Economics Archives - emptywheel

Where We Go from Here

January 13, 2026/52 Comments/in 2024 Presidential Election, Economics, Financial Fraud, Weaponized DOJ /by emptywheel

At the beginning of 2026, I did a post piggybacking on what had succeed against Trump last year, laying out ways to use Trump’s own conspiracism and grievance against him. That post linked an assessment of our success in five ways fighting fascism, and also explained why I think we need to fight Trump using his own tools against him.

This page repeats the same categories from that post, and fleshes out developments that accord with my original framework.

Treat Epstein as the base layer

Remember that Marc Caputo column — it was published on December 23 — stating that the Epstein releases could last a whole ‘nother week? On the day that would mark that week, December 30, Devlin Barrett published a story saying that, “The document review” of what is now believed to be 5.2 million documents “is expected to take until at least Jan. 20, according to a person familiar with the matter.” Even if they could finish it by January 20 (they won’t), that’ll just be the first go-around. DOJ has not done what they need to do to document the redactions, so there’ll be demands from Congress for them to do that (with obvious areas — including DOJ names and some deliberative documents specifically included in the law, where they’re in violation), they’ll need to repeat the entire process over again, Congress will begin to bring more legal pressure, and all the while survivors will be pointing out things they missed.

A week, Marc Caputo reported, as if that were credible!

This will go on for some time. This will go on for a very long time.

Still, while the Epstein scandal has been absolutely instrumental in loosing Trump’s grip on things, people are naive in thinking that will be enough. “My friends will get hurt,” Trump predicted, but what does it really mean for Trump’s power that Les Wexner has been implicated in the Epstein scandal as a co-conspirator? What is the use of creating right wing cognitive dissonance about Les Wexner, when Wexner is not the oligarch currently helping Trump destroy the country?

In my opinion, the Epstein scandal is a tool. It undercuts Trump’s ability to grab and redirect attention. It can create moments of cognitive dissonance, as it did for MTG. It is a way to turn Trump’s conspiracism and populism against him and may make other related narrative lines more salient. And if there’s a surprise disclosure — perhaps about Melania’s origin story — all the better. But as you keep the focus on Epstein, remember that there needs to be a direction beyond Epstein as well, a direction which incorporates the oligarchs who are still key players in Trump’s network of power.

Focus on the Broligarchs and AI

The Broligarchs who’ve been a key part of Trump’s power are one way to do that (and that’s before we’ve really gotten into Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel’s ties to Epstein).

Tesla Takedown was one of the most successful campaigns of 2025. At a time when Tesla faced cheaper competitors worldwide, the protests incurred a cost on Musk for his DOGE depredations.

Elon was installed in the White House in significant part by fellow South African “alien invader” David Sacks, who is even more conspiratorial and even more pro-Russian than Musk. Sacks was installed in the White House as a Special Government Employee (who, Elizabeth Warren suggests, has overstayed his welcome) to force a bunch of policy decisions that suck for America but ensure that Broligarchs won’t pay any consequences for their rash business deals. When one or both of crypto and AI crash (this is a really good story on how and why AI will burst), he’ll be there to ensure the government bails them out, as he did after playing a role in the failure of Silicon Valley Bank.

And even as Trump sheds support based on his mockery of affordability, even as MTG split with Trump over that and his support for crypto, Sacks is trying to brand Democrats as being more populist than even Zohran Mamdani is.

Fine. You want Democrats to be the party attending to the needs of working people? You’ve just made the GOP the party of “alien invader” billionaires who got tax cuts as millions lost their health care.

This happened even as AI has become a political liability. It has happened as local groups successfully stave off new data centers. It has happened as more instances of AI-inflamed suicide, murder, and porn — including porn exploiting children — appear. And it happens before the aforementioned crash.

Sacks and the other Broligarchs are going to do something for which they’ll try to dodge accountability. Now is the time to make sure his name comes up as people look for culprits.

January 12, 2026: Trump seeks to quell data center rebellion (WaPo)

January 12, 2026: America’s Biggest Power Grid Operator Has an AI Problem—Too Many Data Centers (WaPo)

Emphasize Trump’s loser stench

Another thing that will lead people to defect is to realize that Trump is a loser. He has done things — like the takeover of the Kennedy Center — that makes it easy to demonstrate he’s a loser in tangible fashion. Better still, every time Trump attaches his name to something, it provides an opportunity to hijack that brand, as comedian Toby Morton auspiciously managed to do by anticipating Trump’s most venal instincts and buying the domain.

The same is true of his businesses. Trump and his entire family is getting rich off the presidency 2.0. But his businesses are built as cons, sometimes Ponzi schemes. The idea is to leverage the loyalty of MAGAts to get them to invest in something, run up its value, only to collapse, leaving the most vulnerable screwed. In the past, at least, the cult effect was such that even MAGAts bilked by Trump associates, as with Steve Bannon’s Build the Wall graft, were reluctant to turn on the fraudsters; that may change. But at the very least, the volatile nature of Trump’s frauds makes it easy to show that as a businessman, he’s a loser.

Visualize Trump’s corruption

While there has been good reporting on Trump’s corruption — see, for example, NYT’s nifty visualization from New Year’s Eve — there has not been a systematic effort to take on his corruption.

Nevertheless, possibly because of the Epstein scandal, a majority of the country does think Trump is corrupt.

That may actually not be in a bad place to be as we move into 2026. That’s because Democrats can make Republican inaction in the face of Trump’s corruption a campaign issue (and then, if it leads to a Democratic sweep in midterms, the electoral buy-in will be in place to do a lot of oversight and defunding of Trump’s corruption).

Trump’s pardons are similar. There’s actually a solid stream of reporting on how corrupt they are, without yet any political direction to it. Democrats running against Republican incumbents — especially in the Senate — should state as presumed that it is the job of Senators to respond to the kind of naked corruption Trump is engaged in.

Where activists can magnify the good reporting on both Trump’s corruption and his pardons is to focus on the victims. This is actually showing up in the reporting on both topics. WaPo focused on the victims of Trevor Milton who might have gotten restitution had Trump not pardoned him. LAT similarly focused on the victims fucked over by Trump’s pardon of David Gentile.

Rosenberg, a retired wholesale produce distributor living in Nevada, has supported Trump since he entered politics, but the president’s decision in November to commute the sentence of former private equity executive David Gentile has left him angry and confused.

“I just feel I’ve been betrayed,” Rosenberg, 68, said. “I don’t know why he would do this, unless there was some sort of gain somewhere, or some favor being called in. I am very disappointed. I kind of put him above this kind of thing.”

Trump’s decision to release Gentile from prison less than two weeks into his seven-year sentence has drawn scrutiny from securities attorneys and a U.S. senator — all of whom say the White House’s explanation for the act of clemency is not adding up. It’s also drawn the ire of his victims.

“I think it is disgusting,” said CarolAnn Tutera, 70, who invested more than $400,000 with Gentile’s company, GPB Capital. Gentile, she added, “basically pulled a Bernie Madoff and swindled people out of their money, and then he gets to go home to his wife and kids.”

This superb Bloomberg story on the extent to which the Juan Orlando Hernández pardon unraveled years of work starts with a murder arranged by the network.

Five minutes later, González was circling a roundabout when a gray van braked in front of him. At the same time, a green SUV crowded his rear bumper. A motorcycle carrying two men emerged on his left. A man on the back of the bike fired six shots through the driver-side window. González’s head slumped toward his shoulder, and he tilted forward, held upright by the seatbelt. He died instantly.

More than a dozen men streamed out of the two vehicles that had sandwiched his Nissan. They scrambled to collect the spent shell casings on the ground, then scattered other casings across the pavement—decoys to complicate ballistics tracing. They jumped back into their vehicles, circled the roundabout and took the same road Julián had just driven down.

When they approached the Slaughterhouse, the gates opened to let them in, then closed behind them.

Every one of these pardons has a victim — and that’s before you get into the people newly victimized by people who’ve been pardoned by Trump, which NYT covered in November and others are tracking as well.

A New Jersey fraudster who was pardoned by President Trump in 2021 was sentenced to 37 years in prison this month for running a $44 million Ponzi scheme, one of a growing number of people granted clemency by Mr. Trump only to be charged with new crimes.

