Tariff TACO Tantrums and Mega MAGA Meltdowns
Trump's biggest supporters become disillusioned and enraged as Epstein's clients all get a free pass. They don't exist!
The stock market threw a tantrum today when it heard that Trump is increasing tariffs. The very fact that investors recoiled from the news shows they are as lunatic in their irrational exuberance as I said they are. There was nothing to be surprised by here. For the reasons I pointed out, it has always been clear that Trump believes a good deal is one where Americans pay more taxes! It’s as simple as that. Investors were fools to price stocks up in hopes that tariff damage was coming down.
The TACO trade
Trump was only delaying his tariffs because stock and bond markets originally balked, but he made it clear throughout that a good deal was one where Americans get to pay higher taxes on their imports than foreigners have to pay on imports from America, which, of course, they are free to dodge because they have every other country in the world to trade with, and we don’t (without paying high tariffs on all of them because high tariffs on everyone is the goal).
Trump has said all along he intends to reduce income taxes by adding tariffs because other countries pay for those taxes. We’ll see soon enough just how much other countries pay by either subsidizing their own industries so those businesses can lower their prices to Americans or by those businesses reducing their prices on their own to offset the American tax on Americans to where Americans don’t pay any increase. My belief is that you are going to see Americans holding most of the bill.
Trump is already extending and pretending on his 90-day tariff deadline. This time we have a lighter seasoned TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out). Having already backpedaled a little on his ninety-day extension by having his Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, notify the nation that the July deadline this week is not that important, Trump is now pulling a soft fade. He told everyone as we went into the weekend that he would be starting to send letters out to about ten nations a week, telling them what their unilaterally decided higher tariffs will be since they didn’t negotiate.
By saying this, he has as good as admitted that many nations have not made deals with the US and are, apparently not even close to deals to where they must be cajoled into taking action. In fact, the only deals that have closed so far were with China and the UK—both of which were partial deals. While Trump claims a third deal has been closed with Vietnam, the public has not seen it in writing yet. So, after a ninety-day moratorium on his extraordinarily higher tariffs, he’s managed to close, at most, three deals. So much for his braggadocious claims that his phone was ringing off the hook with nations begging to make deals. On the contrary, he still has to try to cudgel them into negotiation.
What is important to note here is that, as I predicted, every one of the deals that has been signed has been at a higher tariff level, not at the lower levels the deluded stock and bond markets chose to believe Trump’s stalling would bring. The stall was intended to try to negotiate deals that allow the US to put higher tariffs on other nations’ exports to the US than the retaliatory tariffs they place on our exports to them. That is what Trump got in the three deals he is willing to boast about, and he has made clear to all the nations who are getting letters that their higher tariffs will be placed on top of a tariff rate equal to all their retaliatory tariffs on the US.
We, as Americans, gain the privilege of being able to pay much higher taxes on our imports of their stuff than they will have to pay on the things they import from us. So, that’s a win!
Now, here is how the extend and pretend works: When Trump starts sending out his ten or so letters per week, telling selected nations what their new higher tariffs will be, he’s said the new tariffs will kick in on August 1. That is a de facto extension of the deadline when you consider that all of his original tariffs kicked in on the day he announced them or within a few days. This time they come with a built-in delay.
Trump is trying to avoid looking like the TACO king by giving the nations that are not negotiating a one-month extension before the new rate kicks in, hoping they will leap to making a deal during that time if he reminds them what their default tariff will be (as if they don’t already know). He’s announcing those deals this week to look like he applied these tariffs right on his moratorium deadline when, in fact, he’s holding them off for another month to allow more time to negotiate. TACO!
That way, if a deal is struck in the next month, he can announce along the way that the new tariff rate he just sent them will not be applied in August because he’s replaced that with the better deal he negotiated. It’s really the same thing he’s done each time in the past, except that if they don’t negotiate, then I guess MAYBE they’ll finally get stuck with the higher rate. We’ll see about that, though, once we see how stocks and bonds respond to these new letters going out and how Trump responds to the ruction in the marketplace that his brave new unilateral rates cause, especially when the other side responds with retaliatory rates of its own … again. So far, the markets look unhappy with bond yields rising moderately today (prices falling) and stocks falling about 1%.
As Seeking Alpha wrote this past weekend:
Wall Street's focus next week will squarely be on trade developments, as a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs against U.S. trading partners is set to expire on Wednesday. U.S. President Donald Trump has said he will not extend the pause and will start sending letters to countries specifying the tariff rates they will have to pay.
Except that giving them another month in which to negotiate is extending the pause.
With substantially higher tariffs possibly being implemented amid a lack of further announcements of trade deals, investor sentiment will certainly be tested and the benchmark S&P 500's … record levels could come under pressure.
Yes, ninety days and almost no deal announcements with those who were ringing the phone off the hook, clamoring for deals.
There might be a sale price on TACOs coming up shortly after the unilaterally applied tariffs are announced if stock and bond markets continue to respond as they did today, which is as they did in the past rounds of unilateral high tariffs along with the inevitable retaliatory tariff announcements that followed from other nations.
There is all kinds of wiggle room in this new phase for Trump to say, “Well, X nation called me back and we’ve been working hard on a deal now, and I like to be a nice guy because, you know, it’s more about getting the deal than about the deadline, so we’ll see how it goes, but I’m giving them another month to work out the details now that they’re negotiating.”
More fun and folly to come! Endless chaos of businesses having no idea what to plan for. As Raymond Reddington, the master schemer, would say on Blacklist, “Oh, how fun!”
MAGA mania
The meltdowns among Trump’s staunchest MAGA supporters went absolutely manic today. Take, as a leading example, Alex Jones, who spent the morning crying and said he could feel the vomit coming up in his throat because of how Trump, Dan Bongino, Pam Bondi and Kash Patel have joined the Deep State. Jones spent his morning commute literally choking back tears on his dash cam as he relayed to his viewers the news that AG Pam Bondi has announced that there is no Epstein client list and, so, there will apparently be no court trials of pedophiles either.
All of Team Trump appears to be on board with this, but the conspiracy-leaning voices who have long been his core media support are in a total tirade. Understandably so. Think about what the announcement means: Pam Bondi assured all of them and the rest of the world months ago that the Epstein client list was sitting on her desk right while she was being interviewed on television. Now she says there is no such list. She was either a baldfaced liar then or is a baldfaced liar now. You just have to figure out in which timeframe is she lying to everyone?
The only reason Jones could see for this shock announcement is that Team Trump, including the Donald, has joined the CIA’s and FBI’s coverup for the Deep State. According to Jones this is the biggest disaster to hit MAGA yet, and, he adds, the movement is coming unravelled everywhere over it. Numerous other Deep MAGA media personalities are also quoted up in arms over the revelation in the articles below that no client list exists.
Think further about what this means about Trump covering for big names. EVEN IF NO ACTUAL LIST EXISTS, it would be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel to go through the many Epstein videos and create your own list of all the pedophiliac users of young girls, BUT Team Trump also said today that no images from the videos would be released in order to protect young women from further damage by this pedophilia.
Now, hold on minute! You just admitted you have videos of pedophilia acts. You can easily create your own list from that rich trove and use the videos as evidence. Moreover, if you don’t want to protect all the MEGA-rich, MAGA-powerful people who frequented Epstein Island (such as maybe Trump himself), then why not make the videos public but block out all the sexual parts and the young girls’ faces, while keeping the faces of the rich abusers fully in frame? You don’t have to protect the abusers in order to protect the abused children from further pedophile abuse. So, that’s a bogus reason.
Even if you refuse to go that far with the imagery, you can still easily create a list of girl-abusers and go public with the list of names that you will be taking to court. But it doesn’t sound like that is going to happen either. Trump promised an unredacted list, outside of any redaction absolutely essential for US security. Bondi did, too. A full list. Instead, they are delving no list. Sort of like during Trump 1.0, when his team delivered no effort at all to “lock her up,” and we all heard that chant, which was encouraged and baited by Trump enough times for everyone to know who I’m alluding to there.
Inconclusion
So, today we got tariffs going back up from anywhere between 25% to 70% above whatever tariffs other nations apply, and we got total immunity, it sounds like, for the Epstein Island Pedophile ring of baby-eating, pizza-eating, girl-raping lizards. We don’t want to be shaming the important people because, as Trump said about the Clintons, “They’re good people.” (Or good lizards, anyway.) Come to think of it, that is also what he said about the likes of people who ran over BLM protestors with their cars, not because they got trapped in the angry mob and needed to break out of it, but by driving into the crowd in one case, just to mow down as many as the driver could.
This is the kind of person the majority of US voters selected as a president. He turns the pedophiles, including the Clintons, free from their crimes, exonerates people who smashed in Capitol windows and brained cops with sticks, flag poles and fire extinguishers and who arrived with a gallows to “hang Mike Pence” and with zip-ties to bind up the hands of kidnapped members of congress, except that they didn’t wind up finding many they could kidnap (because that is what you call it when you capture people against their will and bind them up and hold them hostage). Suddenly, people are surprised to find their strongman is turning loose the Epstein social club, where we all saw pictures of the Donald hanging out, setting them all free???
Consider also, what you have to conclude about Dan Bongino: Either he is lying through his teeth now to protect the worst of the worst from justice by claiming no one assassinated Epstein and going along with the “no-list” story (keeping young women from getting justice) -or- he was a conspiratorial nut job when he said over and over that Epstein was assassinated by the Biden administration and their Deep State members and then later when he claimed there was a client list. Again, Bongino was either an errant nut job or lying back then -or- as deputy FBI director, he’s lying now. It’s binary!
