Ingo Wagner/DPA via ZUMA

At the same time that Donald Trump is trying to undermine environmental standards for US cars, he wants to tighten them for imported cars:

Mr. Trump has asked the Environmental Protection Agency and several other agencies, including the Commerce and Transportation departments, to pursue plans to use such laws as the Clean Air Act to subject cars made overseas to strict emissions-standards testing and reviews when entering the U.S. The rules could effectively require more expensive technology on some foreign cars or subject those cars to more expensive hurdles that can be billed to the manufacturer or importer.

Either option would likely raise the costs for foreign cars sold in the U.S., making domestically produced cars cheaper by comparison. This effect of raising prices on consumers is common to most nontariff barriers, which seek to penalize imports through measures other than tariffs or duties.

I don’t even know what to say about this stuff anymore. Is this aimed at Canada and Mexico as yet another threat to force them to cave to his NAFTA demands? Is it a play for votes in the upper Midwest? Does he care that it would mostly affect Europe, Japan, and Korea? Is it just some random idea that sprang from his mind after watching Fox & Friends? There’s no telling.

This is prompted by nothing in particular, but I thought I’d put up a chart showing the real wage gains for blue-collar workers over the past few years. These are “production and nonsupervisory” workers, who make up about 70 percent of the labor force. The election of Donald Trump and a Republican Congress doesn’t seem to have done much for them. But at least the stock market is up, so there’s that.

The American economy gained 103,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at a very weak 13,000 jobs. The employment-population ratio was flat yet again, and the headline unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.1 percent. Wages of production and nonsupervisory workers were up 2.2 percent. That’s exactly the rate of inflation last month, so blue-collar workers saw no pay increase at all.

This is a pretty sluggish jobs report: new job creation stalled and blue-collar wages were flat. Let’s hope things pick up next month.

On Tuesday, the Atlantic reported that Scott Pruitt went behind the president’s back to give two of his favorite aides huge pay increases. On Wednesday, Pruitt went on Fox News to say that he had just heard about this and had immediately rescinded the raises. Today, the Wasington Post confirmed that Pruitt was lying:

On Thursday evening, two EPA officials confirmed that Pruitt endorsed the idea last month of giving substantial raises to senior counsel Sarah Greenwalt and scheduling and advance director Millan Hupp — although he did not carry out the pay raise himself….[Pruitt] instructed staff to award substantial pay boosts to both women, who had worked in different roles for him in Oklahoma.

The Wall Street Journal ran a laughable editorial today insisting that all of Pruitt’s offenses were the merest peccadilloes, total nothingburgers cast into the spotlight by a conspiracy among the press, the “administrative state,” and environmentalists who hate Pruitt. For some reason, though, they failed to mention either Pruitt’s end run around the White House or his firing of officials who questioned his spending habits. When they get around to it, I’m sure they’ll decide those are just nothingburgers too.

More Scott Pruitt news from CBS:

NEW: Scott Pruitt was stuck in traffic. He wanted to use lights/sirens to get to his official appointment, but the lead agent advised him that sirens were to be used only in emergencies. Less than two weeks later that agent was removed from Pruitt’s detail https://t.co/yfPYHmFaN0

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) April 5, 2018

The New York Times tells us the rest of the story:

At least five officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, four of them high-ranking, were reassigned or demoted, or requested new jobs in the past year after they raised concerns about the spending and management of the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt.

The concerns included unusually large spending on office furniture and first-class travel, as well as certain demands by Mr. Pruitt for security coverage, such as requests for a bulletproof vehicle and an expanded 20-person protective detail, according to people who worked for or with the E.P.A. and have direct knowledge of the situation.
Mr. Pruitt bristled when the officials — four career E.P.A. employees and one Trump administration political appointee — confronted him, the people said.

Aside from being hellbent on wrecking the environment, Pruitt is just a very strange guy. What kind of person is so paranoid that he wants all this stuff, or so puffed-up that he thinks the EPA administrator rates it? Pruitt is a stone nutcase.

*Not counting Donald Trump, of course, who has been removed from competition for chronic use of asshole steroids.

Family week ends today with a picture chosen by my brother. This is a swan in the Round Pond by Kensington Palace. This pond swarms with swans, and getting a super-duper closeup like this is just a matter of setting down your camera and pressing the shutter button over and over. Naturally, it’s best to free ride on somebody else who’s feeding the swans, since that’s where they congregate. Keep it up, and eventually you’ll get a swan beak right in your lens.

One of Donald Trump’s most effective white nationalist trolls during the 2016 campaign was “Ricky Vaughn,” who was also one of the most reliable retweeters of Russian Twitter accounts. He did his best to stay anonymous, but Luke O’Brien finally tracked him down for HuffPost and he turns out to be…

Douglass Mackey.

