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Sunday, October 12, 2025

The New Dark Ages.

Our government is flooding the airwaves. It is a clear strategy. Before a reaction can be formulated to one news segment another begins. Before the implications of roving bands of Gestapo-like police forces shipping alleged illegal immigrants to foreign gulags, without trial, can be considered, those police forces are joined by the National Guard to place cities governed by the political opposition under effective martial law. At the same time, the country's president, family and allies, rake in billions of dollars from businessmen throughout the world seeking favors.

You might ask (I might ask myself), then, why am I reading Thompson's The Medieval Library (1939)? Why would I be refreshing my memory of how there were 28 major libraries in the mid-4th century B.C.E. city of Rome and 100 years later there might have been one. In a world in which we each are bombarded by stimuli, to begin with, anything an old fashion book might have to offer, no matter how wise, can only come much too late to answer any particular affront. It is made inconsequential in a moment by an executive order or even a social media meme.

It was the beginning of the “Dark Ages” — the mid-4th century C.E. Books (actually scrolls, in those days) and even a few institutional libraries continued to exist but they were rare. Personal libraries were formed from the remains of late classical libraries in a manner not altogether unlike the public library book sales so common in our own recent decades. The agents of wealthy bibliophiles would sift through ruins, as well, at every opportunity, in search of volumes. Upon their owners' deaths most volumes that were not destroyed moldered in a corner of one or another dilapidated building.

In the midst of all of this, the lands of the west were ruled by men marginally literate if at all. The Roman Empire had fallen into the hands of the barbarians. The pagan schools were disappearing along with the libraries. Those that replaced them were under the auspices of a new Roman professional class known as Christian clerics. They were monastic and cathedral schools. It would be centuries before the subjects in their libraries would expand beyond Christian histories, books of monastic rules and ritual practices, hagiographic biographies, etc.

But those libraries did come in time to include recovered texts in classical Greek and Latin — languages that no one any longer spoke as a first language. Their presence in the libraries was controversial and cherished. Together with classical texts recovered by Muslim scholars, they would be a major factor in the advent of the Renaissance nearly 1000 years later.

The exceptions to the above rules were the academies within the major cities for the maintenance of the secular laws. These were largely pagan laws but highly functional and absolutely essential for the maintenance of order and of trade. The professors and students in the academies might be pagans (early during the Dark Ages) or Christians.

Even in the Dark Ages there needed to be laws. In cities, anyway, where business was still transacted, still vitally important. Though the powerful might brush them aside, chaos was the price of doing so. Foreign traders would avoid the city too intent on turning trade into pilfer, tariff into extortion. Local artisans would lose business and have to close up shop.

There is more than a passing argument that the United States has been in decline for half a century now. A short period of time compared to the decline of the Roman Empire but then our history is lived in a world that proceeds at an ever faster pace.

The new barbarians are led by a tiny ultra-Wealthy elite who have recruited their numbers in order to be electable. Wealthy elites and their servants being far too few to win elections, plans were made, over decades, to coöpt disaffected groups through whatever means necessary. Once sufficiently in power, the plan was to use democracy to dismantle itself.

The new administrative class for the Ultra-Wealthy is not dominated by Christians. The Christians are now generally counted among the barbarians. The administrators do, however, commonly claim to be Old Testament Christians in order to justify the neutralization of “heretics” who would resist their seizure of the vast wealth and power of the country. Also in order to maintain the numbers to get elected again should it prove necessary.

Those members of the new administrative class who gather under the umbrella of the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation have diligently done their reading in law for many years. Intending to pervert the law, in pursuit of wealth and power, they have made themselves exceptionally well versed in the law.

While they have done this they have captured the astonishing new technologies of our time. The disaffected citizen is no longer a private man or woman of rumored name and vague description. Every detail of their life is on file. Their face is digitized from thousands of encounters with security cameras. Facial recognition computer programs can recognize them from all others.

A small but essential minority — the Democrats in Congress of various ability, their staffs and names like Mark Elias, Democracy Forward, Legal Aid, the American Civil Liberties Union, etc. — identifying with the general population, has also spent long tedious hours in libraries reading heavy tomes of law, science, etc., building up stores of functional knowledge, and now find themselves the last hope of a people courageously fighting back with smart-phone videos and social media memes.

