Trump is Trying to Amass the Powers of a King

I am a self-confessed political junkie and have been heavily involved in politics for well over thirty years.  Arguably, politics and who holds political office impacts all area of of our lives, from taxes, to public schools, to the courts - the list goes on and on - even as most of us struggle to live our lives, pay bills, raise children and grandchildren and are involved in everything from work to children's sporting events. For some, they feel they either dislike politics or don't see where it impacts them, although the ongoing federal shut down may be delivering a wake up call to many who heretofore have not paid attention.  In a long piece at The Atlantic, J. Michael Luttig, a respected former federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and former Republican lays out why every American who believes in democracy and the rule of law must not only pay attention to what the Felon is trying to do to subvert the U.S. Constitution and give himself autocratic power, but also become actively engaged in pushing back against America's would be dictator.   These are decidedly NOT normal times and the complacency which might have been the default mode for many simply cannot continue if we are to avoid catastrophe.  Here are article highlights:

In the normal course of history, the president of the United States is a figure who inspires optimism in the American people. The 47th president prefers to stir feelings of fear, vulnerability, hopelessness, and political inevitability—the sense that he, and only he, can rescue the nation from looming peril. Since his second inauguration, Donald Trump has seized authoritarian control over the federal government and demanded the obedience of the other powerful institutions of American society—universities, law firms, media companies. The question weighing heavily on the minds of many Americans is whether Trump will subvert next year’s midterm elections or the 2028 presidential election to extend his reign.

With his every word and deed, Trump has given Americans reason to believe that he will seek a third term, in defiance of the Constitution. It seems abundantly clear that he will hold on to the office at any cost, including America’s ruin.

The Founders of our nation foresaw a figure like Trump, a demagogue who would ascend to the presidency and refuse to relinquish power to a successor chosen by the American people in a free and fair election. Writing to James Madison from Paris in 1787, Thomas Jefferson warned that such an incumbent, if narrowly defeated, would “pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government.” Were that moment ever to come, the Founders believed, it would mark the demise of the nation that they had conceived, bringing to a calamitous end the greatest experiment in self-government ever attempted by man.

Trump proved in 2021 that he would do anything to remain in the White House. Even after the violence of January 6, his second impeachment, and the conviction and incarceration of scores of his followers, he reiterated his willingness to subvert the 2024 election. That proved unnecessary. Yet since his victory, Trump has again told the American people that he is prepared to do what it takes to remain in power, the Constitution be damned.

In March, Trump refused to rule out a third term, saying that he was “not joking” about the prospect and claiming that “there are methods which you could do it.” . . . . In September, after meeting with congressional leaders about the looming government shutdown, Trump posted photographs on Truth Social in which Trump 2028 hats rested prominently on his Oval Office desk. In October, when discussing the possibility of a third term, Trump said, “I would love to do it. I have my best numbers ever.”

We Americans are by nature good people who believe in the inherent goodness of others, especially those we elect to represent us in the highest office in the land. But we ignore such statements and other expressions of Trump’s intent at our peril. The 47th president is a vain man, and nothing would flatter his vanity more than seizing another term. Doing so would signify the ultimate triumph over his political enemies.

I am not a Pollyanna, nor am I a Cassandra. I was at the forefront of the conservative legal movement that began in 1981 with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. I have had the privilege of spending much of my career in public service, first in the Ford and Reagan White Houses; then in the Department of Justice; and, finally, appointed by George H. W. Bush, in the federal judiciary. I have never once in more than four decades believed that any president—Democrat or Republican—would intentionally violate the Constitution or a law of the United States. But Trump is different from all prior presidents in his utter contempt for the Constitution and America’s democracy.

The clearest evidence that Trump may subvert upcoming elections is that he tried to overturn the 2020 election. He shocked the nation and the world when he ordered then–Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the votes electing Joe Biden president, while claiming that the election had been stolen from him by his “radical left” enemies, whoever they are. . . . . he continues to deny that he lost the election. He describes January 6 as a glorious day in American history, not one of its darkest.

