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The news doesn’t feel much slower these days, but our reporters’ assignments have changed. Rather than prioritizing those quicker updates that are necessary to keep up during campaign season, we’ve asked our politics team—Mike Warren, David Drucker, John McCormack, and Charles Hilu—to focus on more in-depth reporting, bringing readers behind the scenes of Donald Trump’s Washington and providing the context necessary to decipher what actually matters and what is just fleeting, cable-news-driven hysteria.
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Thanks for subscribing to The Dispatch. And without further ado, here’s David.
Here at The Dispatch, we do our best to look beyond the sensationalist rhetoric and report on the substance of what is actually happening in Washington, D.C.—in no small part because that substance just might happen to affect you. To be honest, there’s more than enough reporting on the sensationalist rhetoric to go around, on both sides of the aisle, especially with President Donald Trump’s second administration under way. We don’t need to add to the noise.
Which brings us to a story of mine we published recently: Businesses Scramble for Tariff Exemptions; As Donald Trump implements (and threatens) import levies, industries lobby for carveouts. As is often the case, this reporting was born out of one of our twice-a-week staff editorial meetings, where we discuss what’s happening in American politics and policymaking that we think our readers might want to know about, need to know about, or just find plain interesting.
Trump’s long-promised trade agenda of proactive and punitive tariffs on imported products and commodities, announced at the beginning of this month, was among the items we discussed during one recent staff meeting. An editor suggested there might be a story to tell about corporate America’s reaction to Trump’s tariffs, and so I, er, pounced. Turns out, there was a good story to tell.
And so, hopefully, you’ll walk away from the resulting piece of reporting just a little bit wiser about both how American businesses are feeling about Trump’s tariffs (hint: not good) and what they’re doing to convince the president that their business or industry is a special case and deserves an exemption, even if (as some are telling the commander-in-chief) their counterparts in the business community don’t. Let me know what you think in the comments!
—David
How Faith-Based Nonprofits Once Funded by Trump Became Bogeymen
After Budget ‘Victory,’ Hard Work Ahead for House Committees
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