Friday Talking Points -- Trump Singlehandedly Destroys World Economy

[ChrisWeigant]

So, does everyone feel wonderfully "liberated" now?

President Donald Trump, in his second term, decided to liberate himself from having any adults in the room when he made important decisions. Instead, he surrounded himself with ass-kissers and other assorted sycophants, all of whom tell him he is great no matter what crazy notion pops into his head.

This is the result. Yesterday, the Dow Jones average lost 1,600 points. Today it lost another 2,200 points. Trump has singlehandedly crashed the economy -- and we're only two days in.

At the end of a very frightening week, the Washington Post ran an article which explained the decision process that went into Trump's tariff scheme. It was precisely what you would expect -- a bunch of experts gave him a number of possible options, and then Trump ignored all of them and came up with his own plan -- which bears no relation to economic reality. Once he had decided, everyone enthusiastically went along with it. This article had one terrifying insider quote:

Inside and outside the White House, advisers say Trump is unbowed even as the world reels from the biggest increase in trade hostilities in a century. They say Trump is unperturbed by negative headlines or criticism from foreign leaders. He is determined to listen to a single voice -- his own -- to secure what he views as his political legacy.

"He's at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore," said a White House official with knowledge of Trump's thinking. "Bad news stories? Doesn't give a f---. He's going to do what he's going to do. He's going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail."

This isn't rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. This is the captain of the ship actively seeking out the biggest iceberg imaginable and then steering the ship straight towards it at full power. After the collision, he is now assuring everyone that they should ignore the water flooding the decks and that there's simply no reason to jump in a lifeboat, since everything is going to be just fine. Because he says so.

Before Trump made his announcement, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries made a prediction that it wasn't going to be remembered as "Liberation Day" (as Trump called it) but instead as "Recession Day." Turns out he might have been too optimistic, at that.

On the campaign trail last year, Trump told everyone he'd take us back to the wonderful economy we enjoyed during his first term. Well, he has succeeded, but not in the way he had hoped. The stock market is crashing worse than at any point since the very start of the COVID pandemic -- when Trump was also in charge. Trump wanted everyone to conveniently forget about that pesky pandemic (and what it did to the economy), but now we're all being reminded of just how bad things got at the end of his first term. Mission accomplished!

In fact, it's gotten so bad that even Republicans are now pushing back. Well, four of them at any rate, in the Senate (and, late-breaking news: one in the House as well). Senators Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul all voted for a Democratic measure to end the "national emergency" Trump declared so he could put his initial tariffs on Canada. The bill passed, but until a whole bunch of other Republicans decide to cross their Dear Leader it will go nowhere in the House. Even if such a bill passed both chambers, it would eventually need to overcome Trump's veto, so we're still a long way from Congress wresting the power of levying tariffs back from the president. However, if the stock market continues to slide and the economic effects of the tariffs really start hitting home to average American consumers, more and more Republicans might decide that enough is enough. We'll have to wait and see if this pushback does grow to such a level, but at least such an offramp does exist.

Trump ran for office promising that he'd bring prices down on everything. He has now singlehandedly driven prices up. He promised he'd get inflation down, but his tariffs are going to drive it way up. His one metric he uses to gauge the health of the economy is ridiculous, since trade deficits don't actually "rip off" America in any way (any more than you have a "trade deficit" with Safeway because they don't buy anything you have). He called his big announcement "Liberation Day," but what he's "liberating" everyone from is being able to afford buying stuff because it is cheap.

It's not just the way he talks about it all that is Orwellian, it's the math he used to figure out the individual tariffs as well. We wrote about this yesterday, so we'll just provide a quick list of some of what economists and politicians (from both sides of the aisle) are saying about this methodology and the announced tariffs:

• a disaster of idiocy


• not only bad economically, they're bad politically


• an indefensible foundation to an indefensible policy


• extraordinary nonsense


• basically gibberish... divorced from economic analysis


• a botched and child-like formula


• this is to economics what creationism is to biology, astrology is to astronomy, or RFK thought is to vaccine science


• this is bananas... indescribably crazy


• malignant stupidity


• one of the biggest unforced economic policy errors in US history

But Trump doesn't care. As (once again, because it is so frightening) one of his own White House officials put it: "He's at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore. Bad news stories? Doesn't give a f---."

