Yipee Hi Ho 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

All About the Bonds: Hold on tight because despite Trump’s bigly blink followed by yesterday’s huge stock market rally, the market turmoil isn’t over.  The Orange guy’s announced tariff pause is just that a 90 day pause: the tariffs on China imports are now at a “staggering” 125%;  at 10% the tariffs on most other countries are still relatively high; and the erratic and irrational one is still president.  That blink, it wasn’t because Trump cares much about the huge drop in your IRAs, 401Ks, and college savings accounts, rather it was driven by fears that the disruptions his tariff announcements had caused to the Treasury bond market were verging on causing a catastrophic meltdown and that the impending disaster would go down in history with his name on it.  It didn’t help that before his “pause,” both Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan had increased their predictions of a worldwide recession from possible to likely.  Also, though Treasury Secretary Bessent and Commerce Secretary Lutwick were putting on faux happy faces during their public outings, in private they too were warning Trump of the disaster at his door. Your portfolios, they recovered a lot yesterday but they’re still underwater and futures are down again this morning.  We’re still on that rollercoaster and though yesterday’s ride upward was invigorating, there are plenty of downward plunges ahead. By the way, if you haven’t mastered Trump speak, maybe you should enroll in one of Maggie Haberman’s classes, quickly, because while Trump kept many in his circle out of the loop about his change in tariff policy, he hinted that it was coming with an early morning Truth Social post about how the down markets were providing a good buying opportunity.  Hmmm.

Targeting Opponents:  While the tariff drama dominated yesterday’s news cycle, plenty of other 💩 was still happening.  Trump announced that he had directed “his” Department of Justice to open investigations into two of his adversaries: Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs. Taylor, a politically conservative young Republican, served in George W Bush’s administration before joining Trump’s first administration where he served as chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security. Upset by what he saw, he authored the “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” op-ed that appeared in the November 2019 NY Times under the pen name “Anonymous.” He went on to write the bestselling book A Warning, again under the same pen name before outing himself and campaigning against Trump’s reelection.  To be clear he hasn’t violated any laws, but he did succeed in enraging Trump. The well-respected and accomplished Chris Krebs served as the Director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) during Trump’s first administration.  His “crime” is that he repeatedly said that the 2020 election was legitimate and that the widespread fraud that Trump claimed hadn’t happened.  Trump fired him for his act of speaking truth to power after the 2020 election but apparently still harbors a bigly grudge and now that he’s president again he’s all about retribution.  Neither Taylor nor Krebs are going to jail, in fact it would be challenging to even indict them, or at least it should be, but they now will be forced to defend themselves, a costly proposition under any circumstances but even more costly when the person going after you controls the DOJ and has silenced a slew of law firms with his intimidation tactics. In fact, judging by Trump’s comments that he has some cases he wants his newfound legal friends to work on, he might even try to get one or more of “his” law firms to help DOJ press the case against Taylor and Krebs, assuming that they aren’t too busy helping coal companies with their pollution plans.  Trump is following the Stalin, Putin, and Hitler playbook in plain sight and, of course, his Attorney General Pam Bondi is right there with him.

More:  Wired Magazine, one of my favorites, has branched out from covering often geeky technology news and is now a good source of political news, especially about the DOGE crowd. Their newest scoop is that the Department of Labor has or is in the process of approving a $1.3 million payment to DOGE to cover the salaries of the members of the Musk team tasked with shrinking the department into oblivion.  Remember when Musk promised that his DOGE bros were working for free or that he was compensating them, forget about that, not only are they being paid, but they are also being paid by us, the US taxpayers, at a rate which exceeds the government maximum. Newsmax, the rightwing media company that went public at the end of March, saw its shares skyrocket from an IPO price of $10 to $265 before falling back down. Yesterday’s it closed at $34, and maybe there’s more downside risk ahead.  The misinformation lawsuit against Newsmax by election machine company Dominion, which received a $787 million settlement from Fox, appears to be coming to a head.  Yesterday, the Delaware judge presiding over the case found that Newsmax issued false and defamatory claims about the role Dominion played in the 2020 election. Unless Newsmax settles, the case is headed to trial where a jury will be asked to decide about the awarding of damages.  And lastly for today, Republicans in Congress appear to be having a hard time advancing their slash and burn budget not because it’s hugely destructive to health care and a whole lot of other nice things but because some members of the Republican squad are concerned it doesn’t cut enough.    

#BringThemAllHomeNow