The Daily Reid: The DGAF President

Donald Trump is torching the economy and he doesn't care. Maybe because he's doing it on purpose?

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Donald Trump is living the fantasy only a dictator could imagine. He’s so hopped up on Curtis Yarvin-Peter Thiel monarchisst juice, he is planning to throw himself a June 14 birthday military parade in Washington, ostensibly. to commemorate America’s 250th birthday, too, if he must, though that isn’t technically until next year. (Now you know why the Black Lives Matter mural in the District of Columbia had to be painted over at the demand of the White House and under the threat of congressional defunding. Can’t have the visual of the murdered Blacks memorial driven over by Tesla tanks and military marching bands…)

Trump is doing this despite having disrespected the American war dead by skipping the dignified transfer of four servicemen who were killed in a recent training exercise in Lithuania. Instead of receiving their remains with the honor they deserve, he chose to play golf at his Florida resort instead; an outrage the regime channel Newsmax helpfully nicknamed “golf diplomacy.” So to review: Trump wants the U.S. military to honor him with an unprecedented French envy parade down the streets of the nation’s capitol, but he can’t be bothered to honor them when they actually die in service of this country. Got it. Here’s how Trump whisperer Maggie Haberman explained it during an appearance on CNN:

“I think long ago he stopped caring about certain optics. And he’s made very clear during this presidency, he’s going to do what he wants,” Haberman, a veteran New York Times reporter, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Friday evening. “And, you know, it’s not just playing golf.”

“He is not messaging this in a way that suggests that he understands what average people might be going through right now,” she continued. “And part of what you know it is, is he is convinced he is right, he is convinced he is going to show people he is right.”

She wasn’t just talking about the dignified transfer disx. She was also talking about Trump’s 40-year fever dream of imposing massive tariffs on America, to return the country to the magical 19th century Gilded Age economy, when McKinley was King and apparently, we were great.

Thanks Howard, who as much as people want to, we can’t even blame for putting this nutter tariff idea in Trump’s elderly brain.

More Haberman:

“He has believed in tariffs for 40 years. You know, he wanted to do this last time, and he was stymied by a bunch of advisers who were much more pro-free trade,” she said late Friday on “AC360.”

“And now, he is going to do what he’s going to do. He’s doing it in a very different economy post-COVID,” Haberman added. “He is doing it on a much broader scale with these tariffs.”

Lucky us. Do let us know when we’re great again.

Look, I considered being an economics major for about six months my freshman year at Harvard when my brain wasn’t wired right because I was still mourning my mom’s death from cancer and I couldn’t bear being a pre-med anymore because of it, so don’t go by my single semester of Ec 10 with Marty Feldstein. But I’m just gonna tell you, massive, across-the-board Smoot-Hawley style tariffs in a modern, largely service economy that’s underpinned by consumer spending (which benefits from the more affordable goods that come from a globalized economy and workforce) and not old, dusty, deadly factories with children working in them twelve hours a day alongside their parents who die in their 50s of soot poisoning, makes no actual economic sense in the 21st century. Most actual economists (and if they’re being honest, most Republicans) agree with me. I can tell you this as someone who used to be a weekly guest on Larry Kudlow’s show on CNBC, where I was frequently booked, as Larry’s “favorite Obamacon” to debate one or sometimes two Republican adversaries (and Larry himself) that no matter what he says when kissing up to Trump on TV, he agrees with me, too. He just loves tax cuts for the rich, more than he cares about a possible recession.

In fact, I’d wager to say that every elected Republican also hates these tariffs, which are currently lighting the U.S. and global economy on fire like a recalled Tesla.

Most people believe that even Howard, who used to run a Very Important Financial Firm, probably hates them too. But that hasn’t stopped him from making the media rounds to brown-nose the boss, including on CBS this week, where he tried tried to explain Trump’s “reasoning” to an actual journalist (rather than just sticking with Fox.) It didn’t go well…)

Clearly, Howard’s bragging that Trump is “re-industrializing America” ain’t calming the rich folks. Even Billionaire Bill “Run The Negroes & Pro Palestinian Protesters Out of Harvard” Ackman is crying foul. (And also FUCK YOU, Ackman. In the precious name of Dr. Gay, I’m rooting for you to become poor…)

And no less than Chase oligarch Jamie Dimon has also changed his tune after blurting in January that scardies should just “get over” their tariff fears … as has the woman forever to be known as John McCain’s Daughter (and don’t you forget it!) who once begged for Trumponomics to be injected directly into her veins…

And let’s not leave out Elon Musk’s younger, union-busting brother, who happens to sit on the Tesla board, who denounced the tariffs, too. They’re certainly not good for already declining Tesla, whose owner owns share in Donald Trump.

None of it matters. Not even getting royally mocked for tariffing an island inhabited almost solely by penguins is slowing Trump down. He’s busy YOLO’ing the tariff game and according to the people who actually talk to him on a daily basis, he “doesn’t give a f**k.” While farmers who likely voted for him suffer , he’s focused on selling America’s golf legacy to the Saudis, ignoring the growing national protests against him and Elon, and even hiking the prices of his own mainly Chinese-manufactured fan merch by threatening to jack up the tariffs on that country by 100 plus percent while China vows to fight to the end. He even stepping off the golf course for a hot minute to lecture Americans to “take your medicine” and eat the higher prices so he can have his way … all while his own oligarchs get (slightly) poorer and much angrier. Some Republican members of congress have gotten the memo and are dumping their stockholdings while publicly supporting the helter skelter Trump trade wars, and even some Fox spokesmodels are wringing their hands on air, while the Murdoch empire overall continues to cover for the madness.

So why is Trump so committed to this bit despite all of the evidence that it’s a certain bust? Maybe somebody he thinks “has the look” and is “smart” (meaning white, male and rich) told him so at some point in his morally desiccated septuagenarian life that tariffs are good and the Gilded Age was golden? God only knows, and since Trump didn’t touch the Bible at his swearing in, God will likely never tell him.

The simpler explanation, of course, is that Trump is just kinda dumb. The media generally doesn’t want to go there, because Trump is a rich, white, male Republican with an Ivy League degree (that his dad arranged for him, like so many legacy admittees in the Ivies including Harvard) who almost no one in the mainly affluent, white, male press corps (or most voters) can bear to admit just might not be that bright. Well, I despise John Bolton. I believe him to be a warmonger and a complete horse’s ass. But he may have nailed it when it comes to his former boss:

What does Trump really intend? What is bluff, braggadocio, and bargaining and what is not? Because he does not have a philosophy or a national-security strategy, and often doesn’t seek pre-conceived objectives, observers from left to right are often confounded. Trump is the very epitome of “transactional,” his one immutable focus being himself. Accordingly, assessing such aberrational behaviour, what’s really happening inside his head, can be nearly impossible. Media, politicians and businesspeople alike frequently persuade themselves he is simply posturing, but are continually surprised by what he does. Consider Ukraine, Nato, and tariffs. …

… Then there’s Trump’s fascination with tariffs. The damage Trump has caused Ukraine and Nato pales by comparison to what his tariffs will do to America’s economy and the entire international economic system. If Trump had acted on April 1 instead of 2, he could quickly have said it was all an April Fool’s Day joke, thereby saving the global economy trillions of dollars of damage when markets started heading south. Unfortunately however, Trump is totally serious, a fact evident long before “Liberation Day.”

Here too, “experts” and anxious businesspeople steadfastly ignored Trump labelling “tariff” the dictionary’s most beautiful word. Tariffs, they said, will be targeted, carefully calibrated, and he’ll do deals quickly. It’s all a bargaining tactic, Treasury Secretary Bessent said in October, 2024: “escalate to de-escalate”. Even as global stock markets drop like rocks, experts are still rationalising what his “strategy” is.

Wrong again. Trump is more likely to win the Nobel Prize for literature than for peace. As with Ukraine, Trump listens primarily to himself, not to others. He creates his own world, this time an imaginary trade world, and then lives in it. Trump isn’t lying so much as he is ruling a parallel universe, like a boy’s tree house, where numbers mean what he says they mean. He doesn’t react well when the real world’s numbers don’t match: after all, who’s in charge here?

Ok, dumb … and delusional.

All of this while regular Americans wonder when (or if) the Trump pain will ever end…

But what if Trump doesn’t want it to end?

He either genuinely believes in the economic horse pucky as his delusions are propped up by bad men like Lutnick, Peter Navarro, Peter Thiel and JD Vance … wait scratch that, I doubt he cares what JD thinks … who are so desperate to end the income tax they are willing to return to the all tariffs era and have bought into the idea that we need to have a zero or negative trade deficit with every country on earth except Russia … or he sees the tariffs as a means to end: forcing the Federal Reserve — which he cannot bring to heel like he has so many elite law firms, the Justice Department, Marco Rubio’s soul, and the entire Republican Party — to severely drop interest rates due to a recession he creates.

Item: back in January, Trump said he planned to “demand” an interest rate cut, but admitted that it “wouldn’t be that simple.”

Item: from the Economic Times, back in February:

Fiscal and monetary policy have diverged widely since the Fed began its fight to bring down inflation. The Fed has tried to slow the economy by raising short-term interest rates more than 5 percentage points in just over a year beginning in 2022, the biggest rate increase in five decades, before pulling back modestly last fall. It has also trimmed its balance sheet by more than $2 trillion since the rate-increase campaign began, or about a quarter of its original size.

