What did Donald Trump do today?

He got even more confused about basic economic reality than usual.

Today, the Federal Reserve voted unanimously to raise the interest rates that banks charge one another for spot loans by a quarter of a percentage point. In practical terms, that means that interest rates in general will rise by a similar amount. The reason for raising rates is to curb inflation, which has been well above the target rate of 2% for all of Trump's second term, and has been greatly inflamed by Trump's war on Iran and the imposition of taxes on American consumers for imported goods.

In a social media rant immediately after the vote, Trump demanded that rates plummet to 1%, confusing the yields on US Treasury bills with the Fed rate. Trump also repeated his apparently genuine, but incredibly stupid, belief that trade deficits mean the United States is simply giving money away to foreign countries. (This is true in exactly the same sense that you are "simply giving money away" to the grocery store when you buy groceries.) 

To be clear, making it cheaper to borrow money during a period of high inflation would be like fighting a wildfire with gasoline. But what Trump does seem to understand is that he is one of the few people wealthy enough to actually profit from the damage that would result. It doesn't matter to a billionaire like Trump whether his Big Mac costs $5 or $50, or how many times the price of diesel doubles on his watch: the basic necessities that most American households have to carefully budget for are always a rounding error for him.

But plummeting interest rates would save him hundreds of millions of dollars if he could suddenly refinance the mortgages he has all over his real estate holdings, and it would sharply increase the value of the huge quantities of bonds he's bought since returning to office, apparently in the belief he could jawbone interest rates lower against all common sense.

The current Chair of the Federal Reserve's Board of governors is Kevin Warsh, whom Trump appointed in May. It was obvious that Trump believed Warsh would somehow force interest rates lower. After his social media tirade, Trump changed his story, claiming that he'd "allowed" Warsh to vote in unison with the rest of the board. (Trump has no power to force the Fed to do anything, which is independent from the executive branch by design, as Trump found out after trying unsuccessfully to purge its membership on returning to office.) 

A reporter pointed out that Warsh had already said that "raising rates was the right decision and responsible decision." Trump responded: "Well, I don't know what he's referring to, but I will tell you interest rates are too high. We have the greatest economy in history." (The vast majority of Americans, all but a handful of whom are not billionaires, strongly disagree with Trump's assessment the economy.)

Asked today about Trump's likely reaction to his voting in unison with the Board—and, in essence, every economist in the world—Warsh literally laughed out loud and said "I've got nothing for you."

Why does this matter?

• It's bad if a president can't understand basic concepts like "selling goods" or "inflation." 

• It's bad and suspicious if his lack of understanding of those concepts would somehow still make him money. 

• As one person on the internet put it, "The dumbest asshole in the country and the President need to be two different people moving forward."

What did Donald Trump do today?

UPDATE, Sept. 16: Trump said on Wednesday that the Kennedy Center would be "ripped down" if he could not have it named for him.

He threw a private temper tantrum to match his public one over not getting to chisel his name on the Kennedy Center.

Trump threw a predictable tantrum on social media today over the latest ruling by a federal judge preventing him from carving his name into actual stone of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Judge Christopher R. Cooper, who earlier this year found that Trump had no authority to rename the Center for himself, said that the latest attempt to add Trump's name to the Center without technically changing the legal name was "linguistic gymnastics." The Center was dedicated to the memory of President Kennedy by an act of Congress, Cooper ruled, and only another law could rededicate it to Trump or anyone else.

Trump's name was removed from the facade earlier this year under court order, but only after a tarp was put up to block video of the removal. It has remained in place since.

In response, Trump ranted on social media, threatening in effect to disobey Cooper and any higher court ruling that went against him by shutting the Center down indefinitely unless Cooper's ruling was overturned. The performance was typical of Trump's social media eruptions, personally attacking the judge and casting himself as the hero.

But Trump also lost his temper in private, too, screaming over the phone during a Board meeting at the member whose lawsuit kept his name off the building: Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat. Beatty is an ex officio member of the Board and was one of the few people Trump couldn't purge when he returned to office. A source who listened to the call said the spectacle of Trump berating Beatty was "fucking crazy." 

Like many people who have made Trump lose his temper, Beatty is a Black woman.

Immediately after Cooper's ruling, the Board voted to close the Center. Staff and visitors were ordered out this afternoon. Lawyers fighting Trump's attempts to rename the Center for himself said the Board risked a contempt charge by doing that. Virtually all of the Board's current members are personal Trump loyalists appointed since he returned to office, and include people like Trump's personal criminal defense lawyers, spouses of people he can fire from government positions, and Fox News hosts. Officially, the Board's reason for the closure is that Trump and only Trump can raise the necessary money to keep the Center's budget afloat—and only if he receives "appropriate recognition."

It's certainly true that the Kennedy Center's finances are in much worse shape since Trump personally took over. Like any such organization, its budget relies on ticket sales, facilities rentals, and private donations. All of these revenue streams have fallen off a cliff in response to Trump's attempts to remake it in his image and name. As one official put it, "Donors disappeared, ticket sales disappeared, artists disappeared—like it was doomsday."

The Trump-controlled Board has not, in any court filing or public document, acknowledged the fact that massive artist and ticket-buyer boycotts of Trump's takeover are the reason the Center is suddenly and for the first time in financial jeopardy. 

The Board also cited the danger to the public posed by supposedly deteriorating facilities. But those claims, which Trump has been making for over a year now, are lies. As with any large public facility, routine maintenance is needed constantly—although Trump and the board he controls now have a motive to let the buildings deteriorate. Congress allocated more than a quarter-billion dollars for renovations this year, at Trump's urging, in spite of the fact that the Center had just completed a huge renovation project in 2023. But Trump is now refusing to spend any of that money unless the Center is renamed for him. 

Why does this matter?

• Obsession with glorifying yourself above all other concerns is called megalomania, and while it's not uncommon among wannabe dictators, it's not a sign of good mental health or actual popularity. 

• "If I can't have this thing, I'll destroy it" is a shitty way to run anything, much less a country.  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said it was "not a big deal" that his son got caught accepting even more "gifts" from the Putin regime.

ProPublica reported today that the recent wedding festivities for Donald Trump Jr. and his new bride Bettina Anderson Trump were paid for by a Putin lieutenant, Umar Kremlev. The multi-day celebrations took place on a private island in the Bahamas. 

In response, the couple acknowledged that their "dear friend" had given them the event as a "wedding gift." (Kremlev's "extraordinary gesture" is not one they had previously admitted to.) Just when and how Donald Trump Jr. and Kremlev became "dear friends" isn't clear. Kremlev is associated with a Russian front group that kidnaps Ukrainian children.

Umar Kremlev identified in a photo accompanying the ProPublica article.

In a statement today, Donald Trump Sr. said that "I have no idea who Umar is, never heard of him, and he didn’t pay for Don and Bettina’s wedding, which took place at a totally different location, and on a different day from the wedding [sic]."

Trump appears to be trying to draw a distinction between the wedding ceremony itself, and the private island that Kremlev rented for the whole weekend that followed. (Receptions, as Trump and his son know from the five marriages they've had between them, tend to be more expensive than the actual ceremonies—even when they don't involve putting up dozens of guests on private islands for a whole weekend.)

It's entirely possible that Trump really doesn't know Kremlev—or that he did, but has forgotten who Kremlev is. But whether Donald Trump Sr. is personally acquainted with the Putin regime functionary who put money in Donald Trump Jr.'s hands isn't really relevant, since the wealth of all such oligarchs is really just an extension of Putin's direct personal control over the Russian economy.

The actual costs Kremlev picked up for the Trump family are enormous by most Americans' standards, but still tiny compared to the Trump family net worth. Trump Jr.'s personal fortune is estimated to be around $300 million, much of that derived from monetizing his father's political connections. Among other things, Trump Jr. is an "advisor" to a number of companies that can benefit from having influence over Trump Sr.'s policies.

But the problem with what (for a Trump) is a small amount of money is the symbolism. It reinforces a hard truth that Trump Jr. himself once blurted out: that the Trump family owes its current wealth largely to timely Russian "investment"—much of it in the form of money laundering. That's a dependency that Trump Sr. has never freed himself from, and is a big part of why his personally pro-Putin stance is so at odds with the rest of American government.

It's also just how the Putin regime does business: as an FBI analyst quoted by the ProPublica article pointed out,  

In his statement, Trump also declared that having the Putin pick up the tab for his son's multi-day island celebration was "Not a big deal!" because he "was not present at the party."

Why does this matter?

• Any corruption this obvious is a big deal.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He got even more confused than usual about Iran.

Recently, Trump has given up on actually winning the war he's declared victory in countless times, and has shifted the goalposts to a new place: that the war will be over after the midterm elections.

Asked today to explain why he thought it would happen then—and not in the two months between now and then—Trump changed his mind again, saying that the United States might not disengage from Iran at all. "We'll ultimately get out (of Iran), unless we decide to stay and keep the oil like Venezuela," he said.

The United States is not "in Iran" and has no Iranian oil "to keep."

Changing that would mean invading Iran, a country roughly the size and population of the Eastern Time Zone of the United States, but with much more rugged terrain. Even critics of the ruling regime in Iran are vehemently anti-US, and that was before Trump urged them to overthrow their government and then, when that didn't happen, turned around and threatened to kill civilians like them.

Short of using nuclear weapons, it is all but inconceivable that a U.S. invasion of Iran would succeed. For a comparison, the United States never managed in almost 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan to control more than the capital city of Kabul and the immediate surrounding area.

Trump, who may have gotten confused and convinced himself that some of what happened in Venezuela had actually happened in Iran, did not elaborate on what he thought had happened in Iran. He did, however, say that it was all right for China to assist Iran in targeting attacks that killed American troops. This is not the first time that Trump has excused hostile countries for attacking or killing American troops: he also gave Russia a pass for similar help to Iran, as well as for offering bounties on American servicemembers during the war in Afghanistan.

Why does this matter?

• If you can't remember which war you're fighting or whether you've already won or lost, you're not cognitively fit to be president.
   
• Presidents are supposed to care who is trying to kill US troops during war.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said losing free navigation on the most important remaining sea lane out of the Middle East was "fine and dandy."

There are two main shipping routes for virtually all Middle Eastern oil: the Persian Gulf through the Gulf of Oman, and the Red Sea via the Gulf of Aden. Both have narrow chokepoints: the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, respectively.

 

Iran, on the northern coast of the Strait of Hormuz, has had de facto control over Persian Gulf shipping, resulting in huge spikes in the price of oil and other essential goods like fertilizer and plastic feedstocks. Yesterday, Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen seized control of territory allowing them to control the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. At the same time, a major Saudi oil pipeline was attacked from within Iraq, forcing its closure.

This means that Iran or its proxies are now able to take control of both major shipping lanes in the region—and, therefore, all worldwide traffic going through the Suez Canal as well. Shipping prices and oil prices have already surged dramatically in response. Saudi Arabia, the second-biggest oil producing country in the world, had been shifting its output towards the Red Sea since Iran took control of the Persian Gulf lanes, but now faces a major crisis with both its export routes in jeopardy.

Asked about the situation on his golf vacation in Ireland today, Trump said that "everything's going to work out fine and dandy."

He did not elaborate, other than to say that the Houthis had supposedly called and said they didn't want to fight the United States. White House officials were unable to substantiate that claim, but Trump routinely announces that Iran has surrendered, and that ships are once again passing freely through the Strait of Hormuz. (They haven't, and they're not.)

 

Why does this matter?

• A president who had any clue what was happening probably wouldn't describe this situation as "fine and dandy." 

• A president who did understand the situation and had an idea to get himself out of this mess would probably take this opportunity to share it.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He left the country to go to a golf course on September 11th.

 

At 8:57 P.M. tonight, Trump boarded a helicopter that took him to Joint Base Andrews, where he will shortly depart for Ireland. The trip is a vacation: he'll watch the Irish Open golf tournament at a seaside golf course he owns in County Clare.

Trump virtually always takes Friday off—usually leaving the White House for one of his golf resorts much earlier in the day than this—so in many respects this is a typical Friday for him. That extended to his other activities on the day as well. It began shortly after midnight, as he returned from his so-called midterm convention, when he snapped at and lunged towards a reporter. ABC News' Rachel Scott, a Black woman who has frequently been the target of Trump's temper, had asked him about his pledge to pay Americans $5,000 if they elected a Republican-majority Congress in the upcoming elections.

Later in the day, the left side of Trump's face drooped as he dozed through a memorial service at the Pentagon.

 

This will be the first time a president has ever been absent from the country on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks.
 

Why does this matter?

• Given that Trump spent most of the past week telling ridiculous new lies about his escapades at Ground Zero, it's probably just as well.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He sent his staff out to clean up the mess he made trying to bribe Americans for votes last night.

Last night, in the first of two speeches he's giving at the two-night "midterm convention" he called in Dallas, Trump blurted out a plan to give every adult American $5,000—but only if Republicans win the midterm.

TRUMP: And here is my promise. If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, because of our economic, tremendous economic success—in history, we have never had anything like what's happening—I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.

It's possible Trump made it up on the spot, although a handful of his aides are now saying they'd been looped in. Most, however, were clearly surprised by Trump announcing what amounts to an election bribe of $1.3 trillion dollars.

For comparison, that is more than half of the total individual income tax revenue collected last year. It's bigger than the defense budget, but it's smaller than the roughly $12 trillion Trump has added to the United States' total $40 trillion national debt during his time in office.

Reaction to Trump's latest attempt to make himself the focus of the midterm elections can be divided into two camps. Democrats and independents reacted with scorn and mockery, while Republicans mostly expressed emotions ranging from discomfort to horror. 

The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that no such money will ever be forthcoming. Even Trump's assistant press secretary, Davis Ingle, refused to actually acknowledge the sum of money or any plans to pay it out, saying only that Trump would "keep delivering real results."

Where promises to pay Americans thousands of dollars out of their own government's treasury is concerned, though, Trump has never delivered a single dollar. In his second term alone, he's promised at least $12,000: the $5,000 from last night, a separate $5,000 "DOGE dividend," $2,000 in "tariff rebates," and $1,000-$1,500 to take the place of the Affordable Care Act.

Whether or not Trump had any intention of making those payments, there wouldn't have been any money to give out. DOGE's real purpose was to purge nonpartisan government employees, but what "savings" it delivered while destroying important parts of the machinery of the federal government amount to less than $10 per American. Tariff revenues—which Trump has already "spent" anyway, at least in his mind—are about $130 billion higher than in previous years, or about $390 per American. (That's money Americans already lost in the form of higher prices.) And the ACA money, in Trump's mind, would have been to replace all health insurance and return to paying all medical bills out of pocket.

Trump also tried to join in the clean-up effort today, although not in a way that's likely to help much. In an interview with Fox News that aired today, he was asked why, if he had any intention of issuing such a "dividend," he didn't do it now instead of demanding a victory for his party in the midterms first. Trump stammered, "Because they can't—I tell you what, the Democrats can't do it."

Republicans, not Democrats, currently control both houses of Congress.

Why does this matter?

• Past a certain point, all a lie tells you is how stupid the person telling it thinks you are. 

• Even the worst presidents before Trump never got this desperate.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He shifted the end date of the Iran war from "definitely six months ago" to "maybe two months from now."

Today is the 194th day of Trump's war with Iran. He first declared victory over Iran on the eighth day of the war, in early March, and has been repeatedly insisting that Iran has already been defeated ever since. 

He said it while loosening sanctions on Iranian oil mid-war, in a futile attempt to bring down the soaring gas prices caused by Iran's seizure of the Strait of Hormuz. 

He said it in June while being forced to agree, in theory at least, to humiliating terms just to bring Iran to the negotiating table, and then he said it again after Iran ignored those talks completely and refused to give up the tactical advantages it had gained. 

He said it after four servicemembers were killed by Iranian attacks in July—then deleted their names from a list of those killed during the war to support the idea that the war had already ended. 

He has said it so often that news organizations have attempted to keep track of how many times he's said it, only to lose interest. NBC News counted 32 times by early July.

But as virtually all observers outside the Trump White House agree, the reality is that Iran has trapped Trump in a quagmire he cannot escape through the only realistic tools available to him—economic sanctions and long-range bombardment—while simultaneously making it psychologically impossible for him to admit defeat. The result: a shockingly fast degradation of the United States' ability to function as both an economic and military power in the world.

Today, Trump changed course: instead of declaring the war over, he declared it would end sometime after the midterm elections, which are still two months away: "I think the war's going to end immediately after the election because they can't hold out any longer," Trump told reporters.

But in reality, that is an acknowledgment that Trump is unable to actually change the fact of Iran's new control over the Persian Gulf region, even though it is a matter of political life or death for his party. 

 

Trump made the remarks shortly before he spoke at the "midterm convention" in Texas that he demanded—with limited success—that Republican candidates attend. But even the diehard fans who made up the sparse crowd in Dallas tonight were expressing anger and disappointment over the situation with Iran.

Why does this matter?

• A president fit to command the United States military would never have gotten himself into this humiliating situation in the first place.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He invented a brand new lie about his supposed 9/11 heroics to go with all the old ones.

Today, at a ceremony that was supposed to honor fallen heroes of September 11th, Trump unveiled a new and unequivocally false story that put him squarely at the center of the action. Not just supervising literally "hundreds" of Trump Organization employees in a rescue effort—a disproven lie he's told in the past—but personally in danger of death at the U.S. Steel building right next to the collapsed towers. 

TRUMP: And I'll never forget, two firemen—we thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big strong guys—and I'm not the smallest guy in the world—they grabbed me under the arm, said, 'Got to get out of here!' and they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I'm big. They lifted me up and they started running with me, I said, "Fellas, I can run myself." But they were amazing, but they thought it was coming down. It didn't come down, U.S. Steel.

