Poor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You can tell he’s under orders to say something nice about vaccines every now and then. But it’s hard work keeping that up, and he’s plainly struggling to maintain the facade. Here he was last night in Fox News primetime:

It used to be, when I was a kid, that everybody got measles. And the measles gave you lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn’t do that. The vaccine is effective for some people for life, but for many people it wanes. . . .

There are adverse events from the vaccine. It does cause deaths every year. It causes all the illnesses that measles itself cause, like encephalitis and blindness, et cetera.

Hard to imagine why his top spokesman quit. Happy Wednesday.

Our Cheeto Tariff Warrior

by Andrew Egger

Yesterday was another day on the tariff hamster wheel, with a morning frenzy of threats and counter-threats between the United States and Canada suddenly giving way to an afternoon of more conciliatory talk, ultimately dumping us more or less back where we started 24 hours prior.

After pledging not to back down on a planned 25 percent surcharge on electricity exports to the United States, Ontario Premier Doug Ford changed his tune after what he described as a “productive conversation” with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in which Lutnick agreed to further trade talks this week. “We have both agreed,” Ford said, “let cooler heads prevail.” The White House stood down too, backing off Trump’s latest threat to double his planned tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum to 50 percent.

That was a big-time win, to hear the administration tell it: “President Trump has once again used the leverage of the American economy, which is the best and biggest in the world, to deliver a win for the American people,” spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement. America really showed that single Canadian province who’s boss!

But it seemed plain that Trump had been rattled by the ferocity of Ford’s threats. His own counterthreats had come in an unusually plaintive tone: “Ontario just announced a 25 percent surcharge on ‘electricity,’ of all things, and your [sic] not even allowed to do that,” Trump wrote Monday night. Yesterday morning he added this:

Why would our Country allow another Country to supply us with electricity, even for a small area? Who made these decisions, and why? And can you imagine Canada stooping so low as to use ELECTRICITY, that so affects the life of innocent people, as a bargaining chip and threat?

Hitting us where it hurts in a trade war we started? Hey, come on, no fair!

After Ford called off the dogs, Trump sounded downright relieved. “There’s a very strong man in Canada who said he was going to charge a surcharge, or a tariff, on electricity coming into our country,” he told reporters. “It would have been a very bad thing if he did. And he’s not going to do that. And I respect that.”

Mexican President, Claudia Sheinbaum, may have demonstrated how to best defang Trump’s tariff threats with a bit of flattery and performative diplomacy. But you could argue that Ford has shown another way to snake-charm Trump: matching his alpha-dog stare, making him deliberate on the possibility of real political pain, then giving him an olive branch that lets him deescalate without having to admit weakness.

But the bigger point, of course, is that this reality-TV psychodrama remains a ludicrous way to run a continental economy. After all this noise, what are we left with? A business community that’s starting to develop a serious eye twitch, waiting around to discover which world leaders Trump respects enough to allow them to do some productive business with.

Meanwhile, the actual trade barriers keep clunking into place. Our 25 percent global tariff on steel and aluminum went into effect overnight. Europe immediately retaliated, announcing $28 billion in counter-tariffs on U.S. goods.

It bears reflecting for a minute on the hand Trump currently holds. His sheer capricious scorn and malice have forged, out of practically nowhere, a political coalition of anti-American zealotry in Canada, our heretofore friendly neighbor in the north. He belittled them as unworthy of nation status, rolled his eyes at our historic ties, and threatened them with the “friendly” possibility of absorption as our 51st state. And then he instigated a game of economic chicken with them.

Americans have no animus toward Canadians; they are not signing on to suffer economically provided they can make Canada suffer more. Trump cannot even sell them on a real vision of what this economic suffering would be for, offering only vague gestures toward cracking down on fentanyl (which comes over the Canadian border in objectively small amounts), trust-me-guys promises that untold wealth lies just over the tariff horizon, and shitposting rhetoric about Canada becoming the 51st state.

Most of the pain hasn’t even arrived yet, and already American voters are showing signs of fatigue. Trump’s economic approval rating has taken a severe dip since his inauguration, from +6 to -10 in the latest Reuters polling. CNN’s numbers this morning tell the same story—a bit more on that below.

Trump started this joyride on a lark. You can’t help but wonder if he’s starting to wish he could find a way off.

AROUND THE BULWARK

Another boatload of fresh content on the site for you all to consume:

• Keep your politics out of our archives (except the politics we’re archiving, of course)! ANTHONY CLARK writes: “Trump’s clumsy partisan takeover of the National Archives and Records Administration recalls two consequential and troubling episodes from its history.”

• Russians keep trying to kill us. ALEX FINLEY argues “The ‘gray zone’ war on America and its allies isn’t going to stop.”

• JVL joins MONA CHAREN on Just Between Us 🔐 to talk about the stock market slide, our foreign policy reversal, and whether Dems need to focus on good government.

• Across the MAGA-Verse . . . Meet our new colleague WILL SOMMER as he joins TIM MILLER on the flagship pod for an introduction and a whirlwind tour of the conspiracies and conspiracy theorists that run our government.

Quick Hits

IF THE SHOE FITS: The German sportswear company Puma saw its shares tumble this morning amid word that it had begun seeing weak demand in the American and Chinese markets. But it’s not just the stick price that’s hurting. Puma is now set to eliminate 500 jobs, too—though it’s not clear yet how many of those jobs will be in the United States. While the company has framed its setback as part of macroeconomic trends, internal communications obtained by The Bulwark shows that they believe Trump’s tariffs and immigration policies have played a role.

One slide we obtained noted that the company sales had “stumbled badly into 2025” due to both trade disputes and “immigration fears.” It noted that Puma sales had been hit disproportionately by “Hispanic Hibernation,” a term “coined to reflect the real impact of fear across the country that is keeping people in their homes, affecting consumption that is not being made up online.” That same slide deck included a CNN article noting that the Dow had fallen by almost 900 points after Trump declined to rule out a recession.

As for the headcount reduction, Puma officials said they planned “to move swiftly with any headcount reductions by mid-April.” So things do indeed appear likely to get worse in the short term.

MARCO BEAR-HUGS ZELENSKY: Some real good news for a change: After weeks spent behaving like an enthusiastic partner to Vladimir Putin’