How’s It Lookin’ Under Trump 2.0?

 

How’s It Lookin’ Under Trump 2.0?

Hint: In Trump vs the Rule of Law, Trump is Winning Big; We’re Losing Bigger

Trump’s appointments are a clown car of ineptitude, fawning obsequiousness and a foundation of fabrication and blame that cannot hold the country up. Nobody should be laughing. You can start with the stuff that the headlines keep missing, which just might kill you:

“The number of measles cases has climbed this year to the highest they’ve been since the disease was declared eliminated in the US a quarter-century ago. Still, a record share of kindergartners missed required vaccinations last year, and the vast majority of the 2025 measles cases were in unvaccinated children. As we head into the new school year, exemptions are also climbing — and most are for non-medical reasons.” CNN, August 5th.

RFK, Jr. who may have good notions about nutrition, has replaced qualified medical professionals with so many false medical prophets that the quacking sounds like a huge duck farm. We seem to have a adopted a “freedom to infect others” as a basic right. God help America if another COVID-level pandemic were to invade the United States. With so many cuts to Medicaid and nutritional programs combined with the savings by defunding billions and billions of dollars of productive medical research, our falling life expectancy numbers may well plunge even more. Think of the “bright side;” the rich not only get a huge tax break, but if enough middle- and lower-income people die, falling federal healthcare costs may just make them ever richer.

As bourbon producers in Kentucky (which produces 90% of this spirit) are learning the hard way; the momentary increase in international sales (offsetting Gen Z’s changing tastes) of that beverage is facing the headwinds of retaliatory tariffs and consumer anger at American economic bullying. Multiple bankruptcies among smaller independent distillers reflect the issue. “Beyond bankruptcies and financial difficulties, the American spirits and wine industry has also seen a number of companies cut jobs in an effort to stay profitable in an increasingly uncertain trading environment. In January, Jack Daniel's parent company, Brown-Forman, announced it would be eliminating about 12 percent of its workforce and closing a barrel-making plant in Louisville, Kentucky.” Newsweek, August 4th.

But if you want to watch what is happening to small businesses, farms, meat processing plants and construction sites, the loss of low-cost labor is shutting down job sites, leaving crops rotting in the field, closing small restaurants and creating meat and poultry shortages as meat processing plants are closing for lack of the relevant workers. If childcare was prohibitive before all this, it is untenable now. But for cruelty fans, they do get to watch warrantless brutality in ICE sweeps by anonymous masked “police”… which continue to pick up more than a few US citizens along the way. Despite an injunction against racial profiling, sustained by a federal appellate court, racially based ICE raids have not stopped. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, huh? Good to be an American. That there are politicians proud about our growing construction of “Alligator Alcatraz”-like prisons for a pretty benign cadres of desperately needed workers, is pure cruelty without offsetting benefits. Prioritize deporting the “worst of the worst” has not and will not happen.

On the international credibility front, where we incent treasury buyers to support our massive deficits and push for international investors to place their funds in US companies, we are destroying the foundation of 80 years of prosperity, a time when the United States became the most successful economy on earth. The Great Depression accelerant, the Smoot-Hawley tariff, had been replaced by a long-term move to foster free trade. But as Trump tells you that the foreign countries will pay the new massive tariffs he is imposing, he forgets: retaliatory tariffs, that foreign countries do not pay these tariffs and that US consumers pay in the form of a de facto regressive sales tax. Sure, the government receives this tariff income at the border, but the revenue is more than offset by higher consumer prices and increasing US business failures.

As Trump seeks to control the Federal Reserve, appoint loyal cadres to ensure that bad economic news will never be published, shuts down US data-driven federal agencies that produce contradictions to Trump make-believe “hoaxes,” fewer people everywhere believe us. Foreign governments and international investors, one drawn by the accuracy of these reports and by a predictable rule of law, are instead creating workarounds to replace these tarnished numbers and new unpredictability in cross-border investing.

“European governments are taking steps to break their dependence on critical scientific data the United States historically made freely available to the world, and are ramping up their own data collection systems to monitor climate change and weather extremes, according to Reuters interviews… The effort - which has not been previously reported - marks the most concrete response from the European Union and other European governments so far to the U.S. government's retreat from scientific research under President Donald Trump's administration.” Reuters, August 1st.

The price for all of this Trumpian manipulation? Interest rates on our deficit driven related debt are rising, new international exchanges are being created to circumvent the “standard US clearing house” for international pricing and debt, and numbers from federal agencies are no longer accepted by so many major overseas financial institutions. And if the dollar is soon no longer the major reserve currency (the global value pricing metric), standby for massive increases in all forms of bank interest (from mortgages to credit cards to business loans)… with a concomitant increase in consumer prices.

As the Epstein Whisperer is telling his congressional minions to begin to release selective files on Jeffrey Epstein, the file searching has instead centered around requesting files on settled federal investigation of Russian election interference (ignoring the Russians indicted during the Trump administration)… of Clinton, Obama and Biden. And as Trump gloated over the humbling for foreign nations over much higher tariffs (we’ll see) and what appeared to be solid economic success, the truth began to collapse as the normal release of seasonally adjusted numbers. “Phony” and “rigged” Trump declared as he fired the non-partisan head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But, as the August 1st The Atlantic pointed out, the truth was just plain ugly:

“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. (The prior month’s inflation report was also revised upward to show a slight increase in May.) 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.” If Trump were confident in public support, would he be asking his red state minions to “eliminate Democrat voters” and gerrymander their districts? Exactly!

I’m Peter Dekom, and, without even looking at the DOD, in answer to my title question, as the malignant chickens come home to roost, “not good, actually really bad.”