Letters from an American - March 10, 2025

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

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March 10, 2025. Last week's dramatically dropping stock market prompted Fox News channel personality Maria Bartiromo to ask Trump in an interview that aired yesterday if he was expecting a recession. Trump answered, I hate to predict things like that. There's a period of transition because what we're doing is very big. Yesterday evening on Air Force One, a reporter asked Donald Trump if he's worried about a recession.

Who knows, the president answered. All I know is this, we're going to take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs. We're going to take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs and we're going to become so rich you're not going to know where to spend all that money. I'm telling you, you just watch. We're going to have jobs, we're going to have open factories, it's going to be great. Today the stock market plunged. The Dow Jones Industrial Average of 30 prominent companies listed on the U.S. stock exchanges fell by 890 points, more than 2%.

The S&P 500, which tracks the stocks of 500 of the largest companies listed in the U.S., fell by 2.7%. The Nasdaq Composite, which tracks tech stocks, fell by 4 percent. Shares of Elon Musk's Tesla closed down more than 15 percent, dropping more than 45 percent this year. Tonight, as the Asian markets opened on the other side of the world, the slide continued. According to MarketWatch, this is the worst start to a presidential term since 2009, when the country was in the subprime mortgage crisis. Trump did not inherit an economy mired in crisis, of course.

He inherited what was, at the time, the strongest economy in the world. That booming economy is no more. Goldman is now predicting higher inflation and slower growth than it had previously forecast, while its forecast for Europe is now stronger than it had been. Trump has always been a dodgy salesman more than anything, telling supporters what they want to hear. He insisted that the strong economy under former President Joe Biden was, in fact, a disaster that only he could fix. In October, Trump told attendees at a rally,

We will begin a new era of soaring incomes, skyrocketing wealth, millions and millions of new jobs and a booming middle class. We're going to boom like we've never boomed before." That sales pitch got Trump away from the criminal cases against him and back into the White House. Now, though, he needs to make the sales pitch fit into a reality that it doesn't match. Trump is steering the country toward a downturn with his tariffs and cuts to spending in the federal workforce for no logical reason, Washington Post economic reporter Heather Long wrote on March 6, Trump's whipsaw actions have put businesses and consumers on edge, she noted. If they stop

spending at the same time that the government slashes jobs and spending, a downward spiral could lead to a recession. Trump is inciting an economic storm, Long wrote. The big question is why he's doing this. One answer might be that Trump's top priority is the extension of the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, at the same time that he has also promised to cut the deficit.

Those two things are utterly at odds. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that extending the tax cuts will cost the country more than $4 trillion over the next 10 years. Tariffs appear to have been Trump's workaround for that incompatibility. He claimed that tariffs would shift the burden of funding the US government to foreign countries. When economists reiterated that tariffs are paid by US consumers and would drive up prices and slow growth, he insisted they were wrong. Increasingly, tariffs seem to

have become for him not just the solution to his economic dilemma, but also a symbol of American strength. Tariffs are not just about protecting American jobs, Trump told Congress last week. They're about protecting the soul of our country. Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again and it is happening and it will happen rather quickly. There will be a little disturbance but we are okay with that. After watching Trump talk to Fox News Channel host Brett Baier in mid-February, Will Salaton of The Ballwork noted that Trump seemed truly to believe

that tariffs would bring in tremendous amounts of money. For that, as well as his apparent conviction that Palestinians should evacuate Gaza so the US could take over and develop the real estate there, and that Canada should become the 51st US state and so on, Salitan concluded Donald Trump is delusional. Another reason for Trump's dogged determination to impose tariffs despite the pain they're inflicting on Americans might lie in James Fallows' observation in Breaking the News after

the president's speech to Congress that Trump's mental acuity is slipping. Fallows noted that Trump's vocabulary has shrunk markedly since his first term, and he appears to be falling back on more primitive and predictable phrases. Tonight, the president appeared to be moving back in time as well, advertising the availability of the first season of the Emmy nominated original apprentice starring President Donald Trump. The White House said today in a statement, since President Trump was elected, industry leaders have responded to

President Trump's America first economic agenda of tariffs, deregulation, and the unleashing of American energy with trillions in investment commitments that will create thousands of new jobs. President Trump delivered historic job, wage, and investment growth in his first term, and he is set to do so again in his second term. As the administration's economic policies are rocking the economy, the administration's arrest and

detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old Syrian-born Palestinian activist who figured prominently in the Gaza Solidarity encampment at Columbia University last April, seems designed to rock society. According to Democracy Now, Khalil is an Algerian citizen, but he holds a US green card and is married to a US citizen who is eight months pregnant. Shortly after he took office, Trump issued an executive order saying he would revoke the student visas of anyone he claimed sympathized with Hamas. On Saturday, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE,

arrested Khalil. Khalil's lawyer said that ICE agents claimed they were acting on the orders of the State Department to revoke Khalil's student visa, apparently unaware that Khalil, who graduated from Columbia School of International and Public Affairs in December 2024, is a lawful permanent resident of the United States. When his wife showed officers documents proving that status, the lawyer said, an officer said they were revoking his green card instead.

He is apparently being held in Louisiana. The revocation of a green card is very rare. The Associated Press noted that the Department of Homeland Security can begin the process of deportation for lawful permanent residents who are connected to alleged criminal activity. But Khalil hasn't been charged with a crime. Nick Popley of Time magazine notes that a green card holder can be deported for supporting terrorist groups, but in that case the government must have material evidence. A Homeland Security spokesperson did not offer any such evidence, saying simply that Khalil's arrest was,

"...in support of President Trump's executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism, and that Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization." That is, the Trump administration has arrested and detained a legal resident for expressing an opinion that Trump officials don't like, likely using Khalil to launch this extraordinary attack on the First Amendment because they don't expect Americans to care deeply about his fate. Once the principle is established that the government can arrest and jail protesters, though, officials will use it to silence opposition broadly.

This is the first arrest of many to come, Trump posted just afternoon. We know there are more students at Columbia who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity and the Trump administration will not tolerate it. Representative Greg Kaysar, a Democrat of Texas, posted, this is illegal and it endangers the rights of all Americans. In this country people must be free to express their views, left or right, popular or unpopular, without being detained or punished by the government. On this basic principle, Americans across the political spectrum appear to agree. Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter was one of those who stepped back from the

idea of arrests and deportations of those expressing opinions. There's almost no one I don't want to deport, she posted, but unless they've committed a crime, isn't this a violation of the First Amendment? Today, U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman ordered that Khalil shall not be removed from the United States unless and until the court orders otherwise, and ordered a hearing on Wednesday. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Devin, Massachusetts.

Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss. Thank you.