The man, Eliyahu Weinstein, was pardoned by Mr. Trump in 2021 and was re-indicted by the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey three years later. He was accused of swindling investors who thought their money was being used to buy surgical masks, baby formula and first-aid kits bound for Ukraine, and a jury convicted him in April of several crimes, including conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud.

[snip]
Some of those pardoned for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol have quickly drawn new attention from law enforcement. The group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said in June that at least 10 of the more than 1,500 who were pardoned had been rearrested and charged, and the number has only grown since then.

Earlier this month, a man who was pardoned after having participated in the Jan. 6 attack was charged with sex crimes against two children. Another man whose original sentence Mr. Trump commuted in 2021 was recently sentenced to 27 months in prison after convictions on physical and sexual assault, among other crimes.

These stories provide an important way to explain the costs of Trump’s corruption.

Brand Trump as the criminal he is

And while we’re talking about telling these stories: We must never ever cede the ground of crime to Stephen Miller’s attempt to brand immigrants as criminals.

Trump — a felon who freed hundreds of cop assailants on his first day on the job — has an entire infrastructure devoted to trying to spin brown people as criminal. Every time that infrastructure goes into action, including with the effort to brand Somalis in Minnesota as inherently fraudulent when Trump himself is a serial fraudster, we need to repeat, relentlessly, that Trump is a serial criminal who coddles other criminals.

This is something Gavin Newsom just started doing, with an entire website devoted to cataloging Trump’s crime and that of his pardon recipients.

Do not let a conversation about crime go by without focusing on how much of it Trump does.

Crime, in Trump’s era, is a rich white man’s thing. And while it will take a lot of work to adjust a lot of racist priors, until people start seeing Trump as a criminal it will be far too easy for them to make excuses for him.

Hold Stephen Miller accountable for his failures

I focused on Stephen Miller — and the import of making his failures clear — last week.

The import of shifting how we speak of Miller’s considerable power is clear. That’s true because he frankly has done huge damage, even to Trump’s goals, and well more so to average Americans. He’s someone that people, including Republicans, can scapegoat for Trump’s failures (and they’ll be right). And if we don’t make sure that happens, then he’ll scapegoat brown people.

Again, are Somali day care workers or billionaires systematically defrauding average people the problem? One easy to way to drown out Miller’s case that it’s the former is to make it clear how much he personally has harmed average Americans.

Visualize how Stephen Miller took money for cancer research and veterans care to pay for a goon army snatching grandmothers

On January 12, AOC explained this shift better than anyone has.

Relatedly, particularly as the huge injection of funding Republicans approved last year starts landing at DHS, it will become increasingly necessary to tie the goon squads in the streets to the loss of benefits elsewhere.

We need to make it clear that this is a direct trade. 50,000 ICE goons in, 300,000 other government employees out, including people who cure cancer, help learning disabled kids get through school, protect our National Parks, ensure your Social Security comes on time, and care for veterans.

Christopher Ingraham did a handy graphic to show the trade-off.

Stephen Miller’s dragnet is unpopular in the abstract and wildly unpopular in the lived sense, even — if meekly — among local Republican leaders.

But it still retains support of a big chunk of the population, probably because Trump officials routinely blame their own failures to address American problems on migrants, when as often as not, Trump’s response to immigration is the source of the problem.

America can’t have nice things, like cures for cancer and welcoming public schools, because Republicans in Congress took the money used to pay for those things and gave it to Stephen Miller to use to invade America’s neighborhoods.

Discredit Key Spokespeople

Right wingers like Jonah Goldberg and David French have expressed alarm by an old promo for a 60 Minutes piece (the piece itself was from October) that an influencer reposted yesterday, describing dozens of times when the government lied in court filings.

Judges have caught Trump’s DOJ in several major lies since then. In Chicago, Judge Sara Ellis wrote a 233-page opinion documenting the many lies DHS has told about their Chicago invasion.

And in December, judges in both Kilmar Abrego’s case caught the government obfuscating. In the criminal case, on December 30, Judge Waverly Crenshaw unsealed a December 3 opinion describing how Nashville’s US Attorney lied about how centrally involved Todd Blanche’s office was in demanding Abrego face trial.

The central question after Abrego established a prima facie case of vindictiveness is what information in the government’s control sheds light on its new decision to prosecute Abrego, after removing him from the United States without criminal charges. These documents show that McGuire did not act alone and to the extent McGuire had input on the decision to prosecute, he shared it with Singh and others. (Doc. No. 178-1). Specifically, the government’s documents may contradict its prior representations that the decision to prosecute was made locally and that there were no outside influences. For example, Singh contacted McGuire on April 27, 2025, to discuss Abrego’s case. (See Doc. No. 229 at Abrego-Garcia000001). On April 30, 2025, Singh asked McGuire what the potential charges against Abrego would be, whether the charging document would reference Abrego’s alleged MS-13 affiliation, and asked for a phone call before any charges were filed. (Id. at Abrego-Garcia000007–000008). In a separate email on April 30, 2025, Singh made clear that Abrego’s criminal prosecution was a “top priority” for the Deputy Attorney General’s office (Blanche). (Id. at Abrego-Garcia000037). He then told McGuire to “sketch out a draft complaint for the 1324 charge [making it unlawful to bring in and harbor certain aliens].” (Id.). On May 15th, McGuire emailed his staff that “DAG (Blanche) and PDAG would like Garcia charged sooner rather than later.” (Id. at Abrego-Garcia000060).

And as I’ve already noted, Judge Paula Xinis cataloged the many deliberately ignorant declarations DOJ filed about whether DHS had deportation plans for Abrego when she ruled that he must be released.

Respondents showcased Cantú’s ignorance about the content of his Declaration pertaining to Costa Rica. As the pointed questions of Respondents’ counsel made clear, Cantú’s lack of knowledge was planned and purposeful.

Counsel: So paragraph 4, final sentence [of the Cantú Declaration], do you see where it says the word—the words “certain understandings”?

Cantú: I found it. Yes, I do. I see it.

Counsel: What are the certain understandings referenced in the last sentence?

Cantú: I don’t know . . .

Counsel: What are the “contingencies” referenced in the last sentence?

Cantú: I do not know . . .

Counsel: What are the “interim developments” referenced in paragraph 5?

Cantú: I don’t know.

ECF No. 107 at 26:8–27:12 (counsel for Respondents, Jonathan Guynn (“Guynn”), questioning Cantú). See also id. at 53:8–9 (Guynn, at sidebar with Court, stating “I’ll just say I told you this was exactly what was going to happen,” regarding the witness’ ignorance on Costa Rica as a viable country of removal).

Ultimately, Respondents’ calculated effort to take Costa Rica “off the table” backfired. Within 24 hours, Costa Rica, through Minister Zamora Cordero, communicated to multiple news sources that its offer to grant Abrego Garcia residence and refugee status is, and always has been, firm, unwavering, and unconditional.

It’s a problem that, after huge scoldings like these, right wing critics of Trump don’t understand how much Trump’s people lie — not least because the Supreme Court still credits the most outlandish claims Trump makes, even after they’ve been thoroughly debunked by lower court judges.

Many of these lies are coming from the same people: Stephen Miller, Todd Blanche’s office, DHS spox Tricia McLaughlin, and Greg Bovino.

It is remarkable that so many of these people have been caught lying to courts (or publicly, about people before courts). But it needs to become common knowledge for everyone, so every time Tricia says something, they start from the assumption she’s lying, because she almost always is.

There comes a time when the credibility of systematic liars not named Trump collapse entirely such that every utterance they make discredits the claims they try to sell. Tricia McLaughlin, at least, is close those levels of propaganda, and Stephen Miller is not far behind.

Use Trump’s claimed opposition to antisemitism against him

Within days of his inauguration last year, Trump signed an EO — adding to one he signed in 2019 — claiming to oppose antisemitism. There has been some discussion about the bad faith of this EO and a DOJ lawyer implementing it, Michael Velchik, once wrote a paper from Hitler’s perspective. While it is explicitly targeted at universities (and has been a key tool to attempt to takeover universities), it nevertheless claimed to oppose antisemitism everywhere.

It shall be the policy of the United States to combat anti-Semitism vigorously, using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.

This is the kind of statement of principle that can form the basis of political pressure — particularly as the MAGAt movement splinters around the overt antisemitism of people like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owen, and as political opportunists like Ted Cruz attempt to exploit that splinter.

