More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Trump and Republicans Are Destroying America's Health Care

America has long had the most expensive and least efficient health care system of any developed nation.   We pay much more than European nations and have millions of Americans without access to quality health care - something that will worsen as the Felon/GOP "big beautiful bill" throws millions off of Medicaid, depriving many working class Americans of coverage and putting many rural hospitals at risk of closure. Yes, in the past America had some of the most innovative and cutting edge care for those who are wealthy and/or have top insurance plans, but that too is changing as the Felon and the GOP have taken a meat clever to medical research funding, waging war on vaccines, and ended funding for many promising programs - all with an eye to funding huge tax cuts for the very wealthy. Already the life expectancy of Americans has fallen, especially compared to nations in "Old Europe" where life expectancy has increased.  This trend will likely worsen as somewhere between 11 and 16 million Americans lose access to health care and medical research stalls and medical advances are left to other nations. For a political party that has long pretended to be "pro-life" the actual record is that but for opposing abortion, the Felon/GOP policies view millions of citizens as disposable garbage to be kicked to the gutter.   A piece in The Atlantic looks at the ongoing destruction:

Here’s a piece of Republican rhetoric that used to be ubiquitous but that you never hear anymore: America has the best health-care system in the world.

Republican politicians liked this line because it helped them dismiss the idea that the system needed major reform. American health care at its finest offered the most advanced treatments anywhere. Democrats wanted to expand coverage, but why mess with perfection? “Obamacare will bankrupt our country and ruin the best health-care-delivery system in the world,” then–House Speaker John Boehner said in 2012.

In Donald Trump’s second term, Republicans haven’t given up their opposition to universal coverage—far from it—but they have mostly stopped singing the praises of American health-care innovation. Indeed, they are taking a meat axe to it, slashing medical-research funding while elevating quacks and charlatans to positions of real power. The resulting synthesis is the worst of all worlds: a system that will lose its ability to develop new cures, while withholding its benefits from even more of the poor and sick.

The United States has for decades languished behind peer systems in terms of access and outcomes. We are the only OECD country that lacks universal coverage, and the failure to provide basic care to all citizens contributes to our mediocre health. But America really was among the best countries at producing cutting-edge treatments. Those of us who have access to health insurance benefit from high-level technology and a for-profit system that generates incentives for new drugs and devices.

This was never a convincing reason that the United States could not expand health-care access to citizens who couldn’t afford it. But although the trade-off was false, the Republican Party’s support for medical innovation was genuine. Even during the height of anti-spending fervor during the Obama administration, Republicans in Congress approved large funding increases for the National Institutes of Health. During his first term, Trump tried and failed to repeal Obamacare . . . . .

In the second Trump era, the party’s opposition to universal health care has, if anything, intensified. The signature legislative accomplishment of Trump’s second term thus far is a deeply unpopular budget bill that is projected to take health insurance away from 16 million Americans once fully implemented.

But now the party has turned sharply against innovation too. Trump has wiped out billions of dollars in federal support for medical research, including canceling a promising HIV-vaccine project. This week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. terminated hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for mRNA-vaccine research, one of the most promising avenues in all of medicine. The United States is going to forfeit its role as medical pioneer even as it recedes further behind every other wealthy country in access.

Kennedy has made the party’s pivot explicit. He does not boast about the American health-care system. Instead, he calls it a disaster. “We spend two to three times what other countries pay for public health, and we have the worst outcomes—and that’s not acceptable,” he said on Fox News earlier this year. Kennedy is not wrong about the bottom line; American health care is costly, and the results are poor. But he is almost completely wrong about the cause of this failure. There are many reasons for Americans’ poor health, and shutting down vaccines and medical research, while depriving millions of access to basic care, will make all of those problems far worse.

[T]he anti-science wing of the party is in control of the agenda. Two main forces have driven the shift. One is the emergence of Kennedy’s “Make America healthy again” movement, a faction of gullible skeptics that Trump has brought into his coalition. RFK Jr.’s transition from left-wing kook to right-wing kook personifies the realignment of a certain strain of modern snake-oil peddlers into the Republican tent. Although they make up only a small share of the party, their intense interest in health and medicine has given them special sway—a classic instance of a tiny special-interest group determining policy for a larger coalition.

