Thanks for doing this wrap-up, Tim. It’s obvious that administration officials are only talking to people who live in Trumpist media bubbles because what they say is complete nonsense. Some further observations:
No Russia Tariffs – During the campaign I remember President Trump making a statement like “I have literally stopped wars with tariffs.” Of course, being Trump, there were never any details on that, but if President Trump did that (or believes he did that), then all the more reason for including tariffs and their magical war-stopping properties into the Russia-Ukraine negotiations. Unless tariffs on Ukraine were meant to make Russia retreat, in which case I would give that a down check as a negotiating tactic.
Treasury Secretary Bessent’s comment, “The markets are organic animals. And you never know what the reaction is going to be,” was as hilarious as it is untrue. I'm not a stock market guy or a finance wizard or even a biologist, but watching from the sidelines for the first two and being an "organic animal," it appears to me there are any number of stimuli that will produce completely predictable reactions on markets and organic animals alike ("If you cut us, do we not bleed?" “If you intentionally impose arbitrary draconian worldwide tariffs introducing phenomenal levels of business uncertainty, do we markets not fall?”). For weeks, they have been warning of pain coming from these tariffs and setting expectations about stock market losses, so apparently, someone other than Bessent seemed to know how the markets would react to this tariff news. No less an intellectual luminary than Vice President JD Vance was going around saying, "Well, the market losses were less than we thought," after Friday’s crash, so he had it figured out.
I have two more to share that are tangentially related:
Commerce Secretary Lutnick: To be fair, I misspeak on occasion, but I think I am pretty good at correcting myself. It seems Secretary Lutnick just doesn’t do that. Over the weekend I heard him say something along the lines of "We have a $36 trillion dollar deficit, why don't people understand that what we are doing is needed to address that..." No one called him on the difference between deficits and debt. Even if it were possible to run a $36T deficit, I guess we would all be freaking out quite a bit more, but it is bad enough as the National Debt, so let's not make it far worse.
Attorney General Pam Bondi: She started out comments the other day with “He [President Trump] was overwhelmingly elected by an overwhelming majority of the United States citizens to be our commander in chief and that’s what he’s been doing,” I realize Pam Bondi could care less about anyone who is not Republican, just as I realize she is not a mathematician, but as soon as I hear the words "overwhelmingly elected by an overwhelming majority" I stop listening because she is either lying right off the bat or she is too ignorant to understand that less than 50% is not an overwhelming amount of anything.
The tariff disparity for Russia and Ukraine is telling. It's another way that Criminal Trump has tried to bully Ukraine into surrendering to Russia, like destroying USAID (which was giving Ukraine non-military aid). In every action Criminal Trump takes you can expect him to stick an extra dagger into Ukraine. Zelenskyy didn't help him corruptly find a way to attack Joe Biden, and Criminal Trump will never forget that.
Which reminds me, we need another long speech in the Senate. I don't expect 25 hours, but we should get a good 10 or 12 hours from someone, and I think they should educate their fellow Senators (and the American public) on the war in Ukraine. Start with the fact Russia and the U.S. guaranteed Ukraine secure borders in the Budapest Memorandum in the Nineties. Go over the crime of aggression Putin committed in invading Ukraine in 2014. Talk about the attacks on civilians, the kidnapping of Ukrainian children, the Russian rapes of men and women, the torture of captives, the murder of POWs, the destruction of property, the fouling of the land with toxic materials, the land mines, the clean up costs, the costs to Europe to house refugees.
And then follow that up by filing a bill to provide Ukraine another $50 billion or so for military aid this year. Put the Republicans on the defensive.
Ukraine is vastly more popular in the U.S. than Criminal Trump. Take advantage of that by doing the right thing.
I think it was Haitians they brought to Springfield, and that reminds me of another vicious inhumane action by the Criminal Trump people sending all those people home to be abused by their home countries--like they were before they came here for refuge.
But, once you get past that, the thing in this segment that's upsetting is a government official talking about screwing. It's just not done in polite society.
I don't like free trade and I don't like protectionism; what I like is managed trade.
We have been running an enormous trade deficit, the deficit that matters, for years. It sucks on the order of a half-trillion dollars a year out of our economy. We sell off assets or take loans against them to pay for that, and it runs up the cost of things like real estate, hurts funding for Social Security and Medicare, and depresses our employment levels.