Trump used to be rather obsessed with the stock market's performance. He obviously doesn't care about that anymore. Perhaps he'll care about plummeting poll numbers? One can only hope. His job approval numbers have gone underwater, but only by a few points (so far -- all of these polls were taken before "Liberation Day" ). But he's already down 10 points on how he's handling the economy, and over 12 points on how he's handling inflation. Let's see what the polls say in a week or two, when all that "liberation" really sinks in with the public. It's a pretty safe bet that Trump's polling is going to get worse -- the only real question is by how much.

Americans are not generally in favor of making sacrifices, to be blunt. Even in times of war or global pandemic. Neither of those applies now -- this trade war Trump just launched was entirely self-inflicted, for purely political reasons. His most faithful MAGA followers might see it as a point of pride to pay a whole bunch more for everything, but most people aren't going to have that reaction. Most people are horrified at what is happening to their 401(k) plans right now -- and that's before all the new price hikes show up in the stores.

Trump is not making America great again. He is instead making America small and insignificant. He is driving the rest of the world (including all our closest allies) away in fear. He's got this sepia-toned fantasy of us all going back to the 1950s, where America dominated a world shattered by World War II, but that's not how it's all going to play out. Back then, the rest of the world was grateful to us, for things like the Marshall Plan. But that concept runs counter to Trump's "America first" philosophy. There was an enormous earthquake in Asia last week, and rather than America taking a leading role in helping aid the recovery, we were nowhere to be found:

Hours after a 7.7-magnitude earthquake devastated Myanmar on Friday, sending dangerous tremors across Southeast Asia, the American officials charged with responding to the disaster received their termination letters from Washington.

Most of the personnel who would have made up a U.S. response team, including security and sanitation experts, were already on indefinite leave. Many of the U.S. programs that would have provided lifesaving materials, including fuel for ambulances and medical kits, were shuttered weeks ago. U.S. planes and helicopters in nearby Thailand, which have been used before for disaster relief, never made it off the ground.

America's response to the catastrophic earthquake has been crippled by the Trump administration's sweeping cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to eight current and former USAID employees who worked on Myanmar, as well as former State Department officials and leaders of international aid agencies. Three days after the disaster, American teams have yet to be deployed to the quake zone -- a marked contrast with other similar catastrophes, when U.S. personnel were on the ground within hours.

That is how the rest of the world sees us now. And that was before Trump launched a pointless and self-defeating trade war with every country on the planet -- including even one populated solely by penguins.

Trump is realigning the entire world against the United States. Europe and China are talking about having closer ties, since we simply cannot be relied upon anymore. Trump seems angriest at our closest allies, while being as friendly as possible to our adversaries. A few countries did manage to escape having any tariffs levied on them -- which included North Korea and Russia. What sort of signal does that send to would-be allies?

To top off the week, Trump skipped a ceremony welcoming home four dead soldiers (who died in a training accident in Lithuania this week... which Trump wasn't even briefed on and had to be informed about by a reporter's questions) and waltzed away from the crashing stock market so he could attend a fundraiser and a golf tournament. Nothing could better convey the message that he just doesn't care about anyone but himself.

You'll have to forgive us, since we are largely going to skip over all the other political news this week, but the impact of "Liberation Day" has pretty much overshadowed everything else.





It's not even worth an Honorable Mention, but it is something to make people smile, so we have to start with the story of two adorable little kids who were getting their photo taken during the big cherry blossom celebration in Washington D.C. this week. Their photo could have been ruined, since someone walked right behind them as the camera clicked. But rather than have the photographer digitally remove the image of the stranger, the parents proudly posted it unedited, because it turned out they were photobombed by none other than Barack Obama.

We do have an Honorable Mention for a young Democrat who is running for Congress this week. And she's already got a great slogan for her campaign:

On Monday, Kat Abughazaleh announced her candidacy for Congress with a YouTube video. "What if we didn't suck?" she asked.

