Trump is everywhere, minding everybody's business.

Link and link.

If it's Trump news, the good news can't be good news.

Headline at The New York Times scrambles to squelch whatever lift you might get from the news that the economy grew in the second quarter: "U.S. Economy Grew in Second Quarter as Tariffs Scrambled Data/Gross domestic product rebounded in the spring after contracting at the start of the year, but consumer spending remained weak" (NYT).

We're serving tariff-scrambled data this morning. 

Let's read the text:

Economic growth softened in the first half of the year, as tariffs and uncertainty upended business plans and scrambled consumers’ spending decisions.

Your brains are scrambled! There's growth, but it's soft-boiled growth. Yuck!

The disruptions extended to the economic data itself.

"The U.S. government posted a surplus in June as tariffs gave an extra bump to a sharp increase in receipts, the Treasury Department said Friday."

"With government red ink swelling throughout the year, last month saw a surplus of just over $27 billion, following a $316 billion deficit in May...."

CNBC reports.

Meanwhile, WaPo explains "Why Wall Street is brushing off Trump’s escalating tariff threats/President Donald Trump’s escalating tariff threats have not deterred Wall Street, with the stock market continuing to rise despite trade policy uncertainty" (free access link): "Investors feel free to continue bidding up stock prices because they assume Trump will always back down from his most costly tariff plans, market analysts said. But the president views stocks’ steady rise as a license to intensify his trade threats, acting out the economic policy equivalent of his 2016 quip that he could 'stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody' without paying a price."

"With Taxes and Tariffs in Place, Trump Takes Reins of U.S. Economy President/Trump has achieved much of his agenda, leaving the fate of the economy squarely in his hands."

A surprisingly pro-Trump headline in the NYT, so I guess he really deserves it.

His expensive tax cuts have been signed into law. His steep global tariffs are taking clearer shape. And his twin campaigns to deregulate government and deport immigrants are well underway. With the major components of his agenda now coming into focus, President Trump has already left an indelible mark on the U.S. economy. The triumphs and turbulence that may soon arise will squarely belong to him.

To give him credit is to set him up for blame. 

Not even six months into his second term, Mr. Trump has forged ahead with the grand and potentially disruptive economic experiment that he first previewed during the 2024 campaign. His actions in recent weeks have staked the future of the nation’s finances — and its centuries-old trading relationships — on a belief that many economists’ most dire warnings are wrong.... 

So far, the U.S. economy has remained resilient in the face of these seismic changes....

"But the big picture remains one of surprising resilience — strong job growth, low unemployment and little sign that tariffs and uncertainty have so far derailed the labor market."

That feels like a grudging admission, in "Live Updates: U.S. Hiring Remains Solid, Sign of a Resilient Economy/Employers added 147,000 jobs in June, and the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1 percent, suggesting that tariffs, interest rates and other headwinds are not yet causing employers to pull back significantly" (NYT).

"Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far, and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa."

"No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE. Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this? BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!"

Said Donald Trump, on Truth Social.

ADDED: What Elon had posted shortly before that: "If this insane spending bill passes, the America Party will be formed the next day. Our country needs an alternative to the Democrat-Republican uniparty so that the people actually have a VOICE."

The Presidents go head-to-head in my "For you" feed on X.

Obama, perhaps representing the Democratic Party, sticks to a minimalist position: Republicans might take some of your money. Trump is effusive, lists a lot of things that will benefit some of us, and ends with an exciting but vague and weird attack on Democrats: They've lost control of themselves! They are aimlessly wandering around! They've got no grit! They are warped in the past! They think they're going to bring their insane policies back, but it's never going to happen! Meanwhile, Obama merely wafts anxiety about health insurance coverage. 

Big shot takes fat shot.

Trump: "A friend of mine who is a businessman. Very very very top guy. Most of you would've heard of him. Highly neurotic. Brilliant businessman. Seriously overweight. And he takes the fat shot drug." pic.twitter.com/pFFyXT6pHF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 12, 2025

"Until now, arguments for limiting consumption have tended to come from the left rather than the right."

"They date back at least to the economist Thorstein Veblen, who, at the start of the twentieth century, wrote acidly about the 'conspicuous consumption' engaged in by grandees of the Gilded Age. More recently, a 'degrowth' movement has emerged, which aims to decrease consumption and to de-prioritize G.D.P. growth on the grounds that they are harmful to the environment and that, in any case, accumulating more 'stuff' doesn’t really increase the well-being of people.This argument depends on two concepts familiar to economists: the diminishing marginal utility of consumption, which is, roughly speaking, the notion that if you already own nineteen dolls, buying a twentieth won’t give you much pleasure, and competitive consumption, or the idea that many people are trapped in an endless cycle of trying to outshine their friends and neighbors with their purchases.... 'Trump, degrowther,' the leftist journalist Doug Henwood commented online last week.... 'What he is doing is fairly unprecedented: explicitly saying that he is willing to pay an economic price in terms of growth in order to protect something else that he thinks is valuable and important,' Daniel Susskind, an economics professor at King’s College London who is the author of the 2024 book 'Growth: A History and a Reckoning' told me...."

