Day 191: The Wheels are Coming Off the Bus
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| 'Trump Reinvents the Wheel' by Ideogram |
It's another torturous day of summer - 95°F as I write this at 5:40 PM - so I am finding it hard to focus on what to write about today. I guess I will just see where I wind up!
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As expected, the recent economic data from the Commerce Department shows that the economy is slowing down due to the Trump administration's chaotic and antediluvian economic policy. As the New Zork Times reports:
Economic growth softened in the first half of the year, as tariffs and uncertainty upended business plans and scrambled consumers’ spending decisions.
Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, increased at a 3 percent annual rate in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said on Wednesday. That topped forecasters’ expectations and appeared to represent a strong rebound from the first three months of the year, when output contracted at a 0.5 percent rate.
But both those figures were skewed — in opposite directions — by big swings in trade and inventories caused by President Trump’s ever-shifting tariff policies. Taken as a whole, the data from the first six months of the year tell a more consistent story of anemic, though positive, economic growth.
Many forecasters expect a further deterioration in the months ahead, as tariffs work their way through supply chains, federal job cuts filter through the economy and stricter immigration policies take a toll on industries that rely on foreign-born workers.
I know some pundits were expecting a dramatic crash by summer, but that is not the way macroeconomics work at a national and/or global scale. As with geopolitics, national-level macroeconomics has a type of momentum that can carry it along its existing path for quite some time before it stalls out and abruptly changes direction. This is because an economy is not a monolithic thing; it is a fantastically complex mechanism comprised of innumerable actors, who all have a say in the course being plotted. This is why command economies never work, as there is no human being who can truly grapple with such complexity. At best, an economic steward can nudge economic activity in one direction or another, but commanding an economy to obey the whims of a single master planner is just not workable. This is something this vainglorious administration has forgotten. As with the Soviets of old, this Neanderthalic Trump administration will discover that attempting to reinvent the wheel is something best left to primitive cave paintings and not the modern world.
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Oh, look at that, the sun's clownish face has been obscured by some dark clouds. What a good metaphor for my discussion concerning Trump's economy.
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While I sit here waiting for the words to sluggishly make their way through my brain that has been boiled into a thin gruel by the day's heat, I am reminded of how far my erstwhile conservative brethren have fallen from the days of Reagan.
It wasn't all that long ago - just 2015, incredibly - where the rank and file of Republican politics genuflected at the altar of Reagan-esque free market economics. Everything I wrote above sprang from me, not as researched talking points but as beliefs that have long since transmuted from theory to practical reality. What always amazes me about MAGA is how such bedrock principles are easily cast aside, not because of an antithesis confronting an established thesis, resulting in a fresh synthesis, but merely because a reality TV performer (and we must not forget convicted felon!) says it must be so. MAGA is the epitome of grovelling servility.
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Where are those Epstein files? As Don Jr. once said, the only people who don't want the Epstein files released are in the Epstein files.
The convicted felon and the Epstein file's Doe 174, which is to say Trump, is still trying to lie his way out of this mess of Godzilla proportions, this time by suggesting that Trump's bromance with Epstein broke up over Epstein pilfering towel girls away from Mar-a-Lago. Whoever came up with this latest lie has to be given some credit for accomplishing two tasks with one lying stone: first, it acknowledges the inconvenient fact that Epstein got some of his victims from Trump's Mar-a-Lago, and secondly, it makes it seem like Trump was protecting his girls* from a predator at the same time. (Trump's treatment of Virginia Giuffre as property to be stolen is indicative of Trump's long history of treating women as mere possessions.) Clever, in a making things worse sort of way.
First, does anyone truly believe that Trump was so incensed about losing entry-level and easily replaceable employees that he would sever a long friendship with a billionaire?! Of course not. No reasonable person would. But even worse than the blatant stupidity of the lie is that it is one easily refuted. It has long been reported that Trump and Epstein's friendship broke up over what you would expect seeing how simple-minded Trump is: money and real estate.
Secondly, by intimating that Trump bounced Epstein because he was preying on vulnerable girls, it also makes Trump seem culpable by not doing more to protect them. If Epstein was a creep, as Trump has stated, why did you turn a blind eye to his creepiness?
I am not going to waste more time on this because it is so silly. All I will ask is this:
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