loser

Today we discuss flora, fauna and self-gratification.

You’ve been away.

Yes, I was living in a tent for two weeks, communing with the pine trees and black bears of the Sierra.

You heard about California’s likely special election?

I did.

It seems Gov. Gavin Newsom will have his way, with help from the Democratic-run Legislature, and voters will be asked in November to approve a partisan gerrymander aimed at offsetting a similar Republican power grab in Texas.

As many as five GOP House seats could be erased from the congressional map drawn by California’s independent redistricting commission, which voters established more than a decade ago — expressly to take the line-drawing away from a bunch of self-interested politicians.

Fighting fire with fire!

Could we please retire that phrase.

Huh?

Also references to knife fights and Democrats showing up with pencils, rubber bands, butter knives and other wimpy implements. The campaign hasn’t even started and already those metaphors have grown stale.

Fine. At least Democrats are showing some fight.

In an impulsive, shortsighted fashion.

Look, I get it. Donald Trump truly knows no bottom when it comes to undermining democratic norms, running a familial kleptocracy and, in the felicitous phrase of Gustavo Arellano, my fellow Times columnista, treating the Constitution like a pee pad.

Democrats are powerless in Washington, where a pliant Republican-controlled Congress and a supine right-wing Supreme Court have shown all the deference of a maître d’ squiring Trump to his favorite table. So the idea of doing something to push back against the president is quite invigorating and, no doubt, gratifying for Democratic partisans.

It’s also expedient and facile, sparing the party from looking inward and doing the truly hard work it faces. Taking on Republicans over redistricting — a fight among insiders, as far as many voters are concerned — does absolutely nothing to address the larger problem confronting Democrats, which is the absence of any broader message beyond: Trump, bad!

We saw how that worked for them in 2024.

But this is a “break-the-glass” moment for our democracy. Gov. Newsom said so!

Please.

The only thing worse than a grasping and nakedly calculating politician is a politician who wraps his grasping and naked calculation in all sorts of red, white and blue bunting.

At bottom, this is all about Newsom’s overweening presidential ambitions.

How so?

The whole episode started when our gallivanting governor went on a left-wing podcast during a Southern campaign swing and huffed and puffed about responding to Trump and Texas by executing a similar gerrymander in California. (He elided the fact that, under the state Constitution, he has no such authority. Hence the need for a special election to seek voter approval of new, slanted political lines.)

Soon enough, Newsom’s threat took on a life of its own. Normally, redistricting is done once every 10 years, after the latest census. Suddenly, mid-decade redistricting became a new front in the ever-escalating war between red and blue; now several more states are talking about rejiggering their congressional maps for partisan gain.

The problem for Newsom and his fellow Democrats is that Republicans have a lot more gerrymandering opportunities than they do. So instead of those five Democratic-held seats in Texas, many more could be at risk for the party in 2026.

Golly.

Though, it should be said, at this point all that election handicapping is nothing more than speculation.

What do you mean?

Democrats need to flip three congressional districts to seize control of the House. That’s why Trump prodded Texas Republicans to try to nab those five extra seats, to give the GOP some padding.

But there’s no guarantee Republicans will win all five seats. They’re counting on the same strong Latino support Trump received in 2024, and recent polling suggests some of that pro-GOP sentiment may be waning.

Beyond that, the ever-insightful Amy Walter, of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, makes an important point.

“Even as the possibility of new maps in Texas and California may change the size and the shape of the 2026 playing field,” she wrote in a recent analysis, “the fate of the Republican-controlled House is ultimately still going to be determined by two fundamental questions: how do voters feel about the state of the economy, and how do independent voters assess the party in power?”

It’s a long way to November 2026. But at this point, neither of those factors augurs well for Trump and Republicans.

Well, they started it, by messing with Texas.

True. And none of this is meant to defend Trump, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott or the president’s other political henchmen.

But effectively disenfranchising millions of California Republicans isn’t any better than effectively disenfranchising millions of Texas Democrats.

Huh?

If Democrats have their way, the GOP would hold just a handful of California’s 52 House seats, or even less. How is that possibly fair, or representative, in a state that’s home to millions of Republican voters — more, in fact, than any state other than Texas.

There are already countless residents, many living outside Democrats’ city and suburban strongholds, who feel ignored and politically impotent. That’s not healthy for California, or democracy. It breeds anger, resentment, cynicism and a kind of political nihilism that, ultimately, helps lead to the election of a middle-finger president like Donald Trump.

Of course, Newsom may not care, since at this twilight point of his governorship it’s all about his White House hopes and desire to pander to the Democrats’ aggrieved political base.

By fighting fire with fire!

And potentially burning the whole place down.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s tariff onslaught this week left a lot of losers — from small, poor countries such as Laos and Algeria to wealthy U.S. trading partners such as Canada and Switzerland. They’re now facing especially hefty export taxes — tariffs — on the products they export to the U.S. starting Thursday.

The closest thing to winners may be the countries that succumbed to Trump’s demands — and avoided even more pain. But it’s unclear whether anyone will be able to claim victory in the long run — even the United States, the intended beneficiary of Trump’s protectionist policies.

“In many respects, everybody’s a loser here,’’ said Barry Appleton, co-director of the Center for International Law at the New York Law School.