Among his first acts after being sworn in again was pardoning or commuting the sentences of every person convicted in connection with January 6. He then set about exacting revenge on the American justice system. He summarily fired dozens of government officials who had tried to hold him accountable for the attack on the Capitol, as well as for his other alleged criminal offenses of removing classified documents from the White House upon his departure, secreting them to Mar-a-Lago, and obstructing the government’s efforts to find and retrieve the documents. He has since replaced those fired officials with loyalists—sycophants committed to him, not to our democracy or the rule of law.

Today, Trump has vastly greater powers than he did in 2020. He has a willing vice president to preside over the joint session of Congress that will certify (or not) the next election, a second in command who refuses to admit that his boss lost the 2020 election. . . . . . Trump’s party controls both houses of Congress, and he will surely do everything he can to maintain those majorities. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has paved the way for a third Trump term, as it did for his current term, by essentially granting him absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any crimes he might commit in violation of the Constitution or the laws of the United States.

[A]nyone who doubts that Trump is contemplating a monarchical reign, consider how very far down that road he already is. Since returning to office, he has sought absolute power, unchecked by the other branches of government, the 50 states, or the free press.

On the first day of his current term, he launched a direct attack on the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship when he issued an executive order contradicting the clear language of the amendment, federal statute, and Supreme Court precedent.

He has arrogated to himself Congress’s power to levy tariffs, declaring that previous foreign-trade and economic practices had created a national emergency justifying his unilateral imposition of sweeping global tariffs.  . . . He has usurped Congress’s spending and appropriation powers by attempting to impound billions of dollars that Congress designated for specific purposes, including for public broadcasting, for Voice of America, and for desperately needed U.S. aid to starving and disease-stricken populations around the world.

He has likewise usurped Congress’s power to establish executive-branch departments and agencies, fund their operations, and provide civil-service protections to federal-government employees, unilaterally overhauling the U.S. government. He has hollowed out the Department of Education, effectively abolishing it. He has dismantled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and asserted executive control over the independent Federal Election Commission and Federal Trade Commission, and fired thousands of federal employees without reasonable cause or explanation—all while Congress has stood by silently.

The Supreme Court, too, has largely given the president its imprimatur to continue his power grab. It has either effectively reversed lower-court rulings against the president using the so-called shadow docket, or allowed the administration to proceed until the Court determines the constitutionality of various actions, by which time the damage to the Constitution, the U.S. government, and American society will have been done, as the justices well know.

In violation of the sovereign rights reserved for them by the Constitution, Trump has commanded state officials to aid him in his purge of undocumented immigrants.

The president has also taken military command of cities across the country—over the vehement objection of the states. When a federal judge held that Trump’s military occupation of Portland, Oregon, was unlawful, he circumvented her orders and trashed the judge—whom he appointed—for her ruling, saying that she should be “ashamed” of herself.

Given that Trump has for years pronounced the free press in America “the enemy of the people,” it came as no surprise when media companies were among the first Trump targeted with unconstitutional edicts. In return for his favor, many of the country’s major media institutions have surrendered to him.

He has extorted the nation’s legal profession, forcing law firms to betray their clients and the law in order to secure his favor. He has bludgeoned the nation’s colleges and universities with lawless order after lawless order. The federal government cannot tell universities how to conduct their affairs or dictate the viewpoints that professors teach. The First Amendment zealously guards such decisions, and the Constitution categorically forbids the president from wielding Congress’s power of the purse to punish these institutions.

Trump has turned the federal government against the American people, transforming the nation’s institutions into instruments for his vengeful execution of the law against honorable citizens for perceived personal and political offenses. He has silenced dissent by persecuting and threatening to prosecute American citizens for speaking critically of him, and he has divided us, turning us against one another so that we cannot oppose him.

Trump has always told us exactly who he is. We have just not wanted to believe him. But we must believe him now.

[T]he man who proposed in 2022 that the “Massive Fraud” he alleged in the 2020 election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” and who proclaimed, soon after reassuming office, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

The man who, when asked the question “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?,” answered, “I don’t know.” And the man who, when asked whether every person in the United States is entitled to due process, replied, “I don’t know.”

The man who said in August that he can “do anything I want to do,” because he’s president. . . . The man who has demanded that his attorney general and Department of Justice immediately prosecute his enemies: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.

