Michael Moss (0:00)

Foreign hello, this is Michael Moss. Heather Cox Richardson is traveling today and her travel arrangements did not allow her time to read today's letter, so I will be reading it in her place. March 13, 2025 Trump's 25% tariffs on all aluminum and steel imported into the US were went into effect today, prompting retaliatory tariffs from the European Union and Canada. The EU announced tariffs on about $28 billion worth of products, including beef and whiskey, mostly produced by Republican dominated states. We deeply regret this measure, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said. Tariffs are taxes. They are bad for business and even worse for consumers. These tariffs are disrupting supply chains. They bring uncertainty for the economy. Canada also announced new tariffs on Wednesday on about $21 billion worth of U.S. products in retaliation for Trump's tariffs. Francois Philippe Champagne, Canada's Minister of innovation, Science and industry, said the U.S. administration is once again inserting disruption and disorder into an incredibly successful trading partnership and raising the cost of everyday goods for Canadians and American households alike. With the stock market falling and business leaders begging Trump to stop the trade machinations that are creating the volatility that is wrenching the economy downward, trump said yesterday to reporters, long term, what I'm doing is making our country strong again. In an interview on the CBS Evening News last night, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a billionaire financial executive, was asked whether Trump's economic policies were worth it, even if they cause a recession. These policies are the most important thing America has ever had, lutnick answered. It is worth it. Former Representative Tom Malinowski, a Democrat from New Jersey, reposted Lutnick's assertion and said, in my graduate thesis, I quoted a hard line Communist official from Poland in the 1950s who was asked about terrible shortages of food and housing. He said people had to sacrifice and if that's what it takes to prove the superiority of socialism, it's worth it. The days when the Republican Party were conservatives are long gone. Edmund Burke, the Anglo Irish politician and political thinker who began the process of articulating a conservative political philosophy, did so most famously in response to the French Revolution in 1790, a year after the storming of the Bastille Prison, symbolized the rebellion of the people against the monarchy. Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke had supported the American Revolution that had ended less than a decade before, largely because he believed that the American colonists were trying to restore their traditional rights. But the French Revolution, he thought, was an entirely different proposition, as revolutionaries in France replaced their country's traditions with laws and systems based on their theory of an ideal government, Burke drew back. He took a stand against radical change driven by people trying to make the government enforce a specific political ideology. Ideological driven government was radical and dangerous, he thought. Quickly the ideology became more important than the complex reality of the way society and people actually worked. In 1790, Burke argued that the role of government was not to impose a worldview but rather to promote stability, and that lawmakers could achieve that stability most effectively by supporting the structures that had proven themselves effective in the past. In his time, that meant social hierarchies, the church property and the family. Conservative meant literally conserving what was already there without reference to an ideology. Those in charge of the government should make changes slowly, according to facts on the ground, in order to keep the country stable, he thought. If it behaved this way, the government, which in his time was usually seen as a negative force in society, could be a positive one in 2025. The Republicans in charge of the United States of America are not the conservatives they call themselves. They are the dangerous ideological radicals Burke feared. They are abruptly dismantling a government that has kept the United States relatively prosperous, secure and healthy for the past 80 years. In its place, they are trying to impose a government based on the idea that a few men should rule. The Trump administration's hits to the economy have monopolized the news this week. But its swing away from Europe and toward Russia, antagonizing allies and partners while fawning over authoritarians like Russia's president Vladimir Putin, is also a radical stand and one that seems likely to destabilize American security. Former allies have expressed concern over sharing intelligence with the U.S. in the future. And yesterday, 34 army leaders from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, Japan and Australia met in Paris without inviting the United States. The wholesale destruction of the USA's advanced medical research, especially cancer research, by firing scientists, canceling grants, banning communications and collaboration and stopping travel is also radical and seems unlikely to leave Americans healthier than before. Yesterday, news broke that the administration canceled $800 million worth of grants to Johns Hopkins University, one of the nation's top research universities in science and