Redburn Reads (April 17, 2025)
Our nightmares: now and in the future
Donald Trump is seeking to destroy what makes America great.
First, an apology. . . I’ve only written Redburn Reads once in the past month or so, mostly because we’ve been traveling. But also because what is happening to our country seems so overwhelming that it is impossible to keep up. So, like many of you, I’m afraid, I tuned out.
Kristi Noem, the US homeland security secretary, speaks as prisoners look out from a cell in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on Wednesday. Photograph: Alex Brandon/Reuters
Trump and Elon Musk are trying – and often succeeding – in ruining the ability of our nation to protect the public’s health, to pay Social Security benefits, to do the kind of scientific research that saves lives, to sustain a healthy U.S. and global economy because of his bizarre import taxes, to educate young (and old) Americans about our true history, and so much more.
How to decide what is most important? I don’t know. There are just too many bad things happening at once. So all I can do for now is highlight a few pieces I found insightful and hope to come back more often to these issues and several others that matter most to me.
The most obvious – and the most immediate – crisis is Trump’s attack on our legal system and his systematic effort to take away the rights of people living in the United States to be safe from seizure. Plenty of good pieces have been written about the erosion of our Constitutional rights. Here’s one that, for me, stands out because it makes clear that the threat is already here: Ezra Klein, In the introduction to a recent podcast for the New York Times, rightly raises the alarm.
The emergency is here.
The crisis is now. It is not six months away. It is not another Supreme Court ruling away from happening. It’s happening now.
Perhaps not to you, not yet. But to others. Real people. We know their names. We know their stories.
The president of the United States is disappearing people to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists. A prison known by its initials — CECOT. A prison built for disappearance. A prison where there is no education or remediation or recreation, because it is a prison that does not intend to release its inhabitants back out into the world. It is a prison where the only way out, in the words of El Salvador’s so-called justice minister, is a coffin. . .
Why do we need El Salvador’s prisons? We have prisons here. But for the Trump administration, El Salvador’s prisons are the answer to the problem of American law.
The Trump administration holds the view that anyone they send to El Salvador is beyond the reach of American law — they have been disappeared not only from our country but from our system — and from any protection or process that system affords. . .
That Oval Office meeting between Trump and Bukele was a moment when the mask fully slipped off. I thought Jon Stewart pinpointed part of its horror when he said that the thing that came through so clearly was how much Trump and Bukele were enjoying themselves, each of them declaring that there was nothing they could do for Abrego Garcia — no way to allow him his day in court, no way to allow the American legal system to do its job and assess whether he is a danger. No way to follow the clear order of the Supreme Court.
And from their perspective, maybe they’re right. Because here’s the scary thing that I think sits at least partially beneath their calculus: Politically, they cannot let Abrego Garcia out, nor any of the other people they sent to CECOT, without due process.
Because what if he was released? What if he returned to the United States? What if he could tell his own story? What if — as seems likely — he has been brutalized and tortured by Trump’s Salvadoran henchmen? Well, he can’t be allowed to tell the American people that.
To the Trump administration, Abrego Garcia is not a mistake. He is a liability, and he is a test. A test of their power to do this to anyone. A test of whether the loophole they believe they have found — that if they can get you on a plane, they can hustle you beyond our laws and leave you in the grips of the kind of gulags they wish they had here.
They are not ashamed of this. They are not denying their desire to do it to more people.
This is how dictatorships work. Trump has always been clear about who he is and the kind of power he wants. Now he is using that power.
And everyone around him — including Marco Rubio, Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem — is defending his right to wield that power.
By contrast, Trump and Republicans in Congress are engaging in actions that don’t seem to be an emergency. They are simply trying to write a budget for the federal government. But just because most of us aren’t paying as much attention to the looming fiscal disaster doesn’t mean it isn’t real as well.
Matthew Yglesias, writing in his essential “Slow Boring” Substack newsletter, rightly tries to raise the alarm as well.
Trump won. And now, while a million crazy things are happening in the executive branch, congressional Republicans are moving forward with a fiscal agenda that is incredibly irresponsible and will add trillions in debt, despite DOGE’s efforts to saves pennies through measures like refusing to help Milwaukee address unsafe levels of lead in their public schools’ drinking water.
Republicans are telling some people that there will be trillions of cuts to social safety net programs while promising other people that there won’t. But all possible versions of the GOP fiscal agenda result in huge increases to the budget deficit. In some, those increases are partially offset by cuts to programs for the poor; other times the deficits are just really large. But every version involves the opposite of sound Obama-style deficit reduction.
What we should be doing is aiming for balanced fiscal consolidation: higher revenue and lower spending, while trying to shelter the most vulnerable from the impact of cuts.
But Republicans want to reduce revenue, raise the deficit, and ensure that the pain of budget cuts falls on the vulnerable.
