Maybe the Sleepy President Wasn’t So Bad!
When Trump said he would lower costs, we didn’t realize he meant the cost of stocks.
Another horrible day in the stock market yesterday, but don’t worry: The president is on the case. Politico shares that Trump will give an on-camera address to a Business Roundtable meeting this afternoon at 5. We’d expect many soothing noises to be uttered—or maybe Trump will yell at investors for the deep lack of loyalty they’ve showed in the recent selloff? Either way, should make for good TV. Happy Tuesday.
The Man With No Plan
by Andrew Egger
You know what’s a little galling? Being a longtime professional Trump-skeptic—a card-carrying sufferer of Trump Derangement Syndrome, as Bulwark haters tell it—and still feeling compelled to say: “Man, he’s sure wrecking things faster than expected, huh?”1
President Joe Biden, walking fossil or not, handed Trump an economy that was roaring by pretty much every macro metric. The one massive fly in the ointment—the persistent inflation that doomed Democrats last year—posed little risk to the incoming president. After all, voters had already hung it around Biden’s neck. It was clear skies and smooth sailing ahead. The big gripe among Bidenites, in fact, was that all Trump had to do was sit back, relax, and take the credit as America’s economic messiah.
Instead, less than two months after his inauguration, Trump has been Reverse Jesus, speaking new economic storms into existence. His will-he-or-won’t-he trade-war tap dance with Mexico and Canada has markets genuinely freaked. Ditto with his remarkable refusal to rule out the possibility of a recession over the weekend. Yesterday was the worst day for stocks in years, putting an exclamation point on a remarkable two-week slump with no end in sight.
To hear Republicans tell it, this is all temporary turbulence on the rocket ride to riches. On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the United States had “become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period.” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) suggested that “we were probably over-bloated with the stock market here for a while.” “There is a period of transition,” Trump told Fox News on Sunday, “because what we’re doing is very big. We’re bringing wealth back to America.” Trust the plan.
Except what actually is the plan? If people actually believed that Trump had one—that this was, indeed, temporary pain—then we wouldn’t see panic in the market’s reaction. As Obama economist Jason Furman noted yesterday, “If you are implementing a credible plan that entails short-term pain for long-term gain the stock market will go up not down.”
Investors are jittery precisely because they’re starting to realize that there’s never been a plan.2 Trump lumbers about causing chaos, shaking the economy like a dog shakes a toy, all while ping-ponging wildly from pretext to pretext for his actions.
Maybe it’s all to stamp out fentanyl smuggling—“a drug war, not a trade war,” as Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett said Sunday. Maybe it’s all to compel companies to re-shore manufacturing, as Vice President JD Vance suggested yesterday. Or maybe tariffs are just another tool for Trump to wield to reward countries that please him and punish countries that irritate him, as his recent praise for Mexico and threats toward Canada would suggest.
“All I know is we’re going to take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs,” Trump said Sunday, “and we’re going to become so rich you’re not going to know where to spend all that money.”
In all this, Trump is caught between two deeply held beliefs. For him, it is an article of faith that more tariffs = more prosperity. There is simply no position he has expressed more regularly throughout his political career. Yet he is also image-obsessed and brand-conscious, and he knows the effect on his brand of the stock markets lingering in the red. So he cannot commit to either course—he swerves first in one direction, then another, seeming blissfully unaware that the constant swerves are as damaging as just going ahead with the tariffs would be.
The remarkable thing is that we’re just getting started. This is only one plank of Trump’s economically risky agenda. His assaults on basic government functions are risking a future meltdown due to severe cuts to core services. His planned deportation of millions of migrants will shrink the U.S. labor force. A debt ceiling fight is on the horizon. Buckle up, folks—the worst may be yet to come.
GOP Must Denounce Musk’s ’Treason’ Charge
by William Kristol
Treason is a weighty matter. The first Congress made it a capital crime in 1790, and it’s been one ever since. It is mentioned in four separate places in the Constitution.3 Indeed, one section of the Constitution is devoted to the topic, Article III, Section 3:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
The Founders were well aware of the gravity of the charge of treason. They were well aware that such charges could be abused for political reasons. And so they went out of their way to limit that abuse—even, in a way, to warn us against such abuse in our founding document.
And now the top White House adviser has accused a member of the United States Senate of that gravest of crimes. Yesterday, responding to Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly’s visit to Ukraine over the weekend and to Kelly’s exhortation that we not “give up on the Ukrainian people,” Musk wrote, “You are a traitor.”
Kelly has responded forcefully to Musk, including in an interview with Andrew yesterday, which is well worth watching. “He apparently doesn’t understand how national security works and what makes us safe,” Kelly said. “He’s an unserious person—he’s an unelected billionaire who has been focused over the last couple months on making the world better for billionaires . . . I don’t take him very seriously.”
Other Democrats have responded forcefully on Kelly’s behalf.
But where are the Republicans? Have any Republican senators risen to his defense against this incendiary charge—beyond Thom Tillis, who offered what could charitably be described as the most milquetoast of defenses? How about Kelly’s former Senate colleague, Secretary of State Marco Rubio? Where is he?
And what of Musk’s associates in the Trump administration? What do they think of this? As of last night, the Washington Post dryly reported, “Spokespeople for the White House and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.”
They all need to be asked about this, insistently, today. Trump needs to be asked about it. Rubio and other senior administration officials such as the secretary of defense and the attorney general need to be asked about it. What they need to be asked is: Do they agree with Musk? Was Musk right to level this grave accusation?
Senate Minority Leader Schumer needs to make an issue of it on the floor of the Senate, and House Minority Leader Jeffries in the House. They need to challenge their Republican colleagues to denounce Musk. Because this is, as the founders knew, a most serious charge. It can’t be left to stand.
And Republicans shouldn’t be allowed to get away with simply saying something nice about Kelly. The issue isn’t Kelly. The issue is Musk.
Will Republicans have the decency to denounce Musk for leveling such a false and dangerous accusation? Will Republicans have the courage to say that someone who makes such an accusation is unfit to hold a senior position in the White House?
The question is simple: Who is betraying the United States Constitution: Mark Kelly or Elon Musk?
AROUND THE BULWARK
Hey guys, Jim Swift here. As Overtime is now a Saturday newsletter, I’m joining the Morning Shots team to keep you abreast of all the great things we have in The Bulwark each day. Here’s today’s fix:
MARK HERTLING has a worthwhile piece on Trump cancelling intelligence sharing with Ukraine: “What Will Ukraine Do Without U.S. Intelligence?” Answer: Their military position will suffer and civilians will pay a price.
Bad-faith lawsuits, ugly smears, and even violence against journalists are becoming more common. To that, BILL LUEDERS writes, we must all say, ‘Enough.’
As noted above, SEN. MARK KELLY joined our ANDREW EGGER to react after our ketamine-fueled, explosion-prone co-president called the Arizona senator a “traitor” for visiting Ukraine to see how they’re faring after President Trump switched sides.
Quick Hits
ADVENTURES IN POSTING: How did Trump choose to unwind at the end of a long day crashing the stock market yesterday? With a long post on Truth Social, where he shared some bizarre ad copy for his old show, The Apprentice (“now streaming on Prime Video!”), gloated over D.C.’s removal of its famous BLACK LIVES MATTER mural, solicited a primary challenger against Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), and declared that America didn’t need Canadian exports while fuming about Ontario’s new surcharge on exported electricity (“your not even allowed to do that”).
Finally, he got around to mentioning the stock market. Not the whole market, you understand.
Sure, we may be in for a recession (Trump’s words!), and things already may be looking bumpy for your finances. But show some support for the richest man in the world and buy an electric car.
HE IS WHO WE THOUGHT HE WAS: As they prepared to abandon the last of their pride and confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services, Republican senators talked themselves into thinking the lifelong conspiracy crank might have seen the light about vaccines. Here was Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.): “I think he understands the values and benefit that vaccines play and have played through the years preventing disease.”
Kennedy plainly feels some pressure to appear more positive about vaccines. Unfortunately, that’s turning out to amount to little besides salting his usual slurry of misleading, scaremongering antivax rhetoric with the occasional admission that vaccines are sometimes helpful too. Here’s the New York Times:
In a sweeping interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, outlined a strategy for containing the measles outbreak in West Texas that strayed far from mainstream science, relying heavily on fringe theories about prevention and treatments.
He issued a muffled call for vaccinations in the affected community, but said the choice was a personal one. He suggested that measles vaccine injuries were more common than known, contrary to extensive research. . . . He said he’d been told that a dozen Mennonite children had been injured by vaccines in Gaines County. People in the community wanted federal health workers arriving in Texas “to also look at our vaccine-injured kids and look them in the eye,” Mr. Kennedy said. . . .
Yet the [measles, mumps, and rubella] vaccine itself has been thoroughly studied and is safe. There is no link to autism, as the secretary has claimed in the past. While all vaccines have occasional adverse effects, health officials worldwide have concluded that the benefits far outweigh the very small risks of vaccination.
Mr. Kennedy asserted otherwise: “We don’t know what the risk profile is for these products. We need to restore government trust. And we’re going to do that by telling the truth, and by doing rigorous science to understand both safety and efficacy issues.”
What kind of rigorous science might he have in mind? Reuters reported last week that the CDC “is planning a large study into potential connections between vaccines and autism.”
Cheap Shots
Or even concepts of a plan!
In Article I Section 6, Article II Section 4, Article III Section 3, and Article IV Section 2.
They stole a Supreme Court seat like a gang of thugs in a back alley, shoving democracy against the wall, rifling through its pockets, and grinning as they walked away, daring anyone to stop them. They attempted to overthrow the government—not in secret, not in whispers, but in the full light of day, draped in the American flag as they smeared blood and bile through the halls of Congress. They installed a diseased conspiracy theorist as the head of public health, ensuring that mass death became a partisan litmus test. They put a known foreign asset in charge of national security. They placed a frothing authoritarian in charge of the FBI, a man who promised to turn the power of the state against its own citizens. They have put a convicted felon—fake-businessman turned autocrat, a syphilitic wound on the body politic—in the White House, again, where he openly vows to dismantle the nation in retribution for daring to hold him accountable.
Yet, Bill, you ask where the Republicans are? You wonder if they might finally recoil at the sight of a deranged billionaire casually tossing around the word "treason" to smear a U.S. senator for the crime of standing with our allies? I have news for you, Bill.
Really bad news.
They aren’t coming.
They aren’t going to defend Mark Kelly, not because they fear Musk, but because Musk is them—an arrogant, gilded grotesque who believes that wealth is intelligence, that cruelty is strength, that democracy is something to be mocked, not upheld. The Red Party will not correct him because they do not believe he is wrong. They have no loyalty to truth, no fidelity to the Constitution, no interest in the republic as anything more than a vehicle for their own unchecked dominion.
This is not a party in decline—it is a suicide cult for democracy, a feral, collapsing machine that now exists only to consolidate power and punish those who refuse to submit. The rule of law is dead to them unless it can be twisted into a weapon. The Constitution is not a sacred document but a crutch, waved in performative reverence as they grind it to dust beneath their heels.
So no, Bill, they are not going to do the right thing. They cannot do the right thing. Their movement is beyond saving, beyond reasoning, beyond any last vestige of honor.
This is it. The death spiral is upon us. The question is no longer whether they will return to sanity. It’s when we stop pretending they ever will.Because this—this endless, pathetic waiting for the Red Party to wake up, to remember what a conscience feels like, to suddenly morph back into Republicans instead of an authoritarian death cult—isn't just lunacy. It’s self-inflicted delusion. Writing columns like this, as if moral shame could pierce the hide of a party that sold its soul for power long ago, isn’t just a fool’s errand—it’s the political equivalent of begging a mugger to give back your wallet out of the goodness of his heart.
They are not coming back. Let's stop pretending we think they are.
Andrew hit the nail on the head. There is no economic plan, there was never an economic plan other than make America great again. It’s all reactionary.
My concern is that if the economy spirals and we enter into a recession or worse, Trump will make things 100x worse and will offer no real plans for recovery - see Covid response. Unfortunately I think this is the most likely outcome.