Dear Progressive Reader,

As the economic roller-coaster ride continues in response to President Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again imposition of tariffs, some are wondering whether the President and his friends are using the uncertainty to reap unprecedented profits. As Time magazine reports, “Hours before he announced the pause, as stocks were still in negative territory over an intensifying trade war, Trump posted messages on his social media platform, Truth Social, that seemed to be addressed to investors. ‘THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!’ the President wrote, signing off with his initials ‘DJT,’ which also serve as the stock symbol for his company, Trump Media and Technology Group Corp. It was noticeable that Trump signed the post with his initials—something he does not always do. Trump Media and Technology Group saw its stocks shoot up nearly 22% after the announcement of the tariff reversal on Wednesday and they were up a further 5% in pre-market trading early Thursday morning.” U.S. Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, is now calling for an investigation of the President for “insider trading.”

In fact, this is not the first time that Trump has affected the market standing of his friends and allies. In February 2020, in the weeks before the nationwide shutdowns caused by the coronavirus pandemic, private briefings from Trump Administration officials gave clear warnings to certain wealthy investors, many of them also donors to Trump’s 2016 campaign. According to 2020 reporting from The New York Times, on the afternoon of February 24, Trump “declared on Twitter that the coronavirus was ‘very much under control’ . . . . He even added an observation for investors: ‘Stock market starting to look very good to me!’ ” However, the Times continued, “hours earlier, senior members of the President’s economic team, privately addressing board members of the conservative Hoover Institution, were less confident.” A memo on the risks was circulated and, as the article continues, “The President’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent.”

As Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Atlantic (coincidentally exactly five years after the Tweet mentioned above), “One word describes . . . how the President thinks about the world.” That word? Patrimonialism. Wikipedia offers a concise, and chillingly appropriate definition of the term: “Patrimonialism is a form of governance in which the ruler governs on the basis of personal loyalties which are derived from patron-client relations, personal allegiances, kin ties, and combinations thereof. Patrimonialism is closely related to corruption, opportunism, and machine politics.” In an article posted last month on the website of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the authors note, “in patrimonial regimes there is simply no way to distinguish between the parts of the leader’s speeches that matter politically from empty rhetoric not meant to be taken seriously. . . . In a leader-centered political order, whatever the boss says, no matter how outlandish, sets the agenda for every underling.” The article, which is short and worth reading in its entirety, concludes: “Understanding the way patrimonialism works will be vital for those who wish to resist its triumph in the United States.”

This week on our website, editors at The Progressive crowd-sourced a series of photos from attendees at several of the approximately 1500 “Hands Off” demonstrations across the country on April 5. As Michael Moore notes in his weekly email newsletter, there were “a record 5 to 6 million people who took to the streets to stop Trump on Saturday!—and the only sound of silence you hear is from the media and the Democratic Party.” Stephen Zunes writes further this week about “the silence of the Dems,” noting “As bombs fall and civilians die in Yemen and Gaza, the party’s leaders sit on their hands.” Plus, Nyki Duda compares the recent arrests of students on campuses to her own experiences during the state of emergency in Türkiye; Deeraiya Islam and Namratha Somayajula, both recent graduates of Columbia University Law School, pen an op-ed about the disarray in our asylum system exacerbated by Trump, but which has a longer history; and Sarah Lahm reports on the charter school fraud crisis in Minnesota and its links to national “school choice” initiatives. And, in three other op-eds from our Progressive Perspectives project, Keith Kozloff opines on Trump’s war on information; Karen Dolan looks at Trump’s attacks on accessibility; and Jan Mireles Larson and Scott Schultz, both volunteer members of the board of Wisconsin Humanities, raise a call to protect funding for humanities programs in their state and in states across the country.

Finally, next Tuesday is Tax Day. As the Trump Administration continues is cuts to staff at the Internal Revenue Service, and Congress moves forward with making permanent the President’s proposed cuts to taxes on billionaires, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC), is announcing a series of actions around the country in the coming days to call for an end to wasteful and destructive military spending.

Each year the War Resister’s League, a 102-year-old peace organization, prepares a pie chart showing where your tax dollar really goes. One very notable thing in comparing last year’s chart and this, is that they are almost the same. Trump’s budget proposal assigns more money to military spending (from 46 percent under the Biden Administration to a full 50 percent under Trump) taking 4 percent away from human resources programs of course. But one of the smallest pieces of the pie (general government spending) ostensibly the target of most cuts promised by billionaire-adviser and DOGE head Elon Musk, remains almost unchanged—declining by only $25 billion.

As Belle Case La Follette wrote in May 1915 in the pages of La Follete’s Magazine (today called The Progressive), “War today is the negation of progress and civilization and . . . may trample liberty and humanity under foot . . . History demonstrates that imperfect and temporary plans of mediation, conciliation, and arbitration have been more effective than war in securing justice, that therefore the enlightened and progressive thought of the age should be organized to eradicate the madness of war.”

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

 
Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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