measure, passed by city council (arguably almost as bad at policy as Mamdani) back in 2019, that forces landlords to make very expensive upgrades to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of their buildings. "Local Law 97 targets about 50,000 properties that are larger than 25,000 square feet," reports The New York Times, "calling for a series of reductions in emissions over the upcoming years. To meet the deadlines, some properties may have to take expensive steps like replacing oil-burning boilers or installing solar panels." Landlords may also have to switch to electric appliances, which can be extremely costly when you're talking about hundreds of units. Under the timelines detailed in the law, the next set of limits, scheduled for 2030, requires a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions; the aim is net-zero emissions by 2050.
It all seems like a make-work program for Department of Buildings enforcers and a jobs program for people involved in retrofitting buildings. And it's likely to result in landlords passing on costs to tenants.
QUICK HITS
- Four Shark Tank businesses talk about how hard it is to survive the tariff landscape.
- "Because of the fact that Rosie O'Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity," wrote President Donald Trump on Truth Social over the weekend. "The president of the USA has always hated the fact that I see him for who he is—a criminal con man sexual abusing liar out to harm our nation to serve himself," O'Donnell replied. "This is why I moved to Ireland."
- "The slump in Japan's long-term bonds intensified Monday, pushing yields sharply higher in a move that puts global debt markets on alert," reports Bloomberg. "Amid signs of thin liquidity and increasing worries about higher government spending in Japan, yields on bonds from the 10-year to the 40-year spiked in moves reminiscent of the surge that rippled through global markets in May." Japan will be holding elections in a few days, in which the ruling party in the upper house may lose its stronghold.
- A Just Asking Questions to watch/listen to: How socialism seduced New Yorkers.
- Yes:
Paul Ehrlich, unapologetic author of a mass sterilization campaign, deserves a thousand times more hate than he has gotten. His name should be mud. https://t.co/7pC9pLx1OS pic.twitter.com/nousejhynl
— TracingWoodgrains (@tracewoodgrains) July 13, 2025
- The socialist mind struggles to comprehend this:
He launched them. He didn't take over existing satellites. They weren't there before. https://t.co/AlyyLs4vNV
— Payton Alexander (@AlexanderPayton) July 12, 2025
- Pamela Anderson forever. ("Anderson's feelings about sex and her naked body were less in line with the hyper-materialist 1980s and '90s than with the attitudes of the '60s—she just wanted to be free," writes Caitlin Flanagan.)