And the man who summoned American military generals from around the world to Quantico, Virginia, to tell them that “America is under invasion from within,” repeatedly describing that enemy invasion as being by the “radical left,” a term he now seemingly uses to characterize all of his political opponents. He also said at this meeting, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military” for fighting the “war from within.”

Donald Trump is clearly willing to subvert an election in order to hold on to the power he so craves, and he is now fully enabled to undermine national elections. No one can prevent him from remaining president of the United States for a constitutionally prohibited third term—except the American people, in whom ultimate power resides under the Constitution of the United States.

The nation has survived great challenges and calamities, including the Civil War. Now it is being tested again. Once more, we must ask, as Lincoln did, whether a nation so “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” can long endure.

If America is to long endure, we must summon our courage, our fearlessness, our hope, our spirited sense of invulnerability to political enthrall, and, most important, our abiding faith in the divine providence of this nation. We have been given the high charge of our forebears to “keep” the republic they founded a quarter of a millennium ago. If we do not keep it now, we will surely lose it.

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The Empty Promises of Trump’s Imperial Presidency

On the campaign trail the Felon promised his base of deplorables and the gullible a "golden age" and to make America great again" - which translated to make America white again - with lower prices and a rebuilt industrial base.   While the misnamed "big beautiful bill" and its massive tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporation may have created a golden age for billionaires (a new Gilded Age if you will), for everyday Americans it is anything but a new golden age.  Consumer prices continue to soar, new jobs are few and far between outside of AI and Silicon Valley, millions of Americans are about to lose food assistance and millions of others are about to either lose health care coverage or be forced to pay soaring insurance premiums, ICE goons are seizing undocumented immigrants and even American citizens on the streets like a new Gestapo, federal workers and members of the military are going unpaid, and the economy increasingly appears poised to slide into recession. In the face of this, the Republican controlled Congress is doing nothing - GOP house members have fled Washington - and seem most concerned about keeping the Epstein files hidden. Congressional authority has been relinquished in the face of a demagogue and would be dictator occupant of the White House.  A piece in the New York Times looks at both the Felon's broken promises and Congress' failure to exert its authority:

As it now stands, approximately 42 million Americans will lose access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program when its funding runs out on Saturday. Most are children, seniors and the disabled. Some are able-boded adults who just happen to work jobs that leave them short of what they need to survive.

Private charity can fill a small part of the gap. So, too, can the efforts of individual states, more than two dozen of which are suing the administration to try to force it to release emergency funds to continue to pay for food stamps. But the overall scale of hunger in the United States is too large for any one institution to deal with the lapse in benefits — the federal government must act.

The federal government must also do something to address a catastrophically large increase in premiums for Americans who buy their health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Millions will have to drop their insurance if Congress doesn’t fix this problem, and millions more will be forced to spend themselves into ruin to gain access to needed care.

Looking beyond domestic policy, President Trump has launched repeated, and possibly unlawful, attacks on noncombatants in the Caribbean and even the Pacific. He has mused about land strikes targeting Venezuela as well. There is a chance that he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are thinking of regime change in that country. The president has also taken it upon himself to help pay soldiers using funds from a private donor, part of his ongoing attempt to direct spending without congressional approval.

All of this demands a congressional response. If it is not an impending disaster of food and health care insecurity, then it is a president who has done nearly everything he can to tear down the limits placed on the executive branch so that he can usurp the constitutional authority of Congress.

It is also true, however, that the United States, at this moment, does not have a functioning national legislature. The government has been shut down since the beginning of the month, when the Republican-led Congress failed to pass new spending authority into law. Since then, House Republicans have all but given up on governance, and Speaker Mike Johnson has put the House of Representatives on ice. The Senate is in session, but confirmation hearings notwithstanding, it is more or less inert.

There is no formal mechanism in the American system of government to dissolve the legislature. And for good reason . . . . . But by keeping the House on indefinite hiatus — as well as sidelining its oversight authority and more or less ceding its power to make law to the president — Republicans have successfully circumvented the text of the Constitution to make our national legislature a nullity. They have, for all intents and purposes, dissolved Congress.

It is impossible to overstate the magnitude of this transformation of the American system. Despite what the president and his apologists would have you believe — or what the executive power fetishists on the Supreme Court seem to think — the executive branch is not actually the leading institution of the federal government. The Constitution makes this clear in its structure: Article I belongs to Congress, and where the president is given a narrower set of defined duties, the national legislature is handed a broad array of powers, including powers that, under the British constitution, had been the king’s.