My problem isn't with tariffs--it's with stupidity. It takes time (months, years) to build production capacity. A smart way to use a tariff is to identify an industry where we could reasonably produce goods and announce that in the future we will have a sensible tariff for that industry. This gives it time to build domestic production and hire U.S. workers for it, reducing the trade deficit.
Note that literally nothing in this sensible plan is happening here. Tariffs of maybe 5%, targeted to an industry in the future would encourage domestic production. The tariffs announced aren't sensible and are telegraphed. They are 10, 20, 50%. They are all over the place without regard to what can reasonably be produced in the U.S.
I'm not an economics professor. I'm not a hedge fund manager. But even I can see that what Criminal Trump is doing here is destructive. It's indefensible.
I actually like the idea of tariffs. I'm not too economically literate so I could still be totally wrong, but I wouldn't be opposed to using tariffs as a way to generate revenue, seems to me preferable to income taxes as a way to collect money. But it would have to be gradual, maybe raise tariffs a couple percent and see how it goes, don't just rip the economy a new asshole.
The problem with using tariffs to raise revenue is that they are a regressive tax. The people who pay most of them are poor people.
That's unfair, but it also hurts the economy. We need money flowing in the working part of the economy. This will drain money from that part of the economy.
Tariffs aren't necessarily bad. The way Criminal Trump is using them is. You can see my more extensive comment for details.
Also, why is Russia excluded but McDonald Islands aren’t? Clearly the penguins are dangerous strategic financial adversaries.
OR…
Or trump is PUTIN’s leather bitch sub and he already is going to get sooo much punishment for getting cheeky last week , saying that Putin had better agree to a cease fire… he is playing golf this weekend because he can’t sit down comfortably.
I'm here in Catania Sicily and EVERYONE here is worried about the il re arancione pazzo The Mad Orange King. Too bad the citizens of this planet could not vote since pazzo has impacted their lives as well!
I believe, and I am sure it is coincidental, that T and family sold a substantial amount of stock the day before the tariff announcement. Again, I am sure it is completely unrelated.
Americans love it when they have electrical power for two hours a day! Thanks Trump!
Thanks for doing this wrap-up, Tim. It’s obvious that administration officials are only talking to people who live in Trumpist media bubbles because what they say is complete nonsense. Some further observations:
No Russia Tariffs – During the campaign I remember President Trump making a statement like “I have literally stopped wars with tariffs.” Of course, being Trump, there were never any details on that, but if President Trump did that (or believes he did that), then all the more reason for including tariffs and their magical war-stopping properties into the Russia-Ukraine negotiations. Unless tariffs on Ukraine were meant to make Russia retreat, in which case I would give that a down check as a negotiating tactic.
Treasury Secretary Bessent’s comment, “The markets are organic animals. And you never know what the reaction is going to be,” was as hilarious as it is untrue. I'm not a stock market guy or a finance wizard or even a biologist, but watching from the sidelines for the first two and being an "organic animal," it appears to me there are any number of stimuli that will produce completely predictable reactions on markets and organic animals alike ("If you cut us, do we not bleed?" “If you intentionally impose arbitrary draconian worldwide tariffs introducing phenomenal levels of business uncertainty, do we markets not fall?”). For weeks, they have been warning of pain coming from these tariffs and setting expectations about stock market losses, so apparently, someone other than Bessent seemed to know how the markets would react to this tariff news. No less an intellectual luminary than Vice President JD Vance was going around saying, "Well, the market losses were less than we thought," after Friday’s crash, so he had it figured out.
I have two more to share that are tangentially related:
Commerce Secretary Lutnick: To be fair, I misspeak on occasion, but I think I am pretty good at correcting myself. It seems Secretary Lutnick just doesn’t do that. Over the weekend I heard him say something along the lines of "We have a $36 trillion dollar deficit, why don't people understand that what we are doing is needed to address that..." No one called him on the difference between deficits and debt. Even if it were possible to run a $36T deficit, I guess we would all be freaking out quite a bit more, but it is bad enough as the National Debt, so let's not make it far worse.
Attorney General Pam Bondi: She started out comments the other day with “He [President Trump] was overwhelmingly elected by an overwhelming majority of the United States citizens to be our commander in chief and that’s what he’s been doing,” I realize Pam Bondi could care less about anyone who is not Republican, just as I realize she is not a mathematician, but as soon as I hear the words "overwhelmingly elected by an overwhelming majority" I stop listening because she is either lying right off the bat or she is too ignorant to understand that less than 50% is not an overwhelming amount of anything.