In the Dark Ages, the people would eventually rise up if things got too bad. We are in a new Dark Age, of sorts, similarly tyrannical and plague ridden. For all of our libraries — all of our books physical and digital — we effectively have no libraries, no books, if the hurricane-force winds of our time and place make it impossible to read them.

Human nature having changed little since the initial Dark Ages, many are demanding we rise up. But the powers of the tyrant have grown enormously. His weapons are truly daunting. He is taunting us in hopes that we will rise up and he can give his tyranny the color of law. There is only one power that can overcome this tyrant. It is himself. And he is doing a fine job of it (with the help of our essential minority). But it will take time. And we will have to accept that we live in a changed world. We, too, will have to change.




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Monday, September 22, 2025

The Donald Trump Show. Episode 7: Spending More on Everything in the Golden Age.

At some point in the process of the Heritage Foundation designing the second run of the Donald Trump Reality Television Show, the question can only have come up: “What happens when the Federal Government economic data begins to show that all of the wealth and power is being transferred-up to the Ultra-Wealthy?” That the tax burden is being transferred-down onto the backs of the common citizenry? The ultimate goal of the show is unlikely to have been achieved and locked-in before the numbers are sufficiently obvious to raise alarms.

The administration hit the ground running on this point. Within weeks of the show's first episode, the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC) was terminated as directed in the Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership1. Put euphemistically,

...advisory committees are populated by activists from organizations openly hostile to conservative principles who use the committees to impede conservative policy.2

More directly: highly qualified and respected a-political advice-and-oversight experts can only interfere with Donald Trump Show needs. It is vitally important that the numbers created by the show's writers not be contradicted by any off-stage characters.

That done, the strategy of choice would be to simply present the reality show numbers, after the same fashion real-reality numbers had always been presented, and let the show's fictional media glowingly report them as astonishingly positive numbers — contradicting all real-reality expert predictions — showing that the star of the show is every bit the genius he claims to be. Lies, exaggerations and 8th grade vocabulary notwithstanding.

The process would now work “properly”. At Donald Trump's Bureau of Economical Analysis, elves would be diligently working away to provide the wish-list of the Ultra-Wealthy (who have hung their stockings with care).

Of course, that alone would not be enough. The Donald Trump Show audience is not going to suspend disbelief forever. Regardless that there is a reality-show reality of less than 3% inflation (the number the writers have required of his elves on each occasion thus far), the prices they pay for products and services in the real world going up in a big way is already effecting the show's popularity.

Merely capturing the federal statistics machinery could only serve purposes for so long. To massage the numbers too vigorously could reduce the effectiveness of hijacking the traditional data. Mismatches with Federal Reserve System internal data (for the little time it will remain independent) and with respected private data aggregators will raise eyebrows. Actual prices on grocery shelves will raise eyebrows. Questions begin to be asked.

Already, the administration and it's allies have been assembling new strategies to address these challenges on the fly. Donald Trump promised zero inflation beginning on day one of the show. When it failed to (de)materialize, he suggested that the consumer would likely experience some “pain” for some number of months. Most recently, he is suggesting that there could be a difficult couple of years ahead. The Golden Age he has literally promised will be wonderful, we are assured... when it gets here. Right after the mid-term elections return Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Otherwise, the “Democrats who hate America” will prevent it.

While the goalposts have been changed in order to buy time, still more Bureau of Labor Statistics reports have proven troublesome to the Trump Show story line. Always, numbers that threaten the story line are “fake”.

In a compelling episode, the star fired the “Statistics Commissioner”. The supporting cast has gone to work to declare present traditional BLS methodology in need of major changes. Scott Bessent, the actor playing Secretary of the Treasury, on the Donald Trump Show, has declared “it was incumbent on the BLS to find a new way of collecting data.” From every mouth, it was the numbers that were wrong never the star or the premise of the show.

Trump has suggested that he will remove military spending from the federal GDP calculations. This, presumably, in order to provide an excuse for why his GDP numbers will be much lower than his predecessors'. It will conveniently muddy historical comparisons, as well. For the purposes of the Donald Trump Reality Show it will be said to make such comparisons impossible. His much smaller GDP will actually be much higher than the “fake” historical numbers of the likes of Joe Biden.

Billionaire Steve Forbes has pitched-in suddenly revealing that measuring economic growth by Gross Domestic Product [GDP], as has been done for decades before the Trump Show, was ill-conceived. GDP based national growth primarily on consumer spending. The true measure, he informs us, is “Gross Output” [GO].

With GO, we learn that business investment and entrepreneurship, not consumer spending, are the catalysts for economic growth. Consumer spending is the effect, not the cause, of prosperity.3

The observation for decades now that the consumer drives the national economy, he suddenly reveals, has always been wrong. The role of the common consumer in economic decision-making must be greatly reduced.

GDP is the measure of the value of retail goods and services to consumers. This number is universally expected to be negatively impacted by tariffs. Gross Output [GO], on the other hand, adds the measure of all business-to-business and supply-chain goods and services. The number is always much higher because it counts many more transactions (double-counting many along the way). With the switch to the GO as the standard, The Donald Trump Show would be able to proclaim large increases by comparing apples to apple orchards. He would remain a genius.

The Trump Show, the public is warned, must radically overhaul the methods for determining government statistics hence forward. The numbers too often come out wrong! It threatens the story line of the Reality-President Show. The show's writers must take control of the numbers or the premise of the whole show is threatened.

*

On September 19, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that “The 2024 Consumer Expenditures annual data release, scheduled on September 23, 2025, will be rescheduled to a later date.”4 No further information is provided. Media queries are receiving no response.

The Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) is the name of the continuous survey of representative households, from among U.S. consumers, and provides much of the raw data used to calculate the federal government's monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation numbers. Changes in the CE methodology can greatly alter the official inflation numbers. Failure to release CE survey numbers to the public means that the government's CPI numbers can only be taken on faith.

But then, the Donald Trump Reality-President Show numbers are always highly positive and always support the show's story line.


1Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf 

2Project 2025 @ 666.

4U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Surveys Page. https://www.bls.gov/cex/notices/2025/ce-2024-reschedule.htm



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Saturday, September 06, 2025

The Donald Trump Show. Episode 6: Sauron Peers into the Palantir.

As the Heritage Foundation production staff — Russell Vought, Executive Producer — conceived the Donald Trump Reality-Television-Show they realized that there would be off-camera myriad characters hired during the previous real-reality Presidency that would refuse to obey the rules of the production. They would have to be fired as rapidly as possible. It would be presented as cost-cutting to reduce the annual deficit.

They would wish to continue in their jobs and drawing funds lawfully allocated to them under the incumbent budget. They would appeal to the law courts. The judiciary would have to be coöpted, under the claim that the nation is in the midst of a total emergency, thus giving the President absolute, dictatorial power. The word “emergency” must turn the courts into rubber stamps. The ground-work to accomplish this had been laid during the first run of the show. A Department of Justice, installed for the second run, formed on the concept of undermining the law, rather than enforcing it, might be expected to do the rest.

The first run of the show had greatly disappointed their hopes. They had brought onboard the one star that could pull of the role of reality-show-president and attract a MAGA audience large enough to win an election and put the producer's agenda over the top. Nevertheless, in the end, the show had been canceled due to a supporting cast that kept refusing to perform their roles as written.

The character of the President was an exhausting role requiring constant repetition of misrepresentations, lies and half-truths — whatever could be calculated to accomplish the desired outcome. Trump was perfect for it. Being an extreme narcissist, he loved being every waking minute before the television-camera lens, the center of attention of the largest possible national audience. He loved flattery to the point that he flattered himself at a rate the supporting cast all together could hardly match. Couch policy issues in terms of him gaining wealth, power and fame, and he was able to concentrate sufficiently to speak serviceable approximations of his lines. Where he wandered off script, an electorate — tired of the mind-bending pronouncements of science and math elites — only found it refreshing to be talked to on their own level.

The first run of the show having failed to sufficiently advance the producers' agenda, there might only be four years left to run. The motto of the second run of the show would be borrowed from the trendy tech saying: “Move fast and break things.” Don't be worried about breaking things. The Ultra-Wealthy would end up with all the wealth and power, in the end, and no longer need to bother with beguiling enough voters to win elections. They would be able to buy obsequious experts and put things back together again the right way. Not the communist way that America has fallen into, beginning with the New Deal, of progressive taxation to fund social programs.

Every individual would once again be properly responsible for their own outcomes. They would have no claim on other people's money. No right to regulate how the Ultra-Wealthy use their money.

