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Good morning,
Opening Day in America! Is there anything better? Will the Yankees deliver some good baseball before collapsing in the postseason? Will they even make the postseason? It’ll be fun to watch Shohei and the Dodgers dominate, at least.
I’m not sure how much juice there is left to squeeze in this Signalgate story, but I will squeeze nonetheless since it seems to be all anyone is still talking about. I accidentally watched a few minutes of cable news last night (do not recommend), and saw some talking heads theorizing that President Trump would cut loose either Mike Waltz or Pete Hegseth over this screw up. That shows a very naive understanding of how Trumpworld operates.
To be clear, in most administrations someone would absolutely lose their job for accidentally leaking war plans to a journalist. And any of us would, obviously, be canned immediately for making a mistake of similar magnitude in our own jobs. But Trump is not going to give a scalp to Jeffrey Goldberg and The Atlantic, of all publications, which he is known to particularly detest because of Goldberg’s reporting during Trump 1 that the president called fallen U.S. soldiers “suckers” and “losers.” Trump is also keenly aware that Biden didn’t toss his SecDef, Lloyd Austin, overboard after the Afghanistan disaster or when Austin mysteriously went to the hospital for, like, 4 days last year without telling anyone in the White House. Remember that? The Biden years were weird.
After Goldberg produced more of the Signal chat yesterday—which, again, the WH forced his hand by their incompetent response to all of this—Politico made the smart point that, if you put aside the idiocy of adding a journalist to a group chat with senior national security officials, all Waltz actually did was put together a text chain to get a bunch of the principals to coordinate a meeting. It was actually the defense secretary who then used that chat to pop off about extremely sensitive operational information that could have gotten American service members killed had it fallen into the wrong hands. But you get what you pay for, right? Perhaps hiring a weekend Fox News anchor to run the Pentagon was a poor decision.
Meanwhile, the White House is trying to pivot away from this whole mess with the surprise announcement yesterday that all imported cars will soon be subject to a 25% tariff. So if you had your eyes on that new Toyota 4Runner (as I did before I saw the sticker), or perhaps a Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Bimmer, Benz, VW…I would go and buy that this weekend. Who knows if there are going to be exemptions or delays with these new tariffs. What is more certain is that this will act as a big tax for American households at a time when they are fed up about prices. Surely the Democrats can capitalize on that, right? …Right?
Finally, if you’ve made it this far I’m sure you were awaiting the results of my investigation into why the battery panels on toys now require screws and tiny screwdrivers to open them. Turns out a kid did, indeed, swallow a battery, leading to something called Reese’s Law. Interestingly, the regulation requires screws only for those little coin batteries you find in watches and the like. From what I have gathered, manufacturers just decided to put all batteries, even the harder to swallow AAs, behind screws so they didn’t get sued. It’s always amazing how much of modern life is just litigation avoidance.
The United States-Mexico border may be calmer than usual under President Donald Trump, but it is far from secure, according to a top Border Patrol official. “We don’t want anything coming across that border, narcotics, weapons, money, any of that type of stuff,” Sean McGoffin, chief patrol agent of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, told Newsweek. The southern border has experienced a significant decrease in illegal crossings since Trump’s return to the White House, reaching lows not seen in decades. Read more from Newsweek’s Billal Rahman.
Also happening:
Auto tariffs: President Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on imported automobiles—a decision the White House says is aimed at boosting domestic manufacturing, though it could also strain automakers reliant on international supply chains. Trump called April 2, when the tariff takes effect, “Liberation Day.” Read more.
Boasberg gets Signal case: President Donald Trump has expressed his anger that Judge James Boasberg is overseeing a lawsuit against the president’s administration for accidentally leaking defense secrets. Boasberg is the judge who has threatened the Trump administration with contempt of court for refusing to release information about the deportation of suspected gang members to an El Salvador prison. Read more.
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