The second force driving this policy change is the rising power of the national-conservative movement. Natcons are a wing of almost fanatically illiberal culture warriors who believe that the Republican Party must use government power to destroy its enemies. The fact that cutting university medical research will harm the United States in the long run is, for the natcons, a minor consideration when weighed against the fact that universities and government-funded labs are full of Democrats.

The combined desire of both factions to attack the scientific elite has pushed the party into a retrograde opposition to medical innovation. Making matters worse, the unabashed corruption of the second Trump administration will further weigh down the sector’s innovation potential by elevating politically connected firms over market-competitive ones.

The traditional Republican position defended cutting-edge medical innovation while denying its benefits to those too poor or sick to afford access to it. Who could have guessed that liberals would one day look back at that stance with nostalgia?

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

Trump Keeps Trying to Change the Subject from Jeffrey Epstein

I have long held the view that if one is not guilty of something, then they do not try to change the subject and withhold or try to stamp out information about the story behind the accusations. The Felon and the ongoing fascination by many with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal is a case in point.  Rather than prove his - doubtful in my mind - innocence by calling for a release of all information, the Felon has continued to lie and keep information locked up and, worse yet, through meetings between his former counsel and Ghislaine Maxwell  given the appearance of seeking to silence her and/or cut a deal.  In addition, the Felon has gone out of his way to distract both the public and the media from the Epstein saga.  Imposing tariffs, alleging possible planned meetings with Putin, the Texas GOP redistricting effort, renewed screams about the "Russia hoax," and calls for investigations into Obama and Hillary Clinton all appear aimed at changing the conversation and distracting attention from the reality that the Felon is acting lake someone who is guilty.  Luckily, so far the Felon's efforts are not working and in some ways are serving to keep interest in Epstein and his ties to the Felon the center of media attention.  A piece in The Atlantic by a former conservative Republican looks at the Felon's ongoing gyrations aimed at changing the subject to anything other than Epstein:

Donald Trump doesn’t want you to read this article. Don’t let it go to your head, and I won’t let it go to mine; we’re not special. He doesn’t want anyone reading anything about Jeffrey Epstein, or his own relationship with the late sex offender. And yet his intensive efforts to change the subject to something—anything—else seem to bring only more scrutiny.

This evening, CNN reported, a group of top administration officials, including the vice president, attorney general, FBI director, and White House chief of staff, had been planning to gather to discuss whether to release the recording of an interview between Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker and an Epstein associate, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Then, this afternoon, Reuters reported the meeting had been canceled, with Vice President J. D. Vance’s spokesperson denying that it had ever even been planned. Yesterday, Republicans in the House subpoenaed the Justice Department for some records related to Epstein.

As the Epstein story’s lock on headlines enters its second month, the president has employed three main tactics to try to dislodge it. First, he has ordered his supporters to stop talking about Epstein. . . . . This has been somewhat effective in certain quarters: In the days after Trump’s pleas, Fox News aired less coverage of the story.

Trying to stifle coverage this way has flaws. Much of the interest in Epstein originated in MAGA media itself, so claiming that these supporters fell for a hoax is dodgy—especially when the attorney general and the FBI director were among the foremost merchants of innuendo. And it almost goes without saying that screaming at people not to pay attention to a topic will only make them suspect there’s something to see.

Some Trump-aligned outlets may be willing to take his lead, but other media organizations are not. A press that might have treated the Epstein story as either old news or somewhat prurient just a few months ago is now eager to find new information about it.

Second, Trump has tried to change the subject, whether that’s attempting to breathe new life into his claims of a “Russia hoax,” threatening to federalize the District of Columbia, or taking a walk on the White House roof. Distraction has long been an effective tactic for Trump, but it’s also a familiar one. Trump’s efforts have produced an amusing dynamic where no matter what he does, many people treat it as an attempt to distract from Epstein, which only points back to Epstein. Trump also keeps stepping on his own ploys. When the president announced the return of the Presidential Fitness Test last week, he invited the Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor to join him. But Taylor is a sex offender, having pleaded guilty in connection with paying a 16-year-old to have sex with him. This was not only a strange invitation on its own; it was also a reminder about Trump’s former friend Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of girls.

