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Tariffs, Teleprompters, and the FIFA Peace Prize: A National FarceTrump's unraveling press events, global leaders calling him out, Congress tightening the screws on Hegseth, and America's schadenfreude moment.
Good morning! Trump's America, where the "golden age for farmers" comes with a side of potential war crimes, a collapsing labor market, and a sitting U.S. president trying to sell advanced AI hardware to China like he's cutting a deal on used golf carts. Trump kicked off his latest performance with what was nominally a farm-aid roundtable and twisted into a three-act psychodrama: grievance, delusion, and denial. On paper, the headline was simple enough: the administration is rolling out roughly $12 billion in assistance to farmers, funded, he claims, by his miracle tariffs. In practice, even his own Agriculture Secretary couldn't keep the math straight, Brooke Rollins talks about an $11 billion "bridge payment" to go out by February 2026, with another billion held back for specialty crops, while Trump keeps boomeranging back to "12 billion, a lot of money, peanuts for you though." The whole thing is pitched as a "bridge" from Biden's allegedly wrecked farm economy to Trump's imminent "golden age" of agriculture. So before we swallow Trump's campfire tale about inheriting a "collapsed" farm economy from Biden, it's worth grounding ourselves in what the data actually shows. Biden's presidency deserves credit for boosting exports, stabilizing market access, and introducing regulatory and institutional reforms that made U.S. agriculture, at least for a time, more resilient. U.S. agricultural exports hit record highs in 2021 and 2022, farm bankruptcies fell to their lowest point in nearly two decades, and USDA spent four years trying to pry open new markets instead of just screaming "soybeans" at Xi Jinping like it was a Vegas safe word. But the long-term reality of American agriculture is bigger than any one administration. When you hear someone say "Biden wrecked the farms," it conflates long-term structural shifts with short-term political blame. The truth is more complicated: Biden slowed down some of the damage, but he couldn't, and didn't, reverse the broader trends. Consolidation has been swallowing small farms for decades. Commodity cycles, climate impacts, debt loads, land-price pressures, and global market shifts don't care who's in the Oval Office. The baseline trajectory of U.S. agriculture has been drifting toward fewer, larger operations for years, and that was happening long before Biden took office. Biden didn't preside over a pastoral apocalypse. He was managing an aging, over-concentrated agricultural sector shaped by 40 years of structural forces. Trump, of course, prefers the cartoon version, Biden drove the tractor into a ditch, and only Trump's tariffs can tow it out. The real world is messier: Biden mostly kept the thing upright; Trump's pretending the ditch never existed. The setting is pure Trumpian cult-of-personality. We get the Iowa farmer who tells a story about his two-year-old saying he doesn't want Santa to come, he wants President Trump instead. Trump, naturally, lights up at this as if it's the healthiest possible thing for a toddler to say. We're in a room full of adults nodding along as a small child replaces a mythological gift-giver with a very real, very angry 79-year-old who thinks tariffs are a personality trait. From there, he does his usual tour of alternative reality. He claims he "inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country" from Biden and then personally brought prices "way down," despite the small problem that inflation had already dropped below 3% by the end of Biden's term and has actually ticked back up under Trump's watch. He insists gasoline is down to a "sacred" $1.99 in three states, a number that exists only in his head and on the gas-station signs of his imagination. In the real world, no state is anywhere near that price. Independent trackers like GasBuddy have recorded no stations selling regular gas below $2.00 this year, statewide averages remain in the mid-$2.60s to high-$2.90s, and the national average sits right around $2.95. So when Trump points to $1.99 gas as proof that everything is fine, he's effectively saying, "Trust my vibes, ignore your receipts." If your grocery bill and rent have not followed this mythical sub-$2.00 gasoline down the mountain, you are just being difficult. He tells farmers there is no more estate tax, full stop, and that family farms are no longer being lost because "we have no more estate tax," which is… not how the law works, but by this point it's clear we're not here for accuracy, we're here for juice. He complains that environmental rules have made tractors so complex you now "need about 185 IQ to turn on a lawn mower," promises to strip off "that crap" from John Deere equipment, and then says he'll force the companies to lower prices because that's how capitalism works in his head. Because it's Trump, the farm-aid event morphs seamlessly into a war-room spin session about a strike off the coast of Venezuela that may well be a war crime. When an ABC reporter presses him on the September 2 strike, specifically, on his previous on-camera statement that he would have "no problem" releasing the full video of the incident, Trump does what he increasingly does when confronted with his own words: he denies reality. "You said that, I didn't say that. This is ABC fake news." He then retreats into a mushy fallback line about how whatever Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth decides is fine with him.
