Trump's tariffs aren’t a solution, but free trade is a problem

The dumbest policy possible reveals more than you think

Welcome to a Saturday night edition of Progress Report.

Millions of Americans took to the streets on Saturday to protest the Trump administration’s ongoing dismantling of the federal government, existential attacks on workers and organized labor, and the nation’s general slide into oligarchy.

The marches and demonstrations took place at over 1400 sites nationwide, and if you attended any of them, I’d love to see your photos and videos. You can post them in this chat thread!

In other news, our next live interview will be this Sunday night (April 6th) at 9pm EST. I’ll be talking with worker-activists who are trying save democracy in Utah and have a very narrow window to make it happen. It’s going to be a good one — join us!

In this newsletter, we’ll dive into some state news (including some fun stuff!) and then examine the tariff-induced economic chaos from a progressive perspective you won’t read in the mainstream coverage.

Note: Unlike many progressive advocacy journalists, I’ve gone fully independent, with no special advertising deals or close relationships with powerful politicians to temper what I write. My only loyalty is to you, the reader, and to the cause of progress — economic justice, democracy, human rights, and standing up to oligarchs.

A new study revealed that right-wing influencers dominate the online media space, so it’s never been more imperative to create an alternative progressive media network that can compete with the massive amounts of misinformation flowing every single day. You can help keep Progress Report afloat and build that network for just $5 a month — every subscription helps!

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Grocery heiress eats it: Things got personal on the floor of the Nebraska Senate this week as legislators debated a bill that would partially roll back the minimum wage increase approved by voters back in 2022.

Nearly 60% of Nebraskans voted to raise the wage from to $15-an-hour by 2026 and then index it to the consumer price index. The bill introduced by Sen. Jane Raybould seeks to limit future minimum wage increases to just 1.5% per year — CPI is generally anywhere between 3 and 5% — and create exemptions that would cap very young workers (ie 14 and 15 year olds) and trainees at just $13.50 per hour.

Rolling back successful pro-worker ballot initiatives has become standard for many GOP-controlled legislatures, but the catch here is that Raybould is a Democrat who represents a very liberal district in Lincoln. What’s more, Raybould’s family also owns one of the biggest supermarket chains in Nebraska, which gives her a direct financial interest in limiting pay increases to low wage workers.

Fellow Democrats were not shy about pointing out this clear conflict of interest and the impact it would have on working people during the debate.

“When people ask me how this legislative session is going, it's really hard to describe exactly how this session is going and how it feels," Sen. Danielle Conrad said. "The best sort of description I can share with them is that every day feels like a Dickens novel. Every day political and corporate elites come in to attack the working poor."

“I have never seen such a blatant, bald-faced, self-serving, self-dealing, selfish, unethical example of self-dealing as this bill in the Legislature,” charged state Sen. Megan Hunt, a progressive former Democrat who now runs as an independent.

The bill passed the first round of the unicameral legislature by a 32-17 vote, one shy of what it would need to be sent to the governor’s desk for signing. Several lawmakers who voted for cloture have demanded further changes before they’d provide final approval.

Not great, Bob: Speaking of Democratic lawmakers failing the basic test of backing working people, Washington State Gov. Bob Ferguson rejected his legislature’s budget proposal because it includes a wealth tax.

Ferguson argued that the wealth tax is an unreliable mechanism because it is guaranteed to be challenged in court, though he left out the part about how the all-Democratic state Supreme Court already upheld a capital gains tax in 2022. He also objected to the budget’s inclusion of property and payroll tax hikes, which were intended to fill part of the gap that will be left by an impending reduction in federal funding.

Translation: Ferguson wants significant budget cuts.

Tesla Takedown: Kansas City is one of the most underrated activist hotbeds in the nation, so it’s no surprise that its organizers are taking the anti-Elon Musk protests to the next level: kicking Tesla out of town altogether.

Missouri, like nearly every other state, requires all car sales to go through local dealerships. Tesla was granted an exception to that rule back in 2013, a gift that a new ballot initiative aims to revoke. If the initiative passes, Tesla would have to give up its showrooms in the city and once again sell through third parties.

Another great example of Elon Musk’s incredible business acumen. Few people would even think to turn an upscale statement vehicle into the official car of neo-Nazis, much less pull it off.

DEI Forever: Road Rules star Sean Duffy finally worked up the courage to ride the subway, but I’m not sure he can handle what’s coming next here in New York City: our schools are staying woke. Ope!

Trump’s tariffs offer a window into our demented values

He may have branded it “liberation day,” but Donald Trump quite literally did an economic 9/11 on Thursday when he unveiled a new round of giant tariffs.

