Trump Chose the Oligarchy Over Our Democracy

Donald Trump’s new tariffs sent the stock market plummeting to its worst low since March 2020. But he thinks things are “going very well.” He also thought things were going well in March 2020, too, if I recall.

And by "going very well," he doesn't mean "good and completely fine." He said that he meant "going very well," like a patient undergoing surgery.

“It’s to be expected,” Trump said. “This is a patient that was very sick. We inherited a terrible economy, as you know, with a lot of problems, including loss of manufacturing and plants closed up all over the country. It was a sick patient and went through an operation on Liberation Day,” he said before flying out to Florida for a Saudi sponsered golf weekend.

“The operation’s over, and now we let it settle in.” By the way, he chose this golf event at his course over attending the dignified return of deceased American troops.

Not very America First, if you ask me.

Stocks lost about $3 trillion in market value in the largest one-day selloff since the COVID pandemic. The S&P 500? Down 5 percent. The Dow Jones? Dropped 4 percent. The Nasdaq suffered the most, falling 6 percent. The dollar also sank more than 1 percent against the euro, Japanese yen, and Swiss franc, in its worst fall since 2023.

The last time U.S. markets saw a week this messy was in March 2020, when the stock market had its worst closing since the 2008 financial crisis. At the time, the Dow lost 913 points or 5 percent, the S&P closed down 4 percent, and the Nasdaq composite slid nearly 4 percent.

“The markets are going to boom, the stock is going to boom, the country is going to boom, and the rest of the world wants to see, is there any way they can make a deal?” Trump said, as if he thought he was still hosting The Apprentice, and not bombing the US economy.

“Remember, there are no tariffs if you build your product in the U.S.,” Trump said. “There’s going to be a transition period because they’re going to be building instead of paying tariffs to some other place.” Someone should really tell him that America can't survive under these isolationist tariffs.

In response to the tariffs, JPMorgan raised its recession forecast to 60 percent, up from 40 percent before Trump’s tariff announcement. Experts and commentators also destroyed the math behind Trump’s tariffs as “absurd.”

“If a 9th grader in high school presented this tariff chart to a teacher in a basic economics class, the teacher would laugh.”

Paul Krugman, a prominent economics professor at the City University of New York, said Trump had “gone full-on crazy.”

Chuck Grassley, one of the Senate’s most powerful Republicans, also joined forces with Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell in introducing a bill that would ensure Congress has a say in the president’s tariff calls.