Those powers include the “Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises”; “To borrow Money”; “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States”; “To declare War” and “To raise and support Armies”; and “To constitute Tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court.” The Constitution also states that Congress will have the power “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”

The traditional understanding is that these powers were enumerated like this to limit Congress. But as Richard Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan, argues in his new book, “The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power,” there is a strong case to make that these powers represent the floor — not the ceiling — of congressional authority.

We may speak, colloquially (and somewhat redundantly), of “coequal” branches, but there is a real sense in which Congress is first among equals, with the power to shape and discipline the other departments of government when necessary. Or, as James Madison observed in Federalist No. 51, “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.”

It is difficult, in the present moment, to imagine a powerful and active Congress rather than what we have instead, a hidebound, sclerotic legislature unable to tackle the nation’s most serious problems. But this deficiency isn’t set in stone; it is a function of political choices. . . . Put a little differently: Although Congress has a host of powers available to it, its ability to deploy those powers in conflicts with the other branches — and to walk away from those conflicts with its authority and stature enhanced — has as much to do with politics and public engagement as it does with the enumerated powers themselves. To reflect on the high-water marks of congressional influence throughout American history is to see periods in which individual lawmakers were powerful and skilled enough to battle with presidents and their administrations for public support.

This current Congress, led by John Thune in the Senate and the aforementioned Johnson in the House, has tossed away its ball and left the field of play. It treats its power as a burden: something to avoid for fear of challenging the chief magistrate and risking his wrath in the form of an angry social media post or, more concretely, a primary challenge. Individual members cannot even be bothered to actually represent their constituents, abandoning any effort to push for the material interests of their voters in favor of a commitment to the psychological and symbolic demands of a distinct partisan minority.

In the absence of a functional Congress, the White House has taken the lead, all but supplanting the legislature as the branch that matters. If and when the shutdown ends — if and when the House returns from recess — there is little chance that this authority, freely given to the executive, will flow back in the opposite direction. . . . . And yet, the powers do remain, if only on paper. The authority still exists, albeit only in theory.

We are still far away from anything like a post-Trump period in American politics. But it will come, and it is not too early to think about the reconstruction and renewal of American democracy. What should be at the top of any agenda, given the magnitude of the challenges that will face us when Trump and his movement are gone, is the rebirth of Congress as the dominant force in the business of government. And in particular, a Congress that doesn’t hesitate to use its powers — hard and soft, formal and informal — to reshape the American political system.

If Trump represents the apogee of the imperial president — an executive unbound by rule of law — then what we may need, in his wake, is an imperial Congress.

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The Felon's Effort to Distort Reality—and Create Apathy.

Throughout his first regime and even more so now in his second regime, the Felon has sought to generate so much chaos that it becomes difficult to keep track of all of the misdeeds and objectionable policies being pushed by the would-be dictator's regime.  If the news is constantly flooded with stories and propaganda, it becomes hard to know what is happening in real time much less oppose the assaults on democracy and the free press. Trying to stay informed becomes exhausting and it is the hope of the Felon and his bootlickers at the Department of Justice and Department of Defense that the confusion and swirl of stories - some real others fake - will over time lead to public apathy which will make autocracy easier to impose on the nation. At the moment, it also is a means to keep the media distracted from the ongoing Epstein scandal. The downside, of course, is that it will become more difficult for those seeking to make policy decisions, including military decisions, based on objective reality to know what is really happening as well.  Not that the Felon cares because objective facts and experts are viewed as an enemy who expose the endless stream of lies coming both from the lips of the Felon and his self-prostituting minions and congressional Republicans like Mike Johnson, a fake Christian, who parrot the Felon's lies. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the misinformation campaign:

When you imagine media in a dictatorship, you probably think of something dull and gray.  Maybe a Soviet state-television program, extolling the annual harvest. Perhaps a smudgy newspaper photograph of Chairman Mao or General Pinochet, surrounded by blocks of turgid prose.

