A picture worth 1,000 words

 

Trump ALWAYS shafts Americans

 

The uniter

 

Left Behind

 

Tariffs are good and trade is easy

 

Native Americans aren't waiting around for the find out stage

 

Doing her best

 

And I guess MAGA believes that.

She's right about one thing, though: farmers (except for the large corporate farms) don't like taking aid, because it makes people claim, rightly, that they're on welfare.  In the end, they'll take it, though.

SCOTUS shadow docket deformation of America

 

Judge Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent that entities similar to the FTC are independent agencies “whose members serve staggered terms and cannot be removed except for good reason.”

“Yet the majority, stay order by stay order, has handed full control of all those agencies to the President,” wrote Kagan, whose dissent was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Trump “may now remove — so says the majority, though Congress said differently — any member he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all. And he may thereby extinguish the agencies’ bipartisanship and independence.”

Kagan said the court’s conservative majority — which includes three justices whom Trump appointed — may be “raring” to overturn Humphrey’s.

“But until the deed is done, Humphrey’s controls, and prevents the majority from giving the President the unlimited removal power Congress denied him,” she wrote.

“Because the majority’s stay does just that, I respectfully dissent. Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars.”

  CNBC

 

MAGA regrets

 

I'm surprised they haven't been bailed out yet.

Trump's great trade deals

 

Sour deal with Japan

Frustration is mounting in Japan after it became clear this week that Tokyo and Washington have different interpretations of a key component of their new trade deal.

[...]

Tensions are running so high here that Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, fighting for his political survival after a humiliating electoral defeat last month, had to try to explain the unusual, vague deal his government struck with President Donald Trump on July 23.

“The other party [Trump] is not a normal person,” Ishiba told frustrated lawmakers pressing for more detail in a session at the Japanese parliament this week, asserting that his counterpart doesn’t play by the rules of conventional trade agreements and unilaterally changes the rules.

  WaPo

No shit, Shigeru.

Late last month, the two sides announced they had reached a trade deal but it essentially amounted to a handshake agreement. With no provisions committed to a formal document, the fact sheets that both governments released have conflicting information.

In their announcement, both countries said the United States would impose a 15 percent tariff on goods from Japan. Tokyo said any item already subject to tariffs higher than 15 percent would be exempt from the new taxes. But the executive order Trump signed last week suggested the rate would be applied on top of existing levies, including beef, which faces a 26.4 percent tariff.

Ryosei Akazawa, Japan’s chief trade negotiator, traveled to Washington on Tuesday to try to sort out the discrepancy but just after he landed, the U.S. interpretation was published in the Federal Register. On Thursday, Akazawa announced that the two sides had agreed to Japan’s interpretation. The White House has yet to release a public statement.

So, actually, there is no deal?

“I think Japan, South Korea, and other allied countries feel the same — that even toward strong allies, Trump tariffs are imposed without mercy,” Itsunori Onodera, policy chief for Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, said in an interview. “This shows how difficult the U.S. is as a country to understand in terms of balancing its security alliance and trade relationships.”

[...]

Another point of contention is the $550 billion investment plan that Japan pledged in exchange for lower tariffs, a hallmark of the deal. Trump this week said the U.S. would be free to use the money to invest as Washington deems fit. “I got a signing bonus from Japan of $550 billion — that’s our money. It’s our money to invest, as we like,” Trump told CNBC. But Ishiba has maintained that the process would be led by Japanese companies and backed by financial institutions affiliated with the Japanese government, which would offer up to $550 billion in equity investments, loans and loan guarantees. The Japanese government does not have the power to compel Japanese companies to invest in the U.S., let alone the Trump administration.

America, your president is delusional

 

Flip-flop

 90 deals in 90 days!

He didn't get them, so now he says he didn't want them.

What a clown show.

Letter exchange

 

Response template:

Actual response:

UPDATE 07/10/2025:

Letters for everyone!

 

Apparently, he means releasing names of countries, or countries that will be getting the next tranche of letters.

UPDATE 07/11/2025:

The letters all read mostly the same, like shockingly incoherent spam e-mails with the recipient’s name in an obviously different font. They are filled with alarming typos, random Capitalization, and sloppy errors. For instance, Trump’s letter to Željka Cvijanović, the chairwoman of the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, [addressed to "Her Excellency,] begins with “Dear Mr. President.”

The letters double down on Trump’s bizarre belief that other nations are taking advantage of the US because we run a trade deficit with them. But as even Republican Rand Paul pointed out, the average American runs a trade deficit with their local grocery store. That’s a good thing. It’s how free trade works.

[...]

He’s imposing new tariffs without actually reaching any formal trade deals with our partners.

  Public Notice

If one of your top goals is stock market manipulation, it doesn't really matter if you actually deal with the trading partners.

For all the bluster, the shakedown letters are yet another example of the “TACO” phenomenon: Trump Always Chickens Out. These are basically the same tariffs, just with a new “deadline.” It’s more governance through chaos.

And market manipulation.

Trump posted on Truth Social copies of his letters to foreign heads of government from Europe, Asia, and Africa (no word yet if he’s reaching out to the penguin island). He imposed the steepest tariff rates of 40 percent on Myanmar and Laos, but kept South Korea’s tariffs at the same 25 percent rate he originally levied on the country’s goods in April, which was temporarily lowered to 10 percent.

Trump increased Japan’s tariff rate from 24 percent to 25 percent for no discernible reason. He’s just juggling numbers, as evidenced when he told a reporter that his “formula” for calculating the tariff rates is “based on common sense.”

Must be hell at the ports where people have to figure out how much to charge.

Like a cross between a schoolyard bully and a mob enforcer, Trump threatened any nation that dared respond in kind to his unprovoked economic assault.

"If, for any reason, you decide to raise your tariffs, then, whatever the number you choose to raise them by, will be added on to the 25 percent that we charge," Trump wrote to Japan and South Korea.

[...]

The US actually has a trade surplus of more than $410 billion with Brazil, so Trump’s tariff threat in this instance is based entirely on a personal grudge. In a blatant attempt to intervene with a sovereign nation’s domestic policies, he demanded that the so-called “witch hunt” against Bolsonaro “end IMMEDIATELY!” However, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has vowed to reciprocate if Trump follows through and implements 50 percent tariffs. That could prove damaging to the US economy, as the top exports to Brazil include aircraft and spacecraft, fuels, industrial machinery, and electrical equipment.

Our president is fucking insane.

The whole exercise is rooted in Trump’s economic illiteracy. He’s stuck in a Gilded Age mentality about tariffs, but he doesn’t simply have outdated views. No, whenever he discusses trade, he sounds as if he’s suffering a mental episode.

He has been suffering a mental episode since before he was elected for his first term.

[D]uring a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Trump rambled nonsensically that “the country had a Great Depression. And then after the Depression, long after it started, they brought back tariffs to see if they could save it. But it took them really 25 years to get out of the Great Depression. A lot of people don't understand that."

But the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 actually worsened economic conditions during the Depression.

[...]

The Depression lasted about a decade and ended when the US entered World War 2. Twenty-five years after the 1929 stock market crash, America was about to enjoy an extended post-war economic boom. Trump has no idea what he’s talking about.

[...]

Trump insists his trade policies are part of a patriotic push to manufacture more goods within the US when in reality he’s doing everything possible to make that less likely. It’s difficult to persuade sensible businesses to build new factories here against the backdrop of a chaotic and ever-changing tariffs, especially when the administration’s hateful deportation policies are targeting the law-abiding labor force necessary to staff them.

[...]

It’s not the “art of the deal.” It’s economic self-harm.

When asked earlier this week about that much-ballyhooed “90 deals and 90 days” promise, Trump’s response was a mental collapse that should have triggered the 25th Amendment. Trying to paraphrase Trump’s gibberish is its own form of sanewashing, so it’s important to read this in full. These are the words of the man holding the levers of our global economy:

Oh, we’ve spoken to everybody. We know every. It’s all done. I told you. I told you we’ll make some deals, but for the most part we’re gonna send a letter. We’re gonna say, ‘Welcome to the United States. If you’d like to participate in the greatest, most successful country ever.’ I mean, we’re doing better than ever. We have. I don’t think. And you’re gonna see these numbers soon. We’ve never had numbers like this. We’ve never had investment like this. Uh, we have more than 90. We’re gonna have much more than 90. But most of those are gonna be sent a letter. This is exactly what I said. Now, we’ve made a deal with United Kingdom. We’ve made a deal with China. We’ve made a deal. We’re close to making a deal with India. Others, we’ve met with, and we don’t think we’re gonna be able to make a deal. So, we just send them a letter. ‘Do you wanna, do you wanna play ball? This is what you have to pay.’ So, we’re, as far as I’m concerned, we’re done. We’re sending out letters to various countries, telling them how much tariffs they have to pay. Some will maybe adjust a little bit depending if they have a, you know, cause. We’re not gonna be unfair about it. And actually, it’s a small fraction compared to what we should be getting. We should be. We could be asking for much more. But for the sake of relationships that we’ve had with a lot of really good countries, we’re doing the way I do it. But we could be getting a lot more. We could ask for a lot more than what we’re asking for.

[...]

Trump’s just alienating foreign heads of state and making actual deals less probable. His letters decree, “These Tariffs may be modified, upward or downward, depending on our relationship with your Country.” But why would anyone negotiate with someone so unstable?

