What's Waiting Around The Corner? Another Republican Recession? Or Is This One A Trump Depression?

The Market Collapse Has Begun— It's Not Going To Turn Around

I’m 100% positive the stock market is going to come back. Even the worst Republican crash in history— 1929— came back… although not entirely until 1954. That’s a long time… two and a half decades. I’m 77 and I sure won’t be around for that long. In fact almost all Baby Boomers will be dead by then. So a month ago, I called one of my money managers and said I wanted to lighten up on equities. Money managers don’t like lightening up on equities and he gently tried talking me out of it. “Look,” I said, “you guys know the markets better than I do. But I know Trump better than you do. We’ll be lucky if all he triggers is a recession. Sell.” So we sold. And a couple of weeks later, the Trump crash commenced, slowly at first and then, last week, for real.

During these downturns you only lose money if you sell. If you missed a chance to sell when the market was around 42,000, you’ll lock in your losses by selling now. Of course, if this issue just the beginning of a more massive crash— and it could be— getting out now might not be the stupidest thing you can do. Imagine the market below 20,000, territory last seen after Trump won in 2016and was sworn in in 2017. You’d have been a genius to lighten up on equities this morning when the market opened at 37,879.

When someone tells you we may be headed for a recession, they’re bullshitting you. There’s a recession built into the MAGA cake. As John Pavlovitz wrote today, those who voted for Trump because they perceived him as having been a successful businessman had the adjective wrong. He suggested exchanging it for something more accurate, like “unscrupulous, irresponsible, incompetent, crooked— and failed.” He bankrupted his businesses, even a casino— twice. “On nearly a half dozen occasions,” wrote Pavlovitz, “he ran a billion-dollar endeavor into the ground, leaving in his wake thousands of devastated employees and unpaid creditors and then jumping ship without personal accountability of any kind. With each financial implosion, he's shielded himself and his family, leaving everyone else to clean up his mess.”

He’s concluded what many people who have paid attention to the real Donald Trump have: “Trump has neither the capacity nor the intelligence nor the aspiration to lead this nation, to honor its Constitution, to represent its citizens. He is not the least bit interested in people's healthcare or their educations or their golden years. He couldn't care less about morality or virtue or Christianity. He doesn't lose sleep over disabled veterans or unemployed factory workers or exhausted single mothers or suicidal gay teenagers. He has no interest in dignity or decency or nobility befitting the Office— not because, as his supporters say he is a ‘straight-shooting Washington outsider’ but because America is nothing but another host organism to him. As always, he is here solely to slap his name on something and to suck it all dry, and if your eyes are open you can see that he is doing that right now with terrifying velocity.”

There’s a human cost to Trump’s signature chaos— and gaslighting, which, wrote Peter Wehner, is “manipulative and controlling, comfortable belittling and insulting others. They are accomplished at denying, lying, and projecting. And sometimes, if they’re lucky enough and skilled enough, they make it to the White House. When they do, the horrors that are usually visited on an individual are instead visited on an entire nation. At that point, the enormous machinery of the federal government, supported by outside groups and media outlets, becomes part of a massive and relentless disinformation campaign. The aim is to provoke distrust, confusion, and disorientation, which corrodes people’s confidence in institutions and undermines their grasp of reality. The ultimate goal is to divide and weaken civil society, and to undermine its ability to mobilize and cohere. When there is no objective truth, when everyone gets to make up their own reality, their own script, and their own facts, authoritarians thrive.” Try using that to pay your rent or buy some rice and veggies.

Wehner concluded with a hunch or a hope: “As Trump’s malevolence intertwines with his incompetence, public disenchantment will grow… I imagine there will be more, much more, to follow, as the injuries Trump inflicts on Americans catalyze widespread fury and opposition. Trump is an agent of chaos, and chaos has a human cost. If disenchantment with Trump and Musk and the rest of this freak show leads to mass protests, it could be an inflection point, not just against Trump’s policies but also against the vertigo-inducing disinformation he promotes during almost every one of his waking hours. I’ve long wondered how long it will take Americans to stop tolerating the unrelenting conflict and antipathy, which divides not just citizens but also families, that is endemic to life in the Trump era. The answer may be that they will stop tolerating it at the point when the quality of their life is degraded, when preventable diseases spread, when car prices and egg prices skyrocket, when 401(k) accounts start losing significant value. At that point, Trump-style nihilism may lose its appeal; his disinformation campaign may begin to blow apart, and people may be reminded that living in truth is better than living within lies. The drama has a long way to go, but the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.”