But if that is your mental picture, then your imagination is out of date. Nowadays, authoritarian propaganda can be varied, colorful, even mesmerizing. Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan dictator, used to perform on television for hours, singing, chatting, and interviewing celebrities. On one recent day, the website of Komsomolskaya Pravda—formerly the organ of the Soviet youth movement, now a mouthpiece of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin—offered stories ranging from clickbait about “the beautiful women who lure Muscovites into dating scams” to an alarmist account of how Ukraine is “being turned into a training ground for the EU army.”

The point of these efforts is not merely to misinform but to build distrust. Modern authoritarian regimes often offer not a unified propaganda line but rather contradictory versions of reality, and in many different forms: highbrow and lowbrow, serious and silly, sort of true and largely false. The cumulative effect is to leave citizens with no clear idea of what is actually happening.

For the first time in our history, the Department of Defense has been carefully preparing to offer Americans something similar: not information but entertainment, scandal, sycophancy, and jokes. Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded that all news organizations at the Pentagon sign a document agreeing to some new restrictions on reporters’ movement—and, more important, prohibiting journalists from publishing information that contradicts official accounts, a stricture that some believed risked criminalizing ordinary journalism. Several dozen reporters left the building, including from The Atlantic but also representatives of Newsmax and Fox News. Many had years of experience, as well as deep knowledge of military budgets, logistics, and technology. Now their replacements are arriving, and they are indeed different. Although they are widely described as “right wing,” as if they were conservatives, most are conspiracy theorists, domestic and foreign propagandists, and others with little institutional knowledge.

One of the new outlets covering the Pentagon, for example, is LindellTV, the streaming service founded by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy . . . . LindellTV is already invited to press conferences at the White House, where one of the outlet’s “reporters” asked earlier this year whether the president’s staff would consider releasing his fitness plan. Donald Trump looks “healthier than he looked eight years ago,” she said, and asked, “Is he working out with Bobby Kennedy, and is he eating less McDonald’s?”

Another new face is Tim Pool, now the owner of something called Timcast Media. Pool previously worked for Tenet Media, a company that was secretly funded by RT, Russian state media. Pool has insisted that he did not know that the company received Russian money, although there were plenty of clues, including messages time-stamped in a way that indicated they came from Moscow, as well as encouragement to make videos that backed up absurd pro-Moscow narratives . . . .

Pool’s team and LindellTV will be joined by The Epoch Times, which is linked to the Falun Gong religious movement in China. The outlet is perhaps best known for promoting QAnon conspiracy theories as well as false accounts of the 2020 election. Accompanying it will be the Gateway Pundit, a site that unsuccessfully filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to thwart a lawsuit by election workers whom it had falsely accused of fraud. One America News Network, The Federalist, and representatives of Frontlines, a publication of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point network, will also be part of the new press corps. None has a reputation for expertise in military affairs.

These outlets might, of course, produce pro-Trump propaganda. But, more important, they will produce confusion. At a time of multiple international crises, at a moment when the United States is about to engage in some kind of military action in Venezuela, as the National Guard is being sent to American cities against the will of American governors, the Pentagon’s official positions will be relayed by Timcast, The Epoch Times, LindellTV and the Gateway Pundit, which means that many people simply won’t believe Pentagon statements at all.

This appears to be the Trump administration’s preferred model, not only in the Pentagon but in the White House and everywhere else: Keep the public off-balance. Tell jokes, lies, and amusing stories or publish sinister AI-made videos, not in order to get Americans to believe government statements but in order to make them distrustful of all statements. If they aren’t sure what the U.S. military is really doing, then they won’t object.

If people don’t believe anything they read anywhere, then they won’t be motivated to argue, to discuss, or even to engage in politics. Modern authoritarian propaganda, of the kind we are about to receive from the Pentagon and perhaps other government agencies, isn’t designed to produce true believers or mass movements. It’s designed to produce apathy.

In a world where more and more people get their information from ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek and Gemini, this information fog could grow worse over time, creating permanent misunderstandings or historical vacuums. One study has already shown that these AI chatbots frequently link to Russian state media and produce false information about Russia’s war on Ukraine. But Americans might not have to wait for AI to write false histories before we feel the consequences. If the public, our allies, our adversaries, and eventually the military itself no longer believe what the Pentagon is saying, then the Pentagon might find it faces obstacles to its credibility, and to its operational capability, much greater than those once posed by investigative reporters with access to the building.

