It's interesting to watch MAGA in full celebration mode before anything has locked in yet.
Yes, it certainly can all work out, but the penalty for Trump belly-flopping on the economy like he has with the Epstein files so far (does anybody even remember JFK or RFK?) is severe: he holds Congress by the narrowest of margins and if he loses it in the midterms his ass will be impeached and convicted by March 2027, Vance will be toothless and gelded, and the Dems come back with extreme vengeance in 2029. Beating two brain-dead candidates and engaging in conquest by Executive Order brings to mind a maxim of Niccolò Machiavelli: “Those who rise to power by good fortune, with little effort on their own part, find it easy to acquire power but difficult to maintain it.” Without underlying legislation to lock gains in place - which even his Republican congress seems extremely reluctant to give him - these changes will be swept away like sand castles by the tide as soon as the pendulum swings back. People forget that The Swamp has always been a product of bipartisan cooperation because both parties benefit massively from it: the Democrats directly and the Republicans as controlled opposition.
And back to the economy: starting trade wars with virtually every other bloc on the planet while monetary inflation is already kicking back up and the economy is arguably sliding into a recession is suicidally insane. On the one hand, there's a glimmer of hope that DOGE can do so much damage to the bureaucracy that business sentiment picks up enough to offset that. One the other hand, if BRICS decides "now is the time to strike," dumps their dollar holdings in favor of their own currency, and embargoes raw materials and components then we'll be far worse off than the 1930s Great Depression. Then they wait for the Dems to come into power and cut some Treaty of Versailles-style deal with us on the losing end. In the middle (most likely case) we "just" have an absolutely brutal recession and a very significant, long-lived reduction in standard of living - and Trump gets blue-waved in the midterms.
I wish more people understood that Trump is rolling the biggest national dice since the Revolutionary War, and as it was then the dice are incredibly loaded against us.
It worked out in 1776, through an incredible amount of luck.
Maybe we'll get lucky again, but I'm not a big fan of betting our world on a roll that the house has heavily rigged.
I repeat: the downside risk of Trump is greater than that downside risk of Harris.
AFTERTHOUGHT: I wonder who it was that put the tariffs idea into Trump's head. It stinks of sabotage to me.
Don’t worry!
His “very smart people” are totally right about things this time when it comes to trade.
There is zero - I repeat, zero - moral difference between the people who pushed for "experimenting" with lockdowns because "we have to do something!" and the people who push for "experimenting" with trade wars because "we have to do something!"
Musk is out.
Musk put himself in a corner where he can't rip into Trump and he has to play nice probably at least through the midterms, but just look at the guy's face and watch him refuse to give a straight answer here. He put a lot on the line with endorsing Trump and starting DOGE, and Trump absolutely stabbed him in the back. Trump's supporters will blame congress, but Trump has very openly and loudly endorsed all of the DOGE-defying moves that congress has made, and has viciously attacked the one congressman (Thomas Massie) who has stood against it.
The reason is simple: Trump cares about trophies. Cutting the budget is not a trophy. DOGE trying to take a chainsaw to government was a trophy, but as soon as DOGE became more of Musk's than Trump's trophy, Trump stopped caring about it because congress offered him a Big, Beautiful Bill as a trophy instead. Just like the FBI offered the opportunity to build a Big, Beautiful new headquarters building for them (Trump loves buildings!). ...
As comedy slowly slides into unfunny wokeness hell, the last comedian standing (assuming he doesn't drop dead first, I mean just look at the guy; he's a trainwreck) will be Doug Stanhope. He closed out his recent special "The Dying of the Last Breed" with this bit on how important it is that we be able to make fun of anything. Because making fun.
Language warning, duh.
Preliminary Q2 numbers for Argentina are in. This is still subject to adjustment but so far their preliminaries have been pretty accurate under the Milei administration.
Slashing spending works. Trump and Bessent are very optimistically projecting economic growth of 3% doing the opposite of what Milei is doing to deliver 7.6% - and climbing!
