He didn’t read the book
They actually took Trump’s tweets and turned them into bronze plaques. (He might have checked a 4th grade social studies book for some additional facts to pad the report.)
He thinks this makes him look very smart — mostly because all the sycophants around him have undoubtedly told him so.
We paid for this national humiliation.
Happy Hollandaise everyone!
Paul Brandeis Raushenbush and Ian Bassin (R&B) publish this morning in The Bulwark a call for a new Great Awakening. Students of history know that there have been three recognized in colonial history and in the democratic republic that followed. Each grew “out of periods of moral dislocation” and a recognition that character is an essential element of a stable government.
Today we face a need for another, R&B declare. Our current crisis is not merely a political one but spiritual too. Nowhere, they write, “is this more painfully evident than in how our government treats immigrants in our name.”
I wrote yesterday about my Wednesday sign: REMEMBER DECENCY? | YEAH, ME TOO. On Thursday, that sign elicited a middle finger from one driver. On Tuesday, a woman passenger flipped me off for displaying another reading ETHNIC CLEANSING | IS ILLEGAL AND UNAMERICAN. I assume HOW WOULD JESUS | TREAT STRANGERS was too on the nose to elicit a “fuck you” from such people. But they represent the America that R&B believe needs an intervention.
Yes, the country has a duty to enforce its laws, R&B insist, but enforcing them with gleeful cruelty “deforms institutions and deadens consciences.” Moreover, it degrades the moral character of people who tolerate it and look away:
When we normalize the humiliation of the powerless, something in us breaks. When suffering becomes bureaucratic routine, our moral imagination shrinks. And when that happens, democracy itself is imperiled—because a society willing to deny the humanity of some will eventually rationalize denying the rights of many.
This is why if we are to survive this moment, let alone rise from it, we must do more than reform our politics, we must call forth a new Great Awakening.
Mutual regard matters. Decency matters. Sharing power with others with different views and backgrounds matters in a democratic republic. Freedom “untethered from responsibility corrodes the soul of a people.” Plainspokenness is one thing. “Telling it like it is” with intent to insult and wound in the name of freedom is another.
Organizations R&B lead have launched an ad campaign to promote rejection of our government’s cruel, terror-based approach to applying immigration law.
The pair conclude:
EVERY GREAT AWAKENING in American history arose not because conditions were ideal, but because they were intolerable. People sensed that the old ways were failing, and they dared to believe that renewal was possible.
They are not alone. You see it. We see it. Bishop William Barber has preached for years on the need for a Third Reconstruction, a moral movement of renewal dedicated to “overcoming the politics of division and fear” R&B decry today. In Barber’s book he shares this anecdote:
Not long ago I was a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, with one of America’s most prominent atheists. Wearing my clerical collar, I realized that I stood out among his guests. So I decided to announce to Bill that I, too, am an atheist. He seemed taken aback, so I explained that if we were talking about the God who hates poor people, immigrants, and gay folks, I don’t believe in that God either. Sometimes it helps to clarify our language.
Sometimes it helps to stare at oneself in the mirror.
What a shame this isn’t a Sunday sermon.
Happy Hollandaise everyone!
Today is the day. Or not. Today, Friday, December 19, is the legal deadline for the Department of Justice to release the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking investigation files that Donald Trump pledged to release throughout his 2024 campaign and did not. Semafor suggests that if the DOJ is diligently at work on the release, “you wouldn’t know it by watching the White House.“
Following the letter of the law is not exactly muscle memory with this administration. So the question for the day is, will they? And if they do release the files, how many will they withhold and how redacted will be the documents they actually release?
Don’t expect anything before the close of business. Do expect that Team Trump has prepared workshopped excuses.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) anticipates excuses.
Politico’s Jacob Wendler notes that the legislation Trump signed last month orders the DOJ to declassify any covered files “to the maximum extent possible.” But it also includes no penalties for failure to meet the deadline. Wendler offers more observations on Epstein Friday:
The DOJ has provided scant details on how it intends to comply with the law, which specifies only that it must “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” in its possession related to Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said last month that the Justice Department would “continue to follow the law with maximum transparency while protecting victims.”
[…]
It allows for the department to redact or withhold records that “would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution” but explicitly prohibits omissions “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.” The prohibition is an effort to prevent the Trump administration from withholding files that could provide further insight into Epstein’s relationship with the president, his allies and other powerful people.