This would already be bad in isolation: a president, clearly slipping, insisting he never said the thing everyone saw him say on tape. But now we know what was happening on the other side of that exchange. Congress is moving to withhold a quarter of Hegseth's travel budget in the new National Defense Authorization Act until the Pentagon hands over the unedited videos of all the boat strikes in the southern Caribbean and eastern Pacific, including that September 2 "double tap" where U.S. forces fired repeatedly on survivors in the water. At least 22 strikes, 87 people killed, and lawmakers in both parties are worried enough about legality and oversight that they're literally putting the defense secretary's travel perks on the line to pry loose the footage. So when Trump snarls at the reporter, calls her obnoxious, and pretends he never committed to transparency, he's not just being thin-skinned. He's reacting like a man who can feel the walls closing in: Congress has seen the full video, analysts are openly using phrases like "possible violation of international law," and his usual trick, deny, attack, move on, is running into statutes, appropriations riders, and subpoenas. His memory is unreliable. His instinct to lie is unchanged. The combination is getting dangerous. If that were the only front where his detachment from reality was colliding with real-world power, it would be alarming enough. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is now openly calling him out too. In South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa has finally run out of diplomatic euphemisms. After Trump spent weeks insisting that South Africa is engaged in "genocide against Afrikaners" and promising to bar the country from the 2026 G20 summit over a long-debunked white-genocide conspiracy theory, Ramaphosa went on national television and said the quiet part loudly. Trump's claims, he said, are "baseless and false" and amount to "blatant misinformation" about South Africa. He reaffirmed that South Africa is a founding G20 member and "will remain a full, active and constructive member" whether or not Donald J. Trump has hurt feelings about demographics and land reform. Coming from a sitting head of state, "blatant misinformation" is the polite, diplomatic version of "this man is lying to the world." Because quietly ignoring him is no longer safe, domestic journalists, foreign leaders, and members of Congress are all now actively correcting Trump's statements in public. Bearing this in mind, Trump has decided that what this moment really needs is to loosen the export controls on advanced AI chips to China. In a social media post and subsequent confirmation, he announced that the U.S. will allow Nvidia to export its H200 AI chips to "approved" Chinese customers, with the U.S. government taking a 25% cut of the revenue as a kind of national-security tithe. Nvidia is thrilled, for obvious reasons, and Trump is selling the deal as a masterstroke that protects national security while "keeping America's lead in AI" and creating jobs. China hawks, including a cluster of Democratic senators and not a few Republicans, are describing it as a "colossal economic and national security failure." They're not wrong to worry: H200s are not Nvidia's very top-of-the-line Blackwell chips, but they are still plenty powerful enough to help Chinese AI labs build systems comparable to U.S. supercomputers and to supercharge military AI research. The basic structure of the decision is very Trump: take a complicated, long-term strategic trade-off and reduce it to a quick cash skim. Years of bipartisan work to keep the most advanced chips out of PLA-linked hands get converted into, essentially, "we'll let you have last year's hardware if we get a cut of the action." That might make sense if we were dealing with souvenir t-shirts. It makes considerably less sense when we're talking about the computational substrate for autonomous weapons systems. So on the foreign-policy front, we have a president in observable cognitive decline alienating democratic partners, amplifying white-supremacist conspiracy theories about South Africa, trying to bully a G20 founding member out of the club, and at the same time shipping advanced AI chips to China for a 25% finder's fee. Everything is fine. Domestically, the economic picture layered under all this is, if anything, grimmer, and here Max at UNFTR really earns his coffee. His latest breakdown of the labor market is essentially an autopsy of a system being hollowed out from both ends. On the surface, the government numbers don't look catastrophic. Initial jobless claims are lower than expected. Continuing claims are flat to slightly down. Prime-age labor force participation looks fine on a chart. That's the stuff Trump's people point to when they call the labor market "resilient." But as Max patiently walks through, the denominator has changed. The 25–54 cohort has been basically flat since the financial crisis; boomers are aging