There is no evidence whatsoever that Trump was anywhere near the World Trade Center site on September 11th or September 12th. The earliest he was anywhere near the site was on September 13th, when he gave the latest in a series of post-attack interviews, this time for a German news outlet. He did not mention the fictitious imminent collapse of the U.S. Steel building then—or at any point in his life until today.

That interview on the 13th was when he claimed to be there supervising Trump Organization workers—"over one hundred… and about 125 [more] coming." This was, and has always been, a lie. No one, including the hundreds of supposed workers, has ever come forward with any evidence. Contrary to Trump's version of the facts, untrained office workers would not have been allowed anywhere near the site, which was incredibly dangerous and an active crime scene. As an NYFD battalion chief at the time put it, if Trump's phantom army of volunteers existed,

There would be a record of it. Everybody worked under direct supervision of the police and fire department and the joint commander for emergency services.  

In reality, by early on the afternoon of September 11, Trump had kicked off a media blitz. He called into a local Fox affiliate to brag that a property he owned, 40 Wall Street, was now the tallest in Manhattan. Even this was a lie: The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and 70 Pine Street were all taller. Trump didn't even own the building: he just held the lease. 

During his post-attack publicity spree, Trump promised the massive audience of the Howard Stern radio show that he would give $10,000—about 0.01% of his supposed net worth at the time—to 9/11 charities. He never did. In 2016, while running for president, he directed his charitable foundation to give $100,000 of other people's money to the 9/11 Museum. (That foundation was later dissolved by court order as a fraud.)

Trump's September 11th story has changed considerably over the years, though never quite as dramatically as today. When he was running on an anti-Muslim platform in 2016, he claimed to have seen television footage of a "large Arab population… thousands and thousands of people" in Jersey City who were "cheering as that building was coming down." This, too, is a lie: literally nobody other than Trump has ever corroborated his story, which would have happened during a time of extreme tension and backlash against Muslim- and Arab-Americans. No such television footage ever existed.

At today's event, Trump also "jokingly" complained that an actual 9/11 hero, the volunteer firefighter Welles Crowther, had "become more famous than me—I don't like it." Crowther, whose identity as the man who ran repeatedly upstairs to guide injured people to safety, died on the day of the attacks. He had helped to save 18 people who were trapped on the upper floors of the South Tower, just below the point of impact.

Welles Crowther, who died on Sept. 11, 2001, after saving the lives of 18 other people

Trump will not attend the official 9/11 memorial in New York City. He is scheduled to leave the country on that day to attend a golf tournament in Ireland. 

Why does this matter?

• The kindest possible interpretation of what Trump dared to say today, in front of the families of actual heroes and victims, is that he is so far gone into dementia that he has no idea what he's saying. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He celebrated Labor Day in the United States by trying to move Canadian jobs to Brazil.

Trump continued attacking Canada today via what may be the only tool he has left: social media. In a post this morning, he declared "NO MORE SELLING BOMBARDIER IN THE UNITED STATES!" Bombardier is a Canadian jet manufacturer that produced many of the medium-sized passenger jets currently in use by regional airlines.

A Bombardier CRJ-700

 

It's not clear whether Trump was declaring his intention to make such sales illegal, or whether he was simply exhorting US airlines not to buy them. If it was intended as a threat, it's one that's he's made before, but never followed through on. In January, he said he would order the FAA—which is responsible for aircraft safety, not international trade—to decertify Bombardier aircraft. This would have instantly crippled air travel in the United States, as hundreds of Bombardier jets are in currently in service. (White House spokespeople quickly walked back Trump's empty threat.) 

Trump framed his rant as defending Gulfstream, a US-based manufacturer of private jets. But Gulfstream wouldn't benefit from airlines being unable to buy Bombardier jets: it doesn't make passenger jets for airlines. Instead, the most likely beneficiaries of such an action would either be the Brazilian-based Embraer or the Chinese company AVIC Chengdu. Both of those companies are known to have benefited from the kind of illegal state support that Trump is accusing Canada of—and that he is now trying to do on behalf of Gulfstream.

Last week, Trump gave reporters a hint of why he was rushing to prop up Gulfstream when he told them about a conversation he'd had with an unnamed friend—presumably a Canadian—who complained that he couldn't buy a Gulfstream jet because Canada hadn't certified the model he wanted. That is, to put it mildly, unlikely: private jets are usually owned by shell companies and can be "flagged" anywhere and flown into Canada without issue. But Trump thinks of himself as a connoisseur of luxury aircraft—he admitted himself that he chose the specific plane he wanted Qatar to "give" him—and may simply be siding with Gulfstream out of brand loyalty.
 

Why does this matter?

• Firing off random shots at the behest of wealthy "friends" isn't a great trade strategy. 

• Americans who can't afford their own private jets (or demand that they be given one from foreign heads of state) have a little more skin in the game than Donald Trump here. 

• Repeating threats you didn't make good on the first time is a good way to not be taken seriously the second time either.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He showed off another facet of his financial illiteracy.

Trump retreated to social media again today in his attempt to force trade concessions from Canada. Nothing else has been working for him: Canadians are absolutely galvanized against Trump's demands, and are completely politically united against giving him any further ground. This morning's post was a mystifying complaint about the US-Canadian "dollar imbalance:"

Canada's (currency) Dollar imbalance with the U.S. is unacceptable. It has been that way for years - but no longer! President DJT 

As of today, a US dollar (USD) is worth about $1.38 Canadian dollars (CAD). With a few brief exceptions, that's roughly where the exchange rate has been for the last fifty years: trading about 30-40% above "par."

 

What's more, the CAD is not at all a weak currency by global standards. It's generally regarded as one of the strongest currencies in the world, right next to the USD. 

Trump is apparently under the impression that $1 USD and $1 CAD should necessarily be equal, possibly because they're both called "dollars." That is simply not how currencies work. The particular ratio between stable currencies is arbitrary. For example, $1 USD is worth about 0.73 British pounds, but the GPB isn't inherently stronger just because the base unit buys more. What makes a currency stronger or weaker is a change over time in that ratio. 

There have only been two brief periods in recent decades where the CAD approached par with the USD. The first was at the outset the "Great Recession" of 2008, which hit the United States much harder than Canada, and the second was shortly afterward during a period of high demand for Canadian commodities like oil and lumber.

If Trump really did want the CAD to gain in strength against the USD, the simplest way would be to stop driving inflation in the United States. That would allow interest rates to fall, which generally weakens a currency. Specifically, Trump could abandon his ultra-high tax regime on imports, especially Canadian imports, which is driving up prices for American consumers. Resolving his war with Iran would be another big step, but much more difficult to do, given the almost inconceivably strong bargaining position he's put Iran in. 

Trump's thoughts on currency valuation was the only text post in a long string of 37 posts that he—or someone using his authority—posted today. Most of the rest were AI-generated images of the type that seem to help soothe Trump's emotions: posing heroically on horseback with George Washington, pretending to work blue-collar jobs, or changing the name of New Mexico to New America and then dancing mockingly.

Why does this matter?

• Facts do not change because Donald Trump can't or won't understand them.
  
  
• "It is bad to trade with other countries and I will do whatever I can to stop it, starting with our biggest trading partner and closest ally" is an objectively insane thing for a president to believe.

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.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to sell his Venezuelan oil grab but left out the many reasons it won't ever lead to lower prices at the pump.

The Trump administration released some details of its supposed "deal" to secure access to Venezuela's 65 billion-barrel untapped oil reserves. Supposedly, the United States will form a joint partnership with an existing private Venezuelan oil company. That new joint company would have 100-year leases on various fields. Its profits would be shared with the Defense Department, and the State Department would have an option to buy a certain amount of oil at production cost. (When Trump isn't doing it himself, as he frequently does, he usually calls centralized state ownership and control of key industries like energy "communism.") 

Trump is painting this as a quick fix for the much larger oil price spike he's caused with his war on Iran. There are, to put it mildly, a few problems with this argument.

• The untapped Venezuelan reserves are just that—untapped. Nothing about putting a different name on the lease changes the fact that virtually all of those billions of gallons of oil will remain in the ground for decades, even if massive infrastructure is quickly built to extract it. 

• The massive infrastructure needed to extract it doesn't exist yet. Oil drilling infrastructure is incredibly complex, has to be carefully tailored to each new drill site, and costs an enormous amount of money to build even in areas near established power and road networks—which Venezuela's fields aren't. It's not impossible to build economically viable wells at the sites Trump has chosen to take, but it won't be easy or cheap either. That's why they haven't been exploited before now. 

•  Venezuelan oil is low-quality and not in high demand for gasoline. In oil industry terms, it's "sour," meaning it contains high sulfur levels, and "heavy," meaning it's sludgy in consistency and difficult to move via pipeline. It's mostly used for making asphalt or as the ultra-low-grade bunker fuel for ships. 