We’re going to have to fight this battle in any case. As part of the revocation of everything Eric Adams did after he was indicted for bribery yesterday, Zohran Mamdani revoked an EO that gave Israel preferential treatment, which Israel is using to stoke division; yet Mamdani preserved the office Adams opened to combat antisemitism.

We need to call out the dripping antisemitism of Trump’s team, from top (at least JD Vance, who refuses to disavow Fuentes) to bottom.

There are two key Trump aides who should be targeted. Most notably, Paul Ingrassia, who had to withdraw his nomination to be Special Counsel after Politico exposed texts in which he confessed to a Nazi streak been installed at GSA instead. In addition, Kingsley Wilson became DOD spokesperson in spite of Neo-Nazi comments. NPR has done good work unpacking these ties.

Reclaim disinformation research

Republicans plan on exporting fascism via US tech platforms.

That’s not new. I’ve been talking about Elon’s plans to use Xitter as a machine for fascism for some time.

But since then, Trump’s minions worked it into the National Security Strategy.

And, in the wake of the EU’s sanctions against Elon Musk for — basically — lying about why I have a blue check, Marco Rubio stripped the visas of five people, including US Green Card holder Imran Ahmed, a long time adversary of Elon’s.

But there are several developments that suggest it is time to renew efforts to defend disinformation research, not least the White House’s absurd effort to attack real journalism, what is sure to be a snowballing failure on Bari Weiss’ part to make propaganda popular, and the meltdown the head of DOJ’s Civil Rights division, Harmeet Dhillon, had over the holidays about right wing “misinformation” targeting Pam Bondi.

The right wingers are doing what they themselves established is unlawful. And that presents both political and legal opportunities to demonize their propaganda.

Which in turn cycles back to the increasing problem of AI propaganda, including Grok’s flagrant willingness to nudify children in recent days.

Some people write short resolutions. I guess I write 4,000-word To Do lists. Join me in my efforts!

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Fridays with Nicole Sandler

January 2, 2026/7 Comments/in 2024 Presidential Election, Domestic Policy, Economics, Epstein, January 6 Insurrection, Pipe bomb case /by emptywheel

Listen on Spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

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Peeling Off MTG

December 30, 2025/54 Comments/in 2020 Presidential Election, 2024 Presidential Election, Economics, emptywheel, Epstein, Financial Fraud, Tariffs /by emptywheel

Robert Draper did a 1,000-word piece describing the Four Takeaways of his much longer magazine profile describing Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump. It focuses on four steps in the process, which he presents out of chronological order:

“Trump’s speech at Charlie Kirk’s memorial was a clarifying moment,” because it contrasted Erika Kirk’s forgiveness with Trump’s lack of Christian faith
“Greene’s demands to release the Epstein files seemed to be the last straw for Trump,” because MTG’s threat to reveal the names of those who abused Epstein’s victims would hurt Trump’s friends
“Her disillusionment with Trump goes beyond the Epstein files,” in which Draper lumps tariffs and Gaza but focuses primarily on the way Trump’s stochastic terrorism led to threats against MTG’s son
“Greene said she was wrong for accusing Democrats of treason in the past,” which simply doubles down on the apology MTG made already on CNN and explained that MTG realized Christians don’t do such things

I don’t doubt that Draper thinks of the transformation he describes as dominated — bullets one and four — by MTG living by her faith, but the word “Christian” only appears in the 8,100-word profile six times.

And word frequency is just one tell that Draper may be indulging MTG’s own retroactive reconstruction of it.

The profile is based on interviews that took place earlier this month, though as Draper recounts, he has been covering MTG closely since 2021 and met with her repeatedly before this month. The Kirk memorial with which Draper began both his profile and his Four Takeaways occurred on September 21. He describes MTG’s perception of the difference between Erika’s forgiveness and Trump’s doubling down as the moment when, “the stress fracture that had been steadily widening between Greene and her political godfather became an irrevocable break.”

But his stress fracture comment introduces a paragraph listing five policy splits with Trump, most of which predate the Kirk memorial, the most important of which — her support for releasing all the Epstein files — predates the memorial by several weeks and gets its own paragraph here and a more focused treatment later.

Declaring the war in Gaza a “genocide”
Objecting to cryptocurrency and artificial-intelligence policies that, from her perspective, prioritized billionaire donors over working-class Americans
Criticizing the Trump administration for:
- Approving foreign student visas
- Enacting tariffs that hurt businesses in her district
- Allowing Obamacare subsidies to expire
Argu[ing] that all investigative material pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein should be released

Much later, the profile describes that well before the Epstein break came the realization that Trump does not return loyalty (including a campaign disloyalty similar to the one that drove Elise Stefanik’s later break), followed by Trump’s targeted harassment when MTG opposed his cryptocurrency graft.

She considered running against Senator Jon Ossoff but announced in May that she had decided not to.

Greene’s stated reasoning at the time was that “the Senate is where good ideas go to die.” But the week after her announcement, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had shared with her a survey from his pollster, Tony Fabrizio, projecting that Ossoff would beat her by 18 points. Later, Trump would claim in a Truth Social post that their split “seemed to all begin” when he sent her the poll — suggesting, in effect, that Greene was pouting over his lack of support: “All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!” Greene insisted to me, “It wasn’t about a Fabrizio poll.” She added: “I never had a single conversation with the president about it. Instead, he told me all the time, ‘You should run for governor — you’d win.’”

Still, Greene told me, it began to dawn on her that when it came to the president, loyalty is “a one-way street — and it ends like that whenever it suits him.” Being disabused of the idea that subservience would be rewarded appeared to have a liberating effect on her.

In June, Greene did an about-face on the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill after conceding that she voted for it without realizing that it contained a provision that would prevent states from enforcing restrictions on artificial intelligence for a period of 10 years. If the Senate did not strike the moratorium from the bill, Greene publicly warned, “when the O.B.B.B. comes back to the House for approval after Senate changes, I will not vote for it with this in it.” On July 1, the Senate voted to sever the provision from the bill, which Trump signed into law three days later.

Greene broke again from Trump on July 17, arguing on X that his cryptocurrency bill could permit a future president to “TURN OFF YOUR BANK ACCOUNT AND STOP YOUR ABILITY TO BUY AND SELL!!!!!” This time, Trump made his displeasure known to her — and to her peers.

That same day, Greene and roughly a dozen other House Republicans who also had reservations about the bill were summoned to the Oval Office. In Greene’s recollection, Trump focused his wrath on her. “When you have a group of kids,” she said, “you pick the one that is the most well behaved, that always does everything right, and you beat the living shit out of them. Because then the rest of them are like: ‘Oh, man, holy shit. If Dad does that to her, what would he do to me?’” A White House spokeswoman disputes that the meeting was contentious. “Not surprising to me at all,” Greene replied when I informed her of this. “They have major problems, and it’s only starting to build.”

That all preceded the date when MTG signed the Epstein discharge petition, which Tom Massie initiated in July, the day before Trump told her that his friends would get hurt if she exposed their names.

After the hearing, Greene held a news conference at which she threatened to identify some of the men who had abused the women. (Greene says that she didn’t know those names herself but that she could have gotten them from the victims.) Trump called Greene to voice his displeasure. Greene was in her Capitol Hill office, and according to a staff member, everyone in the suite of rooms could hear him yelling at her as she listened to him on speakerphone. Greene says she expressed her perplexity over his intransigence. According to Greene, Trump replied, “My friends will get hurt.”

When she urged Trump to invite some of Epstein’s female victims to the Oval Office, she says, he angrily informed her that they had done nothing to merit the honor. It would be the last conversation Greene and Trump would ever have.

Along the way, Draper inserts something between the Epstein break and the Kirk epiphany and the ultimate break: the 8-week recess, during which MTG stewed as she heard complaints about affordability from her constituents.

But there was one more important ingredient.

As noted, Draper describes the evolving relationship he had with MTG. He first flew down to Rome, GA, in 2022, and honored MTG’s confidences, which built trust. She blew off a meeting for drinks during last year’s convention because Trump was giving her pride of place at the Convention, but shortly thereafter met with a NYT team and scoffed at their claim Trump would pursue retribution. Draper persisted with someone who adhered to the axiom that real news was fake for years.