Frustration mounts at the DOJ as it rushes to handle redactions (CNN):
A substantial number of redactions are needed, one of the sources said, and the documents each attorney is processing since Thanksgiving week can number more than 1,000 — a time-consuming task that likely will come down to the wire. The sensitivities of executive and legal privacy, victims’ protections and other concerns all could play in to the choices the lawyers must make when it comes to potential redactions.
Lawyers working on the Epstein files at the DOJ’s National Security Division also believe they aren’t getting clear or comprehensive direction on how to make the most information available under the law, several sources said.
Counterintelligence specialists were asked to drop nearly all of their other work to process the Epstein documents, two people said, but some lawyers declined to participate.
Expect more redactions than necessary as well as mistakes that may jeopardize sensitive personal information.
“Either they’re going to screw it up or they’re going to withhold things. It wouldn’t surprise me,” said one lawyer outside the Justice Department who is awaiting the release to determine whether there should be complaints made about how the redaction work was done. “Some of it may be incompetence as much as deliberate.”
Politico’s magazine side offers five rules for how to interpret the documents.
Rule #1: Don’t Read the Files. Resist the temptation to “pluck information — even something as simple as an email communication — from a large body of material and assume that you can fully understand it.” Instead, “trust serious reporters and media outlets with a track record of reporting deeply and responsibly on Epstein.” Don’t jump to conclusions and eagerly post them to social media. (Right, like that’s going to happen.)
Rule #2: Understand What Kind of Documents You Are Reading. “The documents likely to attract some of the closest attention are the FBI’s interview memos — known as 302s in law enforcement parlance — but you cannot simply presume that their contents are true.” Recognize your “factual sources, their biases and their limitations.”
Rule #3: Remember: Sleazy Behavior Isn’t Criminal. But if it’s salacious and draws clicks and likes, that will be enough for many. Ask Ken Starr.
Rule #4: Be Skeptical of the Early Releases. This one is perhaps the most important:
It’s critical to remember that there’s nothing that prevents the Trump DOJ from trying to manipulate the flow of information — for instance, by frontloading early releases with material that is particularly harmful to Trump’s political opposition.
The administration could also produce seemingly damaging information about people early on, only to release exculpatory material later in the process — after much of the damage will already have been done — and could selectively withhold material on the grounds that it would impede an ongoing investigation or harm national security.
As always, exculpatory information will appear on Page 6 weeks after front-page smears.
Rule #5: Ask Yourself: Where’s Trump? Expect as much Trump-related information as possible not to be in the releases. This takes us back to my comment about the Trump administration’s aversion to following the law:
Needless to say, we should not expect the Trump administration to prominently produce this information given their handling of all this to date — as well as Bondi’s own, over-the-top personal and political dedication to Trump. For all we know, they may never produce it — or at least not all of it. (Yes, the law mandates this disclosure, but there are plenty of laws that the Trump administration has simply decided to ignore.)
If material pertaining to Trump is not produced early, there is reason to believe that the Trump administration is engaged in a (continuing) cover-up of information that would be harmful to the president. That is reason alone to be cautious about jumping to conclusions about other political and media figures.
All this assumes that there is anything Epstein to read by the time tonight’s cable news shows air. Until then, Happy Epstein Files Friday for those who celebrate.
UPDATE: Say it ain’t so!
Happy Hollandaise everyone!
Susie Wiles describes Trump and Epstein in the 90s as a couple of “young playboys.” In 1995, Trump was 48 years old. I guess it’s good news for some of us that that’s now considered “young” but I suspect most people wouldn’t think that men pushing 50 are just experiencing youthful hijinx. And Trump was married to Ivana until 1992 and Marla from 1993 to 99.
The New York Times took an in-depth look at the two “playboys” relationship and it isn’t even one bit surprising. (Gift Link)
Mr. Epstein had a talent for acquiring powerful friends, some of whom have become ensnared in the continuing scrutiny of his crimes. For months, Mr. Trump has labored furiously to shift himself out of the frame, dismissing questions about his relationship with Mr. Epstein as a “Democrat hoax” and imploring his supporters to ignore the matter entirely. An examination of their history by The New York Times has found no evidence implicating Mr. Trump in Mr. Epstein’s abuse and trafficking of minors.
But the two men’s relationship was both far closer and far more complex than the president now admits.