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Inflation and Economic Fears Are Coming for Trump

During 2024, we heard constant whining and complaining from Republicans, the MAGA base and, of course, the Felon about inflation and rising prices. Indeed, things got insane about egg prices while those whining ignored the fact that the driver of increased prices was avian flu decimating chicken flocks rather than any polices of the Biden administration. The Felon promised he would lower prices if elected and bring back some mythical golden age.   Fast forward to ten months into the Felon's regime and he has done neither (nor has he ended the war in Ukraine as promised).  Inflation is up, job creation is down, international trade and import prices have been driven up thanks to the Felon's insane tariffs. Add to this the federal government shutdown with federal employees going unpaid and SNAP benefits about to stop on November 1, 2025 - the latter will harm not only recipients of assistance, but also the many retailers who serve communities with large numbers of SNAP recipients.  The Felon's response? Claiming inflation is gone and that all is well.  Meanwhile, the MAGA base which will engage in self-harm to "own the libs" are having a reality check as they check out at grocery stores, pay the power bills and see other prices higher.  Ironically, the Felon posted an AI video of himself dumping feces on "No Kings" protestors, but hi is dumping feces on American consumers.  A piece at Salon looks at where we find ourselves: 

This time last year, America was focused on the upcoming presidential election. Despite a major hiccup during the summer, in which President Joe Biden bowed out after weeks of fevered speculation following a catastrophic debate performance . . . . Democrats were feeling very positive about their prospects. After all, the former guy, as Biden often referred to him, had lost the previous election, tried to stage a coup and had been convicted of 34 felonies. He couldn’t possibly make a comeback.

But no matter how they tried to explain it to voters or to shift the focus to other issues, Democrats were faced with a problem. In the end, they couldn’t escape it. 

In mid-2021, for the first time in 40 years, inflation took hold of the American economy. The Covid-19 pandemic had caused upheaval around the world. Delayed consumer demand accelerated dramatically at a time when supply chains were chaotic and necessary government stimulus increased the money supply. The Russian invasion of Ukraine put even more stress on the situation by driving up food prices and energy costs. By June 2022, inflation reached 9%.

In October 2024, just a month before the presidential election, inflation had decreased dramatically to 2.4%, just slightly above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. But people weren’t feeling the recovery — and in politics, perception is everything.

Prices hadn’t reverted to what they were before the pandemic. And when the price of eggs spiked due to an outbreak of avian flu, it became the symbol of general anger and unhappiness at the overall economy. The vibes, as they became known, were bad. 

Many Democratic party officials, pundits and analysts believe inflation is what got Donald Trump reelected. There were enough people who were spooked by perceptions about the economy, and many remembered the first Trump administration as a kind of golden economic age — mostly because he kept telling them they were. They believed he would bring prices down. At campaign events and in interviews, Trump would be asked what he planned to do about the cost of living, and he would meander around, saying that tariffs would bring in huge amounts of money, implying the government would cover additional costs. 

At an event at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, he posed with tables full of groceries and vowed, “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One.”

That never happened, and now many of the people who were counting on their grocery bills going back to what they were seven or eight years ago are gravely disappointed. Still, that hasn’t stopped Trump from telling them that their vibes are wrong and that inflation is gone. During a Thursday roundtable at the White House, he dismissed such anxieties. “Inflation, I’ve already taken care of,” he said. “Economically, the country is the strongest it’s ever been — thank God for tariffs. If we didn’t have tariffs we’d be a third-world nation.”

That’s a typically absurd comment and barely anyone believes it — not even many of his own supporters. Polling shows that inflation is the president’s lowest issue rating, averaging in the mid-30s and dropping. While the price of eggs has fallen back to normal levels now that the bird flu crisis has abated, people are seeing the price of beef skyrocket by 51% since February 2020. Americans famously love beef, so this placed Trump in dangerous territory — even before he announced his plan to quadruple imports of Argentinian beef, which have left ranchers “furious,” according to the New York Times.

The [Felon's] president’s tariffs haven’t helped. Inflation has been edging up ever since he announced his trade war in April, despite the warnings of most economists, who cautioned that tariffs will raise prices for consumers. The full effects of Trump’s tariffs haven’t yet been felt. Bigger companies were able to front load their inventories in anticipation, and small businesses have been taking out loans and freezing hiring to keep from raising prices.