Third, the Trump administration and its GOP allies have tried to provide at least some information to the public, in the hope that it will sate appetites. Frequently, these moves have just whetted them. The Justice Department released what it said was “raw” footage from the jail where Epstein died, only for Wired to report that the tape was, in fact, spliced.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has called for “full transparency” about Epstein, yet he also adjourned the House rather than hold a vote on releasing files related to the case. The mystery of the reported planned meeting scheduled for tonight is more fuel for intrigue.

When Trump himself has spoken out recently, he has brought only more attention to the matter, to borrow his phrase. The president was evidently aware of Epstein’s sexual proclivities—“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” he told New York magazine in 2002—but has said that he didn’t know about Epstein’s criminal activity. . . . . Last week, however, Trump suggested that their clash came after Epstein “stole” employees from Mar-a-Lago—possibly including Virginia Giuffre, a prominent Epstein accuser who died by suicide in April. This drew understandable outrage from Giuffre’s family but also raised questions about what Trump might have known about Epstein’s trafficking.

Yesterday, I wrote about how Trump talks about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. In that case, Trump’s heated denials fed a belief among many of his critics that he must be hiding something. But the juiciest rumors did not prove true; the worst of the scandal had already been made public. Perhaps the same is true of Epstein: We already know that Trump was friends with him, and we already know that Trump was seemingly aware of his interest in young women. If Trump isn’t hiding anything, though, he’s not doing a good job of convincing the public of that.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

America Will Suffer From Trump’s Assault on Facts

The old Soviet Union was notorious for pumping out false information to make it appear the regime's economic policies and programs were successful.  Just about everyone, including much of the Soviet population knew the data and statistics were cooked and edited to depict a reality that was not true.  Under the Felon's regime were are seeing a similar war on facts and objective reality. In addition the regime is seeking to defund research - ranging from climate change research and data collection to vaccine research - and and programs that produce data that shows the  regime's failings and/or display a real world that counters the regime's ideology.  With the Felon's attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the firing of its director, the Felon is sending a message to the world that economic and other data that is essential to the financial markets and would be foreign investment - which the Felon claims to want - are going to be untrue and unreliable.  The result will potentially less foreign investment and a degrading of U.S. government bonds.  Meanwhile, here at home many will find it ever more difficult to know the truth about the economy, climate change, product safety and a host of other issues. A main editorial in the New York Times looks at where Americans find themselves:

President Trump [The Felon] treats facts in the same way that he treats people: He expects them to line up in support of his goals, and if they don’t, he seeks to get rid of them.

Last week Mr. Trump was confronted by the inconvenient truth that job growth has been in a three-month slump. A more grounded president might have considered whether the data raised questions about his agenda. Mr. Trump characteristically insisted that the questions were about the data. He charged that the beige functionaries of the Bureau of Labor Statistics were engaged in a conspiracy to discredit his administration, and he fired the head of the bureau. The firing is so clearly damaging to the credibility of the federal government that it drew objections from some Senate Republicans.

Mr. Trump’s allegations against Erika McEntarfer, the longtime public servant whom he summarily fired, have no foundation in reality. . . . . Experts, including past leaders of the agency nominated by presidents from both parties, said that it was effectively impossible for the bureau’s leader to manipulate those numbers.

But there is no doubt that Mr. Trump’s actions will cast a shadow over the rest of the government that he leads. Public servants must now do their work while fearing that they may be fired merely for producing information that displeases the president [Felon]. Mr. Trump is also making it harder for the government to obtain information, as people and businesses asked to respond to questions now have reason to doubt whether the answers will be accurately reported.

The reality is that Mr. Trump’s actions will create the very problem he claims to be fixing. Instead of improving the quality of information gathered and reported by the government, he is sowing doubts about the ability of federal agencies to produce reliable data. And in doing so, he is leaving Americans ever more reliant on whatever he declares to be the truth.

The production and dissemination of reliable information is an important government service. The decisions Americans make, from whether to wear a raincoat to which medicines to take and which investments to make, are often shaped by federal data.

Countries that fudge statistics are basically lying to themselves, and they suffer the consequences, as Ben Casselman documented in a recent analysis in The Times. Greece understated its fiscal deficits for years, even prosecuting an official who insisted on reporting the actual figures — lies that contributed to a crippling debt crisis beginning in 2009. Argentina became so well known for undercounting inflation that investors were left to assume the worst, driving up the country’s borrowing costs. Authoritarian regimes have long published rosy data that conceals and deepens the immiseration of their populations.

The Trump administration, blind to this history, is engaged in an increasingly wide-ranging effort to erase data or to prevent the collection of new data that contradicts its political agenda. It has proposed to defund the Hawaiian observatory that has measured the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since 1958. It shut down a national database created to track misconduct by federal police officers. It removed from the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the results of the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, a long-running study of adolescent behaviors — including sleep, sexual activity and substance abuse — and then, after a court blocked the decision, reposted the data with a note insisting that much of it wasn’t accurate.

One of Mr. Trump’s most powerful political techniques is to seize on problems as the justification for his destructive policies.

The bureau does face challenges. It relies on a monthly survey of approximately 60,000 households at a time when people are harder to reach and less willing to participate in surveys of any kind. The agency needs to work harder to gather the same amount of data, but Congress has repeatedly refused its requests for additional funding. As a result, the bureau has been forced to rely increasingly on other sources of information to impute what is happening in the job market.

Dr. McEntarfer said last year that the agency, without more funding, might need to remove 5,000 households from its survey, which would further reduce the quality of its estimates.

A president concerned about the quality of the jobs data ought to be focused on addressing those problems. Mr. Trump, however, isn’t proposing to provide more funding or to improve the agency’s methods. He is not interested in how many jobs the American economy will produce this month. In firing Dr. McEntarfer, Mr. Trump made clear that he doesn’t want to know the answer.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away

In Nazi Germany, the old Soviet Union, Kim's North Korea, Putin's Russia of today - and now the Felon's America - the truth was/is always replaced with lies and propaganda to support the regime. Inconvenient economic and other data are labeled as false or a conspiracy against the regime and the messengers are fired from their positions or worse (think all the Russian who have "fallen" from windows or down staircases to their deaths).  Meanwhile, those who know the regime's pronouncements are false either keep their heads down and go along with the lies or, worse yet, repeat them. In 2025 America, Republicans - even those who know better - are only too willing to parrot the Felon's lies.  Indeed, the slide from reality based federal government policies seemingly is accelerating and will likely have adverse impacts on everything from federal bond markets to democracy itself.  Yet, sadly, too many Americans either don't care as they remain gripped with tunnel vision focused on getting through each day or are willing to embrace any propaganda that supports their hatred and prejudices.  Both groups - as well as the rest of who are paying attention - will ultimately pay a steep price. A column in the New York Times looks at what once was normality slipping away.  Here are highlights:

Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened on Friday. Trump, in effect, ordered our trusted and independent government office of economic statistics to become as big a liar as he is.

He fired Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for bringing him economic news he did not like, and in the hours immediately following, the second most dangerous thing happened: The senior Trump officials most responsible for running our economy — people who in their private businesses never would have contemplated firing a subordinate who brought them financial data they did not like — all went along for the ride.

What they should have said to Trump is this: “Mr. President, if you don’t reconsider this decision — if you fire the top labor bureau statistician because she brought you bad economic news — how will anyone in the future trust that office when it issues good news?” Instead, they immediately covered for him.

The moment I heard what Trump had done, I had a flashback. It was January 2021, and it had just been reported that Trump, after losing the 2020 election, had tried to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes — exactly 11,780, Trump said — to overturn the presidential election and even threatened him with “a criminal offense” if he didn’t. The pressure came during an hourlong telephone call, according to an audio recording of the conversation.

The difference, though, is that back then there was something called a Republican official with integrity. And so Georgia’s secretary of state did not agree to fabricate votes that did not exist. But that species of Republican official seems to have gone completely extinct in Trump’s second term. So Trump’s rotten character is now a problem for our whole economy.

Going forward, how many government bureaucrats are going to dare to pass along bad news when they know that their bosses — people like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, the Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer and the U.S. trade representative Jamieson Greer — will not only fail to defend them but will actually offer them up as a sacrifice to Trump to keep their jobs?

Shame on each and every one of them — particularly on Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, who knows better and did not step in. What a coward. As Bessent’s predecessor, Janet Yellen, . . told my Times colleague Ben Casselman of the B.L.S. firing: “This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”

It is important to know how foreigners are looking at this. Bill Blain, a London-based bond trader who publishes a newsletter popular among market experts . . . . “Friday, Aug. 1 might go down in history as the day the U.S. Treasury market died. There was an art to reading U.S. data. It relied on trust. Now that is broken — if you can’t trust the data, what can you trust?”

He then went on to imagine how his Porridge newsletter will sound in May 2031. It will begin, he wrote, with “a link to a release from Trump’s Ministry of Economic Truth, formerly the U.S. Treasury: ‘Under the leadership of President Trump, the U.S. economy continues to grow at record speed. . . . All recent graduates have found highly paid jobs across America’s expanding manufacturing sector, causing many large companies in Trump Inc to report significant labor shortages.’”

If you think this is far-fetched, you clearly have not been following the foreign policy news, because this kind of tactic — the tailoring of information to fit Trump’s political needs — has already been deployed in the intelligence field.

In May the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, fired two top intelligence officials who oversaw an assessment that contradicted Trump’s assertions that the gang Tren de Aragua was operating under the direction of the Venezuelan regime. Their assessment undermined the dubious legal rationale Trump invoked — the rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act — to allow the suspected gang members to be thrown out of the country without due process.

And now this trend toward self-blinding is spreading to further corners of the government. . . . One of America’s premier cyberwarriors, Jen Easterly, who was the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Biden administration, had her appointment to a senior teaching position at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point revoked last week by Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll after Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist, posted that Easterly was a Biden-era mole.

Read that sentence again very slowly. The Army secretary, acting on the guidance of a loony Trump acolyte, revoked the teaching appointment of — anyone will tell you — one of America’s most skilled nonpartisan cyberwarriors, herself a graduate of West Point.

And when you are done reading that, read Easterly’s response on LinkedIn: “As a lifelong independent, I’ve served our nation in peacetime and combat under Republican and Democratic administrations. I’ve led missions at home and abroad to protect all Americans from vicious terrorists …. I’ve worked my entire career not as a partisan, but as a patriot — not in pursuit of power, but in service to the country I love and in loyalty to the Constitution I swore to protect and defend, against all enemies.”

And then she added this advice to the young West Pointers she will not have the honor of teaching: “Every member of the Long Gray Line knows the Cadet Prayer. It asks that we ‘choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.’ That line — so simple, yet so powerful — has been my North Star for more than three decades. . . . . The harder right is never easy. That’s the whole point.” That is the woman Trump did not want teaching our next generation of fighters.

And that ethic — always choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong — is the ethic that Bessent, Hassett, Chavez-DeRemer and Greer know nothing of — not to mention Trump himself.

That is why, dear reader, though I am a congenital optimist, for the first time I believe that if the behavior that this administration has exhibited in just its first six months continues and is amplified for its full four years, the America you know will be gone. And I don’t know how we will get it back.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

Spanberger for Governor of Virginia

Please join us on September 3, 2025. http://secure.actblue.com/donate/asfg090325

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

The Trump Economy Is Beginning to Tank

Many of those who voted for the Felon in 2024 claimed that they believed he would handle the economy better - perhaps rather than admit that their true support for the Felon stemmed from his white supremacy agenda - despite (i) the strength of the Biden economy notwithstanding inflation triggered from the recovery from the Covid pandemic, and (ii) some of the Felon's proposals, including tariffs.  Now, it is beginning to appear that the results of the Felon's reckless tariff policies and the assault of federal employees and the slashing of funding for everything from cancer research to decimating the National Weather Service are coming home to roost.  New job generation is down significantly, unemployment is up, and inflation is rising - and will likely worsen as tariffs take increase effect.  Many economist predicted what is happening albeit it has been slower setting in that first thought.  Thus, much of the MGA base and swing voters who seemingly paid little attention to the Felon's actual economic proposals on the campaign trail once again voted against their own economic interests.  What little benefit many voters will get from the :big beautiful bill" will be more than offset by higher prices due to tariffs. And just wait until millions lose health care coverage through slashing Medicaid funding and attacks on Obama care.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the economy which could well be careening into a ditch.  Here are highlights:

The Trump economy doesn’t look so hot after all. This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released revised data showing that, over the past three months, the U.S. labor market experienced its worst quarter since 2010, other than during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. The timing was awkward. Hours earlier, President Donald Trump had announced a huge new slate of tariffs, set to take effect next week. He’d been emboldened by the fact that the economy had remained strong until now despite economists’ warnings—a fact that turned out not to be a fact at all.

After Trump announced his first sweeping round of “Liberation Day” tariffs, in April, the country appeared to be on the verge of economic catastrophe. The stock market plunged, the bond market nearly melted down, expectations of future inflation skyrocketed, and experts predicted a recession.

But the crisis never came. Trump walked back or delayed his most extreme threats, and those that he kept didn’t seem to inflict much economic damage. . . . . The Trump administration took the opportunity to run a victory lap. “Lots of folks predicted that it would end the world; there would be some sort of disastrous outcome,” Stephen Miran, the chair of Trump’s council of economic advisers, said of Trump’s tariffs in an interview with ABC News early last month.

The sky’s refusal to fall likely influenced the Trump administration’s decision to press ahead with more tariffs. In recent months, Trump has imposed 25 percent tariffs on car parts and 50 percent tariffs on copper, steel, and aluminum. He has threatened 200 percent tariffs on pharmaceuticals. Over the past week, Trump announced trade deals under which the European Union, Japan, and South Korea agreed to accept a 15 percent tariff on exports to the United States. Finally, this morning, he announced a sweeping set of new tariffs, a sort of Liberation Day redux, including a 39 percent levy on Switzerland, 25 percent on India, and 20 percent on Vietnam. These are scheduled to take effect on August 7 unless those countries can negotiate a deal.

Then came the new economic data. This morning, the BLS released its monthly jobs report, showing that the economy added just 73,000 new jobs last month—well below the 104,000 that forecasters had expected—and that unemployment rose slightly, to 4.2 percent. More important, the new report showed that jobs numbers for the previous two months had been revised down considerably after the agency received a more complete set of responses from the businesses it surveys monthly. What had been reported as a strong two-month gain of 291,000 jobs was revised down to a paltry 33,000. What had once looked like a massive jobs boom ended up being a historically weak quarter of growth.

Even that might be too rosy a picture. All the net gains of the past three months came from a single sector, health care, without which the labor market would have lost nearly 100,000 jobs. That’s concerning because health care is one of the few sectors that is mostly insulated from broader economic conditions: People always need it, even during bad times. (The manufacturing sector, which tariffs are supposed to be boosting, has shed jobs for three straight months.) Moreover, the new numbers followed an inflation report released by the Commerce Department yesterday that found that the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of price growth had picked up in June and remained well above the central bank’s 2 percent target.

Economic growth and consumer spending also turned out to have fallen considerably compared with the first half of 2024. Taken together, these economic reports are consistent with the stagflationary environment that economists were predicting a few months ago: mediocre growth, a weakening labor market, and rising prices.

The worst might be yet to come. Many companies did in fact stock up on imported goods before the tariffs kicked in; others have been eating the cost of tariffs to avoid raising prices in the hopes that the duties would soon go away. Now that tariffs seem to be here to stay, more and more companies will likely be forced to either raise prices or slash their costs—including labor costs. A return to the 1970s-style combination of rising inflation and unemployment is looking a lot more likely.

The Trump administration has found itself caught between deflecting blame for the weak economic numbers and denying the numbers’ validity. . . . . . Trump posted a rant on Truth Social accusing the BLS commissioner of cooking the books to make him look bad. “I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” he wrote. . . . . . These defenses are, of course, mutually exclusive: If the bad numbers are fake, why should Trump be mad at Powell?

In these confused denials, one detects a shade of desperation on Trump’s part. Of course, everything could end up being fine. Maybe economists will be wrong, and the economy will rebound with newfound strength in the second half of the year. But that’s looking like a far worse bet than it did just 24 hours ago.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty