Trump this.

[Alistair]

 

[KaraBulut]

Word of the Day: TRUMPCESSION

https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/atlanta-fed-shock-sounds-trumpcession-warning-mcgeever-2025-03-03/

Atlanta Fed shock sounds 'Trumpcession' warning

If you haven't heard the term before, you will now, as a closely watched real-time U.S. economic weathervane is signalling that GDP is shrinking at the fastest pace since the pandemic lockdown.

The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow model estimate for annualized growth in the current quarter was a stunning -2.8% on Monday, down from +2.3% last week. A month ago the model showed that growth in the January-March period was tracking close to +4.0%.

These estimates are published regularly as new economic data is released, and can be quite volatile. There were 11 in February alone. Friday's shock reading of -1.5% was led by a record-high $153 billion trade deficit in January, most likely as firms front-loaded imports ahead of tariffs, and Monday's decline was driven by soft manufacturing activity.

'Trumpcession' talk surges as US economy could be rapidly shrinking

Consumer confidence is cratering, inflation expectations are rising and new tariffs imposed by the president have rocked global markets.

www.newsweek.com

Trumpcession' Talk Surges as US Economy Could Be Rapidly Shrinking

On Monday, the Atlanta Federal Reserve's GDPNow model predicted that the U.S. economy would shrink by 2.8 percent in the first quarter of 2025, reinforcing fears that the country may be on the brink of a recession.

"The economy appears to be gagging on the uncertainty created by the haphazard economic policymaking happening in D.C.," Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, said on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday.

While some economists warn of slowing growth, others, including Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, believe the likelihood of a full-blown recession remains minimal.

The term "Trumpcession" has gained traction as market volatility, inflation concerns, and aggressive tariff policies raise alarms about economic stability. The Conference Board's consumer confidence index recently fell by seven points to 98.3, with the expectations index dropping below the warning threshold of 80 that usually signals a recession ahead.

 

[rareboy]

 

[rareboy]

There were many more than 13 lies...the transgenic mice thing among them.

'Extremely Dishonest': CNN Fact-Checker Nails Trump On 13 'Flat False' Claims

Daniel Dale said the president's speech before a joint session of Congress was filled with falsehoods.

www.huffpost.com

 

[rareboy]

 

[rareboy]

REPORTER: How concerned are you that the large-scale federal government layoffs will weaken the labor market?

TRUMP: The large-scale fentanyl what?

 

[NotHardUp1]

REPORTER: How concerned are you that the large-scale federal government layoffs will weaken the labor market?

TRUMP: The large-scale fentanol [sic] what?

Fixed that for you

 

[NotHardUp1]

Word of the Day: TRUMPCESSION

He has the true Midas touch. And like Midas, he will find eating gold grapes to be just as palatable.

 

[rareboy]

 

[KaraBulut]

He has the true Midas touch. And like Midas, he will find eating gold grapes to be just as palatable.

Speaking of the Midas touch...

The pundits tell us that Americans were mad because groceries were so much more expensive in 2024. That's why they threw the Democrats out of the White House and both houses of Congress.

Can someone explain, then, where did the billions come from to buy Trump bitcoin and how do Trump investors lose $12 BILLION dollars and no one is saying, "Throw the bum out!"?

Trump supporters lose $12bn as president’s cryptocurrency collapses

Donald Trump ‘meme coin’ loses 80pc of value since his inauguration amid wider market crash

www.telegraph.co.uk

Donald Trump’s supporters have lost more than $12bn (£9.5bn) in a month after the value of the president’s cryptocurrency collapsed.

$Trump, a so-called “meme coin” unveiled on Jan 17, three days before Mr Trump’s inauguration, has lost more than 80pc of its value since its peak on Jan 19.

This has led to its overall worth falling from a peak of $15bn to $2.7bn on Thursday, as it suffered amid a wider crypto rout.

The paper value of the coins owned by Mr Trump himself has also fallen by $50bn.

 

[KaraBulut]

More winning...

Trump's net worth plummets $1.8 billion as Trump Media shares nosedive

According to a new report at Politico, Wall Street is experiencing a significant downturn that's affecting all risky assets, including those associated with President Donald Trump. Since Inauguration Day, publicly traded investments linked to the Trump empire have been in substantial decline...

www.alternet.org

According to a new report at Politico[/URL], Wall Street is experiencing a significant downturn that's affecting all risky assets... Since Inauguration Day, publicly traded investments linked to the Trump empire have been in substantial decline. Trump Media & Technology Group's shares have fallen 36%, while the $TRUMP and $MELANIA memecoins have dropped 64% and over 90% respectively.

 

[NotHardUp1]

Speaking of the Midas touch...

The pundits tell us that Americans were mad because groceries were so much more expensive in 2024. That's why they threw the Democrats out of the White House and both houses of Congress.

Can someone explain, then, where did the billions come from to buy Trump bitcoin and how do Trump investors lose $12 BILLION dollars and no one is saying, "Throw the bum out!"?

The anger at groceries is mere pique, not real pain for most people. It reminds me of when Governor Bill Clinton was voted out of office after raising Arkansas car tags by about $20 per vehicle. It wasn't a burden on anyone to pay, but the idea of it rankled them enough to oust him. He learned a valuable lesson about optics.

Anyone telling you groceries lost the electtion for Harris is not paying attention. Harris didn't have the bona fides to be a successful candidate, and still does not. She does not inspire, and she lost the very votes she SHOULD have been able to carry with confidence, black and brown men.

The Democrats have been in a tailspin since losing with Senator Clinton. Extreme progressives clashed with the status quo in Congress and it went nowhere. Not one of them has even the appeal of Bernie Sanders. They got off message by making Wokeness their identity when they should have made working class concerns their platform, not esoteric fringe battles.

And, to make matters worse, they failed to galvanize opposition to the court stacking that Mitch MicConnell illegally created by blocking Obama's constitutional right to have a nominee considered. THAT should have been a Constitutional crisis, yet the Democrats failed miserably. They should have called for national strikes, shutdowns, and holy hell until the nominee was not just considered, but confirmed.

And Obama may bear some of the blame, as he leapfrogged into the Oval Office without the seniority in the government and politics to be seasoned enough to handle the chaos.

A lot is being blamed on Trump that predates Trump. Trump is just riding the wave of ugly conservatism that was already seeping out of the ground.

 

[rareboy]

More winning...

Trump's net worth plummets $1.8 billion as Trump Media shares nosedive

According to a new report at Politico, Wall Street is experiencing a significant downturn that's affecting all risky assets, including those associated with President Donald Trump. Since Inauguration Day, publicly traded investments linked to the Trump empire have been in substantial decline...

www.alternet.org

View attachment 2953669

It amazes me that there have been these absurdist spikes on relatively large trading volumes for what was and is and will be a meme stock.

Again, I imagine that Cletus and Jolene were right there after the election to plunge their savings into it, expecting that the world (and advertisers) would flock to the altar of their big orange god to leave offerings.

These totally inexperienced yokels likely though it was their patriotic duty.

But instead, it is likely turning out that even more and more of the red hats are not tuning in these days because the actual news is not delivering what they want and there really is no actual dialogue on TS...only middle of the night rants by an aderall raddled man shitting his diaper and having to hose himself down in the shower before his caregiver gets him into a clean pair of track pant bottoms and back into his bed.

 

[KaraBulut]

Anyone telling you groceries lost the electtion for Harris is not paying attention. Harris didn't have the bona fides to be a successful candidate, and still does not. She does not inspire, and she lost the very votes she SHOULD have been able to carry with confidence, black and brown men.

HELLO? ANYONE HOME? I'm not quite sure to whom I should address this, considering that you have no leadership right now....

Will Rogers once said, "I'm a member of no organized political party. I'm a Democrat." That is more of a problem when the Democrats are in power. When you're out, it's much easier to organize around what you're against than what you're for.

That's from a November, 2002 article written by Jonathan Alter that is probably one of the worst pieces of political analysis ever written, at least in hindsight. At the time, it sounded like the conventional wisdom. The Democrats were rudderless! They had no leader! When they were in power, it was like herding cats. Nancy Pelosi is a failure and politically clueless and her time in Democratic leadership would be coming to an end!

Political pundits might be good at the play-by-play stuff but most of them are terrible at post-election analysis. Where they usually go wrong is that they tend to be reductive: they try to find one single cause for an election loss.

The 2024 election had multiple missteps and quite a number of them did center on the economy. It started with the Biden Administration's malpractice in political messaging around their successes. It then went awry in the Presidential candidate shell-game in the middle of the election cycle. Probably the biggest misread was trying to run on abortion and not on "change". It is the economy, stupid. You cannot run against something instead of running on something.

They also misread Trump. He didn't want to be President. He was desperate to save his own ass from prison. He wanted to get revenge on the people who tried to hold him accountable for being a sexual predator, crook and con man. He would have bartered away all his children and grandchildren in exchange for money and backing from corporations and wealthy people. Never underestimate a desperate man.

I was familiar with Harris from her time in California politics. She was accurately gauged as down-to-earth, smart, accessible and viewed as a potential governor or presidential candidate.

Then the consultants got in her head.

Her 2020 campaign was a trainwreck. Her early days as Vice President were a trainwreck. I was very pessimistic when she emerged as the candidate after Biden withdrew (or was forced out depending on your perspective). I was wrong. She rediscovered her previous California incarnation of a relaxed, warm candidate with good political instincts.

