Trump's Got A Guy Named Steve With Charts That Say The Economy's Great!
And like a hundred new tariffs, but whatever.
Attention Walmart shoppers! Do The Groceries seem more expensive? Unemployed and can’t find a job? All of that is in your imagination, because President Donald J. Trump has got charts, beautiful charts, charts with new, secret data that no one has ever seen before, and still can’t really see because the numbers are very small and blurry. But the charts and this white man named Steve who saw the numbers inscribed on a secret tablet he was directed to by some peepstones say YOU’RE WRONG ABOUT THE ECONOMY, America!
Poor Abe Lincoln, hanging his head in shame. What is that X axis? Why are those blurry numbers comparing some kind of data from Trump’s first term to Biden’s? Oh, because you can’t count COVID, COVID numbers don’t count! TRUMP CALLED A DO-OVER! Hey, who was the president who failed to control COVID when it arrived in the first place, lied about the numbers of infected and dead, and pushed fake cures? Also wouldn’t Trump’s first term be OBUMMER’S or BIDEN’S economy, didn’t Trump just claim that the first months of 2025 was Trump-economy sloppy seconds?
Whatever, no reporter is going to ask him about any of that, and risk getting themselves and their organization banished from the Oval Office or plane like some kind of AP, Wall Street Journal, or HuffPost. The scrum has got to triage its questions around his goldfish attention span and the hairplug-trigger rage that explodes the instant he gets any sense he’s being challenged.
Yes, the American consumer is doing just great, and also going to be paying 50 percent tariffs on goods from India now, and higher tariffs on goods from 90-ish other countries as of last night (though even the New York Times is unsure of the exact number). But that is good, because Dear Leader says Americans buy too much Indian stuff, and India buys Russian oil, and Vladimir Putin himself will decide when he wants to stop bombing Ukrainian hospitals and if he wants peace talks with Ukraine or not, THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER, NOW FILTHY REPORTERS GET OUT!
So hard to keep up with Trump’s tariffs and all the belfry-bat numbers and deadlines flapping around in his brain! Yesterday was a deadline that he had set the week before, with new tariff rates once again seemingly pulled directly out of his ass, including a 25 percent tariff on goods from India. And then the regime pulled the exact same clown act on India that they did on Switzerland last week.
LAST WEEK!
Last Wednesday, Indian trade negotiators were reclining with some chai, listening to Lata Mangeshkar, confident that they had a deal, because that’s what Trump’s art-of-dealmakers Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and trade rep. Jamieson Greer had told them. In February Indian PM Narendra Modi and Dear Leader were a couple of cozy dosas, exchanging warm hugs and praise for each other. But yet, at the 11th hour, as he is wont to do, Bhagwan Trump decreed NO DEAL, and announced a 50 percent tariff that will start in three weeks.
Who pays for those tariffs again? Oh look, Scott Bessent finally said it out loud, after a root-canal’s worth of being asked WHO WRITES THE CHECK, MOTHERFUCKER?!
YOU DO, AMERICA! And though some foreign and domestic companies may have been eating those tariffs, hoping that sanity might yet prevail, they’re not going to forever.
Trump’s unhinged negotiating and re-negotiating of trade embargoes with himself only brings India and the rest of the world closer to each other, of course, and especially to Russia, China, and everybody’s New Best Friend, Brazil, so rich in oil, coffee, and soybeans. Time to cut down more rainforest! Those American soybeans rotting in the fields are also a HOAX, America!
Oh, also there’s going to be a hundred percent tariffs on semiconductors now, to force companies to build factories in the US. Which is now more expensive to do, what with all those tariffs. But Trump decreed, “If you’re building, there will be no charge.” Because he, Bwana Trump, can grace individual companies with exemptions now, we guess, even if that is unfair to their competitors, and it seems no court is going to stop him.
And now Tim Apple says he’s gonna build a whole semiconductor supply chain in America, make domestic iPhone glass, and invest $100 billion he was totally not already planning to spend. It’s not the iPhones built in America Trump wanted, but good enough, especially since Mr. Apple gave him the gift of a shiny gold plaque, and Trump loves shiny gold like a crow. So iPhones will now be tariffed at zero percent from China, and 20 percent from India. It’s a bribe-and-flatter economy now!
And because everybody knows the best math comes from white men in glasses called Steve, Trump’s also nominated Stephen Miran, his head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and formerly underling to Steven Mnuchin during Trump 1.0, to temporarily fill the Federal Reserve Board seat vacated by the abrupt resignation of Adriana Kugler last week. And then chair Jerome Powell is scheduled to step down from the seven-member board next May, bringing Trump ever-closer to being able to personally twiddle the knobs of the interest rates. Isn’t that going to be a wild ride!
Miran is a former hedge-fund dick, and one of the main brain geniuses who’s been encouraging Trump on this tariff thing, telling him that tariffs won’t make consumer prices go up because foreign suppliers will just eat the cost. And also that a weak dollar is good, because when American goods are cheaper overseas, foreigners will buy more of them, then everybody else will use their stronger currencies to invest in factories in the United States! Yes, that’s how you make money, by making your own money worth less money. It’s 6D chess, people!
Miran is also pro-crypto, of course, and wants everybody’s retirement plans invested in crypto, though he intimately knows how easily volatile magic beans can go wrong— his former hedge fund, Hudson Bay, traded off the bankrupt carcass of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto-exchange scam.
Trump has also executive-ordered an end to “debanking,” the practice of banks choosing not to work with accounts that set off alarm bells for not-strictly-financial reasons, like say, those of an indicted criminal or their companies, such as Trump and the Trump Organization, John Eastman, or a shady financier with a whole lot of small-dollar payments to human traffickers and underage girls. And Trump has of course been defanging money-laundering and transparency laws and running his own little crypto-griftos on the side, too.
PREVIOUSLY!
A real Wild West for finance! Can’t trust the government’s numbers, can’t trust the government to enforce any kind of banking laws or regulations, or the dollar to be worth two tuppence tomorrow. Place your bets on what investments will be worth a hill of beans in a year!
But winners get made from losers, just like in the old Trump Casinos, or any other scam. And every time Trump twiddles an economic knob, some insider gets a nut. If you aren’t one of those insiders, well, buckle the fuck up.
The tariff-taxes, highest since the Great Depression, are expected to cost the average household $2,400 a year, Walmart prices are getting rolled up, not back, and non-Steve economists say the chances of a recession keep going up.
On the other hand, the tariffs are making the government soo much money, maybe Trump will give everybody a rebate check. Why, it is practically in the mail right now! You didn’t get yours yet? That’s probably because it is invisible to stupids and only Trump supporters are smart enough to be able to see it! PWNED! BASED! ECONOMY GREAT!!
[The Hill / Politico / WSJ gift link ]
The thing about those charts is that Trump is all over the Epstein files.
If you look closely you'll see that one of the charts is labeled "medium income." That would be "median," as anyone who has sat through the first two days of an Econ 101 class could tell you.