….The 28-year-old has done a good job keeping information about himself off the internet….But here’s what we know so far….Mackey is from Waterbury, Vermont, a small town of around 5,000 people in the middle of the state. His father, Scott, a lobbyist who focuses on tax policy affecting wireless communications and the digital economy, was a former legislative aide to the late U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords (R-Vt.). When contacted by email, Scott told HuffPost that “this is a very difficult time for our family and I don’t have any comment.”

….He went to Harwood Union High School, then nearby Middlebury College … moved to Brooklyn, New York, and took a job as an economist at John Dunham & Associates … terminated for reasons that Dunham could not reveal under New York labor laws … moved that year into a two-bedroom apartment on Lexington Avenue.

….Secrecy will no longer be effective for Ricky Vaughn.

No it won’t. Good.

Eric Vance/Planet Pix via ZUMA

The curtain has rung down on the great Kevin Williamson affair. It turns out that Williamson didn’t propose the death penalty for women who get abortions in just a single angry tweet, but also in greater depth in a podcast:

Kevin Williamson has been fired from The Atlantic.

From Jeffrey Goldberg’s letter to staff: “The language he used in this podcast—and in my conversations with him in recent days—made it clear that the original tweet did, in fact, represent his carefully considered views.”

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) April 5, 2018

“The tweet was not merely an impulsive, decontextualized, heat-of-the-moment post…Furthermore, the language used in the podcast was callous and violent. This runs contrary to The Atlantic’s tradition of respectful, well-reasoned debate, and to the values of our workplace.”

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) April 5, 2018

Of all the reasons to get fired, this is the craziest. Goldberg didn’t think Williamson was serious about his view of abortion? That’s nuts. Of course he was serious about it. How could Goldberg have somehow convinced himself otherwise?

Do you remember during the 2016 campaign, when Donald Trump said that “there should be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions? It was obvious at the time that Trump was just freewheeling and had no idea what the pro-life community thought of this. He just figured (a) hey, if abortion is illegal this makes sense, right? and (b) taking the farthest right-wing stance had worked before, so it should work again.

What he didn’t know was how hard the pro-life community works to not say this. They will talk about abortion being murder. They will talk about it being worse than the Holocaust. They will talk about punishing doctors who perform abortions. But they will never, never take the obvious next step of saying that women who get abortions should be punished. “We need to change the culture,” they’ll say. “Women are victims,” they’ll say. “This isn’t the most effective way to reduce abortions,” they’ll say. Trump was advised of this posthaste and he backed down within a few days.

It goes without saying that nobody would take this kind of forgiving attitude if we were murdering, say, a million adult Hispanics every year. We would all agree that the murderers should, in fact, be punished, and not lightly. So if abortion really is murder, then punishing women who get abortions is obviously the right thing to do.

But conservatives are firmly prohibited from saying this because they know perfectly well that everyone would find it heinous—and this prohibition is enforced with an iron fist. Williamson’s crime wasn’t believing that women who get abortions should be hanged, it was saying out loud that women who get abortions should be hanged.

Personally, I wish Williamson had said this loudly and proudly in the pages of the Atlantic. That would help tear the mask off the duplicity of the anti-abortion movement and expose it for the barbarism that it is. It would be great to see them tearing each other apart over what they really think should happen to women who get abortions. I guess now that will never happen.

Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA

From the perspective of Economics 101, everybody hates tariffs.¹ But even among economists, there’s broad agreement that tariffs have one legitimate use: as a weapon to force another country to lower tariffs. Cue Larry Kudlow:

Kudlow to reporters 15 minutes ago: “Technically, both countries have just proposed tariffs. Nothing enacted. I think that’s an important point.. Nothing around the corner. There’s going to be a big discussion about it.” https://t.co/iZvol8F2bV

— Abby D. Phillip (@abbydphillip) April 5, 2018

It’s a funny thing. There are a couple of areas where Donald Trump’s habit of bluster and bullying can be genuinely effective. One of them is illegal immigration: by scaring the hell out of everyone, he probably really has reduced traffic across the border.² Another is trade: by threatening China, he might very well get concessions that others haven’t. But having done the blustering and bullying, I wonder if he can now switch gears and handle negotiations with China with the dexterity to get what he wants? Or does China know that he’s likely to cave as soon as he gets just enough to claim victory on Twitter?

I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.

¹The contemporary liberal case against trade agreements goes beyond Econ 101. Liberals don’t generally favor tariffs, which are already low in any case, but they’re unhappy over things like patent protection and corporate control of the adjudication process. If modern trade agreements were solely about reducing tariffs on goods, there would hardly be anyone opposed to them.

²Whether this effect lasts more than a year or two is a whole different question.

For those of you who are worried about the president of the United States attacking a corporation out of personal pique—Amazon is the latest—you’re right to be worried. But as with every other time Trump has done this, you probably shouldn’t be too worried:

We’ve seen this movie before: Trump says or tweets something about somebody, the target’s stock price briefly goes down, and then a couple of days later it goes back up. This happens so reliably you could probably make money from it if you invested regularly in companies that Trump attacks.