The "we" she was referring to was the Democratic Party.

"Unfortunately, this party has become one where you have to look to the exceptions for real leadership as the majority work from an outdated playbook," she said to the camera.

Abughazaleh is a 26-year-old content creator who lives on the North Side of Chicago. She cut her teeth at the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, where she monitored right-wing media and has continued to make left-leaning videos and social media posts after she was laid off last year.

Her candidacy is a longshot, since she will be running against Representative Jan Schakowsky, who has held the seat since 1999 (the year Abughazaleh was born). Schakowsky will be hard to beat in a primary, since she hasn't earned any ire from Democrats for any particular reason -- the race won't be an ideological one so much as a generational one. And we all know the Democratic Party could use a few new fresh faces, so it'll be interesting to see how this goes. In related news, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is ahead in a new poll that asked New York voters who they'd prefer as senator: her, or Chuck Schumer. A.O.C. got 55 percent to Schumer's 36 percent.

But we have two Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week awards to hand out this week, the first going to a candidate who just chalked up an amazingly impressive win. Well, technically judicial candidates in Wisconsin are supposed to be non-partisan, but it was pretty easy to see which party Susan Crawford was aligned with, since none other than Elon Musk weighed in (heavily -- to the tune of $25 million) for the other candidate in the race.

The entire election for a seat on the state's supreme court became a referendum on Musk, in fact, which made it even easier for Crawford to win. Wisconsin has been decided in the last three presidential races by a single percentage point, but Crawford easily romped to a 10-point victory.

This was cause for much celebrating among Democratic ranks, far beyond the borders of the Badger State. Not only did they score a big and very important win (if the conservative had won, the entire balance of power on the court would have shifted), but they got to directly defeat Elon Musk. Musk is, not to put too fine a point on it, unpopular. And it seems the more people see and hear from him, the less popular he gets. Trying to flat-out buy an election doesn't always work, when the money is coming from someone seen as being akin to Dr. Evil.

The victory was about as sweeping as you can get, too. Every single county in the state shifted towards Democrats from the 2024 election results. Put this together with the overperformance of two Democrats in special House elections in Florida on the same day, and things are looking decidedly grim for Republicans. And all of this was before Trump intentionally wrecked the economy.

The midterms are a long way off, 'tis true, but the solid victory in Wisconsin gave Democrats a whole lot more hope, heading towards them. So not just for an impressive victory but for revitalizing the party's vibe nationwide, we have to award Susan Crawford a MIDOTW award.

But we have a second award to hand out as well, this week. Senator Cory Booker stood up in the Senate to give a speech. The time was seven o'clock at night. He spoke at length, and sat down a little after eight o'clock -- the next night.

It wasn't technically a filibuster, since it wasn't holding up a Senate vote, but Booker's performance did put him in the Senate record books for the longest speech ever. This broke a record which has meaning for Booker -- one of only 14 Black senators in American history -- since the previous record-holder was Strom Thurmond, who filibustered a Civil Rights Act for over 24 hours, way back in the 1950s.

Booker's entire speech was impressive. He did not merely read from the phone book or read children's books (as Ted Cruz did during his own lengthy speech, a few years back). He ripped into the Trump administration -- up one side and down the other -- for the entire 25 hours. He was inspirational and uplifting. It was precisely the sort of thing Democrats have been looking to their elected officials for ever since Trump took office, in fact.

Booker is no stranger to political theater, and he will most likely run for president again. But his speech was not just a stunt, it was a reaction to Democrats everywhere being downright frustrated that Democrats in Congress haven't been fighting the good fight nearly hard enough.

Booker showed that there still is some fighting spirit left in the Democratic Party. He set a fine example of how to do so, in fact. Which is why he's an easy choice for this week's Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week award. Well done, Senator Booker, well done. History will remember what you did this week.

[Congratulate Senator Cory Booker on his Senate contact page, to let him know you appreciate his efforts. Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice-Elect Susan Crawford is not in office yet, and we don't link to campaign websites as a rule, so you'll have to seek her contact info out yourself if you'd like to congratulate her.]