There are a lot of lefties who hate this profile: They feel it goes easy on her (and given the Christian reconstruction, I’d agree). They see it as a willingness to let MTG rebrand herself, even while it foregrounds her transphobia. They hate the glam photo of her, which nevertheless provides helpful context to MTG’s claim she always opposed the plastic femininity of Mar-a-Lago (and provides a useful contrast with the still fresh Karoline Leavitt portrait).

In particular, she told me recently: “I never liked the MAGA Mar-a-Lago sexualization. I believe how women in leadership present themselves sends a message to younger women.” She continued: “I have two daughters, and I’ve always been uncomfortable with how those women puff up their lips and enlarge their breasts. I’ve never spoken about it publicly, but I’ve been planning to.”

I would add that Draper still treats Trump as the actor — Trump banished MTG, rather than she stood her ground in face of his demands.

It has been tempting for some observers to predict that the meteoric crash and burn of the MAGA movement’s loudest champion signals the beginning of the end for its leader as well. But it is Greene who is exiting the stage, while Trump continues to dominate it, as he did through impeachments and indictments and other controversies that no other politician would have survived.

Still, Draper hedges his bets. Maybe she will be a harbinger.

But because it represents an evolution for Greene, she may yet again prove to be a harbinger of a sea change in the movement she once helped lead.

By far the most fascinating part of the profile to me is how Draper traces MTG’s cognitive dissonance. In 2022 — and still today — MTG is certain there’s no way Joe Biden could have won the election in 2020.

One autumn evening in 2022, I ventured to ask just how she thought the 2020 election was stolen. Did she really think that a grand conspiracy, perhaps masterminded by the Obamas and the C.I.A., had secretly rigged the results?

“Robert,” she replied with a searching look, “do you really think Joe Biden got 81 million votes without even campaigning?”

“Yes,” I said. “They counted all the votes. That was the final tally. Why wouldn’t I believe it?” The look she then gave me, which I will never forget, was one of bottomless pity.

But the contrast between the earnest stories of the survivors followed by hearing Trump complain that naming those who abused Epstein’s girls would hurt his friends broke through a belief created by the bubble of Fox News.

The reason for her lack of concern, as Greene explained it to me, might seem improbable to anyone who is unfamiliar with how the mainstream press and the right-wing media cover the same story differently — or not at all. “The story to me,” she said, “was that I’d seen pictures of Epstein with all these people. And Trump is just one of several. And then, for me, I’d seen that Bill Clinton is on the flight logs for his plane like 20-something times. So, for people like me, it wasn’t suspicious. And then we’d heard the general stories of how Epstein used to be a member of Mar-a-Lago, but Trump kicked him out. Why would I think he’s done anything wrong, right?”

For Greene, the decades that Epstein spent eluding justice for exploiting and sexually assaulting countless girls and young women while amassing a fortune, and the seeming efforts by the government to cover up the injustice, “represents everything wrong with Washington,” she told me. This September, Greene spoke with several of Epstein’s victims for the first time in a closed-door House Oversight Committee meeting. She knew that the women had paid their own way to come to Washington. She saw some of them trembling and crying as they spoke. Their accounts struck her as entirely believable. Greene herself had never been sexually abused, but she knew women who had. In her own small way, Greene later told me, she could understand what it was like for a woman to stand up to a powerful man.

One of the most important parts of MTG’s split from Trump has been an evolving relationship with the media, especially Fox News, and therefore, the truth, but with Draper always there persisting. That is, MTG had to work through the cognitive dissonance of learning that Trump really did have ties to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking, that he really was trying to cover it up, before she got to the point of retconning it all inside a faith narrative. Her own banishment from Fox News may have helped work through the cognitive dissonance.

I talk a lot about one of the ways you fight fascism is to peel off members of Congress, four in the Senate or eight in the House. I’ve laid out repeatedly how central the Epstein scandal was to that process.

Whether you like the Draper profile or not, whether or not MTG’s split from Trump will be a harbinger of more (like Stefanik’s) to come, what this profile does do is show what it took for one diehard MAGAt to go through it: political betrayal, real policy differences, retaliation, and then cognitive dissonance regarding Epstein, the Kirk epiphany, until finally responding to his terrorism in a dramatically different way than almost every other Republican, whether MAGAt or not.

There’s a process.

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Four Ways to Fight Fascism: Checking In

December 19, 2025/38 Comments/in 2026 Mid-Term Election, Economics, Epstein, Immigration, Impeachment, Russo-Ukrainian War, Tariffs /by emptywheel

Throughout this year, I have argued there are four ways to fight fascism — and doing so through the guise of the Democratic Party (especially DC Democrats) is not yet the best way to do so.

I argued these were the four ways to peacefully fight Donald Trump’s authoritarianism:

The Erica Chenoweth rule, which says that if you can get 3.5% of a population in the streets, it often leads to regime change.
Beginning to peel off four people in the Senate or eight or nine people in the House.
Rescuing Republicans from a predictable catastrophe like Democrats did in 2008 and 2020.
Waiting until 2026, winning at least one house of Congress, and beginning to rein in Trump that way.

Since for many of you, today will be the last normal day of the year, and unless Trump sets off a predictable catastrophe, today will also be the last Nicole Sandler show we do, I wanted to check in on how we’re doing on these four issues.

The 3.5% rule

Start with people in the streets.

If 6.5 million people attended October’s No Kings rallies (some estimates go as high as 7 million), it would amount to about 1.8% of the US population. That would make them the biggest protests in American history, but still just halfway to that 3.5% mark, and not directly in response to a particular outrage. The organizing and openness of those protests was a huge accomplishment and, at the very least, taught a lot of people who had never protested before how to do so.

But it wasn’t enough to oust Trump.

A more interesting measure of people in the streets, however, is Chicago (and other anti-ICE/CBP protests). I have no idea what population of Chicago took part in mobilizing to oppose Stephen Miller’s goons. But there are aspects of that mobilization — perhaps most importantly the way media coverage arose from citizen witness to local media to independent media to mainstream outlets — that provided real lessons in how to thrive in a disastrous media environment.

One point I keep making about this kind of opposition: it does not have to be, and arguably is far more successful if it is not, coincident with the Democratic party. Some of the most powerful moments in Chicago’s opposition came when right wingers in conservative suburbs joined in — holy hell those people were assholes!!

Whatever else Stephen Miller’s terrible dragnets have done, they have renewed civil society in most places the invasions happened.

Peeling off defectors

Both Axios and Politico took a break from Dems in Disarray or ragebait stories this week to instead focus on Hakeem Jeffries, both focusing on Jeffries’ success at getting four “moderate” Republicans to vote for his discharge position extending ObamaCare subsidies for three years.

Time and again this year, Democrats under Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have maneuvered to successfully undercut the GOP agenda and put its leaders on the back foot. From a daily drumbeat on health care to the long-running saga over the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to a new focus on the rising cost of living, they believe they’re succeeding by making the party in power talk about Democratic priorities, not its own.

Their success was underscored this week when four House Republicans joined a Jeffries-led effort to force a vote on expiring Obamacare insurance subsidies — a major embarrassment for the GOP speaker.

“Our message to Mike Johnson is clear — you can run, but you cannot hide,” Jeffries said as he took a victory lap on the House steps Thursday.

And as Politico notes, it started (actually, two months earlier than they credit) with the Jeffrey Epstein effort.

Indeed, since Tom Massie and Ro Khanna, with Jeffries’ cooperation, chased Mike Johnson away a week earlier in July for fear of Epstein votes, Johnson has largely vacated his majority.

There have been limited instances where Republicans have defected on other issues. Just before the SCOTUS hearing on Trump’s illegal tariffs, for example, a handful of Republicans defected to pass resolutions against Trump tariffs.

Where things may get more interesting in the new year — on top of what is sure to be a frantic effort to fix the healthcare crisis Republicans are causing — is on Russia. The NDAA Trump signed yesterday included a number of restrictions on European and Ukrainian funding and troop alignment, measures that directly conflict with Trump’s National Security Strategy.

In a break with Trump, whose fellow Republicans hold majorities in both the House and Senate, this year’s NDAA includes several provisions to boost security in Europe, despite Trump early this month releasing a national security strategy seen as friendly to Russia and a reassessment of the US relationship with Europe.