The markets are currently taking a skeptical approach to Trump’s madness, optimistically assuming the “TACO” phenomenon will prevail once again and the August 1 deadline will just get extended … and extended … until Trump eventually leaves office, still celebrating all his triumphant self-proclaimed “deals.”

He'll leave office in a pine box. He doesn't plan on going anywhere.

UPDATE 07/12/2025:

Quite the trade policy you've got there

 

What a deal!

 

Trump is special.

And Starmer should have let the ignorant old geezer bend over and pick up his own spillage.  He did, however, chuckle, saying, "Very important paper." In on the joke.  The pages were blank.  The only one with anything on it was Trump's signature.  Why does he have to use props, anyway?  We couldn't understand they made a deal if they only told us?  Also, what kind of deal would have only 4 or so pages?  Never mind.  They were blank.

Is this Trump's first trade deal? And is it one where nothing actually changes?

UPDATE 06/19/2025:

Trump and Xi

President Donald Trump announced that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping had a “very positive” call on trade. The two leaders, he said, had resolved tensions over rare earth mineral exports, and their teams would meet again soon. Xi welcomed Trump to visit Beijing.

Invitations were exchanged. Smiles posted. Beneath the surface, almost nothing changed.

A 90-day tariff truce brokered in Geneva was already unraveling when Thursday’s call took place. Xi’s message was diplomatic but direct: Steer this “big ship” away from sabotage—or else. Trump, of course, heard what he wanted: a deal he could sell, regardless of whether one exists.

We’ve seen this play before. The handshakes. The headlines. The claim that he alone can fix it. The problem is that rational trade policy isn’t the goal. Performance is.

[...]

That’s what the floated China trip is about. If Xi Jinping offers him just enough symbolic respect, Trump might return to the U.S. proclaiming victory without ever touching the hard questions: IP theft, state subsidies, rare earth controls.

That’s why China’s posture isn’t just strategic. It’s psychological. Beijing knows Trump has no appetite for drawn-out talks or institutional give-and-take. They’re not offering structural reform or reciprocal liberalization. They’re offering the illusion of deal-making. Carefully stage-managed meetings. Polished communiqués. Soft words that can be twisted into triumph. It’s diplomacy as theater—because that’s all Trump’s capable of absorbing.

[...]

Trump isn’t averse to risk. He’s averse to blame. What looks like caution is often just delay—waiting for a scapegoat to emerge. He’s happy to escalate as long as someone else is holding the bag when it goes sideways. That’s why, even in areas of possible progress—like cracking down on fentanyl precursors or negotiating critical mineral access—he won’t anchor to a position. Anchoring means owning the outcome. And Trump only bets when he can rig the table.

[...]

America cannot negotiate coherently when its leader does not distinguish between national interest and personal standing. The Chinese side knows this. They know that Trump’s advisers, however competent or hardline, are window dressing. That the only briefing that matters is the one that reaches Trump’s sense of grievance.

[...]

Meanwhile, American industry remains paralyzed. The 90-day pause has not brought clarity. It has brought a holding pattern, which China is far better equipped to exploit. Xi can afford to wait.

[...]

This is why every theory used to describe Trump eventually breaks down. The madman theory? Trump doesn’t act erratic to induce strategic advantage—he’s just erratic.

The transactionalist theory? That presumes negotiation in good faith. Trump’s idea of a deal is one where the other side is locked into something unenforceable while he walks away.

The “three-dimensional chess” metaphor? Please. This isn’t chess. It’s Calvinball.

Trump is a prestige actor. Not in the sense of dignity or tradition, but in the theatrical sense. He craves dominance and praise. He needs to be seen “winning.” That’s the outcome every move is calibrated to support.

[...]

Trump’s advantage isn’t unpredictability. It’s that too many still treat him like a conventional negotiator, knowing full well he isn’t—because it’s easier, safer, or more profitable than calling it what it is.

He doesn’t need success. He needs spotlight. That makes real policy impossible—even for his own team. They’re not crafting strategy. They’re staging scenes and then managing the fallout.

  Contrarian

UPDATE 06/19/2025:

Thanks to the art of the deal

 

Don't think about it

It's just more ignorant blather. At least Baier pointed it out.

President Trump said Friday that he thinks that China would have suffered more harm than the U.S. in a prolonged trade war because America “has spirit again” after electing him to a second term.

“If I didn’t do that deal with China, I think China would have broken apart. We are not going to break,” Trump said during an appearance on Fox News’s “Special Report.”

[...]

Media outlets have also reported that Trump backed off his initial sweeping tariff agenda because the impact hit hardest on his supporters.

“The key argument was that this was beginning to hurt Trump’s supporters — Trump’s people,” a person briefed on the talks told The Washington Post.

  The Hill