Writes John Cassidy, in "Donald Trump Versus Barbie/Can the Administration retain public support for a trade policy that could force Americans to buy less stuff?" (The New Yorker).

Why don't the anti-consumption lefties embrace Trump? 

My first reaction to Trump's "Maybe the children will have 2 dolls instead of 30" was: "This reminds me of what those on the left used to say to us

"The single worst thing I think this White House could do politically is what they are doing, right?"

"Creating a causal relationship between their signature economic policy and prices going up. And so if... we do see that inflation or we do have a recession... this White House will be blamed... And that creates the perfect conditions for Democrats to have a good midterms and feel good about 2028. And that's nothing to do with their own vision.... Right now, it seems like the chaos, they're kind of used to. Donald Trump up against his usual enemies. And I think there is some leeway — for art of the deal... negotiation, things like that. But the guy who says he'll eat a rat for Donald Trump is the exception. If those prices increase, the only person who will be blamed for that is the president. And if you're a Democrat, that's the best thing that could happen for the prospect of the party returning the power, right?"

Said Astead W. Herndon, in "Do Trump Voters Like His Tariffs? We Went to Michigan to Find Out," today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast.

Was there a guy who said he'd eat a rat for Donald Trump? There was a guy who said he wouldn't care if prices go up, that he would "survive," "adapt," and: "I'm the kind of guy that'll, if I'm starving, I'll eat a rat. I'll eat cockroach. I'm a survivalist." I wouldn't say that's eating a rat for Donald Trump. It's eating a rat for himself — to survive. The implication is that he's self-reliant. He doesn't look to the government to solve his problems. The podcast made it sound like a "Fear Factor" challenge or a sick devotion to Donald Trump, the man. 

Anyway, I'm trying to highlight the idea that — on the tariff issue — those who are rooting for the Democrats seem to think their best strategy is to do nothing but hope for inflation and recession: "That's the best thing that could happen for the prospect of the party returning the power, right?"

"From a negotiating position — and the president talks about this in his book 'The Art of the Deal' — this is what they describe as anchoring."

"It's called an anchoring technique, which is to say that you state your position and you hold your position, and the moment you break from that position, it becomes a lot harder.... The second that they start announcing that they are taking a pause [from the tariffs] or that they're willing to do a deal at a lesser number or whatever it is, they've undermined their own case.... The business community has a phrase that they've been using all weekend which is 'What is the off ramp?' — which suggests that there is one. And there might not be an off ramp...."

Says Andrew Ross Sorkin, on "How Trump Wiped Out $10 Trillion in Wealth in 3 Days," today's episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily."

Later Jonathan Swan says: "One problem that some of his advisers have, I would say most of his advisers have, if they're being honest, is... your messaging is so all over the place.... It's like, you know, he is in deal making mode and then he's in: No, this is an economic revolution and you need to hang tough. You're getting these competing messages.... It's not just pundits that have been surprised or his donors, but some of his advisers, I think, were still of the mindset that this would be Term One Trump. And Term One Trump talked a really big game on tariffs, but actually, when the market started to wobble, he backed off.... [I]n his first term, he had to run for reelection.... He's not running for reelection anymore. So there is a theory that, well, he feels somewhat liberated by that, and he can do what he thinks is the right thing to do and move forward and deal with the consequences...."

"This is a patient that was very sick.... It went through an operation on Liberation Day, and it's going to be... a very booming country."

"It's going to be amazing, actually.... The operation's over, and now we let it settle in. You see the plants are starting to construction, already. We have many plants — Indiana massive auto plant...."

Do you like the reasoning through analogy? The economy is a person, its supposed problem is a sickness, the tariffs are a surgical procedure, and the patient is in the post-op stage. That might be a difficult stage, with various pains and struggles. Even if this is a good analogy — economies are like human bodies, and tariffs are like an operation for an illness, and the immediate effect is a stage in the recovery from surgery — we still don't know if the right medical treatment was chosen and performed successfully.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Could you summarize the Susan Sontag book 'Illness as Metaphor' and say whether it has some use in critiquing the above-stated analogy about the economy?"

That book is less about using illness as a metaphor to explain something other than illness and more about using something other than illness to explain illness. From "Illness as Metaphor" (commission earned):

"But, if the new tariff regime has been hyper-publicized, it has also been somewhat undertheorized."

"If the plan is to disrupt the existing regime, in the conviction that global free trade has undermined American interests and workers, what is meant to replace it?... Ever since Trump was first elected, in 2016, his main guru and interpreter on trade, the man largely charged with converting the President’s protectionist instincts into theory and practice, has been a voluble, savvy seventy-seven-year-old Washington lawyer named Robert Lighthizer.... The view Lighthizer has come to after nearly half a century working on the issue is that free trade is a fiction, believed only by Americans and economists (and, intermittently, by the British). 'Free trade doesn’t exist anywhere in the world,' he told me. 'It just doesn’t. And it doesn’t largely because of details.' Even in the absence of tariffs, countries do all sorts of things to protect domestic manufacturing.... What Lighthizer would like to see, as he explained to me, is 'a new trade system,' in which the U.S. walked away from the disadvantageous trade agreements of the nineties and negotiated a new series of agreements with other democracies, wealthy and not, that fixed those mistakes.... 'We have the momentum politically to do it,' Lighthizer said. 'We have the benefit of a trillion-dollar trade deficit, which gives us enormous leverage. We take unilateral action, we disrupt the system, we build over not too long a period toward what I suggest.'..."