The articles below are fecund with MAGA meltdown madness over the obvious lies that have ensnared many. It is just a matter of trying to reach a conclusion about which times they were all lying! And either way looks bad!
A memo published by Axios states that a review found no proof Epstein blackmailed powerful figures, kept a “client list,” or was murdered….
How convenient. Not only did Epstein keep “no incriminating client list,” to use the exact wording in the actual memo (see the stories in the headlines below), but there is no proof of him blackmailing clients either. This new claim by the Trump administration takes down the whole conspiracy that claimed the US FBI and/or CIA used Epstein to blackmail high members of society with videos of their corruption -or- it puts Trump in league now with the Deep State that has long guarded this conspiracy from factual exposure. And that is what Alex Jones brings it all down to.
Worst of all, it does appear there will be no criminal investigation beyond anything already in action:
“We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
So, nothing to see there, Folks.
To prove there was never a government assassination, the …
DOJ also released over 10 hours of video footage from outside Epstein’s jail cell to support the claim he killed himself, despite previous reports that the CCTV footage outside the cell had been lost.
Good luck for them; they found it! Or course, how hard is it for AI to create a video of the cell door that shows nothing happening?
“The FBI’s independent review of this footage confirmed that from the time Epstein was locked in his cell at around 10:40 pm on August 9, 2019, until around 6:30 am the next morning, nobody entered any of the tiers in the SHU.”
Well, that’s good enough for me. (Tin hats on!) We have video of a door that doesn’t show what’s going on inside the door. Are we sure the CIA didn’t just falsely date-stamp video from the day before? Week before? Month before? Are we certain they didn’t have AI generate video from real footage taken the day after when no one was in the cell, superimposing Epstein walking into his cell from one of the days before, and changing him to be holding or wearing something slightly different or to do something slightly different so no one could prove it was an image of him entering the cell days prior? Do we know they could not hide someone inside the cell before Epstein entered to drug him and hang him and then that they didn’t keep the assassin in there until the footage ended at 6:30? Are we sure this cell isn’t rigged with a trap door? No, a video that shows nothing happening is all the proof we need.
Case closed, I guess, since no evidence has been found that would indicate any need for investigation into pedophiles.
“The files relating to Epstein include a large volume of images of Epstein, images and videos of victims who are either minors or appear to be minors, and over ten thousand downloaded videos and images of illegal child sex abuse material and other pornography,” the memo reads.
So, images of Epstein and images of the victimized girls, but no images of all those who used them? How does that happen? Were the victimizers all ghosts or witches who don’t show up on camera? You can see the victims but not the victimizers? As a result, no images will be released or used as public evidence in trials against the abusers in order to protect the girls?
“Much of the material is subject to court-ordered sealing. Only a fraction of this material would have been aired publicly had Epstein gone to trial, as the seal served only to protect victims and did not expose any additional third-parties to allegations of illegal wrongdoing.”
Say what? You have 10,000+ images of child sex abuse and not a single one of them shows the parties involved in perpetrating the abuse? Or is the operative word here “additional?” Or was this just entertainment material kept on hand at Epstein Island?
Even after the review, the memo states the DOJ and FBI “found no basis to revisit the disclosure of those materials and will not permit the release of child pornography.”
That’s a nice cover. So, we’re done here then, right? Maybe not. Apparently the 10,000+ images were not just entertainment kept in the library:
The materials were laced with confidential details concerning more than 1,000 victims.
The materials were illed with confidential details of the victims but no details of the people victimizing them?
“This includes specific details such as victim names and likenesses, physical descriptions, places of birth, associates, and employment history,” the memo stated.
But nothing like that on the victimizers. Huh! Nothing you could readily build a list from if Epstein actually didn’t keep a formal list? Thus, there will be …
no further disclosure” of information on the case.
If memory from a lifetime serves, I’m pretty sure that, if you take perps to court for their crimes, you have a right to publicly name who you are charging. So, might as well do it in a list of all the names going to court!
But Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, who are qualified to run the FBI told us for a long time that blackmail was happening, and that many very high-strata people were caught up in this. So, spreading fake conspiracy theories is what makes you qualified to get a job running the FBI, or is it a great knack for covering up actual conspiracies? It would be fun to see Dan asked the question, “Did you spread fake conspiracy theories prior to your engagement with the FBI, or are you covering actual conspiracies now?” Again, its binary.
The hasty conclusion to a case that has been the subject of so many conspiracy theories from many in the MAGA base did not sit well with some of the biggest names on the far right.
I would think not.
Much of the ire was directed at Attorney General Pam Bondi — who claimed, in a February interview on Fox News, that the Epstein client list was “sitting on her desk.”