Beginning in the late 1980s, the two men forged a bond intense enough to leave others who knew them with the impression that they were each other’s closest friend, The Times found. Mr. Epstein was then a little-known financier who cultivated mystery around the scope and source of his self-made wealth. Mr. Trump, six years older, was a real estate scion who relished publicity and exaggerated his successes. Neither man drank or did drugs. They pursued women in a game of ego and dominance. Female bodies were currency.
Over nearly two decades, as Mr. Trump cut a swath through the party circuits of New York and Florida, Mr. Epstein was perhaps his most reliable wingman. During the 1990s and early 2000s,they prowled Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan mansion and Mr. Trump’s Plaza Hotel, at least one of Mr. Trump’s Atlantic City casinos and both their Palm Beach homes. They visited each other’s offices and spoke often by phone, according to other former Epstein employees and women who spent time in his homes.
With other men, Mr. Epstein might discuss tax shelters, international affairs or neuroscience. With Mr. Trump, he talked about sex.
“I just think it was trophy hunting,” Stacey Williams, who rose to fame as a star of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions during the 1990s, said in an interview with The Times. In social media posts and interviews with news outlets in recent years, Ms. Williams has described how Mr. Trump groped her in 1993 at Trump Tower while Mr. Epstein — whom she was then dating — watched. “I think Jeffrey liked that he had this Sports Illustrated model who had this name, and that Trump was pursuing me,” she said. Mr. Trump has denied her account.
To shed light on their friendship, The Times interviewed more than 30 former Epstein employees, victims of his abuse and others who crossed paths with the two men over the years. The Times also obtained new documents that illuminate their relationship and scoured court documents and other public records.
Many of the people interviewed by The Times asked to share their stories anonymously, saying they feared for their safety at the hands of supporters of Mr. Trump, a president who has deployed the might of the federal government to target and punish his political opponents. Some Epstein victims have already received death threats for demanding a full accounting of the government’s investigations, according to a statement released by more than two dozen of them last month.
Over the years, Mr. Epstein or his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, introduced at least six women who have accused them of grooming or abuse to Mr. Trump, according to interviews, court testimony and other records. One was a minor at the time. None have accused Mr. Trump himself of inappropriate behavior.
One of the women, who has never before spoken publicly about the experience, told The Times that Mr. Epstein had coerced her into attending four parties at Mr. Epstein’s home. Mr. Trump attended all four, the woman said. At two of them, she said, Mr. Epstein directed her to have sex with other male guests.
In an email among those released by Congress in November, Mr. Epstein boasted that he “gave” Mr. Trump a 20-year-old woman whom Mr. Epstein dated in the 1990s. During a flight together in the early 1990s, Mr. Trump came on to another Epstein employee traveling with them, telling her that he could have anyone he wanted, according to a different Epstein worker who learned of the incident. A separate Epstein employee from that era recalled that Mr. Trump would occasionally send over modeling cards for Mr. Epstein to peruse, like a menu.
Mr. Epstein, who claimed he required three orgasms a day, exploited or abused hundreds of women and girls before dying in what was ruled a suicide. Mr. Trump does not stand accused of sexually abusing a minor. But over the course of his friendship with Mr. Epstein and beyond, he left a trail of alleged abuse and assault, many details of which began to surface publicly during his successful 2016 presidential campaign.
Close to 20 women have publicly accused Mr. Trump of groping, forcibly kissing or sexually assaulting them — behavior that he once bragged he could get away with because of his celebrity but later denied ever engaging in. In 2023, the writer E. Jean Carroll won a $5 million civil judgment against Mr. Trump for sexual abuse and defamation.
Read the rest but here’s one more little tid-bit:
The first assistant, who often worked late, recalled that sometimes, when the office emptied out, Mr. Epstein would check to see that she was at her desk and put Mr. Trump on speaker. Mr. Trump, she said, seemed to enjoy regaling Mr. Epstein with tales of his sexual exploits. And Mr. Epstein seemed to delight in how uncomfortable it made her to overhear them.
She remembered one call in the mid-1990s on which the two men discussed how much pubic hair a particular woman had, and whether there was enough for Mr. Epstein to floss his teeth with. On another, Mr. Trump told Mr. Epstein about having sex with another woman on a pool table, the former assistant said.
They would bus in underage models to parties at Mar-a-lago and ply them with alcohol.