Domestic and international social programs would have to be terminated or shifted to state budgets as quickly as possible. Programs supporting individual citizens must be turned into tax-advantaged investment accounts thus legally piping-lining billions of dollars directly into the U.S. stock markets, inflating their value, while simultaneously eliminating the federal budgets for social programs.

Any resistance would have to be dealt with summarily. The writers would be called upon to quickly provide devastating sound bites claiming vicious criminal intent threatening “national security”. Time would be of the essence.

The climactic episodes, the production staff must always keep in mind, is to be the termination of progressive taxation of the Ultra-Wealthy under the guise of making other countries pay for the country's huge national debt. Every decision must facilitate this historic episode.

The Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee would have to be terminated in order to avoid counterproductive Commerce Department numbers or commentary on the new “improved methodologies” of which they would not likely approve. Headline numbers would be expected to support the story-lines of the show. Unavoidable counter-productive revisions to statistics must be be drowned out by continuous news coverage of a secretive new police force entertaining the MAGA voter base with arrests of persons of color and/or with foreign accents.

The military must be coöpted to the uses of the show — fully obedient to the President's reality-television orders by voice or social media account — before the general public realizes where the show's story-line is going and stages disruptive protests. Repeated exercises, purportedly against heinous, ferocious criminals, conflated with members of the political opposition, must steadily acclimatize the television viewing audience toward this end.

The narrative that the protesters are communists and Democrats intent on destroying the country must be repeated again and again in order to establish a rationale.

Arguably, it could only be a matter of time until the producers would have to expand the government's partnership with the AI data-mining company called "Palantir". There being so much to do, and so little time, only AI would be capable of accomplishing the production's myriad tasks.

So much opposition would arise, getting under-foot and slowing down vital progress of the show's story-line, that the population would need to be surveilled and persons threatening its success to be identified and neutralized. Every data point of anyone who might impede that progress must be available to scrutiny virtually guaranteeing that data ripe for defamation or for allegations of criminal acts would be discovered allowing the impediment to be rapidly cleared away.

That capability was advanced, early on, with the star's March 20 executive order “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos” which orders a giant unified data base on all Americans. The show's story-lines begin to show the effects.

Thus far, at least one Trump appointee has formed an “AI-powered Crime Detection Unit,” using Palantir, and announced three criminal referrals to the Department of Justice, all for alleged mortgage fraud. Two are people who Donald Trump has identified as hated enemies: New York Attorney General Letitia James and Democratic Senator Adam Schiff.

Trump has fired the third — Federal Reserve Governor, Lisa Cook — as the most promising way to take extra-legal control of the Federal Reserve Board which he intends will drastically reduce the Federal Funds rate in order to prop up the U.S. financial markets and help to create the illusion that his extreme tariffs have super-charged the U.S. economy. Cook has gone to the Courts in an effort to keep her job and to keep the Fed decision-making independent of the President's political manipulation.

The firing was widely expected to tank the stock markets. But, like the “Miracle of 10:02 AM on August 1st,” when the stock market futures of the three major markets began to plunge, the night after the firing, they immediately and simultaneously reversed momentum, at 3:00 AM, recovering their losses. The futures being flat, signaling no downward momentum, the markets opened flat and stayed more or less flat for the rest of the session.

Like the days after the “Miracle of 10:02 AM on August 1st,” the reality-television fictional news channels announced that the “so-called” experts had been wrong, again, and the star of the show right, again. The star was always right. Those who spoke otherwise were always wrong. It is the rule of reality-television-presidencies: the rule of The Donald Trump Show.




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Sunday, August 24, 2025

The Donald Trump Show. Episode 5: East is East, and West is West, and the Twain Meet in the Caucasus.

On May 5, 2023, U.S. Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, announced the completion of successful “bilateral peace negotiations” he had hosted, at the George P. Schultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center, between the Foreign Ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan. There was still more to be done but progress had been made.

The main outstanding issues were legal claims against alleged war crimes during the recent war between the parties, a transit corridor through southern Armenia, and a clause in the Armenian constitution stating that the country included the area known as Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan had captured the area during the brutal war.

In November 2023, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, James O’Brien, informed the parties that the transit corridor through Armenia

should be built with the “involvement and consent” of Yerevan [Armenia] while pointing out that the “transit corridor created some other way, by force or involvement of Iran will … be met with a strong reaction”

The U.S. made it clear that Azerbaijan would not be allowed to take the corridor, known as the Zangezur Corridor, by military force, as it had threatened to do, nor would Iran, without severe consequences.

During early 2024, Armenia, much the militarily weaker, sought to make Azerbaijani threats of military force less effective by purchases of arms from India and France. The EU sent unarmed observers toward the same end.

On July 10, 2024, Blinken announced that

based on all of the engagements that we’ve had, including in recent weeks, I believe both countries are very close to being able to reach a final agreement, one that the United States would strongly, strongly support.

With the end of the Biden Administration, the U.S. had no further direct involvement in the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process that arrived at a 17 point, March 13, 2025, preliminary peace accord. Both sides reported that the change to the Armenian constitution and finalization of the details of the Zangezur Corridor still must be accomplished before the signed preliminary accord would become a signed legally binding final accord.

The Trump Administration was busy, during the subsequent time, strong-arming nations into extortionate trade deals under threat of escalating tariffs on their exports to the U.S. Armenia and Azerbaijan's tiny economies and minuscule amount of exports to the U.S. might have discouraged it from using its time in their direction.

On the August 8th episode of the Donald Trump Reality-President Show, however, the star of the show announced that he, in his deal-making greatness, had “brokered” a peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The “fact” immediately went up on his White House dot gov Donald Trump Fan Page:

Today, President Donald J. Trump hosted Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan at the White House, where the two leaders signed a historic joint declaration for peace after decades of bitter conflict and scores of lives lost — a landmark achievement for international diplomacy that only President Trump could deliver.

The two leaders also signed bilateral economic agreements with the U.S., unlocking the great potential of the South Caucasus region in trade, transit, energy, infrastructure, and technology, and creating new opportunities for the American people and American businesses.

“For more than 35 years, Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought a bitter conflict that resulted in tremendous suffering for both nations… Many tried to find a resolution… and they were unsuccessful. With this Accord, we’ve finally succeeded in making peace,” said President Trump.

After the event, both sides reported that the change to the Armenian constitution and finalization of the details of the Zangezur Corridor still must be accomplished before the signed preliminary accord would become a legally binding final accord. The White House was not celebrating the “signing” of a peace accord but rather the “initialing” of a preliminary peace accord.

The writers of the Donald Trump Reality Show were at the top of their game in this episode. In real-reality, Donald Trump was presiding over a re-signing of the March 13th 17 point pact (in which he had played no part at all). But U.S. viewers don't follow the politics of the South Caucasus. In their history, now, the Greatest Ever Deal Maker, Donald Trump, has brokered the deal. Presumably, the Smithsonian Museum of History will be directed to celebrate the “deal” as a Trump accomplishment in its exhibits... or pay the price for disobedience.

But what made it worth the star's while to bring the two leaders to appear on the main set of the Reality-President Show for a piddling third-world peace-deal? One, that is to say, that was actually brokered by the Biden Administration and third parties?

How was it even a peace deal? What was changed from the March agreement?

If we answer those questions, the pure genius of the episode becomes clear. Armenia and Azerbaijan's final tariff rates were not announced. Only that there had been “economic agreements” as part of the “peace” deal.

If silence on the matter meant that the two countries' tariffs remained 10% — the lowest available rate — or perhaps were even quietly lowered, what had they traded in order to get such a sweet deal? It is in the character of the star, Trump, to always extort an impressive amount thus marking his territory.

There would seem to be no other answer but that he left the tariffs as they were in exchange for: 1) a 99 year lease on the potentially most lucrative piece of land either country possessed; 2) officially naming the land the “Trump Route for Peace & Prosperity”; 3) effectively post-dating the preliminary peace accord; 4) dropping the word “preliminary” for purposes of the key scene of episode; 5) removing all reference to the Biden Administration's primary role; 6) and fawningly referring to the star of the Donald Trump Reality-President Show as the Greatest Ever Peace-Deal Maker who must receive the Nobel Peace Prize if there is any justice in the world.

