“It’s actually smart for Bloomberg,” Ken Goldstein, a professor at the University of San Francisco, told reporter Nick Corasaniti. “Bloomberg is running a national campaign, and the most efficient way to reach a lot of people in a national campaign is buying an ad in a top-rated show. And as expensive as it is, it’s cheaper than buying the ads market by market.” It’s also a surefire way to make Trump spontaneously self-combust, or, at the very least, shoot off a string of barely comprehensible tweets about “Little Michael,” and then force his staff to spend the remainder of the evening saying things like “Yes, sir, you are very rich. No one cares about those silly little terminals. $57 billion isn’t that much more than $3 billion!”

If you would like to receive the Levin Report in your inbox daily, click here to subscribe.

Trump’s tariffs have been an economic boon

For lobbyists, that is:

Overall, Trump’s tariffs have not had the effect that the self-described “Tariff Man” promised. Companies have moved manufacturing out of China—and it has mostly gone to Vietnam, Taiwan, and Mexico. Tariffs are chiefly behind a months-long decline in domestic manufacturing, Federal Reserve researchers have found. The total loss of jobs across the economy may be as high as 300,000.

But constantly up-in-the-air trade agreements and the byzantine, opaque exclusion process has been a blessing for one set of players: Washington’s influence industry, including the firms of former Trump officials and allies like inauguration committee chief Brian Ballard, former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, and Trump fundraiser Marc Lampkin.

Ballard and a colleague, for instance, was paid $540,000 by cancer therapy firm Varian Medical Systems to lobby the White House, Vice President Mike Pence, and the trade office on trade issues, and ultimately received four exemptions. Meanwhile, on Monday the New York Fed confirmed, in case anyone still thought otherwise, that American businesses and consumers, and not China, are paying for Trump’s tariffs. “U.S. tariffs continue to be almost entirely borne by U.S. firms and consumers,” Mary Amiti, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, wrote in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper.