The Age of Stupid 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱 🐧 🐧 🐧

The Science of Stupid:  Asian markets plunged overnight, and Dow futures are down1000 points, they were down as much as 1600 when I started writing.  And no, despite the “charm” offensive put forth by members of the Trump administration including Secretary of the Treasury Bessent who MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle reports is already looking for the exit, none of this is good, nor is any of it necessary.  Moreover, there’s little likelihood that manufacturers will shift a substantial amount of their production to the US in part because building new plants takes time and there’s so much uncertainty.  In fact, given that many economists are raising their expectations of recession, Goldman Sachs now puts the odds at 45%, JP Morgan at 60%, if anything, it’s more likely we will see production shutdowns and worker furloughs as weary consumers tighten their belts.  Everything about Trump’s tariff policy is stupid, but perhaps the “stupidest” parts are that the tariff policy is the brainchild of crack-pot Trump advisor Peter Navarro whose book on the subject cites a non-existent “expert” and that the tariffs that went into effect over the weekend were calculated using the wrong inputs and as a result were set four time too high. Don’t even get me started about the idiocy behind the decision to impose 10% tariffs on the Heard and McDonald Islands which are populated by penguins 🐧 but no humans. There’s nothing reciprocal about any of this, ask the 🐧 🐧.   We’ve shot ourselves in the foot, or more likely shot off both our feet, and our allies now hate us but all’s great because while your 401 K and IRA are plummeting and inflation is moving back up, Trump, the one responsible for this economic bloodbath, got to play and watch lots of golf this weekend.  He reports that he won a seniors’ golf tournament at his Jupiter Florida Golf Club.  Sure, he did.  There are no normies with guard rails in this Trump administration so its near impossible to know if any of this insanity will end soon.  The titans of Wall Street who supported Trump in the hopes of seeing their taxes lowered and the easing of regulations are now learning what the rest of us already knew, that Trump is irrational, mean spirited and not trustworthy. Billionaire Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, a Trump supporter, is now calling for a 90-day pause in the tariffs to give the administration time to negotiate with other countries, warning that the alternative is “a self-induced, economic nuclear winter.”  He went on to say that “We are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital.” Ironically, even the ketamine loving Doge guy Elon who as of Friday had lost $30 billion as a result of the stock market plunge, is upset.  Over the weekend he called for free trade and took several swipes at tariff advocate Peter Navarro, saying that “he ain’t built sh*t.”  Sometimes even Elon is right. Congress could stop this insanity but probably won’t, instead they seem ready to further increase the deficit while cutting services including health care coverage.  Remember, how Biden avoided a recession and instead delivered a soft landing as he managed the economy out of COVID, that seems so long ago.  Maybe sleepy wasn’t so bad?

You Can’t Fix Stupid:  Actually, some stupid can be fixed, but Trump’s DOJ has no intention of even trying so though they admit that they wrongly  deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant married to a US citizen, to the mega prison hellhole in El Salvador, they claim that now that he’s in El Salvador they don’t have the authority to bring him back. US District Judge Paula Xinis doesn’t buy that.  She has ordered that Garcia be brought back by midnight tonight.  One indication that the DOJ has no intention of following through is that Erez Reuveni, the DOJ Attorney who represented the Trump administration in the federal court hearing concerning Garcia’s wrongful deportation, has been put on indefinite leave by Attorney General Pam Bond for being “noticeably unenthusiastic” about the government’s position in the case and for telling Judge Xinis that he had urged his government clients to take steps to bring Garcia back to the US.  Attorney Reuveni had also told the judge that his attempts to get more information to offer the court about why officials deemed Garcia to be a member of an MS-13 gang had been rebuffed.  Continuing with the stupid theme, HHS Secretary RFK insists that he didn’t mean to fire all the people he fired and that he’ll hire some of them back, unlikely but it’s a good lie to say so he’s sticking with it. According to the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Peter Marks, the top vaccine regulator ousted by RFK last week, reports that RFK’s senior advisors, a team made up of ardent anti-vaxxers, has sought non-existent data about vaccine related brain swelling and death to justify their antivaccine narratives.  The data doesn’t exist because the effective and safe MMR vaccine doesn’t cause either but that’s not what they wanted him to tell them. Somewhat awkward timing for that report given that another Texas child died from measles related complications this weekend. With measles cases now exceeding 500 and rising, RFK went to Texas to attend the child’s funeral and “console” the parents.  While there he also uttered a few remarks about the measles vaccine being useful for measles prevention, nice but since last week he said that when he was a kid “two million” kids got measles every year and “only” 300 of them died, it’s hard to believe that he’s all that concerned about the child who died but rather that he is concerned about the bad optics of not sounding concerned. Then there’s Trump’s decision to fire Timothy Haugh, the head of the NSA and US Cyber Command and his Deputy Director Wendy Noble.  The two were fired shortly after pro-Trump, far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer met with Trump in the Oval Office.  Apparently, Loomer told Trump that the two highly respected career government officials were disloyal to Trump and couldn’t be trusted. Do we really need cyber security anyway?  Russia and China don’t think we do.

#BringThemAllHomeNow