A tariff deal called a peace deal in order to strong-arm a Nobel Peace Prize through a reality television show campaign. A vital corridor named after the supremely narcissistic star of the show — who narcissistically states that he had nothing to do with the name change. None of the specifics of the trade deal worked out before the announcement — in favor of a compelling television scene in which the star goes supernova. Looked at from this perspective, all of this is perfectly in character for the star of the Donald Trump Reality-Television Show.

As for the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan, they may have managed a narcissist in text-book fashion. Already, Iran is offering Armenia trade deals like they could never have imagined. The Trump Corridor might bring them American business worth many times their minuscule economies. Half the east-west trade going through Central Asia may soon pass through their countries. But extreme narcissists and extremist theocracies are, by nature, highly unstable partners.

Will they survive their perilous success intact? We may learn the answer on future episodes of the Donald Trump Reality Show.

Will Donald Trump receive the Nobel Peace Prize? If he does, there will be bowling trophies that command more respect.




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Sunday, August 17, 2025

The Donald Trump Show. Episode 4: the Miracle of 10:02 AM on August 1st.

In the April 2, 2025, episode of the Donald Trump Show, the star, Donald Trump, hosted a “Liberation Day” presentation in which he displayed a tote-board listing extreme tariffs each country of the world would be required to pay thenceforth for the “privilege” of having their products accepted for sale in the United States. Over the next two days, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell just under 4,000 points. The other two major markets — the NASDAQ and S&P — fell by similar amounts in percentage terms. It was the greatest April drop since the Great Depression.

On the next market day, a 90 day pause was announced in the enforcement of the tariffs. During the pause, a uniform 10% tariff would be charged on most goods from most countries. Countries were called upon to make their best counter-offer to the extreme Liberation Day tariff announced for their country. Failure to do so could result in even higher tariffs than originally announced.

The announcement was made just before the opening of the U.S. stock markets in order to assure a strong rebound. The markets did, in fact, rebound.

Asked for a response to the enormous plunge in the markets, and explanation as to why the star paused his tariffs, the audience was informed that the star being a 4-dimensional stable genius had expected the market reaction and planned all along to initiate the pause. World leaders would now come a-begging for relief. Those incompetent leaders who didn't would cause their people to suffer.

In the weeks ahead, the star, Donald Trump, made wild claims, each day, often just before the opening of the stock markets, declaring trillions of dollars of new investments to expand U.S. manufacturing. The fictional reality-news outlet Fox News repeated these claims day and night.

Refusing to read the lines that the show's writers had composed for them, real-reality media reported that the claims were vastly over-stated. Instead, they reported that many of the announcements had already been made months or years earlier by the Biden Administration and now were announced again with great fanfare, on the show's gilt main stage-set, the Oval Office, as having been achieved by the deal making genius of the star, Donald Trump. The normal annual investment plans of large corporations were also announced with great fanfare as responses to the Great Reality-President's great tariff plan. Corporate CEOs stood admiringly beside the star hoping that their acquiescence would release their companies from crushing tariffs.

The Department of Government Efficiency, it was repeatedly announced, had made over a trillion dollars of savings, in spite of the fact that real-reality media inspection of the claims showed savings of some $100 billion. A small gain, especially given the government dysfunction it has left in its wake.

The Donald Trump Reality-President Show steadily coöpted more and more of the stock markets into its story lines. It was potentially bad business for popular analysts to fail to read the lines that the show's writers were providing. Tentatively, but irresistibly, the markets rose, until the star could boast record levels.

But, while the Donald Trump Show was all being directed, by select members of the Heritage Foundation Directors' Guild, with the expected results, given its infinite emergency budgets and its reality-show obligation to create realities in line with running story lines, there was still a very big problem to be solved. After 90 days would lapse, the full tariffs would once again be enforced. There could be no stopping. Massively greater tariff revenues were absolutely essential to the show's big finale of eliminating progressive taxation of the Ultra-Wealthy.

Dedicated viewers could not help but wonder. What plans were being made to prevent another Great Depression style stock market crash?

There was only so much that markets could be expected to do and accept from out of a reality-show script that promised disaster. The tariffs could only be applied in what was left of the real world. The real-reality business losses would be enormous. A great many investors would feel obligated to sell ahead of the prospect of steep real-reality economic losses.

When August 1st arrived, the markets could only plunge again. In the first half hour the Dow Jones Industrial Average nose-dived over 750 points. At the very least, the markets could be expected shortly to trip the first stock market circuit breaker — a halt to trading in order to prevent panic selling. That alone would cause such an uproar that continuing the full tariffs would once again be highly problematical. At the very least they would have to be paused again.

