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New US "reciprocal" import tariff rates are a childish HOAX.
Trump's import tariffs on each nation is merely that country’s total exports to the U.S. divided by the country’s trade balance, divided by two, with a minimum of 10%.
The import tariffs bear no relationship to that nation's import tariffs on US goods or non-tariff barriers — like regulations, sales taxes, currency manipulation.
Trump imposes the Biggest Tax Hike in US history on all Americans.
Trump claims these "Pro-Fentanyl Republicans" Mitch McConnell - Kentucky, Susan Collins - Maine, Lisa Murkowski - Alaska, Rand Paul - Kentucky . . .
. . . are teaming up with Senate Democrats to stop Trump's import tariffs on fentanyl smuggled in from Canada!
This rant of deranged hallucinations probably sound perfectly sensible to the insane people living in the Trump / Fox alternate reality.
There's probably a lot of Trump loons ready to shoot Senators after reading this trash on "Pravda Social" — Fox and Trump continuing to weaponize the mentally ill.
Erasing Lincoln
The capital city of Nebraska will have to change its name.
by Robert Kuttner - April 1, 2025 - https://prospect.org/politics/2025-04-01-erasing-lincoln/
President Trump stunned Nebraskans today with his demand that the state change the name of its capital, Lincoln, or lose federal funding.
“Lincoln was the original DEI president,” Trump said on his site Truth Social. “Not only did he give racial preferences to former slaves in his land grab program of forty acres and a mule. He sent the Union Army to occupy the South to prohibit most white people from voting and sponsored birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment, which has been abused ever since.”
“I never really liked the guy,” Trump added. “Race relations were fine in the South until Lincoln started a totally unnecessary Civil War. If he understood real estate, he could have made a deal.”
Trump proposed that the name of the state capital be changed from Lincoln to Hayes, in honor of Rutherford B. Hayes, the president who ended Reconstruction in the corrupt Compromise of 1877. “Hayes was a truly great man,” Trump said. “He worked with leaders of both parties to prevent discrimination against white people.”
The reaction of Nebraska leaders was guarded. “We love President Trump,” said Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican. “But folks around here kind of like the name of our state capital.” In the 2024 election, Trump beat Kamala Harris in Nebraska by a margin of 59.6 to 39.1 percent.
Lincoln Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird, a Democrat and a graduate of Yale and Oxford, pointed to the odd timing. “This is April Fools’ Day,” she said. “This has to be a spoof.”
Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School.
President, William McKinley introduced some of the largest tax hikes in U.S. history through import tariffs in 1890.
But in his second Presidential term, McKinley changed his mind, and argued for more free trade.
The Republican import tariffs were not well received by Americans who suffered a steep increase in prices.
In the 1890 election, Republicans lost their majority in the House with the number of seats they won reduced by nearly half, from 171 to 88.
Yet Donald Trump often cites the 25th President as his inspiration for his home-brew of ever-changing import tariffs.
https://www.wsj.com/video/series/news-explainers/why-trumps-tariff-idol-mckinley-abandoned-his-own-tariff-policy/38A9364C-142B-4656-AFE3-B6F7F4F504E2
An older and wiser William McKinley in 1900
American designs on Canada have a long history, predating even our independence and featuring some very familiar names. “You are a small people,” concluded one early overture, “compared to those who with open arms invite you into a fellowship.”
The approaches have changed over time, but the courtship has invariably played out with all the grace and romance of Pepé Le Pew on the trail of Penelope Pussycat. On several occasions, it has blown up in our faces. “Alas, Canada, we have had misfortune and disgrace in that quarter,” John Adams warned some 250 years ago. As another president now hints at a northern expansion, we might care to remember the humbling earlier forays.
In October 1774, the First Continental Congress resolved to dispatch an appeal to Quebec, which was then essentially a synonym for Canada. Over 18 eloquent pages, the letter enumerated the rights of a free people. Though it urged no acts of hostility, it reminded the Canadians that they could expect no better treatment from their common sovereign than did their American counterparts. Might they care to travel — “in order to complete this highly desirable union” — to Philadelphia for the next Congress, in May? To the high-minded rhetoric was added a prod: Canada would be wise to count the rest of North America among its “unalterable friends” rather than its “inveterate enemies.”
Though no Canadian delegates materialized in Philadelphia that May, Congress remained undeterred. A new letter went out “to the oppressed inhabitants of Canada,” this one drafted by John Jay. British rule, the letter argued, reduced Canadians to slavery and endangered their religious freedom. “We can never believe that the present race of Canadians are so degenerated as to possess neither the spirit, the gallantry, nor the courage of their ancestors,” the letter continued. How would they explain their cowardice to their children? It ended with a familiar threat: The Americans hoped the Canadians would not “reduce us to the disagreeable necessity of treating you as enemies.”
