ENCOURAGE A YOUNG WRITER DAY UPDATES
And If You Don’t Write Much But Decide To Write More, That Makes YOU A Young Writer – So HOORAY TO YOU!
-Before we get to the updates, I wanted to thank you for the compliments I have received for these updates. They are appreciated and they help keep me sane as I juggle my natural tendency towards finding the next move to make to make things better (since I always believe there is) with trying to be realistic about … (gestures wildly) … so long as a few people seem to be enjoying the juggling, I will keep doing so!
-That said, when I juggle and drop things because I don’t proofread closely enough I need to call myself out – and so I do by noting in my last Substack the egregious error I made by reposition Bastille Day as June 14. Bastille Day is and always will be July 14, and I both apologize and hope France forgives me and will some day let me visit anyway. Management truly regrets the error.
-Speaking of errors, let’s get to the Update …
-The brutal roller coaster ride that Donald Trump (aided and abetted primarily by the MAGAGOP, but also a bit by Legacy Media Inc. and still-too-woozy national Democrats) put on the world with Those Damn Tariffs was, to be accurate, paused yesterday before the ride got so insane the cars would have flown off the highest hill into a rapidly-demolishing pile of rails that once held track. Going into the morning, the first wave of the mega-tariffs assessed on every country except the worst ones (among them North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and always and forever to Trump, Russia) had led to not only another wave of worldwide stock selloffs, but even more disturbingly sell-offs in bond markets that many economists were watching and starting to speak in not-unrealistic terms of a full-out collapse of the entire American economic system. Simply put, the US was hurtling towards insolvency as well as shattering the trust of all its trading partners, which for those of us who are not economists, was going to be Extremely Not Good.
-Worse, Trump himself seemed oblivious at best to the potential disaster. That the stock selloffs were so deep and so rapid even the billionaires who somehow thought he would be good for the economy were PHA-REEEK-ING OUT over their lost monies and what it could mean going forward to do any kind of business anywhere. From the inability to plan for any kind of contingency of any kind to the potential for such insane inflation Depression-levels of unemployment and worse seemed feasible, attempts to get through to Trump seemed to not be working. Indeed, in remarks to a group of Republicans on Tuesday that meandered into two hours of ramblespewing, Trump not only seemed to defend the tariffs, he proudly began to discuss adding MORE tariffs, this time on pharmaceuticals.
-But was he as oblivious as that? Perhaps not. In that same appearance on Tuesday, Trump did that little-boy-trying-to-act-all-alpha thing of Sounding Tough by insisting that world leaders were about to bow down to his Mighty Manly Tariffs by lining up to “kiss (my) ass” – a tell from previous behavior that, in reality, worldwide leaders were telling him to shut up and not be a cuck since they wouldn’t be. (Albeit far more diplomatically than this.) That was followed up by a series of frantic and oddly-capitalized social media posts insisting he was doing the right thing.
-But then, around noon EDT, Trump caved and announced that, while continuing to escalate tariffs on China, the rest of the world (well, 75 countries) would not get the exorbitant tariffs assessed just yesterday morning, but be given a 90-day reprieve from America’s Orange Savior for the largest tariffs. And, voila! The stocks, whose slide was further ensconcing Trump as the worst stock market President of all time (the 13 worst point drops in the history of the NYSE all were drops that have taken place under Trump) (EEEUUUU), then pivoted and wound up with the biggest gain the markets have seen in 16 years! PROBLEM SOLVED ALL HAIL TRUMP!
-Right? … right?? … RIGHT???
-Uh … not really.
-For one thing, while the most draconian tariffs were removed, a blanket 10% tariff increase on all American trading partners remains in effect – and that rate is far higher than the rightfully-despised Smoot-Hawley Tariffs that Trump insists staved off the Depression rather than the reality that they made them worse. It is unclear which 75 countries’ tariffs would be brought back down to that 10% level, or even if it has been done at all yet. Also, two of the countries that may not be on the list are Mexico and Canada – countries whose products would be 25% or more pricier than before Trump if their tariffs still were there. Finally, the China tariff war has been escalated, with American tariffs at 125% THIS JUST IN: 145%?!?! - and Chinese counter-tariffs at 86% or so. Simply put, there are still STUPIDSTUPID tariffs – just slightly less stupid in some areas and bigger stupid in others.
-For another thing, that means the US is far from being out of the economic woods. The threat to escalate them tariffs remains and remains high. The Stock Market has again returned to negative territory as relief over an economic nuclear winter has merely evolved to an economic Cat 4 hurricane. The looming catastrophic budget – delayed after House MAGAts wanting even more irresponsibly deeper cuts than the ones suggested by the GOP Senate – appears poised to pass another hurdle in the MAGAOP House, possibly as early as this afternoon. And Trump would still be Trump, as he undercut his own administrations “He meant to do that!” spin line over his sudden reversal of the sudden massive tariff rates by saying in a presser last night that people got “a little jiggy” and not the MAGA line of OF COURSE DEAR LEADER DID NOT CAVE IN AND FLIP-FLOP! HOW DARE YOU EVEN SUGGEST A THING!
-Then there is the deep suspicion that the entire exercise may have been nothing more than an elaborate pump-and-dump scheme for Trump and those in his reeking inner circle (“CAN YOU MOVE OVER, LUTNICK?!”) to drive stock prices down to insanely low levels, then grab up depressed assets and cash out when the market skyrocketed. Indeed, in one of his blizzard of posts yesterday morning Trump all-capped “NOW IS THE TIME TO BUY” four hours before the announcement of the “roll back” of the MAGAGOPTrump Tariffs, and given that Trump had a habit in the 1980s of using planted stories (in those days) to do just this, some really want to believe it was all Eleventy-Kabillion Level Chess by the Master, instead of what seems far more likely, that the richie-riches told trump to knock this tariff crap the Hell off OR ELSE, and Trump suddenly saw a cheap and easy and technically semi-disguised-enough to make a few bucks.