Fiscal policy has taken the opposite path. Congress has injected huge amounts of fiscal stimulus into the economy in the form of $4.2 trillion in cumulative deficits since spring of 2022, or about 6% of gross domestic product over the same time. For perspective, annual deficits as a percentage of GDP have averaged 2.6% since World War II. That includes the outsized deficits Congress ran during the 2008 financial crisis and again during the pandemic — rightly, I have repeatedly argued — to support a collapsing economy. No wonder the US has dodged a recession in recent years.

Fiscal and monetary policy may now be set to trade places. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the administration wants to trim the deficit to 3% of GDP. That would require Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency to find $1 trillion in spending cuts. It’s not yet clear to what extent it will succeed, but the mere threat of cuts may already be dampening sentiment and impeding the economy.

Signs to that effect are accumulating. Consumer sentiment declined in January for the first time in six months. The Bloomberg US Financial Conditions Index has tumbled 37% in the past two weeks, implying that economic activity is slowing. The Atlanta Fed’s estimate of annualized real GDP growth in the first quarter has been cut nearly in half, to 2.3% from closer to 4% a month ago. The yield on 10-year Treasuries has dropped 50 basis points to 4.3% over that time and is fast approaching the one on two-year Treasuries, a trend many economic observers view as an omen of looming recession.

A slowdown, particularly one accompanied by a weaker labor market, would most likely prompt the Fed to lower rates. It’s hard to see the central bank easing otherwise. The latest read of core personal consumption expenditures — the Fed’s favored inflation gauge — came in at 2.8% year over year in December, which is still uncomfortably higher than its 2% target. As long as the economy is growing and keeping a lid on historically low unemployment, the Fed can delay rate cuts until inflation is tamed.

By cutting spending, however, Trump may force monetary easing to support fiscal austerity rather than the other way around. It doesn’t even matter if Trump’s spending cuts cause the economy to slow. As long as those cuts — or threat of them — coincide with a slowdown, the Fed will likely act.

Well doge has been a bust so far when it comes to finding waste, fraud, abuse or that magical $1 trillion — because — and this will be a shocker … there isn’t a spare $1 trillion in DEI hiring and websites with Black people and women listed on them. To get to their magic number (which has been cut in half from their original goal of $2 trillion) the doge hacker gang is looking to fire scores of people in the Veterans Administration and the National Parks Service, after already stripping USAID to the bone, rifling through the Department of Education and slashing university grants (especially of universities he and his friends don’t like) and cancer and other disease research (with bird flu still out there and the measles epidemic currently killing children), shuttering Head Start offices, putting Meels on Wheels in jeopardy along with 911 first responder benefits…

A gentle reminder that many if not most of those men, given their demographics and professions, likely voted for Trump and Vance, meaning they voted for the very cuts they’re decrying … but I digress.

The biggest chunk of cash the doge gang have found to loot from is Medicaid, which they’re seeking to take an $800 billion bite out of … and they’ve also got their beaty little eyes on Social Security, which is the only other cash motherlode in the federal government besides the Pentagon — but that’s where most of Elon’s contracts are so… can’t mess with that!

doge: white men, mainly in suits, firing federal workers and dunking on the poors…

And the 1950s Doge Meritocracy Corps need to do their nasty work before the presently recessed American Duma jams through the permanent Trump tax cut, adding $4 trillion to the national debt, which they will magically score at a cost of exactly zero dollars. In addition to the magical tax cuts you ordinary American suckers will never receive, and the massive debt your grandchildren will inherit because of them, you will also have almost no federal government services, maybe no mail service, and literally no civil rights enforcement, (and maybe a bit of segregation in your federal contractor workplace) no Justice Department (they’re Trump’s personal retribution squad, now) and no federal consumer fraud protection if you or your child is ever harmed by a scammer or a Jan 6 insurrectionist Donald set on the loose.

And if it all works as planned, we’ll be stuck with barely any government, almost zero regulation (which is JD Vance’s boss Peter Thiel’s fever dream) and low, low interest rates with which our oligarch elect can buy up all of the collapsed value real estate and farms previously owned by the undeserving poors. They can gobble up shuttered businesses, too, and put the American people back in the shirt factories where they belong (no more shirts from Vietnam and China, friends, your kids can do the machine stiching!) All our new oligarchs need is a decade or so of tariff-fueled economic hell for the rest of us to bend the knee to technofeudalism, while Trump, his family, his chosen oligarchs and the Paypal Mafia treat the United States like one big distressed asset, which they can buy up with low interest loans.

It'll be just like in the good old days when America was great and the *right people” got filthy rich (while their workers mainly just got filthy.) Maybe not as great as when the slaves were singing in the fields, but you can’t have everything (including labor rights. You definitely can’t have that…)

Enjoy your “liberation,” America.