From "Why Is the Mastermind of Trump’s Tariff Plan Still Sitting at Home in Florida? Robert Lighthizer, the former U.S. Trade Representative, lost his bid to rejoin the White House, but he still believes the President’s protectionist instincts can jump-start American manufacturing," by Benjamin Wallace-Wells" (The New Yorker).

"[T]hese criminal networks have extended their operations far beyond drug trafficking and human smuggling. They are now embedded in a wide swath of the legal economy..."

"... from avocado farming to the country’s billion-dollar tourism industry, making it hard to be absolutely sure that American companies are isolated from cartel activities. 'This has come up in previous administrations across the political spectrum and from members of Congress who have wanted to do it,' said Samantha Sultoon, a senior adviser on sanctions policy and threat finance in the Trump and Biden administrations. 'But no one has done it because they have looked at what the implications would be on trade, economic and financial relationships between Mexico and the United States.'..."

From "How Labeling Cartels ‘Terrorists’ Could Hurt the U.S. Economy Isolating U.S. companies from cartel activities could be almost impossible given that the criminal groups operate in sectors like agriculture and tourism, leaving some American businesses vulnerable to sanctions" (NYT).

"But no one has done it"... until Trump. I wonder how many of Trump's innovations are things the others have thought of but rejected. 

"Almost impossible" — that makes me think of this part of Trump's inaugural speech:

That evocative word: groceries.

Trump: I won on groceries. Very simple word, groceries. Like almost, you know, who uses the word. I started using the word. The groceries. When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time. pic.twitter.com/4hDzdJFrTz

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 8, 2024

Nick Gillespie confronts Donald Trump about the deficit. Trump absconds.

WATCH: Former President Donald Trump blames COVID for his deficit spending. But @nickgillespie delivers a live fact check—much of that spending occurred before the pandemic.pic.twitter.com/EA0064nGn5

— reason (@reason) September 28, 2024

"I support and vote for Trump over Harris"... says Rand Paul.

While he continues to withhold an official endorsement, Senator @RandPaul will “support and vote for Trump over Harris… the Democrat Party is the one of Santa Claus, disbursing gifts to children…

For someone who’s concerned about the debt, the Republican Party is the better… pic.twitter.com/K2vKmTWPIc

— Honestly with Bari Weiss (@thehonestlypod) September 24, 2024

"I used to always hear Democrats saying, 'The election was all just Trump’s racist appeals,' but I actually went to the rallies in 2015."

"He would talk about bad trade deals. He promised to bring back Glass-Steagall, which is the bill regulating finance. He talked about health insurance. He was going to do a plan that actually would cover all Americans and wasn’t going to be like a rat’s maze. And if you compare the ads, his ads were overwhelmingly more policy-oriented than Clinton’s. She was really just attacking him as a bad guy and it didn’t work.

Said John Judis, quoted in "Where Have All the Democrats Gone? John Judis and Ruy Teixeira explain how liberals lost their way" (The Free Press)(transcript and audio)(Judis and Teixeira are political analysts). 

The "Honestly" podcast host asks: "So, you didn’t anticipate that the party that said, 'We are the party of Paul Ryan, we’re the party of tax cuts, we’re the party of Milton Friedman,' would actually start to sound more liberal on economic policy?"

"I don’t know why people stick up for [Biden] so much... – when he makes bad decisions, like you.... I don’t know why..."

"... you and other people say, 'Oh, it’s okay that he’s destroyed the strategic petroleum reserves.' I mean, why do you do that? Or, 'It’s okay that he has open borders.'... I don’t know why. And I think that’s why the media has lost so much credibility."

Said Donald Trump to Kristen Welker in the unedited version of the "Meet the Press" interview.

Here's the transcript. Here's the video. And scroll down for the full text of the video, in which you can see how Welker — who is getting criticized for not inserting more fact-checking in real time — broke in to do what Trump called "sticking up for Biden." 

Last words from "the only true outsider ever to win the presidency."

From Trump's Farewell Address, which I didn't watch live or on YouTube. I waited for the transcript, the cold record. He begins with something he ought to have been talking about since mid-November, instead of the doomed notion that he had won the election:

As I conclude my term as the 45th President of the United States, I stand before you truly proud of what we have achieved together. We did what we came here to do, and so much more...

The next part of the speech is full of thanks. Thanks to people who worked with him and thanks to America for giving him the "honor beyond description, " the "extraordinary privilege" of serving as President.

He forefronts an expression of horror for the attack on the Capitol:

All Americans were horrified by the assault on our capital. Political violence is an attack on everything we cherish as Americans. It can never be tolerated. 

He calls for unity:

Now more than ever, we must unify around our shared values and rise above the partisan rancor and forge our common destiny. 

Then he talks about himself. He was an outsider, "the only true outsider ever to win the presidency."