It's not official - it's never official unless it's 100% happy talk bullshit - but DOGE is done.
Trump promised $2T in savings, enough to send every household a check for $5000.
Don't hold your breath.
Trump's fucked up COVID-19 response cost us more than it had to, so he doesn't get a full pass on that one. Let's be overly generous, and just say half of the $3.6T in increased spending due to COVID-19 belongs to him.
All told, in his not-quite 6 years in office, he's bumped spending by $6.6T - a trillion of that is just the increased interest we have to pay on the ten-year T-bills that make up the debt.
So he spends more while his tax cuts for plutocrats means we bring in less, and somehow the MAGA rubes still believe he's some kind of fucking genius business guy.
The current iteration of the GOP is there to serve the interests of parasite billionaires. If you think more than a handful of them are going to lift a finger to help you make your life just a tiny bit better, then you need to be paying a lot more attention.
They don't give one empty fuck about you or me or anything else - just power and money, and their vision of a Post-Government World Order - that's it.
Politics is supposed to be boring. I don't remember when or why I first got turned on to it. Maybe it was when my mom took me out canvassing for Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Maybe I felt it had a strong connection to sales - way before I even knew sales was something I'd end up doing. It's always just kinda turned my crank - talking with people, trying to get them to do something.
IDK. But like Belle says, I'm pretty sure it's supposed be a helluva lot more than entertainment.
We shouldn't be tuning in because we get a kick out of watching the antics of some jagoff who thinks his rhetoric is on par with Cicero, when he's just belching out the banalities he saw in the comments of some 3rd rate grifting "influencer" online.
We're supposed to be doing these things because we want to make life a bit better for each other.
How do views of Trump compare with other global leaders?
Across 36 countries, a median of 23% of adults have confidence in U.S. President Donald Trump to do the right thing regarding world affairs.
These findings come from a new Pew Research Center survey of 42,151 adults in 36 countries, conducted Feb. 8-May 13, 2026. They are part of a larger report on global views of the United States and its president.
Where do people have more positive views of Trump than other leaders?
Colombia, Hungary, Israel and the Philippines stand out as four countries where views of Trump are more positive than views of other leaders we asked about.
In Colombia, 43% have confidence in Trump – higher than the 37% who have confidence in Macron and the roughly third or fewer who have confidence in the other leaders.
In Hungary, 44% have confidence in Trump, compared with around a third or fewer who say the same of Macron, Xi or Putin. Confidence in Netanyahu and Zelenskyy is even lower.
In Israel, 66% have confidence in Trump, while only a third or fewer have confidence in the other leaders. (We did not ask about confidence in Netanyahu.)
In the Philippines, 68% have confidence in Trump, while 61% have confidence in Macron and around half or more have confidence in the other leaders.
In some other countries, including several middle-income nations (as defined by World Bank lending groups) like Argentina, Brazil, Ghana, Nigeria and Peru, Trump is among the leaders rated most positively. In most of these countries, confidence in Trump is similar to confidence in either Xi or Macron.
In three European countries – France, Germany and Greece – confidence ratings for Trump are among the lowest of the leaders asked about, often tied with Putin, Netanyahu or both. For instance, 16% of Germans have confidence in Trump and similar shares say the same about Putin (15%) and Netanyahu (15%), a sharp contrast to the 72% of Germans who have confidence in Macron.
Where do people have more negative views of Trump than other leaders?
Trump is either the leader with the lowest confidence rating or tied for lowest in many countries. This is the case, for example, in the United States’ neighbors to both the south and north:
In Mexico, 11% have confidence in Trump, compared with 18% who have confidence in Netanyahu. Around three-in-ten have confidence in Putin and Xi.
Canadians have similarly low levels of confidence in Putin (18%), Trump (20%) and Netanyahu (23%) and relatively more confidence in Xi (35%), Macron (59%) and Zelenskyy (65%).
In three European countries – France, Germany and Greece – confidence ratings for Trump are among the lowest of the leaders asked about, often tied with Putin, Netanyahu or both. For instance, 16% of Germans have confidence in Trump and similar shares say the same about Putin (15%) and Netanyahu (15%), a sharp contrast to the 72% of Germans who have confidence in Macron.
Trump tends to receive particularly low marks relative to other leaders in the Muslim-majority publics surveyed. Among Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, for example, only 4% have confidence in Trump – similar to the 2% who say the same of Netanyahu, but much lower than the roughly four-in-ten who have confidence in Putin and Xi. In Malaysia, too, Trump ties with Netanyahu for the lowest rating.
PCE rose at an annualized rate of 4.1% last month.
Back out the hikes in energy and food, and you've still got a rate of increase that's a point-and-a-half over what the Fed knows it has to be to keep the whole thing from getting crazy and blowing up.
IMHO, Republicans go on making a play for Plutocratic rule.
They push radical wackos in their primary elections - people who aren't very likely to win in the general election. And they have to know their wacko candidates don't appeal to most voters.
