What did Donald Trump do today?

He announced the list of Republicans who can't get out of going to his "midterm convention." 

One of Trump's ideas for staving off a likely Democratic wave in the midterm election is to hold a party convention this year. Normally, these are done in presidential election years, and serve two functions: they act as a coronation for the party's presidential nominee, and they finalize the party's platform.

This "convention" won't have a platform. In fact, that's how Trump likes it: when he ran for re-election in 2020, he took the unprecedented step of suspending the platform process altogether and, in effect, ruling party policy by fiat. A number of what used to be bedrock Republican principles—for example, opposing the Putin regime—were embarrassing to the way Trump actually governed as president.

The two-day event will have a coronation of Trump, though. He has put himself in prime-time speaking slots on both nights, and he will unveil two ads intended to run nationally that feature him as opposed to local Republican candidates. 

Trump is profoundly unpopular 19 months into his second term. Nevertheless, he seems to genuinely believe that the best chance Republicans will have to hold onto bare majorities in Congress is to make the election all about him. That's straight from Trump's mouth: he recently told a crowd at a political rally that "What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I'm on the ballot." 

Trump's convention is, to put it mildly, extremely unpopular with the Republicans it is theoretically supposed to help. Only one person, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) who running for re-election in a swing House district will appear on the program. Many GOP officeholders are incensed that they are expected to pay $25,000 for the privilege of attending, and have found excuses not to go.  

Today, Trump unveiled the final program for the event, which will take place next Wednesday and Thursday in Houston. Trump's midterm convention will feature 47 speakers, including five women and seven men named Michael.

Why does this matter?

• One way for a president to make themselves an asset to their party would be to govern in a way that Americans didn't hate. 

• There are words like "megalomania" and "narcissism" to describe the unshakeable belief that people worship you as much as you worship yourself, and none of them are indicators of good mental health.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He made his most bizarre threat yet against the Federal Reserve.

This morning on his boutique social media site, Trump threatened to destroy the US economy quickly if the Federal Reserve didn't agree to destroy it slowly. 

There's a lot to unpack here, but the obvious starting point is that cutting off trade with every country with which the United States currently has a trade deficit would mean an absolute boycott of 93 of the world's 221 distinct nations or trading zones. Together, those 93 countries comprise 81% of all trade the United States does (imports and exports). It includes nine of the United States' ten biggest trading partners. If Trump could carry out such a threat, it would wipe $4.2 trillion dollars (out of $5.1 trillion total foreign trade) from the books. 

However, Americans would still be free to import bitter oranges from Haiti, sushi-grade tuna from Kiribati, and postage stamps from Vatican City. 

It's true that Trump does at least in theory have the legal power to cut off trade with a given country, though not at all an "absolute right." For obvious reasons, this has never actually been done outside of war. Trump hasn't even officially cut off trade with Iran during his current war—in fact, in March he put himself in the humiliating position of having to lift sanctions against Iran mid-war.

But it's unlikely that the Supreme Court would uphold Trump if he tried to cut off trade with 4/5ths of the world economy, on the grounds that, as one justice once put it, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. For that matter, Trump would almost certainly be impeached or removed from office via the Twenty-Fifth Amendment on grounds of incapacity if he tried to do this, even assuming his staff was willing to try to carry out the order.

Lowering interest rates in the teeth of already high inflation would absolutely make that inflation much worse. That's why the Fed—which is now chaired by Trump's own appointee—has refused to do so.

But Trump has a personal financial interest in lower interest rates. In spite of massively ballooning paper wealth thanks to his crypto schemes, Trump is still heavily in debt on his properties, owing more than $600 million on them. Refinancing at dramatically lower interest rates would save him hundreds of millions of dollars going forward. It would also likely help Trump's businesses, which were struggling before his re-election, in other ways. Unlike most Americans, paper billionaires like Trump can only borrow money that their income or collateral would let them pay back, so unlike Trump, they can't use near-zero rates to make speculative investments.

Likely in the expectation that he could force the Fed to drop interest rates, Trump has bought hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds since returning to office. Bond prices go up as rates go down, so a sudden drop in interest rates would create an instant windfall profit for Trump.

But with the national debt now at about $40 trillion—a tenth of which has been added since Trump returned to office last year—even if the Fed defied all economic logic and dropped rates now, investors would still probably demand high yields on bonds given the hyperinflation that would result. 

This is the second creative attempt to influence the bond market Trump has had recently. In a moment of cognitive difficulty last month, he suggested that military force was an option.

Why does this matter?

• If Trump weren't the president of the United States, this kind of thing would be grounds for a family member getting a court order to take control of his finances for his own protection.  

• Presidents don't have to be expert economists, but they do have to be able to understand basic concepts at a middle-school level.

 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He commuted a sentence in keeping with his basic philosophy of clemency: if he's done it, it's not really a crime.