Barely six months after he returned to the White House, Trump has demolished the old global economic order. Gone is one built on agreed-upon rules. In its place is a system in which Trump himself sets the rules, using America’s enormous economic power to punish countries that won’t agree to one-sided trade deals and extracting huge concessions from the ones that do.

“The biggest winner is Trump,” said Alan Wolff, a former U.S. trade official and deputy director-general at the World Trade Organization. “He bet that he could get other countries to the table on the basis of threats, and he succeeded — dramatically.’’

Everything goes back to what Trump calls “Liberation Day’’ — April 2 — when the president announced “reciprocal’’ taxes of up to 50% on imports from countries with which the United States ran trade deficits and 10% “baseline’’ taxes on almost everyone else.

He invoked a 1977 law to declare the trade deficit a national emergency that justified his sweeping import taxes. That allowed him to bypass Congress, which traditionally has had authority over taxes, including tariffs — all of which is now being challenged in court.

‘Winners’ still paying higher tariffs

Trump retreated temporarily after April announcement triggered a rout in financial markets and suspended the reciprocal tariffs for 90 days to give countries a chance to negotiate.

Eventually some of them did, acceding to Trump’s demands to pay what four months ago would have seemed unthinkably high tariffs to maintain their ability to sell to the vast American market.

The United Kingdom agreed to 10% tariffs on its exports to the United States — up from 1.3% before Trump amped up his trade war with the world. The U.S. demanded concessions even though it had run a trade surplus, not a deficit, with the U.K. for 19 straight years.

The European Union and Japan accepted U.S. tariffs of 15%. Those are much higher than the low-single-digit rates they paid last year, but lower than the tariffs he was threatening — 30% on the EU and 25% on Japan.

Also cutting deals with Trump and agreeing to hefty tariffs were Pakistan, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Even countries that saw their tariffs lowered from April without reaching a deal are still paying much higher tariffs than before Trump took office. Angola’s tariff, for instance, dropped to 15% from 32% in April, but in 2022 it was less than 1.5%.

And while the Trump administration cut Taiwan’s tariff to 20% from 32% in April, the pain will still be felt by a U.S. ally that China claims as its territory.

“Twenty percent from the beginning has not been our goal. We hope that in further negotiations we will get a more beneficial and more reasonable tax rate,” Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te told reporters in Taipei on Friday.

Trump also agreed to reduce the tariff on the tiny southern African kingdom of Lesotho to 15% from the 50% he’d announced in April, but the damage may already have been done there.

Brazil, Canada, Switzerland

Countries that didn’t knuckle under — and those that found other ways to incur Trump’s wrath — got hit harder.

Even some of the poor were not spared. Laos’ annual economic output comes to $2,100 per person and Algeria’s $5,600 — versus America’s $75,000. Nonetheless, Laos got rocked with a 40% tariff and Algeria with a 30% levy.

Trump slammed Brazil with a 50% import tax largely because he didn’t like the way it was treating former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a close Trump ally who is facing trial for trying to overturn his electoral loss and inspiring a riot in the capital in 2023 — recalling Trump’s role in the Jan. 6. insurrection two years earlier at the U.S. Capitol.

Never mind that the U.S. has exported more to Brazil than it’s imported every year since 2007.

Trump’s decision to plaster a 35% tariff on long-standing U.S. ally Canada was partly designed to threaten Ottawa for saying it would recognize a Palestinian state in light of the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. Trump is a staunch supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Switzerland was clobbered with a 39% import tax — even higher than the 31% Trump announced on April 2.

“The Swiss probably wish that they had camped in Washington’’ to make a deal, said Wolff, now a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “They’re clearly not at all happy.’’

Fortunes may change if Trump’s tariffs are upended in court. Five American businesses and 12 states are suing the president, arguing that his April 2 tariffs exceeded his authority under the 1977 law.

In May, the U.S. Court of International Trade, a specialized court in New York, agreed and blocked the tariffs, although the government was allowed to continue collecting them while its appeal wends its way through the legal system, and may end up at the Supreme Court. In a hearing Thursday, the judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sounded skeptical about Trump’s justifications for the tariffs.

“If [the tariffs] get struck down, then maybe Brazil’s a winner and not a loser,’’ Appleton said.

$2,400 bill for U.S. households

Trump portrays his tariffs as a tax on foreign countries. But they are actually paid by import companies in the U.S. who typically pass along the cost to their customers via higher prices. True, tariffs can hurt other countries by forcing their exporters to cut prices and sacrifice profits — or risk losing market share in the United States.

But economists at Goldman Sachs estimate that overseas exporters have absorbed just one-fifth of the rising costs from tariffs, while Americans and U.S. businesses have picked up the most of the tab.

Walmart, Procter & Gamble, Ford, Best Buy, Adidas, Nike, Mattel and Stanley Black & Decker have all raised prices due to U.S. tariffs.

“This is a consumption tax, so it disproportionately affects those who have lower incomes,” Appleton said. “Sneakers, knapsacks … your appliances are going to go up. Your TV and electronics are going to go up. Your video game devices, consoles are going to up because none of those are made in America.’’

Trump’s trade war has pushed the average U.S. tariff from 2.5% at the start of 2025 to 18.3% now, the highest since 1934, according to the Budget Lab at Yale University. And that will impose a $2,400 cost on the average household, the lab estimates.

“The U.S. consumer’s a big loser,″ Wolff said.

Wiseman writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report.