Disorder Emergency cast – Tariffs, Impoundment, Gaza, AID Freeze, and plane crash
Pounding on about Impoundment
Well, well, well.
So the tariffs on our closest trading partners Mexico and Canada were on for 24 hours before they were then taken off before they are then set to come back in a month. This is clearly rational goal-directed policymaking at its finest. Or rather it is deliberate disordering neo-populism at its most obvious and transparent.
If you wanna catch up on the specifics and what it means for the markets, check out CNBC here: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/04/5-things-to-know-before-the-stock-market-opens-tuesday-february-4.html
So usually I start this substack pumping my own podcast… But this time I am gonna pound on about Impoundment by pumping another podcast that we have no connections to:
This 538 Episode is the most compelling podcast I have heard to date about the ways in which the Trump Presidency threatens the balance of powers among the Executive, the Legislature, and the Judiciary; and how the issue of Impoundment is at the very core of the structural threat of Trump and his attempt to 're-do' the nature of America. It also has very interesting things to point out about the role of popularity of policies or issues (say anti-DEI) vs process of policy making (like you can’t just impound federal funding that is already appropriated by Congress... it critically explains how we are facing a demise of a constituency for 'process' and 'structures'..
Also fascinatingly showcases how Trump lacks a legislative agenda... other than Disordering things and taking power away from the legislator and giving it to the Executive. The legal scholar on the 538 also gives some unique historical parallels with how American structures derive from the struggles btw the King and Parliament in England in the 16th and 17th centuries, where by Parliament had to claw back the power of the purse and appropriations to prevent England sliding towards the Absolutism that characterised developments on the Continent.
So, I do also like to pump the Disorder Show. Why you might ask?
Because the Disorder Show is a podcast where we hate being right. Totally hate it. Jason truly loves being wrong. But fudge and fiddlesticks. Seems he is right again. The thing with neo-populists is that they don’t so much have policy agendas and goals, they just seek to disorder the universe by say – proposing to fire in a haphazard way 2 million U.S. government employees, or forcing out top FBI officials, or appointing officials for Senate confirmation to head government agencies that have overtly said they want to dismantle those specific agencies, or by randomly proposing to deport Palestinians from Gaza to Jordan against their will.
On today’s Emergency Cast (Listen on Apple Podcast here; or on Spotify here), Jane and Jason spontaneously convene to deal with peak disorder and delve into all the interlocking crises, dead catting, plane crashing, impounding, tariff barrier erecting, and AID stopping that has come to a head during Trump’s Second Week of his Second Term.
In the Ordering the Disorder segment, Jane wonders how much of the world will respond by trying to figure out how to decouple - slowly, gradually, cautiously – from the U.S. because U.S. politics does not exactly seem at its most stable. And Jason muses that Canada, Mexico, the UK and the EU could have chosen to present a united front to Trump, but appear to have elected not to.
(Listen on Apple Podcast here; or on Spotify here)
More Background on Impoundment, the DOGE, Trump’s Gaza plans, etc:
From the Washington Post, ‘Senior U.S. official exists after rift with Musk Allies of Payment System’: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/31/elon-musk-treasury-department-payment-systems/
From CNN, ‘Inside 45 hours of chaos: The brief life and quick death of Trump’s federal spending freeze’: https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/29/politics/inside-brief-life-trump-federal-spending-freeze/index.html
From CNN, ‘Trump suggests his plan for Gaza Strip is to ‘clean out the whole thing”’: https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/25/politics/trump-gaza-strip-jordan-egypt/index.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawIJDhZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHfyYNmWDBz3iKiscGQHjvHQx_ZfwOPriV_8VGZmlxTh1JhZ-_NiNKbntsw_aem_rjBE8gcyRVXKVXMhTc-mAQ
From Congressional Democrats, ‘Background on Unlawful Impoundment in President Trump’s Executive Orders’ https://democrats-appropriations.house.gov/news/fact-sheets/background-unlawful-impoundment-president-trumps-executive-orders
Now here is a proposal to Order the Disorder, what the Europeans can do to Order or rather could have done but have chosen not to:
Or in text form:
Key Quotes
Jason: You’ve got to stand up to a bully. If you cave in, he'll keep going.
Jane: How should the rest of the world deal with having such a different face of America?
Jason:You can't just back down. What he's trying to do is harm the Canadian and Mexican economies, bring them to their knees, exert leverage, and then claw back value for American producers, as it were, to use bluffing and leverage. To get a better deal, quote unquote, for America. What they should do, and should have done already, is to have gotten an arrangement where the entire EU, South Korea, Japan, and everyone said, you know what? We don't support this. We have an alternative thing that we're going to snap into action. And that so hasn't happened.
2: Jason: What can European economies possibly do to shelter their currencies, their manufacturing sectors, from the chaos that is headed their way? I'm gonna be pretty pessimistic and say in the short term, nothing. They could have friendshored to isolate themselves from this stuff. They could have made a pan European pact of how to stand up to, for example, Trumpian policies to deregulate AI or Trumpian policies on the Palestinians or Trumpian policies on tariffs. What do you know? There isn't a Canadian, Mexican, EU, South Korean, Japanese unified view on a free trade agreement to come in, to put into being if Trump slaps tariffs on China, Mexico, EU, Canada. There has been forever to do this. But, no one has threatened the bully yet.