•  There isn't enough refinery capacity to use it. The one bit of good news for Trump's scheme is that the United States does have the highly specialized refineries that can make use of Venezuelan oil. They're 30 years old and in need of modern upgrades, which will cost a lot of money. But even fully modern refineries can only process so much, so even if Venezuelan oil eventually started flooding onto the US refinery market (after many years of building up the infrastructure to extract it), there still wouldn't be any place to refine it. To fix that problem, more US refineries would have to be built, and that would involve private businesses thinking it was worth the risk to spend the billions of dollars necessary. 

•  The political situation is much too unstable. For Trump's plan to come to fruition in the form of the first drop of "his" oil, both the United States and Venezuela would have to be in lockstep agreement for decades. Trump's direct control of the levers of American government isn't likely to survive the year, and his ability to coerce the acting President of Venezuela depends on her retaining power indefinitely too. Even routine legal challenges within Venezuela would add years more to the timeline, and that is assuming the mildest possible reaction from the multi-lateral outrage this "deal" is creating in Venezuela. 

•  Nothing stops a future Venezuelan government from re-nationalizing any oil infrastructure that American money and private investment builds now. Venezuela has already nationalized its oil production facilities twice, at first partially in 1976 and then a second time to seize the remaining facilities in 2007. The private companies involved were compensated, albeit less than they would have liked. Trump's claim that no American money would be spent on developing new infrastructure is obviously false—but that would make it much easier for the next government of Venezuela to claim that no harm would be done be taking back control of its own country's natural resources for a third time.

•  Every timeline gets longer if the price of oil drops. Right now, with oil at astronomically high prices due to Trump giving Iran a veto over a major shipping channel for it, Venezuelan oil makes economic sense. But there's no guarantee that will continue for the decades it will take to bring the reserves Trump claims online. A future US president will presumably be able to extricate the United States from Trump's quagmire in Iran, at which point oil prices will presumably fall, and that will make developing Venezuela's reserves cost-inefficient compared to lower-hanging fruit. That doesn't mean wells will never be drilled, but simple economics (which Trump claims to have studied at Penn) dictates that they won't be drilled while there are more profitable alternatives. 

•  Gasoline will never get cheaper in the United States because of this. In part that's because, as noted above, Venezuelan oil isn't really suited for gasoline or aviation fuel production. By the time it was profitable to extract gasoline directly from Venezuelan crude, the price would be so high that the global economy would probably have collapsed from an oil shock already.
  
  But it's also because oil is a globally traded commodity, and Venezuela's oil is still a drop in the bucket. Bringing more oil production online lowers prices for every market. That's why Trump's bungling of the Strait of Hormuz is raising prices even for countries that don't normally buy oil shipped through it: the laws of supply and demand are smoothed out in the global marketplace. More to the point, oil prices are set in large part by cartel action, and that routinely restricts output to keep prices high enough to be economically viable.
  
  

Trump clearly understands that his self-inflicted inflation is a major driver of his unpopularity, even among Americans who were strong supporters of his before he returned to office. It's less clear why he thinks that voters will confuse his announcement that prices are going down with the reality they face at the pump.

Why does this matter?

• American consumers are not nearly as stupid as Donald Trump thinks they are. 

• Bringing back 19th-century-style colonialism is bad; doing it for resources that are worthless without decades of development is stupid.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He pretended he already has the fascist powers he wants.

This morning, Trump—or someone posting as though they were him—threatened to have the FCC inflict "rebuke or punishment" on Meet the Press host Kristen Welker. Her offense, according to Trump, was pointing out that Trump had had "mixed results" in endorsing candidates.

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States specifically bars Trump or any other government official from trying to "punish" journalists, or anyone else, merely because they said something he interprets as criticism.

 

That said, Welker's observation is factually true. Trump is extremely sensitive about his ability to "win" primary elections with his endorsements. He's made a habit of "endorsing" candidates who are running unopposed or with no serious challenger to run up his score. And when his chosen candidate loses, Trump has a habit of attacking them for making him look bad, as he did recently with his "friend" Cory Mills.

He's so fixated on this that he once endorsed "Eric" in the 2022 Missouri Senate primary. (Eric Schmitt defeated Eric Greitens in that race; Trump never specified a last name until the election was safely over.)

But with Trump's brand absolutely toxic after 18 months back in office, more and more Republicans are willing to challenge him—and some who do are winning their primaries. Ten candidates for Congress or statewide office that he's endorsed so far have lost in the primaries. That's as many as in the last three election cycles combined.

Why does this matter?

• "Rebuke or punishment" for criticizing the leader only happens in dictatorships. 

• Making up things to throw tantrums about isn't a sign of great cognitive health.

What did Donald Trump do today?

We don't really know.

As is typical for a weekend day (and not uncommon for weekdays), Trump went to one of his luxury golf resorts today. The pool reporter was prevented from directly observing him, but there is at least some indirect "proof of life" because he reportedly attended a dinner for his political action committee. 

The Trump administration made no policy announcements today. There were no major developments in court cases involving Trump. If Trump signed any bills or orders, the White House hasn't told anyone about them yet.

To be clear, it was anything but a slow news day where the consequences of Trump's actions were concerned. Among other things, news broke that Trump had illegally destroyed cherry trees given as a diplomatic gift by Japan to renovate a golf course. Reports also surfaced that his supposed "deal" to give control of Venezuela's oil reserves to American companies he favored was likely to face legal and constitutional objections from, in effect, the entire political apparatus of the country. And there was more analysis of the lucrative stock trades Trump made in the oil and gas sector that just so happened to come directly before his public statements about the Iran war caused prices to change.

But in terms of events that could be directly attributed to Trump himself, the only evidence came from his social media feed—and that is no longer a reliable indicator. There were 20 posts to his microblogging website account today, including while he was supposedly golfing. But most of these were image posts—memes or the AI slop that is typical of most Trump administration comms these days. For example, there was an AI slop video of "Donald ducks"—ducks with Trump's hairpiece—carrying assault rifles to defend Lake Ontario. 

As a practical matter, it's long been clear that Trump is not personally posting most of what goes on his social media account. For one thing, it's extremely unlikely that Trump is capable of using a phone or laptop well enough to upload video or images. But recent revelations about the extent of his relationship with the aide who does much of his posting for him, Natalie Harp, strongly suggest Trump may not be aware from day to day what "he" is saying, and not just in the AI slop and memes. The emotionally raw letters that Harp sent Trump use the same idiosyncratic capitalization that appear in Trump's posts.

Harp isn't the first young junior aide that Trump has developed an emotionally intense relationship with that alarmed others close to him. Hope Hicks played a similar role during Trump's first term, as did his daughter Ivanka, both of whom were called on to help manage his outbursts of temper.

Why does this matter?

• It's bad if it's not clear who is actually exercising the powers of the presidency.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He remained a convicted felon.

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ruled today against Trump's latest attempt to have his 34 New York state felony convictions set aside.

The ruling was in one sense procedural: Hellerstein found that Trump waited too long to try to move the trial to federal court after his conviction in May of 2024. Trump would likely have been within his rights to ask that the trial be "removed" to federal court, in which a federal judge and jury would apply New York State law. But federal law requires that any such motion be made within 30 days of an accused criminal's arraignment, which for Trump would have been in April of 2023. Trump waited until after a jury had found him guilty and his sentencing was imminent, and did not show the required "good cause" for a later motion.

That rule exists, as Hellerstein wrote, so that defendants cannot "play one court off another," nullifying a state verdict in the hopes of another chance in federal court.

But there's another reason Trump wanted the case heard in federal court: his new argument that the crimes he committed were part of his official duties as president, and therefore subject to a special presidential immunity for official acts.

The "official presidential acts" Trump sought to sweep under the rug included:

• paying a tabloid publisher money in 2015, before he ever became president, to buy the rights to the story of his affair with a porn actress, among other stories
  
  
• using money from his chartered business for that personal matter and creating fraudulent business records to conceal it 

• lying to federal election officials about the nature of those expenditures 

• failing to disclose them as the illegal in-kind campaign contributions they were 

• falsifying other business records to make his bagman's work look like legitimate legal billing 

As Hellerstein wrote in his ruling, "There is no way that discussions regarding hush money payments to cover up the President's relations with Stormy Daniels could be an official act. An affair, or a cover-up of an affair, is not within the 'outer perimeter' of the President's official responsibilities."

Trump has already escaped all real consequences of his criminal actions. He was sentenced just days before returning to office, but a judge gave him the extremely rare sentence of an unconditional discharge, freeing him from any punishment, including even fines or probation. Under normal circumstances, Trump would likely have been on probation for the rest of his life, and would have been at genuine risk of being sentenced to a short prison term.

Trump remains the only president ever convicted of a felony, but those 34 counts are not the last ones he will necessarily face. Even setting aside illegal acts he's committed since returning to office, he is still liable for prosecution on state charges of election tampering and conspiracy in Georgia, and federal charges for his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and his theft of classified materials. Those cases were dismissed for various reasons before he returned to office, but could be refiled.
 

Why does this matter?

• In a democracy, no one is above the law. 

• Anywhere that the rule is "The leader can do whatever he wants and we'll find a way to make it legal" is a dictatorship.