out, millennials never fully replaced them, and overall adult participation hasn't been this low since the mid-1970s. Once you factor in the non-working under-18s, students, older adults out of the labor force, and the millions stuck in gig work and precarious part-time jobs that still count as "employed" if they worked a single paid hour in four weeks, you land in a stark place: less than half the country is actually working in any meaningful sense. Private data fills in the qualitative horror. Small businesses are shedding jobs or closing altogether, while large firms are still adding just enough positions to keep the aggregate numbers from looking like freefall. Tariffs and sticky inflation have jacked up input costs. The big guys can eat margin or use pricing power; the corner shop, the independent manufacturer, the small-town employer cannot. So the losses show up as bankruptcies, repossessions, and spiraling credit-card balances at 22% interest. This is the K-shaped economy in practice: the top climbs; the bottom drowns. Sectorally, we're bleeding in the places you'd expect to drive real growth, business services, manufacturing, while seeing upticks in health care, education, and hospitality, which Max reads as younger people hiding in school and older folks consuming more care and leisure as they age. So much for the triumphant "reshoring" narrative: in reality, we have no coherent industrial policy beyond tariffs, and Trump has spent most of his time tearing up the renewable energy credits and climate incentives that might have generated genuine domestic investment in EVs, wind, and solar. Layer in immigration, and the picture gets even darker. With 2025 likely to go down as a rare non-war year with negative net migration, the economy is trying to function without the usual flow of migrant labor that we quietly rely on to harvest crops, staff warehouses and hotels, and fill critical talent gaps in tech and research. On paper, that keeps unemployment from exploding. In practice, it squeezes growth, worsens demographic imbalances, and exposes the dirty little secret that our flavor of capitalism is built on the exploitation of low-wage migrant workers to suppress wage growth and "control" inflation. Take that away without reimagining the system, and you get exactly what we're seeing: a weak labor market, persistent inflation, and no meaningful wage gains at the bottom. Trump, naturally, tells you inflation is now tamed at around 3%, down from "almost double digits under Biden." Max points out the missing context: by the time Biden left, inflation had already cooled below 3%; the Fed's preferred measure, core PCE, is still running near 3%; the cyclical components tied to food and shelter are closer to 4%; and, crucially, none of this unwinds the fact that food prices are about 36% higher than before the pandemic. Wages up 4% doesn't help the half of the country that isn't seeing raises. Retirees and low-income households still pay 36% more at the supermarket. They're bridging the gap with plastic. On the fiscal side, the administration's story about tariffs paying for everything collapses on contact with the Treasury's own numbers. In October alone, the federal government ran a $285 billion monthly deficit. Tariffs brought in about $31 billion. Corporate income taxes kicked in around $15 billion. Even if you generously annualize the tariff take, you get a few hundred billion at best, not "trillions," not a magical fund to give every American $2,000, and certainly not enough to offset the cost of blowing up boats in the Caribbean and funding a defense budget cruising toward $1.2 trillion a year. The interest line item, $91 billion in October, is where the hangover really starts. With 30-year Treasury yields stuck around 5% and 10-years above 4%, bond markets are quietly telling us that the United States, under Trump's fiscal circus, is a riskier bet than it used to be. So we have: structurally weak labor markets, a consolidation-driven economy where small businesses go under while the "Magnificent 7" tech stocks feast, tariff revenue that's a rounding error compared to the damage tariffs themselves inflict, and a debt profile that now requires us to keep rolling ever-larger sums at higher interest. Trump's answer? Keep the tariffs. Work around the Supreme Court if they get in the way. Promise people a $1,000 rebate "from no tax on tips and Social Security." Hope no one notices that this is roughly the same order of magnitude as the premium increases millions will face when the enhanced ACA subsidies quietly expire. Which brings us to health care, because of course it does. Over in the Senate, Republicans are converging on a plan that does not extend those enhanced ACA premium subsidies at all. Instead, Mike Crapo and Bill Cassidy want to convert the money into $1,000–$1,500 deposits into health savings accounts for some ACA enrollees. Bernie Moreno and Susan Collins are talking about phasing the subsidies out over two years and layering on new income limits and minimum premium payments. Roger Marshall wants a one-year extension and then a pivot into HSA-style accounts. None of these ideas has anything like a governing majority behind it. Democrats will hold a doomed vote on a three-year extension. Republicans will likely resort to choreographed