The Weekly WTF: Inflation rocks!

Plus, Scott Pelley's revenge, Hunter Biden's comeback, and Trump's 38th Iran war peace deal

THIS STUFF ACTUALLY HAPPENED:

I 💖 Inflation. After the inflation rate hit 4.2% in May—the highest level in three years—President Trump said, “the numbers were great. I love it. I love the inflation.”

It’s possible Trump doesn’t even know what inflation is, and he thinks a higher number is better, because that’s the way it is when you’re selling real estate or trying to pass a dementia test. Trump doesn’t buy anything for himself. He probably doesn’t know how a gas pump works. Everything is just a corporate expense and now he doesn’t even have to pay taxes. Paying no taxes makes everything cheaper. Didn’t he just cut everybody’s taxes? Why would anybody be complaining about inflation when taxes are so low and the migrants are gone?

“I love the inflation” could be the saddest thing a president said since Joe Biden told Americans, “we finally beat Medicare,” during his meltdown debate with Trump in 2024. You’ll see “I love the inflation” over and over again in Democratic campaign ads this fall.

[Trump’s affordability plan has unraveled]

Ayatollah Hegseth. The Defense Dept. may have deliberately committed a war crime by targeting a civilian water-processing facility in southern Iran that serves around 20,000 civilians. Trump has repeatedly threatened attacks against Iranian “civilization,” and punkish Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dodged the question when asked if US Central Command deliberately destroyed civilian infrastructure, as the New York Times and other media outlets reported.

Small minds might argue that Iran and other rogue nations attack civilian targets, so why shouldn’t we? If you don’t accept the moral argument that it’s simply wrong, then consider the rational argument that it’s just stupid. Harming civilian populations achieves no military or strategic aim, and it can undermine both by turning populations against you and eroding international support.

Hegseth is an embarrassment and we’ve argued that Trump should fire him. It’s possible the strike on the water facility was an accident or mistake, but neither Hegseth nor Trump deserves the benefit of the doubt.

[Everybody calm down about the SpaceX IPO]

Strait of Hormuz still closed. Trump has claimed a peace deal with Iran is imminent at least 38 times, according to a CNN tally. He’s been wrong every time and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed to most shipping. How long can this go on? Probably all summer. American drivers are getting by on gas around $4.15 per gallon and markets are finding workarounds to the energy crisis Trump created. Iranian officials are probably looking at Trump’s plunging approval rating and wondering how low they can push it.

Social Insecurity. The latest annual report on the financial health of Social Security and Medicare finds that Social Security will run short of money in 2032, with Medicare running short in 2033. This is a depressing annual exercise that demonstrates how feckless the federal government has become. The eventual insolvency of these two programs has been apparent since the 1990s, yet no Congress or president has made a serious effort to fix the problem.

[Trump has a Joe Biden problem on jobs]

If Congress does nothing, Americans participating in the programs will get their benefits cut once the money runs short. What will probably happen is a last-minute fix to prevent that from happening. But the longer Congress delays, the higher the cost of fixing the two retirement programs. With the national debt already at $38 trillion, something will eventually have to give: interest rates will go higher, productivity will shrink, living standards will decline and there will be less room to stimulate the economy when another recession hits.

But let’s worry about that some other time.

60 Minutes of revenge. Fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley aired his side of the story in an hourlong interview with the New York Times, which is worth a listen. If you sympathize with Pelley, as I do, you’ll come away thinking CBS News boss Bari Weiss and her lieutenants are thin-skinned chickenshits not qualified to run a national news network. Weiss has been a gaffe machine since taking over CBS News last year and her days may be numbered.

[The AI bubble might be deflating]

But there are three oddities in Pelley’s rendition. One is that he refers to Weiss’s clumsy dismantling of 60 Minutes as being “like your spouse being murdered,” a metaphor he repeats. Sorry, but what happened at 60 Minutes is not like anybody’s spouse being murdered. Everybody gets to live another day, find another job, reunite down the road and tell war stories. The comparison is overkill to the point of being kind of gross.

Second, Pelley expresses disbelief that a corporation would break up a “family” operation like 60 Minutes used to be. News flash, Scott: This has been happening at scale throughout the whole country for the last 40 years. Ever hear of outsourcing?

Third, Pelley, 69, said he had never heard of Bari Weiss before parent company Paramount appointed her head of CBS News. Okay, she may not have been a household name, but everybody in the news business (sorry, almost everybody) knew about her public spat with the New York Times and her accusations of excessive wokeness at the paper of record. She also founded a startup, The Free Press, that turned out to be pretty successful. No? Doesn’t ring a bell?

Weiss has suggested the oldsters at 60 Minutes are behind the times. Two things can be true: She can be right, and she can also be a hack.

Grim war milestones. Russia’s war in Ukraine has now gone on for longer than the entirety of World War I. That’s 1,569 days and counting. The Russian death toll could be as high as 500,000, according to a new estimate. That exceeds the entire US death toll in World War II. Yet Putin persists. The Russian dictator can’t win but he can’t admit defeat, either. So legions die.

Hunter Risin’. Need more Bidens in your life? No? Well, sorry, the Biden family doesn’t care. We recently got Jill Biden’s memoir, and now wayward presidential son Hunter Biden is making some sort of comeback. The Atlantic reports that “Hunter is winning unexpected praise” by going on podcasts to talk about his addiction issues and writing social media posts poking fun at his drug-addled past. Hunter claims to be seven years sober and says he plans to start a Substack with more serious musings. Please, Hunter: No memecoins!

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