Tina Davis, who modeled for Ford in the mid-1990s, said in an interview that her Ford booker instructed her to get dressed up and attend a Mar-a-Lago party in late 1994. Just 14 and new to Miami, she was told to “dress sexy,” according to her mother, Sandra Coleman, who had accompanied her to Florida. Eight or nine other models came along on the bus. “All the girls were really young,” Ms. Coleman recalled in an interview. “Some of them could have been in training bras.”
OF COURSE Trump knew all about Epstein’s grooming and trafficking. He participated in it. Anyone who believes otherwise is lying to themselves. He and Epstein competed with each other. They were best buddies. And the women who were abused as young girls are terrified to speak out because they were threatened and they can see how vengeful Trump is.
Trump isn’t going to be around much longer. It will all come out. All of it.
Happy Hollandaise, everyone!
Members of the Kennedy family reacted with anger over the decision by the board of the Kennedy Center to rename the arts institution as the “Trump Kennedy Center.”
Tim Shriver, nephew of John F. Kennedy, wrote on X, “Perhaps the board isn’t aware that the Kennedy Center is 𝗧𝗛𝗘 memorial to the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. Would they rename the Lincoln memorial? The Jefferson? That would be an insult to great presidents. This too is an insult to a great president. Notwithstanding their short-sighted action, it is and will remain the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.”
The Trump-controlled board of the center, which opened in 1971 as a memorial to the late president, voted unanimously on Thursday to rename the complex, according to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. But the vote was disputed by one of the ex officio members if the board, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), who said she was muted at Thursday’s board meeting so she could not raise her concerns with the move.
Maria Shriver, JFK’s niece, wrote, “The Kennedy Center was named after my uncle, President John F Kennedy. It was named in his honor. He was a man who was interested in the arts, interested in culture, interested in education, language, history. He brought the arts into the White House, and he and my Aunt Jackie amplified the arts, celebrated the arts, stood up for the arts and artists.
She added, “It is beyond comprehension that this sitting president has sought to rename this great memorial dedicated to President Kennedy. It is beyond wild that he would think adding his name in front of President Kennedy’s name is acceptable. It is not. Next thing perhaps he will want to rename JFK Airport, rename the Lincoln Memorial, the Trump Lincoln Memorial. The Trump Jefferson Memorial. The Trump Smithsonian. The list goes on. Can we not see what is happening here? C’mon, my fellow Americans! Wake up! This is not dignified. This is not funny. This is way beneath the stature of the job. It’s downright weird. It’s obsessive in a weird way. Just when you think somone can’t stoop any lower, down they go…”
Personally, I think the Kennedys should tell them to take the name off if Trump is going to be on it. As soon as a Democrat comes back into office he or she can restore it.
I know Trump is brain dead but the way this works is for someone to be fully expired and in the ground before their names get put on monuments and buildings. This is madness.
Happy Hollandaise everyone!
I assume most of the troops won’t actually know that Trump’s Christmas present is actually just a check (no doubt with Trump’s name on it) using money already allocated by the Congress for housing supplements. In other words, they aen’t getting anything they weren’t already getting.
It would be nice if they could be informed that he’s just scamming them but I don’t know if that will actually happen:
President Donald Trump’s $1,776 checks for more than a million troops, announced Wednesday, come from Congressionally-allocated reconciliation funds intended to subsidize housing allowances for service members, a senior administration official confirmed.
During a prime-time TV address, Trump said he was “proud to announce” that “1,450,000 military service members will receive a special, we call ‘warrior dividend,’ before Christmas.” He added that to honor the nation’s founding, “we are sending every soldier $1,776. Think of that. And the checks are already on the way.”
The senior administration official told Defense One in an emailed statement late Wednesday evening that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the Pentagon to “disburse $2.6 billion as a one-time basic allowance for housing supplement” to all eligible service members ranks 0-6 and below.
“Congress appropriated $2.9 billion to the Department of War to supplement the Basic Allowance for Housing entitlement within The One Big Beautiful Bill,” the senior official said. “Approximately 1.28 million active component military members and 174,000 Reserve component military members will receive this supplement.”
The GOP Congress will be fine with this even though it contravenes their appropriations by law. They’re fine with letting Trump spend money however he wants to. That way they don’t have to take responsibility for anything which is their raison d’etre.
Happy Hollandaise everyone!
Stephen Miller wrote yesterday that “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.”
He’s so insane. But you may be wondering, as I have been, just what they’re talking about when they say that Venezuela stole “our land, our oil and our assets” as Trump said the other day. Well, it’s bullshit, of course. They’re acting as if Venezuela is part of the United States which, needless to say, it is not.