So it would seem they really are counting on a Jim Crow style scheme to keep people away from the polls.
With all the shit they're trying to pull - the campaign against Mail-In, threatening to order the USPS not to deliver ballots, vote roll purges, closing polling places, threatening to post armed "officers" at polling places, and and and. They're working hard to carve off a few percentage points - votes that would normally go to the Democrats - in order to eke out a few wins here and there.
It's the ugliest kind of politics, and I don't blame anybody for being repulsed by the process, and more than a little reluctant to participate.
It's amazing - over a million Americans have been caught red-handed committing fraud, but I guess the supremely sympathetic Trump DOJ just couldn't bring themselves to indict anybody for it?
She references Whirlpool CEO Mark Bitzer using the phrase "other recessionary periods" like the economy is already in recession.
Mark Zandi warns America is ‘close to the edge’ with 40% recession risk — and says US stocks are detached from reality
With stocks soaring to fresh highs, recession may be the last thing on investors’ minds. But according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, America is uncomfortably close to one.
In a recent interview with TheStreet, Zandi said the odds of a U.S. recession over the next 12 months are now sitting at 40%.
“Just for context, in a typical economy, what economists would call the unconditional probability of recession is closer to 15%,” he said. “So, 40% is very elevated, very uncomfortable — it gives you a sense of how close I think things are to the edge here.”
Zandi’s warning came even after a better-than-expected jobs report, with the U.S. economy adding 115,000 jobs in April while the unemployment rate held steady at 4.3% (2).
But the headline number didn’t change his view.
“The labor market is still a vulnerability in the economy, still very soft,” he said, adding that recession risks remain “very high.”
Zandi said businesses remain reluctant to hire, with hiring rates “still very low across most industries.” Hours worked also remain depressed, which Zandi said is “kind of consistent with what you’d see in a recession.”
He also pointed to falling labor-force participation — meaning fewer people are actively working or looking for work — as a warning sign. If participation had stayed steady over the past year, Zandi said, the unemployment rate would be closer to 5%.
At the same time, inflation is becoming a bigger concern. Zandi said price pressures are picking up because of the Iran war, higher energy prices, tariffs and other factors — and that is eating into household purchasing power.
“Real disposable income — that’s after tax, after accounting for inflation — is no higher today than it was a year ago,” he said. “So, there’s been no growth in purchasing power, and that’s going to get worse and start declining.”
That pressure is already showing up in the choices consumers are making.
Zandi noted that wealthy households are drawing down savings to supplement their purchasing power and maintain spending. But lower- and middle-income households don’t have the same cushion.
“They’re living more paycheck to paycheck,” he said.
If Americans have to put more of their paychecks into the gas tank, he warned, they have less left over for everything else — from gym memberships to food choices.
“You’re gonna have to trade down. You can’t have beef — you gotta have chicken,” he said.
Stocks are not the economy
Meanwhile, Wall Street has been telling a very different story. Both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite have recently climbed to fresh highs.
To Zandi, that disconnect is part of the problem.
“The stock market’s not the economy,” he said. “In my 36 years as a professional economist, the stock market’s never been more disjointed from the economy.”
He attributed much of the market’s strength to artificial intelligence, especially large tech companies.
“What’s driving the stock market train is these big hyperscalers and chip companies,” he said, adding that the AI trade “runs on its own dynamic” and “has nothing to do with the economy.”
Zandi also said investors appear to be betting that President Donald Trump will pivot if the economy or markets start to wobble.
“Stock investors are looking at the president, the president’s looking at the stock market,” he said. “That doesn’t feel like a stable… equilibrium — it’s kind of like a hall of mirrors.”
⬆︎ That's a big red flag - if you're expected Trump to behave like a normal rational human being, you're in for a rude surprise.
Zandi also warned that valuations are stretched.
“Valuations are awfully high,” he said, noting that price-to-earnings multiples are near historic highs, “except for perhaps during the internet bubble, which didn’t end so well.”
Zandi isn’t alone in sounding the alarm. Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones has said that the market “feels exactly like 1999.”
Meanwhile, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway now holds $397.4 billion in cash — a record amount that many investors interpret as a signal of caution in an expensive market (3).
To be sure, markets are inherently volatile, and no forecast is guaranteed. But with valuations stretched and recession risk elevated, now may be a good time to consider how to diversify beyond traditional stocks.
The "Thucydides Trap" is a political theory popularized by Graham Allison describing the high risk of war when a rising power (eg: China) threatens to displace an established ruling power (eg: US).
Named after the ancient Greek historian who observed that the rise of Athens and the fear it instilled in Sparta made the Peloponnesian War inevitable, this dynamic suggests that structural tension - rather than sheer accident - makes conflict likely, as the established power takes defensive actions and the rising power demands recognition.
Trump has said publicly that he doesn't think about the effect on you, or me, or anybody, or anything else when he makes "decisions" about his stupid little war with Iran.
