The Daily Doom

The Daily Doom

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The Daily Doom
The Daily Doom
Nuts and Boltheads: The Nuts are Everywhere--Inside Biden's Head, Inside Trump's, Inside Kamala's, and Surrounding the White House in All the Talking Heads who Reported on Biden

Nuts and Boltheads: The Nuts are Everywhere--Inside Biden's Head, Inside Trump's, Inside Kamala's, and Surrounding the White House in All the Talking Heads who Reported on Biden

And, so, the stock market was too dizzy from the endless spin to even respond to the head-turning termination of nearly all tariffs today.

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David Haggith
May 29, 2025
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The Daily Doom
The Daily Doom
Nuts and Boltheads: The Nuts are Everywhere--Inside Biden's Head, Inside Trump's, Inside Kamala's, and Surrounding the White House in All the Talking Heads who Reported on Biden
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The acorn doesn’t fall far from the trees surrounding the nut house.

It appeared to be a big blow against the Trump Tariff Wars—news so big it could force me to change some of my predictions for the year based on the causes being fundamentally flipped on their heads. That would be OK by me because all my predictions are based on cause-and-effect, not on a crystal ball or prophetic guidance. When the causes are political, they can be changed, and a change in the causes will create a change in direction that has to be adjusted for.

Just ask Musk’s rocket-launch team. They know all about sudden changes in direction due to new causes. Besides, I’d be glad to see the inflation-skyrocketing tariffs ended. They are a disaster on top of our pre-scheduled economic collapse.

What happened today of major insignificance to the stock market, though it was actually very significant, was that a US trade court killed almost all of Trump’s tariffs, in one fell swoop, effective right now:

The three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that Trump exceeded presidential authority on the April 2 tariffs placed on more than 180 countries and territories.

"The Constitution assigns Congress the exclusive powers to 'lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,' and to 'regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,' " the Court wrote in granting summary judgment to a set of plaintiffs on the case.

"The question in the two cases before the court is whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 ('IEEPA') delegates these powers to the President in the form of authority to impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world. The court does not read IEEPA to confer such unbounded authority and sets aside the challenged tariffs imposed thereunder," the judges ruled.

"The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined," the Court said.

The stock market was—somewhat surprisingly to me at first—unphased, although the bond market softened a little as would be expected in terms of yields. Looking at what happened in the rest of the day, however, one can understand why the stock market was unresponsive.

The Trump administration, of course, is appealing the decision, but the decision was to take effect immediately. Team Trump has said that, if the trade court doesn’t withhold its enforcement of its decision immediately while it is under appeal, it will likely go to the Supreme Court tomorrow to get the Supreme Court to put a stay on the lower court’s action until the appeal can go through.

The Trump administration, as well as Goldman Sachs, also laid out several alternative courses it can and will take if this ruling is upheld in the appeal court’s ultimate decision. Those approaches will take a few months longer than the present emergency provisions Trump invoked in order to grasp these extraordinary economic powers away from congress.

Trump’s emergency basis for taking tariff control away from congress always felt to me like a huge stretch of anything that constitutes a true emergency, so I don’t see the court as being “activist” at all, as Peter Navarro claimed. The court effectively ruled that the situation Trump is trying to rectify is one that has existed for decades, so correcting these trade imbalances can hardly be construed as an emergency. It was a situation that was even allowed to continue after his 1.0 tariff deals. If something as longstanding as these trade imbalances can be considered an “emergency,” is there any political change that could not be considered an emergency act in order to seize more presidential power?

Other tariff approaches Team Trump has said it will take, as laid out in the articles that follow, should the trade court’s decision hold up, will likely involve congress, but the Trump team does have the majority in both houses to back them up, so they could likely push those through the old-fashioned legal way; though they might be delayed for months by filibusters. Still, filibusters eventually give way if you keep shoving.

In light of all the possible additional disarray for month’s to come, the stock market’s hesitation to take off and soar because of the momentary end of tariffs is easily understood. Today’s decision just means a more protracted fight with tariffs coming from different directions and in new amounts because Trump is still fully committed to tariffs—well, as fully committed as a man can be said to be when he removes most of them within 24 hours of implementing them.