Here’s an explanation of what they seem to be referring to which makes their rhetoric nonsensical and threatened actions illegal.
While US and British companies were involved in early oil exploration in Venezuela, the fuel belongs to the Latin American country under the international law principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources.
Venezuela nationalised its oil sector in 1976 and brought it under the control of the state-owned PDVSA.
Later, in 2007, the late left-wing President Hugo Chavez nationalised the remaining foreign oil projects in Venezuela, effectively ousting US oil giants like ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil.
The US companies filed legal challenges to fight the expropriation process, and in 2014, a World Bank arbitration tribunal ordered Venezuela to pay Exxon Mobil $1.6bn. Legal proceedings remain ongoing.
The US imposed sanctions on PDVSA in 2019, under Trump’s first presidency.
But Trump has ramped up his “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela since returning to office for a second term in January.
Late on Tuesday, Trump announced a blockade on Venezuelan oil tankers, describing them as “sanctioned”. In a Truth Social post on the subject, Trump echoed Miller’s assertions that Venezuelans had stolen oil from the US.
“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America,” Trump wrote.
“It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before – Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”
Venezuela nationalized its oil industry, something other countries have done and which Trump has threatened to do here with certain industries on occasion as well. In fact, he’s now commonly extorting pieces of various companies for the U.S. like it’s totally normal.
Chevron is still operating in Venezuela and seems perfectly happy with the arrangement. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips remain enmeshed in a legal battle with the Venzuelan government to get compensation for being ousted. This has nothing to do with the United States government. But any excuse will do.
If you’re keeping score, we are going into Venezuela because they are trafficking in fentanyl, which is now considered to be a weapon of mass destruction, we’re seizing their oil fields because we consider them to belong to us and, according to Susie Wiles, it’s all about regime change (which is the real reason.)
It’s unclear when the land strikes are going to begin but I suspect it will be soon. And once Maduro is exiled or killed (if he is) we’ll have to bring in some kind of military presence to protect the oil fields, especially since a good portion of the country will be actively hostile. Should be great.
If you ever thought that the violent, domineering Orange Julius Caesar was some kind of anti-war peacenik you were fooling yourself. He and his psychopathic henchmen are exactly the personality types that get off on war in a big way. (Think of the right wing after 9/11.) Blood lust is their favorite drug.
They are indulging that desire here in America by unleashing their masked secret police on anyone who looks like they might be an immigrant and those who defend them. But nothing can really slake the desire to actually kill people like actually doing it. That’s what this is. They got a taste for blood with the ICE raids. Now they need to up the ante. War is next.
Happy Hollandaise everyone!
It’s true that Ronald Reagan knew how to read a lot of words on a teleprompter. But he didn’t feel the need to speak it at 5X normal speed.
Oh Newt. Again? Your track record isn’t all that…
In the same cloud of outrage and optimism that has been wrapped around him all year, Gingrich took to the phones on the afternoon of Election Day still predicting that the President would be made to pay for his sins and that the Republicans would pick up six to 30 seats. But as the hours passed, the numbers just kept getting worse, and by 10 p.m. the Republicans were barely breaking even in the House. Then another seat looked vulnerable. Then seven more. Then, around 10:45, 13 seats. “At that point, we thought we lost the House,” one said later.
When the last returns came in, Gingrich had lost five seats–a setback not matched since 1822. “Well,” said Gingrich when it was all over, “we all misjudged this one.”
The next morning Gingrich held a gripe session by conference call, letting others vent about everything: the Republicans’ utter absence of a message, the Democrats’ lethally effective get-out-the-vote effort. “They were unbelievable,” one of the leaders said to Newt. “They kicked our ass on the ground.” Gingrich was mostly quiet. He listened. “He was in a state of shock,” says one participant.
It was different an hour later during the “listen only” conference call with members. This time Newt talked a lot, but he made no sense. He blamed the election on the unions, on black turnout driven by scare-tactic radio ads, on the fact that the Senate had failed to take up the House’s $80 billion tax cut, and of course on the media for hyping the Monica scandal and blotting out the Republican message. Said one member who listened in: “It was very lame and not credible. He just doesn’t get it. He’s the problem. I don’t see how you get over this bump in the road without getting rid of him.”
They got rid of him.
But sure. Listen to Newt, Republicans! He knows what he’s talking about.
Happy Hollandaise, everyone!
