THE TARIFF ECONOMY: Stocks took another swan dive yesterday following remarks by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell that President Trump’s global trade war might cause inflation, slow economic growth, and bring unemployment.

  With Trump’s up and down, on-again off-again tariffs on imports, “Markets are struggling with a lot of uncertainty, and that means volatility,” Powell said.

  President Trump threw an online fit at Powell, who he has nicknamed “Too Late,” as in too late lowering interest rates. “Oil prices are down, groceries (even eggs!) are down, and the USA is getting RICH ON TARIFFS. Too Late should have lowered Interest Rates,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

THE SHOWDOWN: Federal judge James Boasberg in Washington said he has found “probable cause” to hold the Trump administration in contempt for showing “willful disregard” of his order to stop deportations under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. The judge stopped short of actually holding the administration in contempt but he is the second judge on the brink of it.

  Boasberg is moving toward contempt charges even though the Supreme Court vacated his original order stopping deportations under the Enemy Aliens Act. He wrote in a 47-page opinion that,  “It is a foundational legal precept that every judicial order ‘must be obeyed’ — no matter how ‘erroneous’ it ‘may be’ — until a court reverses it.”

FACILITATION: Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland went to El Salvador to attempt winning the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant and Maryland resident mistakenly deported to prison by the Trump administration. He was not allowed to visit Abrego Garcia, who remains imprisoned in his native country after the Supreme Court ordered the US government to “facilitate” his return.

  Despite the Supreme Court order, Van Hollen told reporters in El Salvador, that “The United States Embassy here has told me they’ve received no direction from the Trump administration to help facilitate his release.”

  US attorney General Pam Bondi said yesterday about Abrego Garcia, without proof, “He was a member of MS-13. Hard stop. He should not be in our country.”

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE: 

— The Trump administration sued the state of Maine for refusing to ban transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports. It’s an escalation of the public battle between Maine Gov. Janet Mills and Donald Trump, who has threatened to cut funding to Maine’s education department. 

  “The Department of Justice will not sit by when women are discriminated against in sports,” US Attorney General Pam Bondi said. “This is also about these young women’s personal safety.”

  Education Secretary Linda McMahon declared on CNN, “I think there’s two sexes, there’s male and female and so transgender doesn’t have a play in this.”

  Maine says there are only two transgender girls participating in high school sports in the entire state. Mills says the state is following federal law as written to allow them in girls’ sports.

— Secretary of State Marco Rubio shut down the State Department office that tracks and counters global disinformation from foreign countries, including the governments of China, Russia and Iran.

  The irony is that foreign propaganda and misinformation have found their way  into American right wing politics and the blogosphere. Rubio said the office and its precursor in the Biden administration had “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.”

— Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared that autism is preventable and that he will make a priority of studies into environmental factors causing the condition despite science to the contrary.

  He dismissed genetics as a cause. “Genes don’t cause epidemics,” he said. “You need an environmental toxin.” Kennedy was referring to new data that says 1 in 31 children will have some degree of autism, up from 1 in 36 five years ago.

  Researchers say the increase is the result of a variety of factors including increased testing, broader definitions of autism, parents having children later, and more access to services. 

  Kennedy vowed that the health department will now focus on examing the effects of  such things as mold, food additives, and parental obesity. “These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they’re 2 years old,” he said.

— The Justice Department issued guidance to immigration judges to deny without hearings claims for asylum that are likely to be denied. A memo from Sirce Owen, acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review says that “all appropriate action to immediately resolve cases on their dockets that do not have viable legal paths for relief or protection from removal.”

— While the Trump administration is cancelling foreign student visas and detaining people accused of no crimes, Elon Musk’s DOGE team is preparing for the sale of what President Trump has labelled “gold cards,” immigration visa for a price pf $5 million, The NY Times reports. In February Trump announced his idea for the gold card, which has his portrait on it, for “very high-level people” to have a “route to citizenship.”

THE SPIN RACK: Car sales and general retail spending jumped in March as people rushed to beat higher tariff prices. — California’s Menendez brothers, who were 18 and 21 when they shot-gunned their parents 35 years ago, head for a hearing today on whether they might be re-sentenced and released from life imprisonment. 

BELOW THE FOLD: British tennis player Harriet Dart apologized after asking the umpire in a Tuesday tennis match to tell her French opponent Lois Boisson to put on some deodorant because “she smells really bad.”

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