The Weekly WTF: Americans feel pinched, president piles on
More Trump tariffs add to inflation misery, plus Elon Musk's money woes and a prediction for when the Iran war will end
THIS STUFF ACTUALLY HAPPENED:
Trump raises taxes, again. Gasoline prices are back above $4 per gallon and inflation is once again a problem. If anybody in power could cut Americans a break, now would be a good time to do it.
President Trump has other ideas. He’s rolling out a whole new round of tariffs to replace the emergency duties the Supreme Court shot down in February. It’s almost impossible to keep up with the on-and-off-and-on-again Trump tariffs, but the upshot is that Trump has raised the average tax on imports from 2.7% when he took office to roughly 12%. By the end of the year, that will rise to around 13%.
The Yale Budget Lab says the Trump tariffs will cost the average household about $1,110 per year through higher costs and a less-productive economy. There’s virtually no payoff from the tariffs. The US trade deficit hasn’t changed, the manufacturing sector hasn’t grown, and the only sign of dynamism in the US economy comes from the AI buildout.
Nevertheless, he persists.
For those trying to keep score, the new set of tariffs puts a tax of 10% to 12.5% on most imports from 60 countries. These replace a temporary set of tariffs Trump rolled out when the emergency tariffs went away in February.
[Here’s the problem with Trump’s new tariffs]
The legal premise for the new tariffs is that these countries employ “forced labor” in some manner to produce the tariffed goods. It’s a plainly ridiculous pretext that could fail in court when the inevitable legal challenges arrive. But that could take a year or two, and ordinary Americans don’t get refunds for the higher prices they pay, even when Trump’s tariffs turn out to be illegal.
Does Trump care about Americans, even a little? He’s pushing tariff policies that nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose. His Iran war is deeply unpopular and his ratings on handling the economy are terrible. Tariffs über alles.
Iran war end date. Ha, made you look. There is no Iran war end date, but Michael Froman of the Council on Foreign Relations offers a thoughtful way to guess. He cites astrophysicist Richard Gott’s take on the Copernican Principle, which stipulates that there are even odds a random phenomenon will endure as long as it already has. If so, the Iran war, which began on February 28, might wrap sometime in December.
That tracks. Iran is intensely aware that the war is a huge loser for Trump, politically. They also know his Republican party may be facing a wipeout in the November midterm elections, due to the botched war and its ugly effect on the price of gasoline and many other things. And it’s self-evident from Trump’s own bombast that he doesn’t know how to get himself out of the mess he started.
[Democratic Socialists have an awful branding problem]
The Iranians could very well be aiming to keep harassing oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz until the US midterms, then try to make a deal. Froman sees three possible ways the war ends. You can find the full analysis here.
Money oopsie. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made a mistake about money. During a July 15 Fox News interview, Bessent pointed to some old silver and gold certificates depicted in a frame on a wall at the Treasury Dept. “If any of these are still outstanding,” he said, “the silver or gold for them is at Fort Knox waiting for them to be claimed.”
That’s not true, as a few gold bugs pointed out on social media. Gold redemption ended in 1934 and silver redemption ended in 1968. If you brought one of these certificates to Ft. Knox, they probably wouldn’t even let you in the front door.
You can trade in a gold or silver certificate at most banks for regular money in the same amount. But they’re probably worth more as collectibles.
[The double-haters’ guide to the midterm elections]
Does it matter that the Treasury Secretary got this wrong? He probably feels a bit foolish, like a pro infielder who lets a ground ball dribble between his legs. But Bessent counts as a relatively competent Cabinet member among the likes of Trump henchman Bill Pulte, problem drinker Kash Patel, and the punkish Pete Hegseth. We’re willing to cut him a break on this one.
Why the Elong face? Elon Musk has lost more than $600 billion in paper wealth in recent weeks and is no longer a trillionaire. That’s mainly because the stock values of his two biggest companies, SpaceX and Tesla, have hit the skids. Tesla’s share price has fallen 21% this year and shares of SpaceX, Musk’s biggest holding, are down 27% from the price they started trading at when the firm went public on June 12.
Musk’s net worth blew past $1.4 trillion shortly after SpaceX went public, when the stock peaked at $202 per share. That made him the world’s first trillionaire. It has since fallen to $118, with Musk’s net worth now around $740 billion. Eh. Easy come, easy go.
Musk is a complex figure who has alienated millions with his Trumpy political activism and controversial views. In the latest Muskstorm, an interviewer asked Musk if he’s anti-Muslim and he answered with a convoluted reference to “rape and murder” that made it sound as if, yes, he is anti-Muslim. The Economist, which conducted the interview, called Musk “plainly bigoted.”
[Check out The Weekly Matterboard, bad lettuce edition]
But Musk is also partly responsible for the striking turnabout in the Russian-Ukraine war, with Ukraine gaining a long-range strike advantage over Russia, for once. Musk’s SpaceX blocked Russian use of its Starlink Internet service in February, while Ukraine has continued to use it. That has turned into a big advantage for Ukraine. Sometimes Musk is on the right side.
Putin bombs. Military analysts are chuckling at recent efforts by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to gloss over his many reversals on the battlefield in Ukraine. The Kremlin recently released a goofy video of Putin supposedly visiting a command post somewhere near the front lines in Ukraine. But there are telltale signs it’s a fake, such as camouflage netting on the inside of the bunker and studio-style lighting.
“I could stage a better fake visit to the front,” Ryan Evans of War on the Rocks said on a recent podcast.”
“Zero stars awarded,” added Dara Massicot of the Carnegie Endowment for Intl. Peace.
As far as anybody knows, Putin has never visited Ukraine since his troops invaded in 2022. The Kremlin tends to crank up the propaganda when things are going badly, which they certainly are. Russians are fleeing the Crimean peninsula amid Ukrainian attacks, and waves of drones have been knocking out Russian energy facilities, causing fuel shortages in an energy-rich country. War is hell, especially when it backfires on you.
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