It got worse on Friday, as the Dow Jones dropped another 6% in response to Trump’s tariffs, which journalists and financial experts quickly recognized were based on a less-than-rudimentary understanding of global trade, calculated with toddler-like precision, and informed by zero real-world context.

This played out exactly as all of us suspected it would, and I think it’s sort of useless to spend much time trying to parse just what was going through Trump’s cheesecloth brain when he plotted out the specifics of this latest disaster. Far more revelatory are the responses to and coverage of the tariff announcement, which explain a lot about how we arrived at the precipice of national self-ruin.

A natural and immutable right

One of the most frustrating things about modern political-economic journalism is the assumption of the corporate prerogative. Every relevant economic policy decision is covered through the frame of how businesses might respond, the implication being that they have a sacred right to do anything they want, no matter how antisocial or damaging.

It wasn’t always this way. Jack Welch’s reign at GM is largely seen as the turning point of what became corporate America’s single-minded pursuit of profit and shareholder value, adopting the priorities of fringe economists like Milton Friedman and turning them into gospel. Financial coverage has become a constant loop of Wall Street professionals urging companies to cut costs however possible, to the point that layoffs and offshoring are seen as merely the cost of doing business, if not greeted with excitement.

Economic coverage also focuses heavily on the price of consumer goods, which winds up justifying many of the gross antisocial policies pursued by big corporations. You can just imagine the scrutiny there would be on companies like Walmart and Amazon if much of the media didn’t overlook union-busting, paying low wages, outsourcing, corporate monopolization in their rush to compile lists of the best Black Friday and Labor Day deals.

Keeping prices low is certainly desirable, especially in a country that is so economically stratified, but a lack of accountability also fuels the race to the bottom.

Always low standards. Always.

During Joe Biden’s time in office, the media obsessively covered the cost of goods as if it were some natural phenomenon, haranguing experts for information about its source as if it were an unconventional weather pattern. That at least half of peak inflation was driven by corporate greed went relatively ignored, at least until someone tried to hold those companies accountable.

Think back to the uproar at Kamala Harris’s vague suggestion of situationally limiting price increases to combat gouging during emergencies — the press lined up to insist that it wouldn’t work, quoted far-right economists, and played down corporate responsibility. Never a profile in political courage, Harris quickly walked back the very notion of interfering with the sanctity of a rigged market (with some help from billionaire backer Mark Cuban).

Now fast forward to this past week, as Trump’s tariff bombshell wreaked havoc on global economies. The refrain we’ve heard over and over is that corporations hit with tariffs will just pass the cost along to the consumer, resulting in steep inflation on almost everything we purchase. While that’s undoubtedly true, and thus one of the main reasons that Trump was so stupid to impose these tariffs, what troubles me is the media’s deference to and in some ways encouragement of corporate price hikes.

The public has been conditioned to expect corporate profit maximization and accept that they will be the ones to bear the brunt of damage. This is a major hurdle on the path to something better.

Glib elites need not apply

Perhaps even more disconcerting is the glib responses I’ve seen from many liberal Democrats who question the general idea of reshoring domestic production of certain goods, as if it’s a net positive that companies can manufacture things in dangerous factories that pay poverty wages.

Most things made for pennies abroad were once made in the United States, and often in facilities that supported entire towns. The country is still reeling from the mass deindustrialization triggered by NAFTA and other trade deals, which is one of the main reasons that working class communities have turned away from Democrats.

Reporters for the New York Times, like the guy above, pride themselves on being cold and objective realists, but that far too often crosses over into seeming advocacy for existing injustices. This moment could be used to highlight the exploited foreign workers making Air Jordans for a dollar an hour, perhaps leading to a demand for better standards that lift up workers everywhere, but we’re instead seeing a defense of the status quo as the only sensible option.

Presidents generally take the blame for a struggling economy, but this is likely to be the first time that the commander in chief has purposely crashed the economy out of the clear blue sky. Because they’re now so inextricably tied to Trump, conservatives are largely going to be forced to go along for the ride, and the best their media apparatus can do right now is either pretend the stock market doesn’t exist or tell people that they don’t need money anyway.

Needless to say, this is going to produce one of those rare moments where a new vision can break through to an electorate desperate for some way forward. Democrats can’t get this wrong again, as they did in 2008 and 2020, when big promises fizzled out and the party returned to business as usual.

It would be a huge step backward to reject the broad concepts of renegotiating trade deals and rebuilding American manufacturing capacity because Trump pursued them in the stupidest and most destructive ways possible. There are better ways to go about re-industrialization — Joe Biden’s main achievement was starting the country down the long road of doing it through subsidies, which acknowledge the need to work with business without deferring to capital.

Rushing to re-embrace free trade without guardrails after this market crash would only further entrench business as the most important constituency and ultimately undermine progressive efforts to reorient policy toward the public interest and win back working families.

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