FTFY. For some reason, a policy that’s a combination of “undisguised panic” and “gutless obedience to presidential whims”.failed to reassure investors.
“Dow Jones? I don’t know the guy. Never met him. Maybe he fetched coffee once.”
Dear God, for someone as invested as he is in market outcomes, you’d think he’d never heard of the dead cat bounce.
On the other hand, Trump is proof that lack of intelligence is no barrier to success in politics.
to me it looked like trump didn’t want to stop americans from getting corona virus until he saw that he couldn’t corner the market on vaccines.
but that is me.
A black swan circling the drain…
Basically the only accomplishment Trump could point to - even if he’s not actually responsible for it - was the stock market. As Paul Krugman put it:
Economists, myself included, often make a point of saying that the stock market is not the economy, which it isn’t. It is, however, pretty much the Trump presidency. Take away his magic talisman and there’s nothing left.
At one point the market went up because Trump said something that indicated (or at least was interpreted that) he was going to do some things to shore up the economy… and then the market immediately tanked again as soon as people realized Trump was just making mouth noises that had no relation to anything that was happening.
Trump’s been whining about that since he got into office, in between all those loans he’s got and his ineffectual attempts to raise the stock market (because that’s the only economic indicator he understands - not that he understands it, really). It just got more extreme over time, such that by last September he was demanding negative interest rates. Now we’ve got a recession and - oops, nothing left in the tool chest to respond to it because he squandered his tools trying to juice the economy. So yeah, he’ll probably blame the Fed for not leaving him with anything.
I wish I could be confident that the stock market crash would appreciably damage his approval numbers with his base, but if I (a person who firmly believes that Trump has been absolutely horrible by every conceivable measure for the entirety of his adult life) have difficulty sticking him with all the blame for the crash then there’s no way in hell his cult is going to abandon him over it.
A competent president would not have been so visibly concerned with the stock market when we have the prospect of many people dying.
Well his base has little invested in the stock market so rationally a fall in it won’t effect them much. In a larger sense if he can manage to get the fuck out of the way and just let the adults deal with this, when it passes and we are recovering, few will remember what a clusterfuck he was at the start. It is remarkable to me to see how his base projects onto him the president that they think he is, rather than self-absorbed moron that I see.
He’ll be long gone before it starts a real sustainable uptick. The one thing I’m not looking forward to will be his sniping from the sidelines when he’s gone, he won’t be able to stop himself.
The problem is that disastrous results will hit population, not politicians. Also, current president lost the popular vote in 2016.
They’ve also got such a short attention span that unless it happens right before the election they are likely to forget all about it. He’s got months to repeat that this never happened and/or cast blame on others, and by November his fans will be parroting that, too.
These people. . .
My local Trumper likes to talk about “common sense” all the time. Here’s some common sense: the DOW goes up, the DOW goes down, you can’t have unlimited unending growth, eventually there will be a dip or a crash. When that comes the conservative mantra is “tax cuts and deregulation”, except you can’t keep doing that – eventually there will be no tax revenue and no laws. It’s better to have higher taxes and a strong social safety net. The rich will still get to be rich, they will maybe just own one fewer ski chalet or private island, of their many ski chalets and private islands.
These guys have put this free-market theology ahead of lives and rational thought.
I finally got fed up not knowing how to pronounce “sycophant” so I looked it up and found the first syllables rhyme with sicko, not psycho - though “psycophant” may be more appropriate in this instance.
I wonder if they will let him tweet in prison?
Whether it’ll hurt his approval numbers with his base is another issue. But the fact is, Trump (insanely) sees it as a number which indicates his success as president. He constantly points to it as the thing he’s done, the thing which indicates he’s a good president who thus can’t be impeached, etc. He doesn’t understand that for the average American, it doesn’t mean anything.
The fact that the economy is also going into the toilet might have an impact, though. A lot of people are going to be hurting and the Republicans are not only doing nothing, but are actively blocking attempts to mitigate that damage to people’s lives, so that might penetrate a few bone heads… Certainly, Trump won’t be able to say, “Hey look at how great the economy is doing under me!” (Even if it - largely - isn’t his fault.)
We’d be so lucky if Trump was only “noise”. Unfortunately he and his army of sycophants are the loudest sound around and are unavoidable.
None of that around here for the last few years.
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