But then the consultants came back.

Soon, she was running against Trump instead of running for something. Trying to be the "deprogrammer in chief" to convince the Trump cultists that he was a liar and a dangerous man was never going to work. The Trump base is locked in. They couldn't be deprogrammed in enough numbers to swing 7 battleground states into voting for someone that most of them knew nothing about. Trump might be awful, but at least he was a known awful... or so they thought.

If she would have been bold- with "we're going to fix the economy", "we're going to raise the minimum wage", "we're going to tax the fat cat billionaires to give the regular people a tax break" and "we're going to start doing common sense things".... well, maybe things would have gone differently.

The Democrats have been in a tailspin since losing with Senator Clinton. Extreme progressives clashed with the status quo in Congress and it went nowhere. Not one of them has even the appeal of Bernie Sanders. They got off message by making Wokeness their identity when they should have made working class concerns their platform, not esoteric fringe battles.

Well, not really.

Unlike Jonathan Alter, I think Democrats are disorganized whether they are in power or out of power. They can come together and get things done but it takes someone with a strong hand to get them to put aside their fractured agendas and focus upon winning. Pelosi had that strong hand and deal-making skill. Biden did not. Schumer does not. Jeffries might but it's not apparent that he's willing to risk being hated/feared in order to get his caucus in line.

Where do I think it went wrong? During the Obama years when the party stopped focusing on a 50 State strategy and they lost local and State-level offices across the entire country. When that happened, they lost their bench of new blood: young, smart, driven candidates who were the next generation to take over. Instead, we have a group of very knowledgeable Democrats who are in their 70s and who are over-invested in old ideas. One only have to look at their "protests" over the past 4 weeks. It looks like the bus from the nursing home dropped off the residents for their doctor's appointments.

There are some up-and-coming voices like Chris Murphy, Jared Moskowitz, Ritchie Torres, Elissa Slotkin, Dan Goldman, Robert Garcia, Greg Casar, AOC. I don't always agree with them but they are good communicators and they have good political instincts. But so far, none of this new generation has emerged as a leader with a message to get the Democrats out of the wilderness. Slotkin (or whoever wrote her speech) built a good starting point in her State of the Union response but it's going to take getting the geriatric leadership to get out of the way (and to give up their fear of losing power) to turn this around.

 

[KaraBulut]

It amazes me that there have been these absurdist spikes on relatively large trading volumes for what was and is and will be a meme stock...

Trump is Amway, Mary Kay and every insurance scam that had the word "Baptist" in the name. The same people who buy the Trump merch, the Trump NFTs, the Trump bitcoin are the likely to be the same people who put their hard-earned money into other scams. It's also why there's a such a big overlap between the Trump base and the people who bought into "prosperity gospel". Those same people allowed Creflo Dollar, Joel Osteen and hundreds of other scammers to call themselves "ministers" while living in multi-million dollar mansions, paid for by their congregations.

What is scary is that it's been normalized. It started in 2017 when Trump was allowed to not divest his holding and use blind trusts like we had required previous Presidents. That's the point where everyone should have stood up and said, "You can be a businessman or a President. You can't be both.".

And here we are in 2025, allowing him to get away with criminal acts again. Only this time, he has a small cult of people who are enablers, and we aren't holding the enablers accountable, either.

 

[Norri]

What is scary is that it's been normalized. It started in 2017 when Trump was allowed to not divest his holding and use blind trusts like we had required previous presidents.

When Trump first became president it was not a requirement it was a tradition and tradition means nothing when it comes to stopping those who love power.

 

[KaraBulut]

When Trump first became president it was not a requirement it was a tradition and tradition means nothing when it comes to stopping those who love power.

Correct, it is a tradition that dates back to the early 1960s. Never was a problem until 2017.

Legislation was introduced with 30 Democrats voicing support in 2017 and again in 2019. Never got a vote.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/65

 

[KaraBulut]

Going down?

 

[rareboy]

Still overpriced.

But I'll bet there are yoiks out there being hustled to buy on the way down...because ya know...its got nowhere to go but up.

 

[KaraBulut]

We're supposed to pretend that Trump and Vance aren't getting Ozempic injections.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5190293-robert-f-kennedy-jr-donald-trump-health/

Kennedy, during an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, said he saw Trump the day before, adding, “I think he’s lost 30 pounds.” His comment came after the news host said the president “is getting healthier.”

“He looks great. And he told me, he’s not using … for example, if he has a burger now, he usually doesn’t have it with a bun,” Hannity said.

Kennedy replied, “Oh, I didn’t know that he was actually changing his diet.”

“I have to say this… And even with all the — can I say — crap that he eats,” the recently confirmed secretary added.