Kagro in the Morning - April 14, 2025

The weekend provided no respite from tariff whiplash. And the tariff whiplash (and attendant cheerleading) just drove the rest of the economy that much further down. Greg Dworkin even titled the APR with a warning. And of course, when you’ve lost Ross Douthat, you’ve temporarily lost Ross Douthat.

Trump spent the weekend snubbing VIPs and watching the wrong people win sporting events.

In other weekend excitement—or incitement, as the case may be—there was a little extracurricular activity at the Pennsylvania Governor’s mansion.

Nayib Bukele is in town today. “Cool!” We’ll see whether he “facilitates” Trump’s defiance of the courts, or moots the whole issue (which he, like me, sees as just a contracts issue) by “gifting” Kilmar Abrego García back to the United States. Either way, we’re preparing to ship still more people to El Salvador, despite the 90% “error” rate. And this extremely poor record is impacting evidence-free student round-ups not at all!

The protests continue this weekend. Good thing, too!

New for your radar: Binance wants the regulatory dogs called off, while it’s busy trying to bribe Trump.

And the latest trend in DOGE sleight-of-hand: declaring immigration targets “dead,” so that they lose their benefits, work papers, insurance, bank accounts, and pretty much everything else that makes it possible to live here. Which is the idea, of course.