Friday Insights-I Hoped Trump Wouldn’t Do It, But He Did
April 4, 2025
Forgive me if I sound a bit angry today. President Trump just burned a large chunk of my retirement nest egg. The market crashed yesterday. This morning, the crash continued after China announced it would place a 34 percent tariff on all American goods. The Trump Trade War is here.
I’ll live, but Americans need to prepare for dark days ahead. History tells us real wars.
Does Trump understand what he has done? I doubt it.
The President posted this at 8:45 this morning:
While Trump’s list of tariffs is long and includes at least one uninhabited island, Russia, North Korea, and Cuba are not on the list. What’s going on here?
Will Elon exit?
I watched President Trump’s rambling unveiling of his tariffs on Wednesday. Most of Trump’s team were dutifully seated in chairs. I looked for Elon Musk, but, in a bit of good news, he was nowhere to be found. We’re learning that his stunts in Wisconsin may have caused Trump to sour on him. We’re also hearing that even some of the stellar minds that Trump appointed to his cabinet have had their fill. They want him gone.
And Elon may want to be gone. He arguably bought the 2024 election for Trump, but he might not be finding his friendship with Trump fun anymore. Just check TSLA stock—it is down another 5.6 percent this morning.
RFK, Jr., hard at work destroying the Kennedy legacy.
Not surprisingly, RFK, Jr. may not be one of the increasingly skeptical cabinet officers. Kennedy continues mass firings of scientists from the CDC, NIH, and other parts of HHS. Junior’s father, I suspect, would rebuke him if he were still alive.
A glimmer of hope.
President Trump dubbed Wednesday Liberation Day. It wasn’t, unless you count being liberated from your retirement and other savings. A better choice for that name would have been Tuesday. Democrats won in Wisconsin, handing Trump a defeat. Perhaps more importantly, the margins by which two Republicans won vacant House seats in Florida were dramatically smaller than the margins by which Trump won both districts in 2024.
The message is that the people are starting to wake up to Trump. Not just the voters this week who rejected Trumpism, but also the people demonstrating in front of Tesla dealerships and setting Cybertrucks on fire. (Please note that I do not condone the vandalism, but disagree with Trump, Bondi, and FBI Director Patel that the vandals are “terrorists,” even though Elon Musk appears a bit terrified by the thought that a lot of people hate him.)
I also see hope this week in Senator Cory Booker’s 25-hour speech. I watched a few hours of the speech from my sofa but went to bed when I got tired. Booker spoke coherently for 25 hours without sitting down once or going to the bathroom.
Since Booker gave his speech, I haven’t heard anyone complain about the Democrats doing nothing. With a bit of luck (okay, a lot of luck), Booker may have awakened Democrats.
I expect other Senate Democrats will engage in similar actions to disrupt Senate proceedings as consideration of Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” of tax and spending cuts, all made possible by fraudulent budget accounting to hide the fact that the bill will balloon the national debt, gets underway.
Will a handful of Republicans stand up and say, “Enough!” I hope so. The votes of Senators Collins (R-ME), McConnell (R-KY), Murkowski (R-AK), and Paul (R-KY) give us hope. They voted with Democrats on a resolution to block Trump’s tariffs on Canada. (Trump’s authority to place massive tariffs on Canada, ostensibly to punish them for not stopping the flow of fentanyl into the U.S., is based on the president disingenuously declaring an “economic emergency.” The Senators voted to declare there is no economic emergency supporting the Canadian tariffs.)
Trump continues to drop in the polls. He owes a thank-you card to Musk, who is increasingly pointed to as evidence of Trump’s declining mental state.
A long weekend of golf? Really?
Trump has had a busy but short week. Yesterday, he jetted out in Air Force One, not to Mar-a-Lago but to another of his Florida golf clubs. There, he attended a dinner for the LIV golf tour, which he helped found. Last night, he jetted to Palm Beach and then took Marine One to Mar-a-Lago.
As I write this, the President’s schedule for today, Saturday, and Sunday has not yet been posted. However, I am confident that it will include few, if any, official acts. Golf is likely to be the focus of Trump’s weekend getaway—a getaway costing American taxpayers millions of dollars.
Senator Banks, you are an assh*le.
Earlier this week, I posted a note about an encounter of Senator Jim Banks (R-IN) with a fired HHS employee. The fired worker told Banks he had been illegally fired from HHS, where he was involved with services for people with disabilities. He asked Banks for his help. Banks responded that the worker “probably deserved to be fired.” When the worker replied, “I deserved it?” Banks then told the fired worker that he seemed “like a clown.”
Hopefully, the video of this close encounter of the wrong kind will be widely distributed. It captures much of what is going on inside the Republican Senate caucus.
Thank you.
That is it for today. I hope to post the results of my recent reader survey later this weekend. The jury is out on whether there will be a Sunday Issues this week—I’m preparing for a trip and might have time constraints.
I will also read up on whether a president can be impeached for incompetence and the 25th Amendment.
Have a good weekend, if possible. Thank you for reading.