Big Storm Swirls around Trump and his Economy
While I may be tempted to write in greater depths about some of these stories in my weekend Deeper Dive, we’ll have to see what more the week brings, but today sure brought a whirlwind of news. The swirling headlines of economic and maybe political collapse feel appropriate where I live as a second large wind-and-rain storm poured through again today, bringing threats of renewed floods … just like the media was flooded with news that must have created quite a tempest behind the scenes in the White House.
Instead of going into depth on any one story, I want to give the general sense of the swirl of chaos that swept the headlines by tying them together in a narrative.
The belittled Bureau of Late Statistics (BLS)
The BLS is a lot more than a day late and a dollar short, and so is the economy they reported today.
On the economic storm front, the Bureau of Belabored Statistics finally got its belated report in, and it went as I figured. Unemployment rose—not by a lot but by more than economists had forecast. Jobs plunged in October when the BLS’s info-gathering was crippled and then bounced back in November to a still recessionary but positive figure. I don’t trust any of the numbers of this overDOGEd and shutdown government department that has also been ordered to give better news, or heads will roll. The biggest head already rolled over a less weak report than today’s. So, there may have been some fear in giving even this slowly withering data out.
The gist of this story, as told by the Trump administration, is that jobs are sloughing away as expected. Nothing remotely surprising there. The economy remains in stealth-recession mode, slowly creeping and receding away. You can read the labor details in the boldfaced articles below. Naturally, the White House shrugged it off, and naturally the stock market did, too. If anything, investors were probably disappointed that the news wasn’t a little worse because that would mean a faster upward slope of new cheap-and-easy Fed funding.
Living in the illusion of affluence
Speaking of Fed funding, another article chimes in with my argument that the Fed’s latests move back to buying up large amounts of government debt is nothing short of all-out quantitative easing all over again, even though they say otherwise.
As the author points out, if this doesn’t mean it’s “QE forever,” then nothing ever will. As I said yesterday, the jolt back to QE clearly shows that the Fed cannot ever tighten its balance sheet without getting thrown right back into having to unwind its unwinding of the balance sheet by rewinding it all back up. So, here we are again.
Should be good for metals but horrid for inflation, as another article spells out. In fact, it is only because it will be so good for raising inflation that it is likely to be good for metals. On the metals theme, another article points out the big move China just made that will make silver more rare in the US and likely all parts of the world outside of China. It’s not clear if they are just not going to sell a certain form of silver to the US in retaliation for tariffs or they are not going to sell it anywhere.
Of course, with tariffs being a huge push for inflation, keep on banking on hotter inflation.
And if you think the bite of inflation is not all that bad during the dearth of government inflation reports, look at today’s survey of people making six-figure incomes and see how much they say it is hurting. They sound like people making far less than that, and they are showing all the symptoms that people making less than that are showing.
They’re said to be living in “the illusion of affluence” as the lifestyle of a good many in that category is only held together by pretending to others that their Venmo isn’t working, by skipping meals, and even taking a second job. 64% say they are barely staying afloat. I’m sure they’re floating in a very nice house (most of it owed to the bank) and driving a fairly new car, but they feel the strains of inflation pulling apart the lifestyle they have come to expect.
War lords
Here was a fun little shot of reality. Putin let Europe know today that, if Europe ever does attack Russia, it will be a very short war. I’ll let you infer what kind of war that is.
Meanwhile, the Peace President is now blocking all the oil tankers he has sanctioned with what he describes as the largest armada in the history of South America. Clearly, nothing shows Trump’s war on Venezuela is a war on drugs more than creating a blockade on oil tankers. Meanwhile Trump’s Chief of Staff made it clear this new conflict is a war about regime change. No question about it in her mind.
White House whirl of words
Speaking of Trump’s Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles let loose a political whirlwind of sound bites that became the most torrential storm of all today from the second-most-powerful person in the White House. She did an interview in which it sounds like she blew the roof off the White House. (You’d have to add that to the recent East Wing damage.) Many of Trump’s critics said this must have been her exit interview, given how many people she torched. Wiles later backpedaled much of what she said by claiming it was all taken out of context.
I somewhat agree with her, as I pored over the stories: The sound bites don’t sound QUITE as significant when you read some of them in context, but I found it flabbergasting that someone who guided Trump’s MAGA campaign and who is the gatekeeper to the president and who seems as wily as Wiles would ever throw out so many choice soundbites and trust the mainstream press not to devour them and to make a lot of noise, spinning them up. HOW do you not see that coming?
