It’s TACO Thursday in America
Tariff Strategy Runs into Rule of Law
Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong had no idea of the potential reaction by coining an acronym while writing about insider trading of stocks tied to tariff roller-coaster foreign trade decisions by the Trump administration.
TACO—or “Trump Always Chickens Out” captured the quest for a theme to respond to the daily stream of bullshit coming from the White House. It metastasized in memes and triggered a Presidential meltdown in response to a reporter’s question. And it’s a catchy name for the practice of loading up on stocks when tariffs are first announced and then selling when the President ultimately backtracks on enforcing them.
Then a three-judge panel in the US Court of International Trade struck down the vast majority of Trump’s tariffs issued since Jan. 20, and said cash must be repaid to those firms who have already paid. A unanimous decision by jurists appointed by three different administrations found that the president exceeded his authority by claiming America’s long-standing trade deficit was a “national emergency” which gave him tariff powers normally left to Congress.
Boom!
The Trump administration’s grand plan for building a new economic model based on trade tariffs and lower corporate taxation was, at best, on hold. So were negotiations with the European Union, China and other key trading partners, forced to the negotiating table by the tariff threats
You can bet this will be heard without delay by the Supreme Court. Based on the legal reasoning I read in the International Trade court ruling, I’m thinking this was not the kind of decision the administration was hoping to take before the high court.
"The court does not pass upon the wisdom or likely effectiveness of the President's use of tariffs as leverage. That use is impermissible not because it is unwise or ineffective, but because (federal law) does not allow it."
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito must be thinking it’s Christmas in Springtime, as visions of personal gain parade through their dreams.
According to the Associated Press, President Trump retains the power to impose a 15% tariff on nations with which America has a significant trade deficit. The 25% tariffs on metal and automobile imports — were issued under different legislation, and should be unaffected. What’s gone are the country-specific fees unveiled on “Liberation Day,” which may have been generated by artificial intelligence.
Still, as Politico noted, “It’s a good day for the penguins, at least.”
Reaction at the White House has been a mixture of denial and defamation. Negotiations with trading partners would continue, according to official sources, under the assumption of a judicial reversal in the appeals process.
Kevin Hassett, the head of Trump’s National Economic Council went on Fox News to insinuate that the decision was a rebuke to those fighting against the fentanyl crisis. Videotape of dope pushers celebrating the court ruling apparently wasn’t available.
Via Politico:
White House deputy press secretary Kush Desai issued a harsh rebuke of the decision, slamming the deciding judges as “unelected,” an oft-used insult launched by members of the Trump administration at sitting judges.
“It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency. President Trump pledged to put America First, and the Administration is committed to using every lever of executive power to address this crisis and restore American Greatness,” Desai wrote.
Longtime Trump adviser Jason Miller similarly decried the decision on Fox Business Thursday morning as evidence of the workings of the “deep state.”
There was other bad news for the Trump administration on Wednesday, as the Washington Post revealed that the done deal for Qatar’s 747 jet, said to be donated with the idea it would be used as Air Force One, wasn’t actually finalized. Negotiations are still in progress.
It’s not hard to imagine there’s a case of recipient remorse in progress as the flying palace came into contact with the harsh realities of national security.
Over at Health and Human Services, the blowback against RFKjr’s so-called MAHA Report included revelations that seven studies used as source material were either misinterpreted or flat-out didn’t exist.
Here’s an example, via NOTUS:
Epidemiologist Katherine Keyes is listed in the MAHA report as the first author of a study on anxiety in adolescents. When NOTUS reached out to her this week, she was surprised to hear of the citation. She does study mental health and substance use, she said. But she didn’t write the paper listed.
“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS via email. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”
It’s not clear that anyone wrote the study cited in the MAHA report. The citation refers to a study titled, “Changes in mental health and substance abuse among US adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic,” along with a nonfunctional link to the study’s digital object identifier. While the citation claims that the study appeared in the 12th issue of the 176th edition of the journal JAMA Pediatrics, that issue didn’t include a study with that title.
It’s a really crazy time. There are a half dozen other actions by and against the Trump administration deserving of analysis, and I’ll do my best to bring them to readers in the coming days.
American doctors look to relocate to Canada to avoid the Trump administration by Brett Kelman at NPR
The Medical Council of Canada said in an email statement that the number of American doctors creating accounts on physiciansapply.ca, which is "typically the first step" to being licensed in Canada, has increased more than 750% over the past seven months compared with the same time period last year — from 71 applicants to 615. Separately, medical licensing organizations in Canada's most populous provinces reported a rise in Americans either applying for or receiving Canadian licenses, with at least some doctors disclosing they were moving specifically because of Trump.
"The doctors that we are talking to are embarrassed to say they're Americans," said John Philpott, CEO of CanAm Physician Recruiting, which recruits doctors into Canada. "They state that right out of the gate: 'I have to leave this country. It is not what it used to be.'"
Canada, which has universal publicly funded health care, has long been an option for U.S.-trained doctors seeking an alternative to the American healthcare system. While it was once more difficult for American doctors to practice in Canada due to discrepancies in medical education standards, Canadian provinces have relaxed some licensing regulations in recent years, and some are expediting licensing for U.S.-trained physicians.
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Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves by Stephen J Vaughan-Nichols at The Register
Welcome to Garbage In/Garbage Out (GIGO). Formally, in AI circles, this is known as AI model collapse. In an AI model collapse, AI systems, which are trained on their own outputs, gradually lose accuracy, diversity, and reliability. This occurs because errors compound across successive model generations, leading to distorted data distributions and "irreversible defects" in performance. The final result? A Nature 2024 paper stated, "The model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality."
Model collapse is the result of three different factors. The first is error accumulation, in which each model generation inherits and amplifies flaws from previous versions, causing outputs to drift from original data patterns. Next, there is the loss of tail data: In this, rare events are erased from training data, and eventually, entire concepts are blurred. Finally, feedback loops reinforce narrow patterns, creating repetitive text or biased recommendations.
I like how the AI company Aquant puts it: "In simpler terms, when AI is trained on its own outputs, the results can drift further away from reality."
I'm not the only one seeing AI results starting to go downhill. In a recent Bloomberg Research study of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), the financial media giant found that 11 leading LLMs, including GPT-4o, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, and Llama-3-8 B, using over 5,000 harmful prompts would produce bad results.
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'Real security threats': Experts alarmed as Trump admin 'dismantles' fight against extremists by Hannah Allam for Pro Publica
“The federal government used to prioritize domestic terrorism, and now it’s like domestic terrorism just went away overnight,” Nessel told the audience. “I don’t think that we’re going to get much in the way of cooperation anymore.”
Across the country, other state-level security officials and violence prevention advocates have reached the same conclusion. In interviews with ProPublica, they described the federal government as retreating from the fight against extremist violence, which for years the FBI has deemed the most lethal and active domestic concern. States say they are now largely on their own to confront the kind of hate-fueled threats that had turned Temple Israel into a fortress.
The White House is redirecting counterterrorism personnel and funds toward President Donald Trump’s sweeping deportation campaign, saying the southern border is the greatest domestic security threat facing the country. Millions in budget cuts have gutted terrorism-related law enforcement training and shut down studies tracking the frequency of attacks. Trump and his deputies have signaled that the Justice Department’s focus on violent extremism is over, starting with the president’s clemency order for militants charged in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
