Trump can complain all he wants - but he can't stop his own economic mess | Sidney Blumenthal

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

67% : It's Trump.
60% : During the 2024 campaign, Trump brought her to the 9/11 memorial service.
59% : He can clamp migrants in foreign gulags, coerce white-shoe law firms into becoming his pro bono serfs and try to simply erase the National Endowment for the Humanities, but he can't rescind his harm to the economy.
58% : That opens the door of the Oval Office for malicious fabulists to whom Trump is particularly susceptible and finds useful as his instruments to terrorize even his own staff.
55% : Here the red lights flashed; Trump raced through them.
52% : Trump resents any limitation on his ability to act however he wishes.
51% : The passage of his "Big Beautiful Bill", with its extravagant tax cuts for the wealthy and deep cuts to Medicaid, wounding his white rural base, of which, depending on the county, are 25% to 40% dependent on the federal healthcare program, will spike the inflationary effect of his tariffs as well as the deficit.
48% : The tariffs are a shakedown by which Trump could exercise his control over corporations that must scrape and bow before him, asking for targeted relief in exchange for, perhaps, payments to his personal political action committee, or, perhaps, throwing money into the kitty of his various financial endeavors, his crypto firm and meme-coin scheme.
41% : The uncertainty factor that Trump has introduced has frozen all planning.
35% : "You don't want to be Loomered," Trump said.
34% : For Trump, experience is meaningless.
30% : Trump is furious at the early indication of the renewed inflation and price rises that are coming.
30% : Trump sought to make him the scapegoat for his own policies.
29% : When the Walmart CEO inevitably announced that prices would have to be raised as a result of Trump's tariffs, Trump warned: "Between Walmart and China they should, as is said 'EAT THE TARIFFS,' and not charge valued customers ANYTHING.
29% : " Trump has falsely insisted that tariffs are levied on foreign importers.
28% : Even after Trump agreed to drop his 145% tariff on China to 30%, Paul Krugman points out that "we're still looking at a shock to the economy seven or eight times as big as Smoot-Hawley, the previous poster child for destructive tariff policy".
28% : "Well," Trump said, "maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls.
27% : But the public is certain that Trump and nobody else owns the economy as he desperately tries to restore it to where Biden bequeathed it to him, with inflation and interest rates falling.
26% : Trump is at war with the corporations' bottom line.
25% : Trump has no real policies.
24% : Trump lies in capital letters: "THE CONSENSUS OF ALMOST EVERYBODY IS THAT, 'THE FED SHOULD CUT RATES SOONER, RATHER THAN LATER."
22% : Trump can slash the National Weather Service, but he can't stop the storm he's whipped up.
22% : In April, Trump called critics of his tariffs "scoundrels and frauds", but retailers do not know how to price goods, how much to raise them to sustain often razor-thin profit margins.
21% : " Trump famously can't accept the slightest criticism.
20% : Between his tariffs and his regressive 'big, beautiful bill', the president is wreaking havoc - and he never learns With his usual threats, Donald Trump is trying to ward off the dire reality that he has created and is bearing down on him.
17% : Nor does Trump really want to draw back completely from his tariffs as if he never had proudly displayed his "Liberation Day" idiot board.
11% : If Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, doesn't do what Trump says he will be turned into the scapegoat: "Too Late Powell, a man legendary for being Too Late, will probably blow it again -

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.