LOVED You nailed it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The tariff disparity for Russia and Ukraine is telling. It's another way that Criminal Trump has tried to bully Ukraine into surrendering to Russia, like destroying USAID (which was giving Ukraine non-military aid). In every action Criminal Trump takes you can expect him to stick an extra dagger into Ukraine. Zelenskyy didn't help him corruptly find a way to attack Joe Biden, and Criminal Trump will never forget that.
Which reminds me, we need another long speech in the Senate. I don't expect 25 hours, but we should get a good 10 or 12 hours from someone, and I think they should educate their fellow Senators (and the American public) on the war in Ukraine. Start with the fact Russia and the U.S. guaranteed Ukraine secure borders in the Budapest Memorandum in the Nineties. Go over the crime of aggression Putin committed in invading Ukraine in 2014. Talk about the attacks on civilians, the kidnapping of Ukrainian children, the Russian rapes of men and women, the torture of captives, the murder of POWs, the destruction of property, the fouling of the land with toxic materials, the land mines, the clean up costs, the costs to Europe to house refugees.
And then follow that up by filing a bill to provide Ukraine another $50 billion or so for military aid this year. Put the Republicans on the defensive.
Ukraine is vastly more popular in the U.S. than Criminal Trump. Take advantage of that by doing the right thing.
I think it was Haitians they brought to Springfield, and that reminds me of another vicious inhumane action by the Criminal Trump people sending all those people home to be abused by their home countries--like they were before they came here for refuge.
But, once you get past that, the thing in this segment that's upsetting is a government official talking about screwing. It's just not done in polite society.
Apparently, no body bothered to tell Trump, "As ye sew so shall ye weep."
I don't like free trade and I don't like protectionism; what I like is managed trade.
We have been running an enormous trade deficit, the deficit that matters, for years. It sucks on the order of a half-trillion dollars a year out of our economy. We sell off assets or take loans against them to pay for that, and it runs up the cost of things like real estate, hurts funding for Social Security and Medicare, and depresses our employment levels.
My problem isn't with tariffs--it's with stupidity. It takes time (months, years) to build production capacity. A smart way to use a tariff is to identify an industry where we could reasonably produce goods and announce that in the future we will have a sensible tariff for that industry. This gives it time to build domestic production and hire U.S. workers for it, reducing the trade deficit.
Note that literally nothing in this sensible plan is happening here. Tariffs of maybe 5%, targeted to an industry in the future would encourage domestic production. The tariffs announced aren't sensible and are telegraphed. They are 10, 20, 50%. They are all over the place without regard to what can reasonably be produced in the U.S.
I'm not an economics professor. I'm not a hedge fund manager. But even I can see that what Criminal Trump is doing here is destructive. It's indefensible.
That's why clowns on TV can't defend it.
I actually like the idea of tariffs. I'm not too economically literate so I could still be totally wrong, but I wouldn't be opposed to using tariffs as a way to generate revenue, seems to me preferable to income taxes as a way to collect money. But it would have to be gradual, maybe raise tariffs a couple percent and see how it goes, don't just rip the economy a new asshole.
The problem with using tariffs to raise revenue is that they are a regressive tax. The people who pay most of them are poor people.
That's unfair, but it also hurts the economy. We need money flowing in the working part of the economy. This will drain money from that part of the economy.
Tariffs aren't necessarily bad. The way Criminal Trump is using them is. You can see my more extensive comment for details.
Also, why is Russia excluded but McDonald Islands aren’t? Clearly the penguins are dangerous strategic financial adversaries.
OR…
Or trump is PUTIN’s leather bitch sub and he already is going to get sooo much punishment for getting cheeky last week , saying that Putin had better agree to a cease fire… he is playing golf this weekend because he can’t sit down comfortably.
💓💓💓
Plain and simple, this is economic terrorism. At least it would be called that if a North Korean hacker caused it.
I'm here in Catania Sicily and EVERYONE here is worried about the il re arancione pazzo The Mad Orange King. Too bad the citizens of this planet could not vote since pazzo has impacted their lives as well!
Lutnick and Bessent in full-on Baghdad Bob mode lmfao
I believe, and I am sure it is coincidental, that T and family sold a substantial amount of stock the day before the tariff announcement. Again, I am sure it is completely unrelated.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/it-s-interesting-how-truth-social-moved-to-sell-stock-right-before-trump-s-tariffs-were-announced/ar-AA1CfipA
I don't want those assholes reordering my cutlery. Global trade order? *Snort.*
They were pathetic.