The fiscal 2026 NDAA provides $800m for Ukraine – $400m in each of the next two years – as part of the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which pays US companies for weapons for Ukraine’s military.

It also authorizes the Baltic Security Initiative and provides $175m to support Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia’s defense. And it limits the Department of Defense’s ability to drop the number of US forces in Europe to fewer than 76,000 and bars the US European commander from giving up the title of Nato supreme commander.

To be sure, thus far, Congress has done nothing to police Trump when he spends money in ways they tell him not to. But these restrictions (along with a few things to make Whiskey Pete Hegseth behave) might set up a conflict early in the year.

Remember: recruiting defectors actually takes efforts to reach out to them, often the opposite of what people think they want.

And while all that is not enough defectors to stop Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene may set off a stampede for the exit. And that could make it easier for Jeffries, at least, to continue to pants Mike Johnson.

Predictable catastrophe

Democrats have done a good job of seeding the ground to get credit for rescuing the country from Trump-caused catastrophes in healthcare and the economy — and both will exacerbate the other in days ahead.

I’m less sanguine that Democrats have prepared to rescue the country (and claim credit) for other likely Trump catastrophes, like a collapsing AI bubble or epidemic. Laying the ground for both is really critical, in the former case bc AI bros plan to spend big in 2026 in the same way crypto bros did in 2024, and in the former case, because bigots are trying to blame rising measles (and, now, whooping cough) on migrants rather than assholes like RFK Jr.

2026

Democrats are doing surprisingly well to position themselves for 2026, both because they’re overperforming by numbers that suggest they will do well (including in elections, like TN-07, with midyear-levels of turnout), and because they’re matching Republican redistricting efforts (and Stephen Miller’s goon squads mean the redistricting in Texas may not turn out like Trump wants).

But it will be harder to achieve a true Blue Wave than in 2018.

Even as this year’s election results have left many in the party encouraged they can mount a massive blue wave, next year’s battleground is a far cry from 2018 — with fewer Republican-held seats for Democrats to easily target.

Democrats don’t need to win as many seats this time around, netting just three seats rather than two dozen to claim a majority. But the hill to reach a comfortable majority like the 235 seats they held after the last blue wave has grown much steeper, driven by multiple rounds of gerrymandering — including ongoing redistricting in several states that threatens to erode the battlefield even further.

The result is that Democrats could post a bigger national swing than in 2018 and still end up with a slimmer majority than they had after that year.

Where Democrats are doing better is in promising consequences if and when they do get a majority.

I’m more interested in Democrats promising those capitulating to Trump — whether it be law firms or Paramount — that there’ll be consequences in 2027 than I am in discussions about impeachment (except for people like RFK Jr, such discussions will work against other Democratic efforts, IMO).

Such efforts, in my opinion, are one way to do more to lay out Trump’s accountability for predictable disasters.

All in all, opponents of fascism have more momentum than they had when caught flat-footed in January. But there’s still a lot of work to do.

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Rent-Seeking: Trump Sells Patriotic Fraud to Boost His Tariff Lies

December 18, 2025/34 Comments/in 2024 Presidential Election, Economics, Tariffs /by emptywheel

I was going to write about how Trump’s promise, last night, to send a bunch of service members a $1,776 checks, was actually a confession that there will be no tariff rebates for civilians.

Two paragraphs after Trump introduced his false claims about tariffs — “my favorite word” — he said that because of tariffs, along with the Big Ugly, Trump was sending some number (he bolloxed the number repeatedly) service members would get a check.

This historic trend will continue. Already, I’ve secured a record-breaking $18 trillion of investment into the United States, which means jobs, wage increases, growth, factory openings and far greater national security. Much of this success has been accomplished by tariffs, my favorite word, tariffs, which for many decades have been used successfully by other countries against us, but not anymore. Companies know that if they build in America, there are no tariffs, and that’s why they’re coming home to the U.S.A. in record numbers. They’re building factories and plants at levels we haven’t seen. A.I., automobiles, we’re doing what nobody thought was even possible, not even remotely possible. There has never, frankly, been anything like it.

[snip]

Because of tariffs, along with the just passed One Big, Beautiful Bill, tonight I am also proud to announce that more than 1,000, 450,000, think of this, 1,450,000 military service members will receive a special, we call warrior dividend before Christmas, a warrior dividend. In honor of our nation’s founding in 1776, we are sending every soldier $1,776. Think of that. And the checks are already on the way. Nobody understood that one until about 30 minutes ago. We made a lot more money than anybody thought because of tariffs, and the bill helped us along. Nobody deserves it more than our military. And I say congratulations to everybody. And by the way, we now have record enlistment in our military, and last year we had among the worst recruitment numbers in our military’s history. What a difference a year makes.

He once was offering bigger refunds — $2,000 — for everyone but high income people. That was, as Dean Baker did the math at the time, totally unaffordable, even ignoring that Trump is likely to have to pay some portion of the tariffs back, only to importers, not the consumers who have paid increased prices for consumer goods.

Doing the simple arithmetic, the country has 340 million people. If 10 percent of these people fit Trump’s definition of high-income, and therefore don’t get the rebate, roughly 300 million people would get the checks.

At $2,000 a piece it would come to $600 billion, more than twice what Trump is collecting from us with his import taxes. Since he’s already $330 billion short, how can Trump think he has money to pay down the national debt? Also, he seems not to know that our deficit this year is projected to be $1.8 trillion, so he is actually adding considerably to the debt and would be adding even more with his $600 billion tariff “rebate.”

So, I figured, promising a smaller number (but hiding the smaller amount in patriotic shlock) to a far smaller number of people would serve the purpose of the rebates — to generate public support for keeping the tariff revenue rather than paying them back — in a way that would be hard to oppose.

Who would begrudge service members a check, after all.

But once you give that $2.5 billion away (assuming the larger number is the correct one), you’ve started eating into the $100 billion you might be able to use to give money away.

The service members were going to get the check instead of everyone.

But according to Defense One, even that is not what is going on. Trump is taking money Congress allocated to expand housing allowances and paying it as a direct check instead.

President Donald Trump’s $1,776 checks for more than a million troops, announced Wednesday, come from Congressionally-allocated reconciliation funds intended to subsidize housing allowances for service members, a senior administration official confirmed.

During a prime-time TV address, Trump said he was “proud to announce” that “1,450,000 military service members will receive a special, we call ‘warrior dividend,’ before Christmas.” He added that to honor the nation’s founding, “we are sending every soldier $1,776. Think of that. And the checks are already on the way.”

The senior administration official told Defense One in an emailed statement late Wednesday evening that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the Pentagon to “disburse $2.6 billion as a one-time basic allowance for housing supplement” to all eligible service members ranks 0-6 and below.

“Congress appropriated $2.9 billion to the Department of War to supplement the Basic Allowance for Housing entitlement within The One Big Beautiful Bill,” the senior official said. “Approximately 1.28 million active component military members and 174,000 Reserve component military members will receive this supplement.”

It has nothing to do with tariffs (though was provided, without enough guidance to prevent such a gimmick, in the Big Ugly bill). Trump just told that lie along with his $18 trillion lie in order to claim his tariffs have been less disastrous than they have been.

Who knows? Maybe Trump will bankrupt the country to send rebates to cover over how much consumers have paid for these tariffs.

For now, though, Trump is simply piling lie on top of lie about it all.

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Donald Trump Is Getting a Pass for His Catastrophic Trade War

December 16, 2025/42 Comments/in 2024 Presidential Election, 2026 Mid-Term Election, Economics, emptywheel, Tariffs /by emptywheel

WSJ had a heavily-produced story on Sunday, “Why Everyone Got Trump’s Tariffs Wrong,” purporting to assess the claims that Trump and economists had made … at some point about his tariffs.

This table includes the six allegedly competing claims WSJ assesses; I’ve added a check marking whichever side WSJ claimed was really right.

For most of six paired predictions, WSJ makes a show of adjudicating who was right, giving Trump credit on two predictions and less ostentatiously confirming economists’ predictions on three.

For example, WSJ provides this table purporting to show that both Trump and the economists were wrong about inflation (with steeper tables showing the spike in coffee and appliances); for some reason, WSJ indexes this to January 1, 2024 prices, not 2025 (and some of the tables at WSJ’s source show steeper spikes).

WSJ judges that economists were wrong this way:

Tariffs swiftly hit Americans’ wallets as major retailers from Macy’s to Best Buy raised prices in response to the duties.

“The magnitude and speed at which these prices are coming to us is somewhat unprecedented in history,” Walmart Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey told The Wall Street Journal in May.

But the worst inflation fears haven’t come to pass. Inflation has for months hovered around 3%—higher than the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, though still lower than many economists’ expectations.

But starting in the very next paragraph, WSJ explains why inflation wasn’t as bad as predicted: first, because Trump reversed the worst tariffs. Then, because companies are still trying to figure out what the fuck his tariff policy will be, especially after the Supreme Court gets done with it, and so haven’t passed on all of the tariffs, which they will eventually do.

Another factor at play: Trump’s repeated policy shifts on tariffs.

Many companies have said they want to see where tariffs will ultimately settle before introducing more price changes. The still-undecided Supreme Court case on Trump’s authority to impose tariffs gives them another reason to wait a bit longer.

Economists predict higher prices as companies draw down on their pre-tariffed inventory and renegotiate contracts with retailers and distributors.

If no new tariffs are announced, the Fed estimates the current ones will take nine months to work their way through the economy. That could push inflation from goods down in the back half of 2026. But “we haven’t been able to predict this with any precision,” said Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. “No one is.”

The rest of the article has similar equivocations. WSJ returns to Trump’s decision to reverse many of the tariffs when discussing the GDP growth (and notes that AI has kept the GDP afloat, without also noting that it’s likely in a bubble that is beginning to crash).

Trump has also walked back and delayed many of his threatened duties.

WSJ’s discussion of Trump’s failure to bring manufacturing back returns to changing policy.

Big projects will likely take years to materialize, if they happen at all, as government policies could shift again in that time.

And the flux makes this assessment impossible. Two days ago, for example, WSJ hailed September’s good job’s report.

The U.S. added 119,000 jobs in September, far more than economists had expected. But the figure was an outlier from previous months, in which job growth had lagged. As of September, the unemployment rate reached 4.4%, the highest in four years.

But that got revised downward today and — Justin Wolfers describes in reading today’s report — in reality there may be zero or negative job growth since Trump tried to impose his big tariffs, which if that proves true, would vindicate the economists.

WSJ gives Trump credit for predicting some revenue growth even while noting he wildly exaggerated how much growth there might be, but then admits that not only will much of the revenue go away if SCOTUS throws out the tariffs, but Trump would have to pay some portion — potentially as much as half — of the tariffs back.

Future collections hang on the Supreme Court’s decision on Trump’s authority to impose the tariffs, expected in coming days.

If the court strikes down tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, monthly revenue collected would fall by more than half. More than $100 billion already collected might also need to be refunded.

And WSJ also notes that a lot of the data it would need to measure all this is delayed (it doesn’t address Trump’s efforts to tamper with the data).

Perhaps the most salient assessment in the story is the last line: “As long as Trump continues to surprise the market with tariffs, trade will remain volatile,” which is both a platitude and an observation that you can’t assess many of these claims using regular measures, because the tariffs are not (or not just) about creating a precondition to shift trade flows.

Trump’s tariffs aren’t just tariffs. They are week-to-week business uncertainty.

They are also, just as importantly, about giving Trump a tool to attempt to leverage power, something captured in a different WSJ story, this interview with Meredith McGraw, in which Trump offers word salad to explain why tariffs are so cool.

When asked if he has alternative ways to use tariffs, the president said there are other laws but they are not as “nimble, not as quick.” He added, “I can do other things, but it’s not as fast. It’s not as good for national security.”

Trump also argued that tariffs gave him leverage in negotiations with other countries.

“I just used tariffs 10 minutes ago, just before you came, to settle the new inflammation that took place with Thailand and Cambodia,” Trump said. “And I told them, ‘If you have the war, not only am I going to break the trade deal we have, but I’m going to put tariffs on your country.’” He added, “Nobody can do that but me.”

“Nobody can do that but me,” Trump said of an authority that SCOTUS is likely to say he cannot lawfully do.

Worse, Trump equates being able to coerce other countries nimbly with national security. But it is anything but.

Consider how inconsistent Trump’s logic is. In the same week that Trump approved the sale of Nvidia chips to China (which chips China promptly said they would limit use), chips that remained, that very day, illegal to ship to China, the White House halted negotiations on similar kinds of technology with the UK because the Brits would not bow to Trump’s demands on food and tech standards. Trump wants to send chips to China instead of (just) shitty chicken, but he won’t send chips to the UK unless they accept US shitty chicken and Nazi Xitter posts.

None of it makes sense.

And this misrepresentation of how Trump is using tariffs — treating as sincere his false claims about how he claims he is using them — is just part of the reason why the reporting on Trump’s catastrophic tariffs has been so shitty.

To be sure, there has been persistent reporting on how badly his tariffs have devastated farm markets, especially soybeans but now shifting to wheat. There have been stories on how China has gotten pretty much what it has wanted. But there has been less coverage of how Trump’s stupid ass trade war — and China’s preparation for it since Trump’s last Administration — has created the opportunity for China to leverage its rare earth dominance and soybean consumption to bring Trump to heel.

Trump thought America was the irreplaceable market, and attempted to leverage access to it accordingly. But as he has discovered how little of all that he understands, it has backfired, giving China leverage it otherwise didn’t have.

And, if we can believe Vanity Fair’s profile of Susie Wiles, half of Trump’s advisors knew it wouldn’t work in real time.

“So much thinking out loud is what I would call it,” said Wiles of Trump’s chaotic tariff rollout. “There was a huge disagreement over whether [tariffs were] a good idea.” Trump’s advisers were sharply divided, some believing tariffs were a panacea and others predicting disaster. Wiles told them to get with Trump’s program. “I said, ‘This is where we’re going to end up. So figure out how you can work into what he’s already thinking.’ Well, they couldn’t get there.”

Wiles recruited Vance to help tap the brakes. “We told Donald Trump, ‘Hey, let’s not talk about tariffs today. Let’s wait until we have the team in complete unity and then we’ll do it,’ ” she said. But Trump barreled ahead, announcing sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs, from 10 to 100 percent—which triggered panic in the bond market and a sell-off of stocks. Trump paused his policy for 90 days, but by that time the president’s helter-skelter levies had given rise to the TACO chant: “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

Wiles believed a middle ground on tariffs would ultimately succeed, she said, “but it’s been more painful than I expected.”

All this is so painful not just because tariffs are a stupid policy and the way in which Trump implemented them is even stupid. It is painful because Trump has no fucking ability to discern what is good for America, and he doesn’t much care if he fucks up and destroys entire markets as a result.

And coverage of Trump’s destruction of the soybean market has not yet called out the systematic lies Republicans tell claiming Trump’s grant of $12 billion to struggling farmers is only an attempt (again) to reverse the damage he did, which will not come close to making farmers whole. Right wingers are, across the board, hailing Trump’s payoff and blaming the damage Trump did on Joe Biden … and almost no one is calling out the projection and lies.

Trump’s tariffs are a failure not just as tariffs, in fulfilling their purported purpose. But because Trump knows so little about the markets he’s trying to alter, he’s simply making the US vulnerable.

Update: Paul Krugman has more on what we learned from yesterday’s job numbers.

[T]he data show a weak labor market. Employment isn’t falling off a cliff, but job growth has been weak and hasn’t kept pace with the number of people seeking work. The headline unemployment rate in November was 4.6 percent, up from an average of 4 percent in 2024. That number is close to triggering the Sahm Rule, an economic rule of thumb devised by Claudia Sahm, a former economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, that has historically been highly successful at identifying the early stages of a recession.

We can’t do a strict application of the Sahm Rule yet because Sahm’s method is based on the average unemployment rate over the past three months. Unfortunately, the shutdown prevented the Bureau of Labor Statistics from collecting key data in October. But if we do an interpolation of October’s unemployment rate by averaging over September’s rate of 4.4% and November’s rate of 4.6%, we can estimate that October’s unemployment rate was 4.5%. And those 3 months of unemployment numbers bring us within a whisker of the unemployment rise that, according to the Sahm Rule, signals that a recession is on the horizon.

The state of the economy looks even worse if we take a wider view of the labor market.

[snip]

Normally, when a president experiences a troubled economy during his first year he dispatches his ~~flying monkeys~~ minions to declare that it’s all his predecessor’s fault. And some Trump officials, like Scott Bessent, are indeed trying to play the blame game. But this standard political tactic is unlikely to work for this president.

First, the economy that Trump inherited when he took office was in much better shape than today’s economy, with lower unemployment combined with faster job growth, and inflation trending down.

Second, Trump’s radical policy changes – huge (illegal) tariffs, mass deportations, big tax cuts (for the rich), benefit cuts (for the poor and middle class), mass layoffs of federal workers, disinvesting in huge green energy projects and aid to farmers — have been clearly damaging to everything besides crypto and AI. It strains credulity – even for the Trump faithful – to claim that we are still in Joe Biden’s economy.

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White Man’s Burden: Trump Is Failing Six of Ten Metrics on His Own Open Book Test

December 9, 2025/23 Comments/in 2024 Presidential Election, Cybersecurity, Disaster Relief, DOGE, Economics, emptywheel, Foreign Policy /by emptywheel

One reason I laid out what Stephen Miller and Trump’s other sad little advisors think they’re doing in their National Security Strategy is because once you do that, it makes it even more clear that their overestimation of their own competence is dooming the United States.

Fully seven pages of the short (33 pages as compared to Trump’s 68-page 2017 NSS and Sleepy Joe Biden’s 48-page 2022 one) document blather about what it is trying to accomplish: two pages announcing the adoption of utilitarianism over values, two laying out what the US should want, another laying out what Trump thinks the US wants from the world, and two more laying out what means the US has to get there.

This is the work of a bunch of men who imagine they are competent telling everyone who came before them that they were doing things wrong.

Yet by laying all that out — by writing down what they imagine competence would deliver — they make it clear how badly they’re screwing up.

Effectively, Donald Trump has already done significant, if not grave, damage to six of the ten things that Trump claims America wants:

Continued survival of US sovereignty
Protect the country from human trafficking, foreign influence, propaganda, and espionage
“A resilient national infrastructure that can withstand natural disasters, resist and thwart foreign threat”
The most dynamic economy
A robust industrial base
Unrivaled soft power that “believe[s] in our country’s inherent greatness and decency”)

Start with the obvious ones.

Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and Elon Musk spent the first six months of this Administration trashing America’s soft power. These boys seem to imagine they can replace it with something that “believe[s] in our country’s inherent greatness and decency.” Except no one else will believe in American decency after it suddenly withdrew funding that resulted in the deaths of 600,000 people, two thirds of them children. People won’t trust you after you renege on paying the bills.

Or consider that 2nd bullet, which reads this way:

We want to protect this country, its people, its territory, its economy, and its way of life from military attack and hostile foreign influence, whether espionage, predatory trade practices, drug and human trafficking, destructive propaganda and influence operations, cultural subversion, or any other threat to our nation.

Of course, Trump claims to combat drug trafficking with his murderboat killings, even while he lets increasingly major drug criminals out of prison.

As for the rest? On her first day in office, the Attorney General stopped policing foreign influence, destructive propaganda, and influence operations; then Kristi Noem piled on by shutting down other programs combatting foreign influence and propaganda.

And, as an endless stream of stories reveal, both Pam Bondi and Noem have reassigned those who would hunt spies and human traffickers to go hunt undocumented grannies and day laborers instead.

Worse, the priority on weaponization has resulted in the loss of those people. Just the firing of a bunch of people who took a knee during the George Floyd protests to deescalate resulted in the firing of a counterintelligence Deputy Assistant Director and a supervisor.

a. In late March 2025, Plaintiff Jane Doe 5 was informed that she was being removed at the direction of Defendant Patel from her position at FBI Headquarters as a Deputy Assistant Director for the FBI overseeing counterintelligence at the direction of Defendant Patel because she kneeled on June 4, 2020. Plaintiff Jane Doe 5 had been specifically identified in then-Representative Gaetz’s letter. Plaintiff Jane Doe 5 retained her SES status but was demoted to a Section Chief position.

b. In April 2025, Plaintiff Jane Doe 6 was serving as the Legal Attache for the FBI based overseas along with her family. In that capacity, Plaintiff Jane Doe 6 had previously provided briefings to Defendant Patel with which he said he was very impressed. Nevertheless, on April 3, 2025, an FBI senior leader informed her that she was being removed from her term position in the Senior Executive Service to a non-Senior Executive Service position, abruptly uprooting her entire family and resulting in a significant pay decrease. The FBI senior leader informed Plaintiff Jane Doe 6 that Defendant Patel had indicated that his mind was made up and could not be changed.

c. In April 2025, Plaintiff Jane Doe 9 was demoted from her position as a supervisor overseeing all FBI ransomware and malware investigations. An FBI senior leader informed her that the demotion came straight from top level FBI leadership.

d. In April 2025, Defendant Patel directed the removal of Plaintiff Jane Doe 8 from her position supervising a counterintelligence squad.

There were even greater losses in DHS’ purges.

That’s part of the problem with bullet 3: The NSS’ grand plan to make America’s infrastructure more resilient. Along with gutting those who protect against foreign influence, Noem has gutted those who protect against hacking and natural disasters.

As for bullets 4 and 5? Trump’s trade war has had the opposite effect than he claimed it would, with historic layoffs and struggling manufacturing and small businesses.

Again, Trump did affirmative damage rather than achieving his goals.

Then there’s the question of sovereignty.

For all its yapping about America First, the NSS doesn’t deal with the way that Trump has been trading away America’s advantages to any rich foreigner with millions in cryptocurrency. Just yesterday, for example, Trump approved the sale of one of Nvidia’s most complex chips to China on the same day Houston’s US Attorney rolled out showy prosecutions for Chinese men accused of illegally exporting those very same chips.

“The United States has long emphasized the importance of innovation and is responsible for an incredible amount of cutting-edge technology, such as the advanced computer chips that make modern AI possible,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg. “This advantage isn’t free but rather the result of our engineers’ and scientists’ hard work and sacrifice. The National Security Division, along with our partners, will vigorously enforce our export-control laws and protect this edge.”

Alan Hao Hsu aka Haochun Hsu, 43, Missouri City, and his company, Hao Global LLC, both pleaded guilty to smuggling and unlawful export activities Oct. 10.

According to now unsealed court documents, between October 2024 and May 2025, Hsu and others knowingly exported and attempted to export at least $160 million worth of export-controlled Nvidia H100 and H200 Tensor Core graphic processing units (GPUs).

Trump already authorized the export of even more complex chips to Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, the same sovereigns backing Paramount’s hostile bid to take over a big chunk of the US entertainment industry (that’s after China’s Tencent was dropped).

And these are just the areas where Trump has most obviously failed his own standards.

He built in a gimme in those standards he actually accomplished by claiming to want nuclear deterrent but then stating, falsely, that the Golden Dome would deliver such a deterrent.

We want the world’s most robust, credible, and modern nuclear deterrent, plus next-generation missile defenses—including a Golden Dome for the American homeland—to protect the American people, American assets overseas, and American allies.

Mark Kelly explained how unrealistic this effort was months ago.

And as for the hope that the rest of the world will use American technology, one of the things Trump wants from the rest of the world?

We want to ensure that U.S. technology and U.S. standards—particularly in AI, biotech, and quantum computing—drive the world forward.

As for those chips Trump cleared for sale, China is limiting their use.

As for American biotech, the rest of the world is instead importing America’s scientists who’ve been defunded as part of Trump’s anti-intellectual purges.

There’s plenty else in this NSS (such as other references to America’s technical superiority) where the boys aspire to have skills they affirmatively destroyed.

As such, the NSS isn’t so much a strategy (a word they scare quote when they define it): it’s a confession that these self-declared competent people are failing to meet their own standards.

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David Sacks and the Entire American Tech Stack Win!

December 1, 2025/40 Comments/in Economics, Financial Fraud /by emptywheel

Something funny is happening over at Xitter.

Yesterday, NYT published a 3,000-word profile of David Sacks describing how his installment as the White House AI and crypto czar has led to a number of decisions that may not benefit the US, such as sharing AI technology with UAE in seeming exchange for personal gain for others, including Trump. The profile quotes Sacks’ own spokesperson explaining that poor David Sacks just “wants the entire American tech stack to win.”

It also quotes Steve Bannon, which might hint at where the article came from, warning of the “road to perdition”!

Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump and a critic of Silicon Valley billionaires, said Mr. Sacks was a quintessential example of ethical conflicts in an administration where “the tech bros are out of control.”

“They are leading the White House down the road to perdition with this ascendant technocratic oligarchy,” he said.

In general, the article is a bit of a squish. As one critical example, it doesn’t mention Sacks’ role in fueling a run on Silicon Valley Bank only to whine and whine and whine until Sleepy Joe Biden bailed out the billionaires, the most significant lesson to explain Sacks’ installation.

The closing paragraphs nod to the significance of all this: that at a time when both crypto and AI need a bailout — a vastly bigger bailout than SVB needed — David Sacks is there to ensure that gets prioritized over real America.

In the keynote speech, Mr. Trump described Mr. Sacks as “great” before signing executive orders to speed the building of data centers and exports of A.I systems.

Then he handed Mr. Sacks the presidential pen.

The tech bros need a bailout and Sacks is there to deliver it to them.

But NYT doesn’t lay out the stakes. If this was a Bannon-attempted hit job, it missed its mark.

Or so I thought until I watched the Xitter response to Sacks’ whiny 1,500-word complaint about how he lawyered the article, to which he attached a much longer letter from defamation lawyers.

In response, every one of the loathesome crypto and AI bros whose installation Sacks served piped up to describe what a hero poor beleaguered David Sacks is.

Mark Andreessen who of course hosts or hosted a private chat of tech bros talking up other tech bros, may have kicked it off with his claim that Sacks was performing some kind of noble citizenship, which Daddy then picked up.

Marc Benioff seconded Gavin Baker’s tautology even while treating AI bros as “builders.”

David Marcus described tech bros’ efforts to collapse dollar hegemony in glowing terms while scoffing at “incompetent technocrats.”

Zach Witkoff — the man facilitating corrupt foreign investment in precisely these technologies — hailed Sacks’ role in “helping advance the ball forward on AI and Crypto.”

Martin Shkreli, who misspelled Sacks’ name, nevertheless insisted this is the kind of guy Americans want selling away American power.

And they all tagged Sacks and he RTed them (well, except for Shkreli) and all these billionaire tech bros were performing a circle jerk for the benefit of the foreign trolls their host has installed, as if that performance itself could affirm the value of all this tech brobery to real Americans.

None of this exposes the real underlying problem here, the degree to which the American economy has been hollowed out so these bro boys can attempt to divorce themselves from the physical reality of real people entirely.

But it performs it.

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Trump Trips over Own Feet Hastening Parallel Retreats

November 18, 2025/80 Comments/in Economics, emptywheel, Epstein /by emptywheel

It is official conventional wisdom.

Trump is retreating on Jeffrey Epstein.

Or rather, Democrats led by Ro Khanna, survivors, and a handful of Republicans who could not give a fuck, starting with Tom Massie, forced Trump to retreat.

Retreat. RETREAT!! Bill Kristol wrote.

And they’re laughing at the position it puts Mike Johnson in. (Well, not CNN. CNN pretends Johnson had a “strategy” on Epstein.)

President Trump’s stunning reversal on the “Epstein files” discharge petition has undercut months of work by Speaker Mike Johnson.

Why it matters: The Epstein issue has plagued the House since the summer. Now the speaker is about to suffer a clear defeat over Reps. Thomas Massie’s (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna’s (D-Calif.) discharge petition.

Johnson cut the week short before the August recess after Democrats forced multiple votes on releasing the files. He then kept the House out of session for nearly two months — a move that, intentionally or not, delayed the discharge petition from reaching the floor.

“What I am opposed to is the reckless disregard that was used in drafting this discharge petition,” Johnson told reporters on Wednesday.

But on Sunday, Trump reversed months of calls to block an Epstein vote, saying Republicans should vote for it. On Monday, he said he’d sign the bill.

Tuesday’s vote is expected to pick up significant GOP support, including from Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.), the highest-ranking woman in the House GOP leadership.

Zoom in: Johnson’s posture about the legislation hasn’t changed, a source familiar with his thinking told Axios.

But after months of railing against it, he opened the door Monday to supporting it.

The focus here is on Mike Johnson. Not the way Democrats chased Johnson out of DC a week early this summer, literally stealing him of the power of his gavel, then forced his members to stay home (and Adelita Grijalva to wait to be serve her constituents) for two months while Americans suffered the costs of the shutdown.

It doesn’t consider that by undercutting Johnson, Trump risks destroying the way he set Johnson up as his functionary. Trump and Johnson are both treated as the agents here.

Both NYT and CNN view this as a rare retreat from Trump.

For the first 10 months of his presidency, Mr. Trump has steered the narrative and bullied Congress into doing whatever he wanted with almost no pushback. But as Republicans gear up for midterm elections and some begin to plot a future after Mr. Trump, the Epstein episode is a rare instance in which he has lost control.

For months, House Republicans had dreaded the prospect of a vote on releasing the Epstein files. Such a moment would leave them torn between pressure from a fervent base demanding that they support the release of the files and a vengeful president who was demanding the opposite.

Mr. Trump’s about-face was a bow to the inevitable that came after it had become clear that many, if not most, Republicans were planning to support the measure, wary of appearing to aid in a coverup for a sex offender.

Kyle Cheney is one of the only people noting that this is not coming in isolation, citing these six (he says seven) signs that Trump is losing his grip.

Republicans refuse to back down on Epstein vote
Indiana GOP lawmakers don’t bite on redistricting
Warning signs appear for tariffs at the Supreme Court
No luck on the filibuster or the blue slip, either
Trump gets a one-two punch after pardoning 2020 allies
MAGA rebukes Trump on 50-year mortgages, H1B visas

He included seventh on social media: 7) Voters overwhelmingly rejects Rs in off-year elections.

I’d add to this list: Trump’s coalition is also unraveling over whether they should be enthusiastic champions or opponents to Nazism, both a squalid fight played out in real life, and potentially useful given revelations that one of his House Nazis, Paul Ingrassia, also interceded to help accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate.

If we use it right, we can use the anti-Nazi backlash as a way to offer an exit ramp to Republicans fleeing the ship, one JD Vance, at least, intends to go down with.

But the Epstein retreat comes amid another important retreat, one only partly captured by Cheney’s list. Last week, the reality that American can’t grow (much) bananas or coffee caught up to Trump and after he single-handedly spiked the price of key breakfast goods, Trump started to retreat — like the Epstein vote — before his partners-in-crime, this time the Supreme Court, abandoned him.

Trump is trying to do with tariffs what he is also trying to do with Epstein, squeeze some victory out of his defeat, float rebates as a way to avoid explaining to voters that Trump single-handedly made Barbie unaffordable for Christmas and, depending on how SCOTUS rules, the possibility he created an enormous hole in his budget and the onerous process of paying back importers.

Both of these may be (attempted) tactical retreats. Pam Bondi may attempt to bottle up the Epstein files at DOJ. Some of Trump’s stupid tariffs were lawfully enacted, and also stupid.

But it’s important to note that these retreats are happening in parallel, not least because tariffs are one area where Republicans have always agreed with Democrats, even while hoping someone else would make the problem go away.

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Where We Go from Here

Treat Epstein as the base layer

Focus on the Broligarchs and AI

Emphasize Trump’s loser stench

Visualize Trump’s corruption

Brand Trump as the criminal he is

Hold Stephen Miller accountable for his failures

Visualize how Stephen Miller took money for cancer research and veterans care to pay for a goon army snatching grandmothers

Discredit Key Spokespeople

Use Trump’s claimed opposition to antisemitism against him

Reclaim disinformation research

Fridays with Nicole Sandler

Peeling Off MTG

Four Ways to Fight Fascism: Checking In

The 3.5% rule

Peeling off defectors

Predictable catastrophe

2026

Rent-Seeking: Trump Sells Patriotic Fraud to Boost His Tariff Lies

Donald Trump Is Getting a Pass for His Catastrophic Trade War

White Man’s Burden: Trump Is Failing Six of Ten Metrics on His Own Open Book Test

David Sacks and the Entire American Tech Stack Win!

Trump Trips over Own Feet Hastening Parallel Retreats

Fridays with Nicole Sandler

Interesting links

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