Before it adjourned in August 1775, Congress authorized an invasion of Canada. In a full-battalion-to-remind-you-of-my-love kind of missive, George Washington informed the Canadians that Benedict Arnold was heading their way with a detachment. “Come then, my brethren,” he wrote, “unite with us in an indissoluble union, and let us run together to the same goal.”
Congress was sanguine about the prospects, expecting, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “every hour to be informed that Quebec has opened its arms to Colonel Arnold.” Around the time Washington was writing his hopeful letter, Arnold and his ludicrously ill-equipped men were surviving on dead dogs and boiled cartridge belts.
Though the siege of Quebec proved a disaster, Congress continued to believe the Canadians were eager to join their revolt. “The unanimous voice of the continent is Canada must be ours, Quebec must be taken,” crowed John Adams in February. Congress that month opted for diplomacy, appointing a commission that consisted of Charles Carroll, among the wealthiest men in America and a French-speaking Catholic; his Jesuit cousin, Father John Carroll; and two members of Congress. The eldest of the group, the longtime colonial fixer and the American with the greatest experience of the wider world, was Benjamin Franklin.
The commissioners were not only to persuade the Canadians that union was in their best political interest, but also to seduce their northern neighbors with dreams of glory. It was to promise freedom of religion and establish freedom of the press. Against all odds and at some expense, a printing press also made its laborious way to Montreal. It was one illustration of the American understanding of her northern neighbors: Over 90 percent of French Canada was at the time illiterate.
The members of the commission traveled less comfortably than did the press, meeting with gale winds and ice floes. They slept in the woods, on a tented ship and in a pillaged cabin, amid weather that could freeze shut a sentry’s eyes. Franklin’s legs swelled. Boils erupted on his skin. He recognized that he had taken on an assignment that at his age — he was 70 — would likely spell his end. He wrote farewell letters to friends.
In Montreal, the delegates discovered they had embarked on the original Canadian goose chase. It was difficult to convince a people that they should place themselves under American protection when the American troops were without provisions or funds, undisciplined, underdressed and unfit for duty. Nearly half had succumbed to smallpox. Shortly after British reinforcements arrived, the commissioners reported miserably to Congress: Canadians “have suffered us to enter their country as friends” and the Americans managed to turn “their good dispositions towards us into enmity, and makes them wish our departure.”
Franklin, said to be “pitifully unwell,” returned home, accompanied by a Montreal couple who took “such liberties in taunting at our conduct in Canada,” he reported, “that it came almost to a quarrel.”
Congress appointed a committee to investigate the Canadian fiasco, producing a long list of causes but omitting the obvious: The Canadians had no interest in revolt. As Father Carroll noted, they did not believe themselves oppressed. Not only did their interests refuse to align, but also the Canadians entertained very different ideas about government. It was almost as if Canada were a foreign country.
For all the miscalculations, neither Franklin nor Washington could relinquish the idea of annexing Canada. Nor could the Marquis de Lafayette, who was promised a command of 2,500 men and given instructions to invade. Somehow the expedition was meant to head out in February, not an ideal time for a Canadian “irruption.” No one had bothered to supply the troops with winter clothing. Congress called off the mission, which Lafayette had described as a “hell of blunders, madness and deception.” His second in command was left wondering if those who had cooked up the ridiculous plan had been traitors or idiots.
At the end of the War of Independence, before the 1783 peace negotiations, Franklin attempted a Hail Mary pass: Should the British not offer up Canada as reparations for the many towns they had burned? Surely a gesture of good will was in order. The British did not find the idea compelling.
Despite the vexed history, — at least one of us seems — to be here again.
It isn’t easy to beat up on modern-day Canada, which hasn’t offended anyone since the great Turbot War of 1995 (Spain, fishing rights). For all the early American missteps, at least in the 18th century, the motives were clear: The northern colonists felt vulnerable to British and Indian attack. As Washington had it, Canada “would have been an important acquisition, and well worth the expenses incurred in the pursuit of it.” Today, there is no sane motive, unless mugging a sovereign nation that happens to be both your closest friend and your most trusted trading partner constitutes reasonable foreign policy. Even George Washington would be hard-pressed to write an appeal to modern Canada — the land of universal health care, universal maternity leave and affordable tuition; a country with a sense of decency, gun control and superior life expectancy; a country that still teaches cursive handwriting — that could persuade it to unite with its southern neighbor. We do not appear to be running together to the same goal. Pepé Le Pew is never going to get that cat.
Already America has submitted to remedial instruction on the cost of overstepping our northern border. In 1812 U.S. generals boasted all over again about liberating Canada, still a British colony, from “tyranny and oppression.” Brig. Gen. William Hull, glorying in the sight of the American flag flying over present-day Windsor, Ontario, demanded a cordial welcome for the invading force, there to emancipate. Two summers later, in a retaliatory raid, the White House went up in flames.
AI
