Meanwhile, is there a governing theory to the president’s trade policy?
Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here. Donald Trump imposed additional global tariffs this week—but is there a governing theory to how the president is carrying out his trade policy? Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss Trump’s latest trade announcements and how they may affect the U.S. economy.Meanwhile, Trump has said he will meet with Vladimir Putin next week in Alaska to talk about ending Russia’s war in Ukraine. “The Biden-era mantra of ‘Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine’ is now ancient history under the Trump administration,” Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said last night. Although this once meant that “you cannot negotiate the future of Ukraine without Ukraine at the table,” she continued, “that’s out of the question.”“Obviously, it puts the Ukrainians in a very difficult position because they basically have lost, first, their sovereignty to the war, and then again to the Trump administration essentially twisting their arm,” Salama said.Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News; Tyler Pager, a White House correspondent at The New York Times; Jonathan Lemire, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a co-host of Morning Joe on MSNBC; and Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic.Watch the full episode here.
Harry Farley Political correspondent Getty Images As Sir Keir Starmer made his address inside Number 10, I was standing outside in a noisy – deafening even – Downing Street. Gaza protesters were making themselves more than heard with drums, sirens and whistles. It was a visible, visceral demonstration of the public pressure the prime minister…
ITV News questioned the former SNP leader on the political and personal revelations in her book. Male rapists should “probably” lose the right to choose their gender, Nicola Sturgeon has said. The former first minister, in an interview with ITV to mark the release of her memoir, also said she was partly to blame for…
Apparently, the long winning streak of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in Sindh is not due to the party’s popularity in the province, but because there is no other force effective enough to challenge the party’s electoral hold here. But Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) “is still very popular.”
This is what most political analysts — especially from Punjab and those stationed in Sindh’s multi-ethnic capital Karachi — often posit. I’ll try to address both the perceptions.
First of all, I find their view (regarding Sindh) rather imbecilic. For every election since 2008, multiple alliances of strange bedfellows have formed in the province to become that ‘effective electoral force’, but none of them have been able to break the PPP’s spell in the province. Why?
The fact is, popularity alone is never enough to guarantee long winning streaks in elections. Functionality is more important. The PPP is now one of the most functional parties in Sindh, which attracts both the popular vote as well as the pragmatic vote. But, of course, then comes that rhetorical question about Karachi. Why is it so ‘mismanaged’ and ‘ignored’?
There is no doubt that Karachi faces some major issues. But to suggest that this is so because the PPP does not have a large enough vote-bank in the city is now an outdated view. Karachi’s issues aren’t recent. The roots of its many social, political and economic problems actually lie in the 1980s.
The PPP’s hold over Sindh, despite what some may argue, isn’t because of weak opposition — it is the result of electoral functionality. So why is media analysis often based on perceptions without evidence?
Due to waves of migrations from other provinces of the country (and from Afghanistan) in the 1980s, Karachi’s population began to balloon. This put the city’s resources under tremendous pressure, triggering vicious ethnic violence and corruption.
From 1977 till 1988, Sindh was governed by Gen Ziaul Haq’s military dictatorship, and then by pro-Zia parties. The 1980s’ ethnic violence in Karachi and the rollback of the city’s economy crossed into the 1990s. For the next decade — from 1988 till 1999 — Sindh was governed twice by the PPP and twice by coalitions of anti-PPP outfits.
Karachi eventually fell into the hands of the Mohajir (later Muttahida) Qaumi Movement (MQM). MQM had enough votes and street power to stall any economic manoeuvres planned for the city, if these were seen by the party as not being in its interest. Also, by the 1990s, cities such as Lahore in Punjab began to compete with Karachi in terms of industrial output, largely due to the security challenges in Karachi.
From 2002 till 2008, Sindh was in the hands of a military regime (Gen Pervez Musharraf) supported by a coalition of pro-Musharraf parties. Apparently, Karachi during this period was ‘getting back on its feet again.’ This was hogwash, really. On May 12, 2007, this farcical perception cracked and many tensions of the past that never went away came screaming to the surface again.
Fifty-eight people died in a single day of violence between ethnic groups, armed gangs, political parties and the security forces. What’s more, the city began to also see the influx of militant Islamists from the northern parts of the country, looking to get their share of the pie in Karachi’s notorious ‘underworld’ universe, which also never went away.
It is true that, in 2008, when the PPP finally returned to power in Sindh, it was slow to address the city’s many issues, focusing more on the rest of the province. But it is also true that, after 2018, the party began giving the city more attention — especially after MQM broke into factions and the ‘popularity’ of PTI in the city started to erode because it had no clue how to do ‘constituency politics.’ Constituency politics is a vital function in Karachi’s many multi-ethnic constituencies.
Mammoth cities such as Karachi have mammoth problems. But it would be naive (and maybe even somewhat dishonest) to suggest that the PPP ‘is doing nothing for the city.’ In the last few years, it has been quite active in initiating various developmental projects here, especially after it won the city’s mayorship in 2023.
Now, something about the PTI’s ‘popularity’ that one is constantly reminded of by analysts and vloggers. Those on PTI’s side doing this, is understandable. But more interesting is the way the so-called ‘neutral’ and even anti-PTI analysts and vloggers do it.
For example, often at the end of a critical tirade against the PTI, one can actually predict that the tirade will end with these words: “Behar haal, iss mein koi shak nahin, PTI aik bohat maqbool jamaat hai [Anyway, there is no doubt that PTI is a very popular party].” I always find this amusing. It is as if, during their tirade, the analysts/vloggers begin to feel guilty. Of what, though?
Indeed, the PTI did well during the February 2024 elections (under trying circumstances). It received 31.17 percent of the total vote. But this also means over 65 percent of the votes were cast for other parties. Nevertheless, things have moved in such a manner in the last one year that there is every likelihood that PTI’s vote-bank may have lost its shape a bit.
PTI was always more of a movement than a functional party. And, today, it is not even a functional movement. Also, there has been no recent survey to ‘scientifically’ gauge its ‘popularity’. February 2024 now looks far away in the past.
It is also possible that the perception of PTI’s ‘continuous popularity’ is the result of ‘feedback loops.’
A 2013 study in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology and a 2023 study in the journal Party Politics describe this as an intense focus on a political figure or movement that can create a feedback loop where media coverage, academic analysis and political discourse all contribute to a heightened sense of the importance of the political figures and movements. This can lead to an over-simplistic and homogenised picture of a political trend.
Imran Khan and his PTI are in shambles today. But the thing that is keeping them afloat is a ‘popularity’ constructed by feedback loops, in which even those who oppose PTI have become stuck. In the current reality, the party’s electoral pull might actually be loosening.
Anyway, so, should I too end this column with, ‘Behar haal, iss mein koi shak nahin, PTI aik bohat maqbool jamaat hai’?
In 2026, Disney expects to shutter Hulu as a standalone app and service — and fully merge Hulu into Disney+. Why did the Mouse House decide to essentially sunset the Hulu platform, which some users believe is superior to Disney+? Disney chief Bob Iger touted a number of benefits through the move, including increased engagement…
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LAHORE, Pakistan — Punjab’s Minister for Information and Culture, Azma Bokhari, has strongly criticized the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) government for what she described as a complete failure to respond to devastating floods in the province, leaving people “helpless” and “without government support.” Speaking to reporters in Lahore, Bokhari said that while Punjab faced the worst…