We are happy to say that no Democrat deeply disappointed us this week. The disappointment all came from the Republicans, and there sure was enough of that to go around, but it was good to see that no Democrat crossed the aisle in support of Trump taking the country's economy down in flames.

So we're going to put the Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week award back on the shelf until next week.




Volume 790 (4/4/25)

Obviously, it's a one-subject kind of week this week. So our talking points are all different riffs on the same theme -- ridiculing Trump's "Liberation Day" label for the Orwellian promise it truly is.

The worse things get, the more these talking points are going to sting.



The freedom to pay more

This one's got a preamble that could be cut and pasted for any of these.

"Trump declared 'Liberation Day' this week as he announced his plans to destroy the world's economy. He doesn't care what this is going to mean for average Americans -- he even said so, when he was talking about his automobile tariffs: 'I couldn't care less' if prices go up. That's his attitude, folks. As for the rest of us, we all get to be liberated from paying less money for things we buy. Isn't that great? We've all now got the freedom to pay more for the same products -- yay!"



The freedom to work longer

Hammer this one home.

"You know what else we've all been 'liberated' from? Having a nice secure retirement. Nobody needed to watch a horror film this week -- if you wanted to be scared, you just checked on how your 401(k) is doing. The stock market is entering bear territory, sharply down from when Trump took office. And it only looks like it's going to get worse and worse the more time goes by. Don't you all feel nice and 'liberated'? You've now got the freedom to work many more years than you had planned for -- what fun!"



The freedom of the rest of the world to hate us

This one's just embarrassing.

"Trump is not making America great, what he's doing is making America into a laughingstock and a country to be hated by the rest of the world. He has 'liberated' us from being seen as the leader of the free world -- a position we have held for over three-quarters of a century. America is now seen as not to be trusted. As a country to be feared, because it cannot provide the stability we've long stood for. As a country that refuses to help other countries in any way. As a country that will stab its friends in the back at the drop of a hat. So yeah, enjoy the freedom that comes with no longer being seen as a world leader -- doesn't that just make you proud?"



The freedom of watching prices rise

This one's going to hurt Trump worse than all the rest of it, most likely.

"Donald Trump got elected on a promise to lower inflation, but his tariffs are going to do the exact opposite. They're going to raise prices on just about everything. Trump brushes all this off by saying everyone can just 'feel a little pain,' no big deal. He has 'liberated' us all from seeing inflation go down, folks. We now have the freedom to watch prices spiral ever-upwards, with the promise of some pie-in-the-sky future where everything is going to somehow be wonderful -- don't you feel relieved by Trump's fantasy future?"



The freedom not to make money on tourism

This one only works in places that have tourist attractions, but that covers a whole lot of places, really.

"Trump is 'liberating' the tourism industry from making billions and billions of dollars on foreigners visiting the United States. And who can blame them? Who would want to visit the country that is destroying not just their own economy but the entire world's? People are making vacation plans elsewhere, because they cannot support what this country is doing. So all those hotels and resorts and tourist attractions will now have the freedom not to take in billions from foreigners any more -- because they definitely don't want to support 'America first' in any way."



The freedom for banks to rip you off

This one was just pure spite from the Republicans.

"You know what else Republicans have now 'liberated' us all from? Having bank fees like overdraft fees capped at only five bucks. The Senate voted to overturn the rule Joe Biden put into place which limited these fees, so they'll go right back up to $35 or whatever else the bank feels like charging you. So everyone should just revel in the freedom to give big banks more money for basic services -- oh boy!"



Freedom from growth

And we close with the term Hakeem Jeffries came up with.

"Trump called blowing up the economy for no reason 'Liberation Day,' but Hakeem Jeffries got it right when he called it 'Recession Day.' Because we're all about to be 'liberated' from watching the economy continue to grow. Instead, get used to an economy filled with pessimism and gloom. And the freedom to experience a recession now looks like the best case -- we've all just got to hope that the Trump Tax doesn't send the economy into a full-blown depression. So we've all got that to look forward to!"




Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com
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