For an administration leading an all-out assault on vaccines, Wednesday night’s primetime address by Donald Trump from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House was all about inoculation. After weeks of losing control of the political narrative — of refusing to release economic data, of alternately embracing and rejecting the term “affordability” — the president attempted to project dominance going into the 2026 midterms and tout what he deemed the successes of the Trump economy.
“One year ago our country was dead,” he said in the combative 18-minute speech. “We were absolutely dead. Our country was ready to fail — totally fail. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world, and that’s said by every single leader that I’ve spoken to over the last five months.”
Trump rattled off a number of demonstrably false claims, including that “inflation is stopped” and prices are falling, while laying the blame for everything bad at the feet of Democrats and, you guessed it, former president Joe Biden.
In many ways, Trump is facing what stymied both Biden and Kamala Harris. One of the bigger mistakes both Democratic presidential candidates made during the 2024 election was to under-appreciate how much voters were reeling from the experience of inflation. When it peaked at 9.1% in 2022. Americans hadn’t experienced anything like that in 41 years. Coming as it did on the heels of the Covid-19 pandemic, the soaring prices and supply chain delays felt like a body blow. To make matters worse, the Biden administration tried to spin the country’s rapid recovery — to a much more normal rate of 2.5% — as a big win when the American people were still experiencing sticker shock at the grocery store.
The truth of the matter was that the Biden administration had done an admirable job of engineering what economists call a “soft landing” by taming inflation quickly without driving the economy into recession. An analysis of the final numbers released before the election showed a resilient economy that still faced some challenges but was, overall, on the road to recovery, so much so that the Economist famously featured a cover with the headline “The American Economy: The Envy of the World.”
Still, the economic vibes people felt were a real thing — and trying to gloss over voters’ concerns was a mistake. Now, over a year later, Donald Trump seems intent on making the same error, telling POLITICO’s Dasha Burns in a recent interview that he gives his economic performance in the past year an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”
The administration has added the flourish of blame casting by saying that they inherited an economy that was the worst the world has ever seen. In their telling, the country was on its last legs, barely functioning. Only through the masterful economic stewardship of the best leader in history have we managed to turn things around and create the greatest economy the world has ever known.
In truth, the economy has been more or less frozen for the past year. Despite Trump’s claims that he inherited the worst inflation on record, consumer price index numbers were at 3% when he took office and have remained steady for much of the year. New figures released this morning showed a modest cooling to 2.7%. The job market is cooling substantially, with new statistics released this week showing that unemployment stands at 4.6%, the highest number since the 2022 peak. With the exception of the stock market, which is riding the sugar high of the artificial intelligence bubble, the economy has been more or less stagnant.
Despite Trump’s declarations Wednesday night that his tariffs have been the country’s salvation, his erratic actions have made it impossible to anticipate beyond the next week. Consumers are seeing spikes in commodities like beef and coffee, even as the president and his people insist everything is getting cheaper — yet another false claim. Everything seems paralyzed, as if we’re all waiting for the next shoe to drop.
That may be starting to happen. As the Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey reported recently, small businesses are being crushed by the president’s tariffs, and big business has pretty much run through its inventories (and their willingness to bear the burden.) That, coupled with the recently released dismal job numbers, means the state of things is starting to look demonstrably worse.
For Trump, who ran his 2024 campaign on promising to lower prices on “day one” and insisting that tariffs would solve every other problem by “bringing in” trillions of dollars, that’s a lethal problem. He’s never been able to understand that those trillions are paid by Americans, whether it’s American companies or consumers.
The president’s broken pledge explains why so much of the country is now even more upset than they were when Biden was in office. It’s bad enough to feel like you can’t easily make ends meet anymore. It’s worse when someone promises you to your face that they’ll fix that problem, and then tell you they’ve done it when they haven’t. That’s where Trump is today.
Naturally, the president cannot admit any of this is happening. He claims the Democrats have created an “affordability hoax” and falsely insists that polls show him with the highest approval rating ever. In fact, the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday showed that approval of Trump’s handling of the economy slipped from 36% to 33%, while those who said they disapprove increased from 52% to 58%. Last week’s AP/NORC poll had his economic approval rating all the way down to 31%. Once his strength, his handling of the economy is becoming his worst issue — and is undoubtedly the most important one.
According to POLITICO, Trump voters who backed Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia in November’s off-year elections were motivated by their angst over the cost of living. They were apparently not persuaded by Trump’s insistence that we are on the cusp of a new golden age which will manifest itself over the next six months or year.
Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff who set off a political firestorm this week with a candid profile in Vanity Fair that featured unflattering quotes about Trump, apparently plans to have him out on the campaign trail all next year selling this new snake oil — that, as he insisted in Wednesday’s test-run, manufacturing and mining jobs are coming back, even as they remain in decline.
Vice President JD Vance is also getting in on the act to sell the administration’s economic policies. On Tuesday, he too told a crowd in Pennsylvania that he gives them an “A-plus-plus-plus.” He also spent a lot of time blaming others, first saying with his trademark snarl that “Democrats on affordability is like Charles Manson criticizing violent crime,” and then giving an extended riff about undocumented immigrants causing the housing crisis. When they are deported, he said, there will be more houses for good, real Americans to buy.
The vice president calls that claim “simple economics,” but it’s actually simple-minded drivel. As working-class people without much money or access to the capital needed to buy property, very few undocumented immigrants are able to own homes. They do, however, build a lot of houses, and between Trump’s deportations and tariffs on building materials, the housing crisis is likely going to become even worse, which is directly due to the president’s policies.
Like Trump, Vance is promising that everything’s going to be great in a few months. So is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who claims that “real affordability relief” is coming soon and it will be a “bountiful” 2026.
It all sounds just terrific. But coming from the party who won a year ago promising they would fix everything immediately, the promises ring just a little bit hollow.
At this point I have to assume that any Republican lawmaker who has the least bit of concern about winning in next November’s midterm elections — if they haven’t already announced their retirement — would love to be able to tell Trump, Vance, Bessent and others to stay home. Every time they open their mouths about the economy, their approval ratings go down. There is no way that these messengers can possibly be helpful to the GOP cause — and Trump’s primetime address was no exception.
Happy Hollandaise everyone!
For lack of anything pithier and more timely, I created a sign for yesterday’s rush-hour preach: “REMEMBER DECENCY? | YEAH, ME TOO.” (It was an oblique reference to the fallout from Donald Trump’s post on Rob Reiner’s murder.) “I do!” one woman shouted out her window. My most joyful responses seem to come from women.
Policy advocacy signs are too easily dismissed. “Fund Public Education,” “Defend Social Security,” and such, declare what policies the protester advocates and directs others to support as well. They’re forgotten in seconds. I prefer to ask commuters to think instead. If they have to ask, “What’s that about?’ then mission accomplished. Rather than tell them what I think, messages like “ARE YOUR GROCERIES CHEAPER?” invite them to engage the question. “YOUR LIFE SHOULDN’T BE THIS HARD” asks them to consider why and what might be done.
I’m thinking of this as highway deep canvassing. I don’t knock people’s doors. Their car doors come to me, week after week. We’re building a trust relationship over time in a world where it’s broken down.
Jo Carducci (JoJoFromJerz) ponders the wearing down of the spirit we’ve suffered. Post-Biden, she’s thinking about decency too:
We had a four year decency vacation. A real one. A stretch where the presidency wasn’t a daily exercise in humiliation, where moral rot wasn’t the organizing principle of the news cycle, where the person occupying the most symbolically powerful office in the country didn’t wake up every morning spoiling for a fight. Four years where restraint wasn’t remarkable, where empathy wasn’t radical, where leadership looked like adulthood. And then we were dropped right back into it, like the floor vanished beneath our feet and muscle memory took over before our minds could catch up.
What still stuns me is that even now, after everything, people still find themselves thinking there’s no way he’s that cruel, no way he’s that broken, no way he’d go that far, as if nearly a decade of evidence hasn’t already answered the question, as if we haven’t already learned, over and over, that his capacity for moral depravity has no bottom.
She recounts what a godawful excuse for a human Donald Trump is and how his followers excuse it. Then Jo segues into how Reiner’s work “was never about dominance, or conquest, or spectacle, or the hollow gratification of winning. It was about connection, about finding ourselves not as we wish we were, but as we actually are, messy and contradictory, tender and ridiculous, earnest and unsure, and locating dignity there without apology.”
I felt joyful yesterday asking commuters to remember what decency feels like with a sign that had only the faintest political angle to it. They had to make the connection. The guy who spun his finger at the side of his head in a “You’re a lunatic” sign just made me smile. For 75 minutes I felt like a character in one of Reiner’s movies.
Happy Hollandaise everyone!