-But perhaps not just Trump. A suspicious spike in trading minutes before the Trump social media post hit the NASDAQ, with one trader apparently scoring a multi-million dollar windfall off a $100,000 investment. Reports that MAGA Leader Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Z-Q-MAGA-R, GA) had suspicious trades being placed the night before are circulating. And in an interview last night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) noted that she “heard murmurings on the (House) floor” of the tariff pullback the night before it actually happened.
-Congressional Democrats are calling for investigations, which is good since Elon Musk and Pam Bondi and the Project2025 drones have removed all the personnel from the departments that would normally investigate such things so that Bondi can accept a TrumProclamation to open an investigation into two whistleblowers Trump believes helped Joe Biden steal the 2020 Presidential election – NO HE IS NOT LETTING THAT GO. (Also, Joe Biden won clean in 2020.)
-The selling of all of this by MAGA Media has been quite a thing. Going back historically to the hours where Trump and his minions were insisting that those who voted for him to get milk and honey flowing through the streets two weeks after the election fully flipped to working to convince everyone that Suffering is Totally Alpha! That is kind of literal, as Fox dopes Jesse Waters and Greg Gutfeld! In particular started to seriously fuse potential economic devastation with toxic masculinity and try to claim that starving and hunting to assemble iPhones with their bare hands (as the aforementioned Howard Lutnick dreamt about on the Sunday talk shows) would make Manly Men More Manly than Men Should Ever Be!
-Of course, Trump job approval ratings have been plummeting, particularly in the under-40 demographic where we know the gender gap gave Trump the win in November and we can deduce is coming from dudebros that might be thinking Trump may not be who they thought he was, but it is an example that TrumpWorld has been flailing thanks to these STUPIDSTUPID MAGAGOPTrump Tariffs.
-So to summarize: Worldwide Economic Catastrophe seemingly diverted, American Economic Pain still on track, Tariffs still STUPIDSTUPID and more or less on, MAGAGOPTrump Ineptness on full display, and when are those next set of Hands Off! Protests for us allegedly woke cuck beta humans who care about people and animals and the next generation and all that?
-The answer: next Saturday the 19th!
-God knows we have way too much other stuff to cover, including heinous comments from Homeland Security officials openly talking about making removing suspected illegal immigrants from the streets as easy as Amazon deliveries, a brutal voting suppression bill that just passed the House (the don’t-believe-the-name “SAVE Act”) that will need to be filibustered in the Senate (CALL THEM NOW!), the discovery in Ukraine of Chinese soldiers being captured by Ukrainian forces (SLAVA UKRAINI!), and to lighten the load, the end of the NBA regular season featuring a mad scramble for positioning in the Western Conference – but with Tariff Madness continuing as the stock markets resume their downward trajectory (now 1,000 as of this Update), let’s all take a breath, read up on the trivia of the day, and get back at it for the rest of the week. Self-care, y’all, and remember – he blinked like he was watching an eclipse with both eyes open. (Which he totally did …)
-NEWS ON THIS DATE: In 1633, bananas were sold in London for the first time. In 1938, Austrians “approved” being subsumed (the “Anschluss”) by Germany in a fixed plebiscite. In 1942, the Bataan Death March began. In 1970, Paul McCartney left The Beatles. In 1986, Halley’s Comet made its closest-ever pass to Earth. In 1998, The Good Friday Agreement was signed, paving the way for self-rule of Northern Ireland.
-DEBUTS ON THIS DATE: The safety pin (1849), The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA, 1866), Arbor Day (1872), HMS Titanic (1912), THE GREAT GATSBY (1925), a 3-D color movie (HOUSE OF WAX, 1953), 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), a bill legalizing euthanasia (2001, in The Netherlands), an image of a black hole in space (2019).
-HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Commodore Matthew Perry, James Bowie, Joseph Pulitzer, Clare Booth Luce, Harry Morgan, Chuck Connors, Sheb Wooley, Junior Samples, Max Von Sydow, Claude Bolling, Doris Huerta, Omar Sharif, David Halberstam, Ken Squire, John Madden, Don Meredith, Paul Theroux, Bunny Wailer, Ken Griffey Sr., Terre Roche, Peter MacNichol, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmond, Brian Setzer, Ruth E. Carter, Joe Cole, Steve Tasker, Orlando Jones, Q-Tip, Rachel Corrie, Shemeika Copeland, Charlie Hunnam, Kasey Kayne, Laura Bell Bundy, Mandy Moore, Vincent Kompany, Haley Joel Osment, Daisy Ridley, and Sadio Mane.
-REST IN PEACE/POWER: Emiliano Zapata, Khalil Gibran, Michael Curtiz, Stuart Sutcliffe, Marjorie Main, Nino Rota, Sam Kinison, Larry Linville, Little Eva, Dixie Carter, Yvonne Staples, and Al Jaffee.
-FEED THE WORMS: Awful evil Pittsburgh Steeler Mel Blount and stone-headed action movie Trumper/Putinite weirdo Steven Seagal entered Earth on this date. O.J. Simpson bought it on this date.
-TODAY’S MUSIC INTERLUDE: From the album FEAR OF A BLACK PLANET, released on this date in 1990 …