They’re talking out of both sides of their mouth in a desperate effort to hold their slender margins together. But turning this into a kind of Schrödinger’s Budget Resolution is also making it harder to criticize them. By continuing to advance this legislation procedurally while hiding the ball in terms of its actual contents, Republicans have thus far managed to avoid it becoming a central political story.
I have to admit that I struggled writing this article.
“They’re going to do a bad budget” is not outrageous in the same way that mistakenly sending a man to prison in El Salvador and then pretending you lack the authority to comply with a court order to bring him back is outrageous. Even in the economic policy sphere, it’s just not as riveting as the tariff drama, where Trump’s endless see-sawing and the whipsaws in financial markets are grimly fascinating.
At the same time, I am extremely concerned that Republicans are either going to bait-and-switch a second time on these budget resolutions and enact draconian Medicaid cuts after all, or else plunge ahead with the hyper-irresponsible Senate version, provoke some kind of bond market crisis, and then push for doomsday cuts to the social safety net.
Suggesting this has been a deliberate effort to keep the budget out of view is perhaps giving too much credit to a shambolic process. So far, though, it has been largely out of view, which is good for Trump and Republicans, but bad for America.
And then there is the even more distant threat of climate change. Yes, I know we are already living with the consequences of pumping too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and yes, I know, that the United States is not the most important actor in this tragedy compared with China and India. But the worst is still to come, particularly now that Trump has vowed to undermine the nascent efforts initiated by the Biden administration to reduce America’s contribution to global warming.
In an opinion column for the NYT, Robinson Meyer also tries to raise the alarm over Trump’s love affair with fossil fuels and rightly points out that the biggest winner of Washington’s retrograde actions, for what it’s worth, is going to be China.
Allow me to catch you up on how America is faring in the fight against climate change: not well. President Trump is attacking the country’s environmental rules in a way that he never did in his first term. He’s trying not only to repeal rules limiting air and water pollution but also to undo the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate climate pollution — even whether it can define carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
Perhaps even more important, his volatile trade policy of the past weeks is helping to usher in a new and more paranoid era. This will weaken all of America’s systematic strengths in combating climate change, make us poorer and get us virtually nothing in return. . .
First, the president’s actions have critically damaged America’s research, development and innovation engine. The United States is the world’s laboratory, but Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has pulled the plug on hundreds of federal scientific grants, gutted key offices assisting our scientists and engineers and forced a total disruption of our world-leading research programs.
At the Department of Energy, Mr. Musk’s downsizing efforts have compromised the federal government’s ability to understand, harness and promote technologies such as nuclear fusion and batteries. And while China is investing in new rounds of demonstration projects to show off its next-generation energy technologies, the Trump administration is considering killing America’s projects meant to keep up with them.
Mr. Trump has also weakened American companies’ ability to discover such technologies on their own. Some climate technologies can be developed in government and university labs, but others can emerge only from tinkering and finding process improvements on the factory floor. By imposing his eye-watering tariffs on manufacturing and mining inputs, he has hurt domestic manufacturers and strangled a nascent U.S. mining boom. This will hurt high-end manufacturers, such as Howmet Aerospace and the machine tool maker Haas, which help make up America’s industrial base and are a major reason the United States is the world’s second-biggest manufacturer. In his pursuit of an 1890s economic fantasy, Mr. Trump is at risk of killing the real comparative advantages that we have in 2025.
These changes mean that some technologies could be invented in China and Europe instead, others will be delayed and others may never be discovered. Either way, America — and the world — will have fewer resources to help the world navigate decarbonization.
The illogical tariffs will also undermine America’s ability to generate economic growth. Only through growth can we clean up after hurricanes, wildfires and superstorms and invent cheap and abundant forms of clean energy. But Mr. Trump’s policies are crashing consumer and business confidence at home and abroad, and they are forcing the rest of the world to reconsider whether it wants to invest here. He is choking off America’s stability premium — the confidence that our people, companies and financial assets are safer investments because we are a stable society governed by rule of law. . .
At moments like these, it is worth stepping back and asking: Why do we care about climate change in the first place? I fret, for one, because a much warmer world will mean a lower quality of life for billions of people. Climate change will ravage Earth’s ecosystems — impossibly complex and iridescent landscapes that make up this planet’s true wealth. It will be harder for the world’s poorest people to improve their lot on a hotter, more disaster-prone planet. In a climate-changed world, even middle-class and upper-class Americans will experience shocks that uproot their families and livelihoods forever. . .
The Trump era has been full of rapid reversals, and perhaps the president will continue to reverse himself on this trade misadventure, too. But some broken things can never be repaired.
The United States has survived a lot of terrible things – and come back stronger than before. Can we survive being presided over by an incompetent sociopath who aspires to be a dictator? Probably yes. But will we eventually recover and thrive again? I don’t know.