unanimous-consent theatrics so they don't have to go on record voting for higher premiums in an election year. The most likely outcome is that the enhanced subsidies vanish at the end of the year and millions of people discover, right on schedule, that their "affordable" plans are now very much not. Max put it nicely: the administration's big plan is to hand you roughly $1,000 in tax goodies while you get hit with roughly $1,000 more in health insurance costs, all in an economy where food is 36% more expensive than it used to be and your two-digit credit card APR starts with a two. And over all of it, we have a president whose cognitive edges are visibly fraying. He can't keep his stories straight about whether he promised to release potentially incriminating war footage. He confidently describes tariffs as generating "trillions" of dollars that don't exist. He insists South Africa is engaged in genocide based on conspiracy theories rejected by every major human rights monitoring body, and then watches as the president of that country goes on television to inform the planet that the U.S. commander-in-chief is spreading "blatant misinformation." He tells farmers there is no more estate tax, as if words alone have legislative force. He greenlights AI chip exports to China for a 25% cut while his own party's hawks scream about handing key strategic advantages to Beijing. He grows more abusive with reporters, more self-pitying about "haters," and more certain that saying something makes it true. Trump keeps calling this a golden age, for farmers, for America, for his tariffs, for his deal-making. What it actually looks like, when you stop listening to the slogans and look at the data, is something closer to what Max described: the early stages of a managed decline into a more feudal order. Lords and serfs. Capital and precarity. The top of the K-shaped recovery pulling ever further away, while the bottom lives on Costco chicken, deferred dental work, and balances they'll never pay off. The only real "resilience" in this story is the resilience of his lies and the willingness of an entire party to keep pretending that nothing is wrong, that the labor market is fine, that tariffs are genius, that boat strikes are patriotic, that South Africa is the problem, that advanced chips in China are "balanced," and that a thousand dollars in an HSA is a substitute for real health care. Finally, for those who enjoy a little righteous schadenfreude with their morning coffee, the universe has gifted us a closing segment that writes itself. Pete Hegseth, Trump's favorite war-tourist, drone-footage enthusiast, and newly minted Secretary of "Whatever He's Currently Screaming About", was confronted outside church by someone who apparently mistook him for the pull-up bar he keeps insisting on installing at airports. There he was, emerging from the house of worship and attempting to radiate piety, when a Washington resident delivered a theological correction the scriptures somehow forgot: "You treasonous traitor! You murderer! You're going to learn how to do a pull-up in prison!" It went on for a while, the kind of prolonged, echoing scolding normally reserved for toddlers who have just overturned a grocery cart. Hegseth attempted composure, difficult when being told, repeatedly, that even your pull-ups are disappointing, but the moment captured the national mood far better than any pollster ever could: this regime's top brass can't walk ten feet in public without being booed like they've just announced a bagpipe solo at a middle-school assembly. And it's not just Hegseth. J.D. Vance got serenaded with "Nazis are not welcome!" at an event that was, notably, not designed as a participatory musical. MAGA officials are discovering that outside the controlled terrarium of Fox News and taxpayer-funded press rooms, actual Americans have developed opinions, loud ones, about their war crimes, their deportation schemes, their farmers-need-bridge-payments economic collapse, and their ongoing efforts to turn air travel into an episode of American Gladiators. And as if the week weren't already rich with comic material, the late-night circuit did its civic duty by roasting Trump's latest entry in the Imaginary Achievements Hall of Fame: his "FIFA peace prize." Stephen Colbert marveled at the sheer audacity of a man who cannot make peace with a teleprompter receiving a global honor from the world's soccer federation, an organization not exactly burdened by an excess of moral clarity or a shortage of lucrative chaos. Jimmy Kimmel added that a FIFA peace prize for Trump makes about as much sense as awarding him the Nobel Prize in Reading Comprehension or Best Actor in a Nonfiction Role. Both hosts gave it the treatment it deserved: the same seriousness one normally reserves for a ceremonial key to a city made out of cheese. But between us? We all know the real accolade worth discussing: the inaugural FIFA Snark Award, which, based upon reader comments that have turned Trump's imaginary trophy cabinet into a recurring comedic ecosystem, and if the universe is even remotely just, you all should be in the top ten contenders. If Trump is going to hand himself pretend awards, the least we can do is hand out real ones for real work, especially when that work keeps a weary nation laughing instead of crying. |
