I, more than Chait, clearly overestimated the Trumpkins. The choice to simply claim prosperity was Trumps doing rather than go down as the one who ended it seems like a no brainer in the wake of November.

Something Chait muses about over at the Atlantic and something I'd agonized about right after the election in November, was that this is a historically massive own goal on Trumps' part. All he needed to do was to do nothing substantively but switch his jawjaw tune from "The economy is garbage" to "The economy is great thanks to me" and the vibessession would have ended and the media would have been wall to wall with "the genius of Trump" nonsense. Trump utterly cratering the economy is, politically, the less dangerous thing he could have done vis a vis trying to topple the electoral order. It'd be a lot harder to try it with a hostile populace and congress controlled by the Dems which Trump seems to be working hard to conjure.

Once again, don't be fooled by the naked idiocy- there's no deeper scheme; they really just are idiots. Cold comfort but that's something.

In theory congress could knock this whole flaming edifice of feces down. The law Trump is using to impose these tariffs obligates Congress to weigh in on it. The current congress actually fiddled with their legislative calendar (IIRC) to functionally make their entire legislative session "day one" of this term specifically to evade a legally required vote on Trumps tarrifs. A new congress (in less than 2 years) or even this congress, if they notice the whining of the rails under their feet or the shrieking of their (suddenly much less) wealthy paymasters could put an end to this stuff with a vote.

But I'm very glad you saw the writing on the wall and jumped off near the peak.

The people I feel for are older folks nearing retirement or depending on investments for fixed income. The stock market, surely, is going to crater like nothing we've seen before. I'm in my mid forties so I can just avert my gaze from the 401k and chant "so long as you keep working you can ride this out" but if I was near retirement age... brrrr... I can't imagine.

It's a new height of idiocy from a dude who already was setting new records for it. He even, fishing, tariffed the Israeli's after they dropped all tariffs against the US.

I have that impression as well.

Seems like a plausible explanation.

The entire plan, such as it seems to be a coherent plan at all, is to let Trump do whatever he feels like while Musk and Trumps other hangers on run around damaging as many government functions (especially tax collection) as they can while trying to generate enough distraction that the GOP will somehow be able to eviscerate the safety net legislatively and pass an even bigger deficit exploding tax cut. The longer-term hope seems to be that somehow the voting rubes won't be angry enough to give Dems a big enough or long enough majority to undo the damage and tax the fish out of the plutocrats to pay for all their chicanery.

Heheheh 20 million dollars to lose by 9 points, couldn't happen to a nicer plutocrat.