Aside from the AI boom that’s fueling the stock market bubble, the economy is basically frozen, according to economist Paul Krugman. Everyone is holding their breath, waiting to see if the mercurial Trump will continue these tariffs, or if he will pull back once he’s flattered just the right way or given something he wants in return. . . . with the tariffs in effect, businesses are paying more for the imports they need to produce their goods and supply their customers. 

The government shutdown has delayed the release of all economic data except the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for September, which the administration called back federal workers to produce because it’s required to determine Social Security payments. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the CPI showed a 3% rise when compared to September 2024 — the fastest annual pace since the start of the year. When combined with what is assumed to still be a deteriorating job market — those numbers are still unavailable due to the shutdown — it shows that Trump’s claim that the economy is the strongest it’s ever been to be laughable. 

Inflation is now a ticking time bomb for Republicans. They should have learned from the Biden administration’s stumbles that you can’t persuade people that they should be happy about the cost of living just because the statistics are good. And in this case, the statistics are not good. In fact, they’re getting worse.

Not even Trump, with his talent for pounding falsehoods so relentlessly that it convinces a lot of people to believe him instead of their own eyes, can beat the vibes when people are paying more and earning less. It’s another perfect storm, and this time it’s one entirely of his own making.

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Is Rural America Finally Waking Up to Trump and the GOP's Betrayal?

I have been involved in politics for over 30 years and even ran for political office in the early 1990's (at the time some farcically labeled me "Christian Right") and have been writing this blog which has a definite political slant to it for going on 18 years.  Throughout this period time and again I have been dumbfound by how rural areas vote Republican even though GOP policies are harmful to both rural residents and rural economies.  As aspects of the Felon and GOP's "big ugly bill" begin to kick in, this harm will only intensify given the reality that rural areas (in yellow on the above map) far more than urban areas (blue on the map) depend on government monetary transfers to support their economies and personal finances.  Add to this the Felon's tariffs and trade wars and the harm to rural areas is even worse.  Will rural areas finally wake up to this reality or will voters in these regions continue to fall for the GOP's use of "god, guns and gays" and resentment towards so-called urban elites and yet again vote against their own best interests?  A thoughtful piece by a Nobel Prize winning economist looks at the continued voting by rural America against its own economic interests as the Felon/GOP social safety net cuts to fund tax breaks for the super wealthy begin in kick in and as the Felon's regime is poised to bailout Argentina, a agricultural competitor.  Here are column excerpts:

Is rural America starting to fall out of love with Donald Trump?

Policy wonks like me have spent decades pointing out that if rural Americans voted based on their informed self-interest, they would be supporting Democrats, not Republicans. Republicans are constantly trying to eviscerate Democrat-supported programs that benefited rural states like Medicaid spending, SNAP (the supplementary nutrition program formerly known as food stamps), and school lunches. Trump is also cutting subsidies for green energy programs like solar farms and wind turbines – subsidies that disproportionately went to red states. Iowa gets 63 percent of its electricity from wind!

Moreover, these programs in effect subsidize rural areas with dollars earned in urban areas: because rural areas have lower incomes than urban areas, rural Americans pay relatively little of the taxes that finance these programs. So Democratic “big government” is highly beneficial to the heartland.

Yet economic self-interest has been swamped by “rural consciousness.” This consciousness rests on a belief that highly educated urban elites don’t understand or value rural culture and rural lives. And I will admit that this belief contains a grain of truth. Urban elites are unlikely to fully understand the attachment of rural Americans to a particular place and its time-worn rhythms of life. Ensconced in salaried jobs, urban dwellers are unfamiliar with the constant anxiety of being a farmer or a small business owner in the heartland. Decades of being battered by the economic changes -- deindustrialization, farm consolidation and corporatization, depopulation, loss of community ties, along with the loss of jobs, particularly “male-coded” jobs – have left rural Americans feeling adrift, marginalized and resentful.

And this created an opening to be exploited by the right wing. Much like how Trump peddled fantasies of a manufacturing resurgence or the return of coal-mining jobs, MAGA leveraged the deep discontent within rural America to inculcate the belief that only Republicans, and Trump in particular, respect rural voters. But this is false: MAGA actually holds its most loyal voters in contempt.

And the reality of this contempt is starting to show through — not, at least so far, via the One Big Beautiful Bill’s savage cuts to health care, which will be especially devastating to rural areas, but via the Trump administration’s bizarre fixation on aiding President Javier Milei of Argentina.

The truth is that rural America is even more dependent than urban America on the programs now on the chopping block. The nonpartisan Economic Innovation Group has mapped out where in America people depend for a large share of their income on government transfers: the counties where a lot of income comes from government programs, indicated in yellow, are overwhelmingly in rural areas, while the places where such aid plays a relatively small role (light blue) mainly correspond to major metropolitan areas:

Why has rural America become increasingly dependent on government aid? The main answer is declining economic opportunity, which has led to an exodus of young people, leaving behind an older population that relies on Social Security and Medicare. Even younger rural residents have low incomes that make them eligible for mean-tested programs, above all Medicaid and food stamps.

There shouldn’t be any shame about the fact that rural America is subsidized by more affluent parts of the nation. That is, after all, what a national social safety net is supposed to do. But it should make rural voters oppose politicians who support Project 2025-type plans to rip up that safety net, which will deeply impoverish already poor regions and degrade life even for those not personally receiving aid — for example, by leading to the closure of many rural hospitals, making health care inaccessible even to those who still have health insurance.

Yet rural voters went overwhelmingly for Trump last year. Why?

Many clearly felt that educated urban elites don’t understand their lives and values — which is true. Most people in New York or Los Angeles don’t have a good sense of what life is like in rural America. But the reverse is also true: Many, perhaps most rural Americans imagine that the surprisingly safe and livable city where I’m writing this is a crime-ridden hellscape, that Chicago and Portland are “war zones,” and so on.

Rural voters may also have imagined that they would be protected from the harsh treatment being meted out to blue cities. After all, our political system gives rural voters disproportionate influence. Wyoming and the two Dakotas combined have roughly the same population as Brooklyn, yet they have 6 senators while Brooklyn has to share two senators with 16 million other New Yorkers.

For both reasons, rural voters either tuned out or refused to believe warnings that a Trump victory in 2024 would be catastrophic for the heartland, that crucial programs would be eviscerated and the agricultural economy would be devastated by Trump’s trade wars.

I thought that rural voters might finally start to realize that they have been taken for a ride when the cuts began kicking in. This will begin to happen next month, when the 22 million Americans, many of them in rural areas, who receive subsidies to help buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act will see their premiums soar, on average by more than 100 percent. It will happen even more dramatically late next year (after the midterms), when the big cuts to Medicaid and food stamps kick in.

But back to a possible rural awakening: It may be starting ahead of schedule, thanks to, of all things, the Trump administration’s efforts to bail out Argentina’s Javier Milei.

The attempt by Trump and Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, to rush $20 billion to Argentina isn’t a big deal compared with the planned savage cuts to crucial programs. But it’s a graphic demonstration of the administration’s hypocrisy. After all the America First rhetoric, all the insistence that spending must be slashed, suddenly we’re sending lots of money to a foreign nation in which we have no real interest except for the fact that its president is a MAGA favorite. I don’t know how many voters are aware that these moves are in large part an attempt to bail out Bessent’s hedge-fund buddies, but I think the sense of something wrong and corrupt is leaking through.

Furthermore, from farmers’ point of view, Argentina is a rival — a big soybean exporter at a time when Trump’s trade war has locked our own farmers out of China’s market.

[F]armers have been shocked and outraged by Trump’s casual suggestion that he might start buying Argentine beef to sell in the U.S. market. That conveys the impression that Trump doesn’t care at all about his most loyal followers — an impression that is completely correct.

We shouldn’t expect rural America to suddenly do a 180 and abandon Trump. Sargent sends us to a lament from one rancher who calls the idea of buying Argentine beef an “absolute betrayal” — but begins by saying to Trump, “We love you and support you.” The sheer extent to which rural Americans have been hoodwinked will make it hard for them to admit their error.

But there are at least hints of a rural awakening. And for the sake of the nation urban and rural Americans share, it can’t come fast enough.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty