Thanks for doing this wrap-up, Tim. It’s obvious that administration officials are only talking to people who live in Trumpist media bubbles because what they say is complete nonsense. Some further observations:
No Russia Tariffs – During the campaign I remember President Trump making a statement like “I have literally stopped wars with t…
Thanks for doing this wrap-up, Tim. It’s obvious that administration officials are only talking to people who live in Trumpist media bubbles because what they say is complete nonsense. Some further observations:
No Russia Tariffs – During the campaign I remember President Trump making a statement like “I have literally stopped wars with tariffs.” Of course, being Trump, there were never any details on that, but if President Trump did that (or believes he did that), then all the more reason for including tariffs and their magical war-stopping properties into the Russia-Ukraine negotiations. Unless tariffs on Ukraine were meant to make Russia retreat, in which case I would give that a down check as a negotiating tactic.
Treasury Secretary Bessent’s comment, “The markets are organic animals. And you never know what the reaction is going to be,” was as hilarious as it is untrue. I'm not a stock market guy or a finance wizard or even a biologist, but watching from the sidelines for the first two and being an "organic animal," it appears to me there are any number of stimuli that will produce completely predictable reactions on markets and organic animals alike ("If you cut us, do we not bleed?" “If you intentionally impose arbitrary draconian worldwide tariffs introducing phenomenal levels of business uncertainty, do we markets not fall?”). For weeks, they have been warning of pain coming from these tariffs and setting expectations about stock market losses, so apparently, someone other than Bessent seemed to know how the markets would react to this tariff news. No less an intellectual luminary than Vice President JD Vance was going around saying, "Well, the market losses were less than we thought," after Friday’s crash, so he had it figured out.
I have two more to share that are tangentially related:
Commerce Secretary Lutnick: To be fair, I misspeak on occasion, but I think I am pretty good at correcting myself. It seems Secretary Lutnick just doesn’t do that. Over the weekend I heard him say something along the lines of "We have a $36 trillion dollar deficit, why don't people understand that what we are doing is needed to address that..." No one called him on the difference between deficits and debt. Even if it were possible to run a $36T deficit, I guess we would all be freaking out quite a bit more, but it is bad enough as the National Debt, so let's not make it far worse.
Attorney General Pam Bondi: She started out comments the other day with “He [President Trump] was overwhelmingly elected by an overwhelming majority of the United States citizens to be our commander in chief and that’s what he’s been doing,” I realize Pam Bondi could care less about anyone who is not Republican, just as I realize she is not a mathematician, but as soon as I hear the words "overwhelmingly elected by an overwhelming majority" I stop listening because she is either lying right off the bat or she is too ignorant to understand that less than 50% is not an overwhelming amount of anything.
Thanks for doing this wrap-up, Tim. It’s obvious that administration officials are only talking to people who live in Trumpist media bubbles because what they say is complete nonsense. Some further observations:
No Russia Tariffs – During the campaign I remember President Trump making a statement like “I have literally stopped wars with tariffs.” Of course, being Trump, there were never any details on that, but if President Trump did that (or believes he did that), then all the more reason for including tariffs and their magical war-stopping properties into the Russia-Ukraine negotiations. Unless tariffs on Ukraine were meant to make Russia retreat, in which case I would give that a down check as a negotiating tactic.
Treasury Secretary Bessent’s comment, “The markets are organic animals. And you never know what the reaction is going to be,” was as hilarious as it is untrue. I'm not a stock market guy or a finance wizard or even a biologist, but watching from the sidelines for the first two and being an "organic animal," it appears to me there are any number of stimuli that will produce completely predictable reactions on markets and organic animals alike ("If you cut us, do we not bleed?" “If you intentionally impose arbitrary draconian worldwide tariffs introducing phenomenal levels of business uncertainty, do we markets not fall?”). For weeks, they have been warning of pain coming from these tariffs and setting expectations about stock market losses, so apparently, someone other than Bessent seemed to know how the markets would react to this tariff news. No less an intellectual luminary than Vice President JD Vance was going around saying, "Well, the market losses were less than we thought," after Friday’s crash, so he had it figured out.
I have two more to share that are tangentially related:
Commerce Secretary Lutnick: To be fair, I misspeak on occasion, but I think I am pretty good at correcting myself. It seems Secretary Lutnick just doesn’t do that. Over the weekend I heard him say something along the lines of "We have a $36 trillion dollar deficit, why don't people understand that what we are doing is needed to address that..." No one called him on the difference between deficits and debt. Even if it were possible to run a $36T deficit, I guess we would all be freaking out quite a bit more, but it is bad enough as the National Debt, so let's not make it far worse.
Attorney General Pam Bondi: She started out comments the other day with “He [President Trump] was overwhelmingly elected by an overwhelming majority of the United States citizens to be our commander in chief and that’s what he’s been doing,” I realize Pam Bondi could care less about anyone who is not Republican, just as I realize she is not a mathematician, but as soon as I hear the words "overwhelmingly elected by an overwhelming majority" I stop listening because she is either lying right off the bat or she is too ignorant to understand that less than 50% is not an overwhelming amount of anything.