Trump commuted the sentence of the notoriously corrupt Philadelphia union boss John Dougherty today, according to Dougherty's lawyer. The disgraced IBEW president had been convicted of using union coffers as his own personal bank account, and bribing a Philadelphia City Council member.

As a Democrat and a union leader—both things Trump isn't usually a fan of—Dougherty may seem like an unusual recipient for clemency from Trump. But Trump's pardons virtually always fall into at least one of two categories: ones where the recipient has put money in Trump's pocket in some way, and ones where they've committed a crime Trump is known or suspected (or in some cases convicted) of having committed himself.

Dougherty's bribery conviction falls squarely into the latter category. Trump has not really bothered to hide the extent to which he is using the presidency as a way to extort bribes. Sometimes these are laundered through cut-outs, like "donations" to his presidential library or his ballroom project, and sometimes they simply take the form of overt cash transactions.

Trump has also been caught dipping into funds he controls for personal use. Where Doughterty stole union dues, Trump used donations to his fraudulent "charity" to pay for personal expenses. 

Why does this matter?

• There's only one reason a politician would want to make political corruption and bribery seem like they're no big deal.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He demanded and got an illegal US coin honoring himself.

The U.S. Mint announced today that gold-colored $1 coins with Trump's face on them are now in circulation.

 

It is flatly illegal for the US Mint to issue any currency, whether coins or bills, featuring a living person. 31 U.S. Code § 5114 (b) states, unambiguously, that "only the portrait of a deceased individual may appear on United States currency and securities."

Trump appears to have simply ordered the Mint to proceed in violation of the law, and without consulting the outside review committee that would have had to approve it. Both Republican and Democratic members of that committee were opposed to Trump putting his face on real United States currency.

American money joins a very long list of things that Trump has tried, and in some cases succeeded, in using the power and influence of the presidency to get his name or face attached to since returning to office. It includes, but is not limited to: airports, train stations, passports, independent government agencies, savings accounts, government benefits websites, a class of battleships, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, national parks passes (which the National Parks Service is under orders to void if Trump's face is covered), and special pay-to-play backdoor to citizenship for wealthy people.

Why does this matter?

• This kind of self-obsession is dangerous and pathological even before the powers of the office of the President are involved. 

• Leaders obsessed with forcing their own image into everyday life aren't exactly uncommon in history, but those memorials don't often work as well as the dictators hope they will.

 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He managed to make a nearly defunct navigation app the top download in the United States.

Last month, Trump imposed a 50% tariff on a wide variety of essential Canadian goods, raising prices for American consumers on everything from basic construction materials to specialized medical devices. This outraged the Canadian public and virtually guaranteed that the Liberal government would respond with retaliatory tariffs, rather than accommodating Trump's demands.

Trump was left with no stronger response than to mockingly—but officially, for US government purposes—"rename" Lake Ontario to Lake America.

That act of trolling has had a few interesting consequences. The most predictable one is that Canadian resolve was hardened even further, with spontaneous boycotts of American goods arising. Needless to say, Canadian approval of the Liberal government's decision to impose retaliatory tariffs is high. Much more surprisingly, a plurality of Americans also approve of Canada's government matching Trump's tariffs. 

It also highlighted the extent to which Trump has corrupted the independence that the private sector once had from government interference. Apple Maps and Google Maps both changed their products to show "Lake America" to US clients. There is no legal requirement that they do so, and public opinion of Trump's gesture is extremely low. But Trump has made no secret of his willingness to punish companies that aren't willing to make political gestures of submission to him.

But that has created an opportunity for MapQuest, a pioneer in internet maps that most Americans haven't used in twenty years. While it gets its location data from the same federal database as Google and Apple, it has refused to change its name for Lake Ontario, just as it refused last year to re-label the Gulf of Mexico at Trump's demand. Effectively "too small to fail" from Trump retaliation, MapQuest has leaned into its choice, publicly announcing its decision by tweeting "We're not changing it."

Americans have responded by making its app—which previously saw a few hundred downloads a day—the most popular app of any kind on Apple's own platform today, and fifth on Android as of this posting. Another way of saying that is that downloads are up about 160,000%.

Changing the default map software on a phone won't really hurt Trump, or Google or Apple for that matter, but it's still an ominous sign for Trump that this kind of organic protest against him can catch on so quickly. He remains at the lowest levels of support any president has ever had going into midterm elections—including himself during his first term, when Democrats gained 41 seats in the House of Representatives.

MapQuest has also been allowing users to create custom maps "renaming" Lake Ontario as they like. Some recent examples:

 

Why does this matter?

• You can't win trade wars—or real wars—with internet trolling, and nobody stupid enough to think you can should be president. 

• Making everyone pretend to love the leader or be punished is what happens in fascist dictatorships.