Here are some of the choice quotation blow-bys. You can read the stories that follow to get more context and see how all of this swirled up around news of the interview today:
Trump has the “personality of an alcoholic.” (He agrees, by the way.) And Wiles attributed her ability to work with Trump to having grown up with an alcoholic father.
JD Vance is a “conspiracy theorist.”
Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” on her mishandling of the Epstein Files by giving out “binders full of nothingness” after promising far more.
Trump many law suits through the DoJ are entirely about “score settling” against his enemies, which she counseled against. It’s about vengeance. “When there’s an opportunity” for retribution, “he will go for it.”
Trump was lying when he said Bill Clinton had been to Epstein Island. The White House knows this is not true. “The president was wrong about that.”
She tried her best to get Trump to back down on his tariffs, and so did many in the White House where there was “huge disagreement” about the tariffs, but he ran full speed with them against better counsel. The tariffs have “been more painful than I expected.” (They’ve been exactly as painful as I expected; but her point is that she expected them to be bad, but they were worse than that.)
Venezuela is about regime change. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” she said. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”
Trump’s talk about seeking a third term was just for the sake of “driving people crazy.”
Elon Musk is an “avowed ketamine” user who says dumb things “when he’s macrodosing,” and he’s an “odd, odd duck” whose sometimes-irrational actions left her “aghast.” The part that left her particularly “aghast” was the terrible way he beat USAID to death—all the good parts (in her opinion) right along with the bad. (I wrote all along that ALL of DOGE’s approach to everything it did was totally ham-fisted, and that is why they had to hire back so many people that they fired.) She thinks it was very destructive.
Interestingly, the one comment she walked back the most was her claims about Musk’s drug use, which everyone knows is true. She said she never said such a thing and never would. And then the reporter who wrote the interview played back the tape in which she said exactly what he claimed she had said. Oops. Makes one wonder how much of the rest of her protesting against the interview is equally specious.
“The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history,” she wrote on X.
“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.
Maybe. You can see in parts of the articles how some of the sound bites don’t sound quite as harsh in context. Yet, they don’t sound good for Trump either, and it’s hard to believe anyone in her position and with her acumen would let drop so many pieces of bloody, red meat all around the White House for the media hounds and would, then, be surprised they ran with all of it. What? You threw the turkey out the window and are surprised the Bumpus hounds ran off with it?
What the heck is going on there? Wiles is now described as being in damage control, though Trump still supports her. We’ll have to see if this windstorm dies down or becomes a full-on political tornado.
She followed her rebuttal of her own interview by giving the usual mandatory sycophant flattery that all of Trump’s cabinet give at every meeting:
“The truth is the Trump White House has already accomplished more in eleven months than any other President has accomplished in eight years and that is due to the unmatched leadership and vision of President Trump….
The Trump critics were rewarded with a feeding frenzy from the White House today. You can see all of that in multiple headlines below. Why she threw red meat everywhere is hard to say.
“It’s hard to square the image of Susie Wiles as this smart, disciplined operator with the person who decided to divulge all of the Administration’s secrets … in exchange for a photo shoot.”
Indeed. Hard to square. The response was huge, sometimes humorous, and often dumbfounded as to why she would do this, and certainly not anything the White House would have wanted … unless it needed a really, really big Epstain distraction.
The most charitable response ran like this:
The Susie Wiles interview seems like a major unforced error. There was no need to get profiled….
Her comments were uncharacteristically careless, and she came off as undermining the Administration’s messaging and belittling her boss.
If the WH wanted a distraction from the Epstain, however, it failed miserably because there is lot more new stuff about Epstein in the headlines below, too. None however that is specifically damaging about Trump, but it certainly shows the story is not going away.
Where you really see Trump’s MAGA backing staring to disintegrate is with Nick Fuentes, a former strong supporter of Trump who says, after seeing what Trump wrote about the deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife, allegedly at the throat-slashing hands of their own son, that Trump has “no center”—that he is “simply empty.” Fuentes rails on and on about Trump’s lack of moral fabric or conscience. You can watch the video clip in the article below.
Meanwhile, another supporter on the Christian side who is so far right, you might just contract that to “so fright!”—a self-proclaimed prophet who claimed God told him to vote for Trump and who encouraged his many followers to follow him on that, too, is now telling all of his followers that Trump turned out to be something that looks much more like the Antichrist.
What a wild world of swirling news stories today delivered.