I would think so.
One certainly does wonder how she had a list sitting on her desk that never existed. You can read the many MAGA outcries against this madness in the stories that follow. Something tells me Team Trump has not successfully buried this story! Stay tuned for the endless saga about trafficking young women to absolutely NO ONE!
“Donald Trump doesn’t make empty promises. I think promises made, promises kept. And that’s why we’re all there to carry out his directive about making America safe and prosperous.” —Pam Bondi
Alrighty then.
“It’s beyond insane. You couldn’t try to hurt yourself worse. You couldn’t try to discredit the FBI worse than what they’ve done. Pam Bondi, all of it. All those videos are saying, ‘Yeah, she’s seen the videos, it’s all coming out.’ And then now it doesn’t exist?… What!? What!!? WHAT!!!? Damnit!!!… Next the DOJ will say, ‘Actually, Jeffrey Epstein never even existed.’ This is over-the-top sickening.” —Alex Jones
Or, as Julian Assange concluded,
The reason the FBI wouldn’t let the Epstein client list come out in court, is because, if they did, their blackmail would no longer be useful, and the CIA would lose their control over all the powerful they spent decades setting up.
That is the thing about blackmail: it only works prior to actually using it.
(Stories covering all the quotes and many more from Trump’s enraged supporters can be found in the headlines below, available to everyone for free today!)
Economania (national & global economic collapse plus market news)
Dow falls 400 points after Trump announces 25% tariff on Japan, Korea goods
10-year Treasury yield rises as Trump extends tariff deadline
Buckle Up: The Jobs Market Just Rolled Over
ICE raids derail Los Angeles economy as workers go into hiding
‘America’s Deficit Reckoning’: How the U.S. debt spiral could spark a crisis
Money Matters (monetary policy, metals, cryptos, currency wars & going cashless)
Kaboom: Fireworks in America's Money System
GoldHaven on the Verge of Releasing Results
Wars & Rumors of War, Revolts, Hacks & Cyberattacks + AI threats
Trump Says Ukraine Needs Patriot Missiles for Its Defense, Chides Putin
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Israel Bombs Ports, Power Plant In Yemen After Month-Long Pause
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The Force-Feeding of AI on an Unwilling Public
Trump Trade Wars & Turf Wars
Trump says he is about to raise tariffs as high as 70% on some countries
Trump announces 25% tariffs on Japan, South Korea in first U.S. trade letters
Trump administration teases more trade deals, but shifting tariff deadlines raise new questions
Donald Trump wanted 90 trade deals in 90 days. How many has he cracked?
Trump advisor Navarro rips Apple’s Tim Cook, says he’s not moving factories out of China fast enough
Political Pandemonium & Social Senescence (socio-political issues & events)
Trump AG Bondi, Reportedly Concludes Epstein Had No Client List, Killed Himself
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Trump’s Fiscal Policy Seen as Reason to Avoid Long-Term Treasurys
The "Big Beautiful Bill" and America's Real Welfare Queens
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Ice Now Has Budget Bigger Than Russian Military!
Mexico braced for Trump’s mass deportations. They haven’t happened, though not for lack of success
Trump ramps up deportation with new stunts and Massive ICE funding flows
Carnage breaks out at Portland ICE detention center as woke crowd tries to storm holding cells
Social Security letter on taxes sends confusing message, some experts say
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‘Elon has finally woken up’: Musk battles to save Tesla from Trump
Air Force Abandons Project With Musk’s SpaceX
Musk Blasts 'Fat, Drunken Slob' Bannon: 'Will Go Back To Prison'
Musk’s America Party could split Republican vote, Trump allies fear
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An Isolated Iran Looks to BRICS for Allies, Testing New World Order
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Nearly Half Of American Expats Ready To Ditch Their U.S. Citizenship
Shari Redstone Did Her Best … to appease a Billionaire
Inside the Media's Web Traffic Apocalypse
Rep. Mark Green resigns, leaving Speaker Johnson with an even narrower majority in the House
A Pox Upon Us (the plagues, pandemics & health police of the 2020s)
Measles cases reach 33-year record high as outbreaks spread
Calamity, Catastrophe & Climate Craziness
Texas floods leave at least 51 dead, 27 girls missing as rescuers search devastated landscape
Texas flood death toll set to top 100 as family members summoned to Kerrville to ID bodies with DNA
Texas Officials Slam Trump’s National Weather Service for Failed Forecast
As Floods Hit, Key Roles Were Vacant at Weather Service Offices in Texas
Millions of flies to be dropped over Texas to combat flesh-eating maggots
Doomer Humor
Of course trump and his rich cronies were on that list. But half of the country voted for this along with giving him a free get out of jail pass. Nobody believes the Epstein list doesn’t exist but there is not a darned thing they can do about it. Half the country gave trump total immunity.