I thought I might go for a more lightweight approach to my post today, especially given it’s the weekend and you no doubt have better things to do than listen to me rattling on. But as I began to write it, it slowly went downhill.
This is what absolute respect for a president looks like. He never needed to cancel comedians or extort media companies, Fortune 500 CEOs or trusted trading partners.
He never instigated a federal sales tax on every American, calling it a tariff and pretending foreign countries paid the bill. And he certainly did not preside over the most significant transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in American history.
He never removed the healthcare and SNAP payments of millions of Americans, while removing consumer and environmental protections protecting clean air and clean water.
He never pretended prices were going down when they were going up. He never threatened to invade Canada, Greenland or Panama.
He never set up a crypto bribe pipeline and earned $5 billion in his first 6 months in office, by using the seal of the President to extort those seeking access to favours.
He never deployed the military to American cities, condoned the abduction of people by masked men from the streets, and never deported people to concentration camps.
He never defunded universities, scientific research, including for childhood cancer and never endangered the lives of children by integrating conspiracy theories into critical vaccine programs for preventable childhood diseases.
He never removed the right to bodily autonomy for women or forced them to risk death to preserve an unviable fetus. Or to face imprisonment for a miscarriage. He never tried to ban access to medicated abortion or to limit access to contraception.
He never tore up the Rose Garden and paved over it with concrete and cheap-looking parasols. He never decorated the Oval Office like a 17th-century French brothel, and he definitely did not sell American citizenship for $5 million and HB 1 visas for $100,00.
He never committed crimes against the English language and sentence structure. And was never a laughing stock on the world stage, neither did he travel abroad to lecture world leaders on the free speech he was denying his own citizens.
He never gave a speech before a monarch, during which people cringed and wanted to crawl into a hole with embarrassment for him. He did, however, win the heart of Queen Elizabeth II, who asked him if he would return to visit after his presidency. He visited Buckingham Palace three times, and the Queen invited his daughters to sit in the Golden Royal carriage as an enduring sign of her affection for Obama and his family.
He was never a fan of wearing orange face paint or living on Big Macs and packed sugar Coca-Cola. Oh, and did I mention he didn’t cheat at golf? He never lost a presidential election and won the Nobel Peace Prize, as well as numerous international honours.
He did speak to a joint gathering of the Lords and the Commons in the historic Westminster Hall at the Houses of Parliament.
In the spirit of balance, he DID wear a tan suit! Was guilty of being the most popular president in American history and could speak using complete sentences, employing cadence and oratory dynamics.
Oh, and he wasn’t obese and in such poor health that he lived with cankles and bruised hands from cannulas.
Other than this, they are like two peas in a pod. 🫛
On a more serious note, reading this comparison should bring into sharp focus the dangers America faces as a result of a president completely out of control, who wants to outlaw now an ideology, ANTIFA, which means anti-fascist. Cemeteries across Europe stand as a testament to the thousands of American soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice in the fight against fascism. Are their names to be removed from the headstones of the fallen and from the military records?
Trumple Thinskin is frankly becoming a caricature ridiculed around the world. The problem is, the more he’s ridiculed, the more unhinged he becomes. It’s like a vicious circle that will continue to deliver pain to the American people, and he could ’t care less.
The Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) delayed the release of a critical annual report yesterday, central to future inflation data, with no explanation. While this is not unusual (it happened in 2024), what is unusual is that the BLS provided no revised date when the data would be released. If you would like a more detailed assessment, you can review the report from Axios yesterday by Courtenay Brown. My concern is that we may reach a situation where the numbers provided by the BLS can’t be trusted.
We know, for example, that Trump’s new appointee to the Federal Reserve, Stephen Miran, was the sole member of the board who voted for a 0.5% interest rate cut this week. This was the clearest of indications of a move to politicise the Fed, not in the interests of serving the American people, but rather Miran’s audience of one. In a preposterous statement reported by Market Watch, Miran said:
“I don’t see any material inflation from tariffs. I see no evidence that it’s occurred,” Miran said in an interview with CNBC on Friday.
[Market Watch noted that] Miran also contended inflation is likely to slow due in part to the president’s crackdown on illegal immigration. He said a surge in immigration in recent years had driven up prices for housing and raised inflation.
I can’t express how dangerous the political appointees are who are installed throughout key positions in government, merely to act as proxies for an out-of-control president.
If you add in the fact that Trump is pushing regulators to loosen earnings reporting requirements for public companies, suggesting they should be relieved of their duty to report earnings quarterly, allowing them instead to report every six months. Another deregulatory move that deprives investors and economic analysts of key data. Should you require a broader overview, take a moment to read the report in the Financial Times by Zehra Munir, Alexandra White and George Steer, which I have gifted here for you to read without the paywall. The report notes that:
Ann Lipton, a law professor at the University of Colorado, said less frequent reporting lends greater leverage to corporate insiders and deprives investors, analysts and regulators of information that paints a macro picture of economic direction.
Other economic commentators also think that it opens the door to less transparency and invites fraud (no surprise there then), which is par for the course when it comes to the way Trump operates.
Amidst all the noise, we must keep an eye on what might at first appear to be insignificant moves that are integral pieces in Trump’s plans. Nothing is off the table, given the out-of-control debt that now runs at $37 trillion. Servicing the debt interest alone is costing US taxpayers a trillion dollars a year. In a report by Billy Bambrough on Forbes.com, he reported recently that:
Last year, during the election campaign, Trump floated the possibility of using bitcoin to pay off the U.S.'s $35 trillion debt pile, telling Fox Business that, “maybe we'll pay off our $35 trillion, hand them a little crypto check, right?”
The report continues:
The Trump administration has embraced bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and dollar-pegged stablecoins, with Treasury secretary Scott Bessent saying in July that stablecoins “will buttress the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency, expand access to the dollar economy for billions across the globe, and lead to a surge in demand for U.S. Treasuries, which back stablecoins."
It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole when it comes to the US using crypto as a vehicle to reduce the burden of its ballooning debt, but the Fed board did release a paper entitled Official Reserve Revaluations: The International Experience. I have linked it here if you want to take a look for yourself. I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND watching the video below because it will tell you exactly where I’ve been going with my economic assessment. It also asserts my view that the American people can bring this government to its knees with a simple act of economic disengagement. As we speak, Disney is understanding the power of such an act of public economic disengagement. It’s a real-life example that it works.
All I want you to do is save a link to this post for downstream reflection, because I don’t believe that Bessant and the Trump international extortion gang do not have a plan up their sleeve if the wheels look like they are coming off the bus and they face defaulting on US debt. I’m just flagging this so that those interested can bring themselves up to speed. It certainly makes me feel vindicated in relation to my assessment that Trump is constantly deploying smoke and mirrors to hide the true state of the US economy.
I remember a month or so ago highlighting that he was looking to monetise federal lands. You might want to take a look at this piece from Rewilding Institute (rewilding.org). Although the administration failed in their attempts for now, you can safely assume that they will find another angle. Everything about this points to an administration which is more than aware that a storm is coming and they are thrashing around to find trillions down the back of the couch.
On this note, I’ll leave you to ponder my musings for the day in the hope that each day I make the case for why it’s vital to support people like me in independent media, especially in these times when Trump is putting corporate media to the sword.
I'd love to get traction supporting the idea of banding together. If every talk show of our persuasion opened with a monologue that Jimmy would record every day, they'd have to take them all off the air. That could be our Berlin Wall, where removing our pop culture entertainment would be the can't take it anymore turning point!!! Ditto for all the categories that are under siege. Let's get smart and feisty!!!!
Under no circumstances should we even consider selling our irreplaceable public lands. Full stop!