medicine. Meanwhile, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has cast doubt on the safe, effective measles vaccine as the disease continues to spread across the Southwest. Today, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin boasted that the administration is taking 31 actions to roll back environmental protections. These include regulations about electric vehicles and pollution from coal fired plants. The administration intends to rescind the EPA's 2009 finding that the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change endanger public health. That finding is the legal argument for regulations governing car and truck emissions and power plants. Also today, the United States Department of Agriculture, which oversees supplemental food programs, announced it was cutting about $1 billion in funding that enables schools and food banks to buy directly from local farms and ranches. This will hit farmers and producers as well as children and food insecure families. In place of the system that has created relative stability for almost a century, Republicans under President Donald Trump and his sidekick, billionaire Elon Musk, are imposing a government that is based on the idea that a government that works to make people safe, prosperous and healthy is simply ripping off wealthy people. Asked if he felt sorry for those losing their jobs in the government purges, Trump told NBC News, when without evidence, sure I do. I feel very badly. But many of them don't work at all. Many of them never showed up to work. The administration promises that it is eliminating waste, fraud and corruption. But Judd Legum of Popular Information today launched the Musk Watch Doge Tracker, which shows that Musk has overstated the savings he claims by at least 92%, with the warning that since these identified cuts are illegal and unconstitutional, Congress appropriates money and writes the laws for how it's spent. And courts have agreed that the executive branch has to execute the laws as they are written. The contracts might not be canceled at all. That the administration knows it is not operating on the up and up seems clear from its attempts to hide what it's doing. It has taken weeks for courts to get the administration to say who is running the Department of Governmental Efficiency and what the body actually is. The White House has tried to characterize Musk as a senior adviser to the president to shield him from questioning. But today, in response to a lawsuit by 14 attorneys general from Democratic dominated states arguing that Musk is acting unconstitutionally, US District Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered Musk and Doge to turn over their records and answer questions, giving them three weeks to comply. On Tuesday, remaining staffers at the U.S. agency for International Development USAID received an email under the name of Acting Executive Secretary Erica Carr at USAID telling them to shred or burn agency records despite strict laws about the preservation of federal documents. Haphazardly shredding and burning US Aid documents and personnel files seems like a great way to get rid of evidence of wrongdoing when you're illegally dismantling the agency, said Representative Gregory Meeks, a Democrat of New York. The top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Two lawsuits are already challenging the order, and the corruption in the administration was out in the open yesterday after Trump advertised Elon Musk's cars at the White House. Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that Musk has signaled to President Trump's advisers in recent days that he wants to put a hundred million dollars into groups controlled by the Trump political operation. This is separate from Musk's own political action committee, which dropped almost 300 million into the 2024 election and which is now pouring money into next month's election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The government that Trump and Musk are destroying, with the complicity of their party is popular, and Republican members of Congress are apparently unwilling to to have to vote on the policies that are putting their radical ideology into place. In an extraordinary move yesterday, House Republicans made it impossible for Congress to challenge Trump's tariffs. The Constitution gives to Congress, not the president, the power to impose tariffs. But the International Emergency Economic Powers act allows the president to impose tariffs if he declares an national emergency under the National Emergencies act, which Trump did on February 1st. That same law allows Congress to end such a declaration of emergency. But if such a termination is introduced, as Democrats have recently done, it has to be taken up in a matter of days. But this would force Republicans to go on record as either supporting or or opposing the unpopular economic ideology Trump and Musk are imposing. So Republicans just passed a measure saying that for the rest of this congressional session, each day shall not constitute a calendar day for the purposes of terminating Trump's emergency declaration. The Republicans legislation that a day is not a day seems to prove the truth of Burke's observation that by trying to force reality to fit their ideology, radical ideologues will end up imposing tyranny in the name of liberty. Letters from an American was written by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, MA. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.