Hence, all of today’s TACO memes in the humor section. Even John Bolthead, Trump’s chosen and highly influential national security adviser during the 1.0 regime, said this week that the TACO trade in stocks is probably convincing Putin he has nothing to fear from new Trump sanctions because they will likely end as soon as they begin.

This is all the kind of uncertainty that stock markets loathe, and today’s court decision means there will be a lot more uncertainty for months to come if the tariffs are taken down because Trump will seek out every way possible to stretch what it means to operate inside of the law, turning that inside-out. Normal understandings of words like “emergency” need no long apply.

(We’ll all go nuts trying to figure out what is going to hit us before all of this is over.)

Mentally taxed out and tapped out

Speaking of “committed,” Jake Tapper’s new book on how people like himself missed seeing Biden’s dementia is a hoot. According to Jake “Tapped-out” Tapper, Biden, who should have been committed to a mental institution for his and our safety, was so brilliant that he was able to fool the press and all the people working with him. No mea-culpa in that pivotal exposé, except that if you stop to think for just a second, you’ll realize Tapped-in-the-Head Jake’s argument says the entire press, including Tap-House Jake, is incredibly stupid if they can be duped for four entire years by a man with serious dementia! Jake must have been hitting the beer awfully hard for those four years to not have noticed the president was regularly shaking hands with curtains after his word-salad talks.

What a farce of a book! It is not the press’s fault or White House cabinet member’s fault that Biden was so brilliant they couldn’t see how full of dementia he was!

But, then, I wonder if Trump’s lawyers don’t realize how much they just made Trump seem deranged, too, when they argued in court that Trump suffered “mental anguish and confusion” from 60 Minutes’ Kamala Harris Interview. Really? Mental anguish and confusion from a president of the United States over watching an interview because it edited his diminutive opponent to make her look a smidge more intelligent than she actually is, as if any improvement in how she comes across would be a high bar to achieve? Please! Kamala’s endless loop conversations all needed editing just to prevent us from being bored by her redundancy.

She routinely made Sarah Palin sound like a frequent-flyer first-class upgrade. Who wouldn’t edit Mamala when her next thousand words always just restated multiple times what she said in her first fifty? Tina Fey would not have added any more to Kalifornia Kamala than she did to Putin-Watching Palin (“I can see Russia from my house”) to make us laugh hysterically. This is practically verbatim Kamala:

“We need to do this together because when we do things together we have togetherness and that makes us more united as a nation … together … because we are less divided when we’re together.” (Dizzy yet from all the loops? Of course they edited her, or their audience would fall asleep.)

Are these people ALL really the best our two parties can come up with??? And the mainstream press can’t see the problem?

(Then help the non-mainstream press just stay alive.)

I got more mental anguish from watching a round-table of the biggest talking heads in the mainstream press act astounded after Trump’s debate with Biden when they all pretended to see for the first time that Biden was losing his mind because it was suddenly too obvious for them to be able to figure out how they were going to hide it. If Trump’s lawyers aren’t lying through their teeth when they claim the edited interview hurt Trump by confusing him and caused him mental anguish just to make a case against 60-Minutes, then perhaps I need to be even more concerned about Trump’s frail state of confusion than I needed to be about #NoMoJo.

Actually listening to Kamala in entirety is what caused mental anguish for all of us. Editing her down did us all a big favor. I didn’t die of old age while waiting for her to finish her closing fiftieth loop on a solitary thought. 60 Minutes probably knew about Trump’s infamous short attention span, and thought they were helping him out by getting it down to byte size.

Not going mad, just getting even

At least, Trump had the presence of mind today to damage the US tech industry—probably another reason stocks failed to rise—by banning the sale of any important tech products to China:

Late in the cash session, markets turned sharply lower after a Financial Times report revealed the Trump administration is pressuring U.S. chip design firms to halt sales to China. The news triggered a marketwide selloff, with chip designer Synopsys closing down nearly 10%….

Then, at 7 p.m. ET, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X: "The U.S. will begin revoking visas for Chinese students….

Adding to the trade tensions, sources familiar with the matter told The New York Times overnight that the U.S. Commerce Department had suspended certain export licenses allowing U.S. companies to supply engine parts and technology to China's state-owned aircraft manufacturer…. Over time, the move could significantly undermine China's aviation.

It’s a crazy world. At least, we can continue to count on that remaining a stable fact.

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