But there was no time for this. Mid-term elections were rapidly approaching. Full control of the government could be lost if the reality-President appeared to be failing to deliver his reality-show promises of the greatest economy in history. Even blaming Joe Biden could fail to satisfy even the show's most dedicated fans.

And then it happened. At 10:02 AM, all three major markets, in unison, totally reversed direction, pulling back almost half of the markets' losses. No stunning news story had caused the about-face. It was a breath-taking move. The odds against such a spontaneous move were astronomical. By standard rules of thumb, such a move required, at minimum, a sudden influx of over half a trillion dollars of buy orders. But there it was.

Still the enormous downward momentum began to turn down all the major markets yet again. The influx of buy orders did not wait this time for a plunge of 750 points. Again, all major markets reversed direction in unison to erase the loss. Investor confidence then somewhat recovered. The markets traded sideways for the rest of the day. In spite of the deep plunge, inexplicable recovery (to still steep losses), and the continuation of the tariffs at the maximum rates, the Monday morning Futures Markets showed substantial gains, such as traditionally indicate high investor optimism. The markets opened with matching gains and continued to have a strong up-day recovering most of their previous Friday's losses.

Investors' reaction to their investments being saved by an apparent miracle of God was... silence. Within days the star of the Donald Trump Reality Show was touting new market highs. The stock market had been coöpted into the Donald Trump Reality Show. The star was totally feeling his God-like powers. He had been right after all. The U.S. economic institutions must follow his orders. There must be no more resistance.

But economies are complex things. Keeping stocks artificially high while company earnings are flat, at best, has arrived at another even more fearful red-flag. A statistic over which a reality-show president has no control. Something called the average market Price-to-Earnings Ratio has been inflated to nearly 30/1. Historically, this has only occurred prior to major stock market crashes such as the 1929 crash, that led to the 10 year long Great Depression, and the 2000 Dot-Com crash. Always it occurs when artificial means have grossly inflated the value of the stock markets.



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Monday, August 11, 2025

The Trump Show. Episode 3: Employment Numbers. We Don't Need No Oversight!

A stop at the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC) page, at the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) internet site reveals the following disclaimer:

The Secretary of Commerce has determined that the purposes for which the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC) was established have been fulfilled, and the committee has been terminated effective February 28, 2025.1

The committee was formed in 1999 under the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972. It's charter, reauthorized every two years by Congress since 1999, was due to be renewed in June of 2025. Not only was it not renewed but some urgent reason required it to be terminated early — as soon as possible after the beginning of the second run of the Donald Trump Reality-President Show.

The excuse of cost savings not being available, as the twelve highly respected experts on the committee provided their services pro bono, and the meetings were held by video conference, the termination was for the reality-show reason that it's “purposes had been fulfilled”. None of the experts was appointed by Donald Trump. None was a Reality-President Show expert so they were written out of the show to avoid conflicts. They were simply unlikely to deliver the lines that were written for them, to obey non-disclosure agreements, etc.

Viewers of television shows phase out when presented with detail. It is a perfect excuse to do away with such detail. On the Donald Trump Show, reality is what the star says it is, or what his co-stars say until he should choose to refute them.

Unfortunately, the DOGE required BEA cost cuts, also, to fight “waste, fraud and abuse”. These cuts necessitated changes to the methodologies for developing labor, inflation, and U.S. Census statistics. Because of the termination of FESAC no advice or oversight was available regarding the changes from outside of the new Department of Commerce MAGA staff and a few leftovers from the previous administration.

Again, this simplified the task of the Donald Trump Reality-President Show writers. Or so they thought until an actual Jobs Report was somehow released on August 1. Not only was the number of new jobs way below expectations (73,000), and way below those of the Biden Administration, but the June numbers were revised down from the 147,000 previously reported to 14,000 and the May numbers from 144,000 to 19,000.

The star had gloated during those months about how little his tariffs were effecting employment. See!!! The doomsayers were wrong and he was right, he repeatedly crowed. The told-you-so calls were echoed by the Reality-President Show experts... endlessly. Now all of that proved to be untrue and he looked imperfect — he whose first rule was that he was never wrong. If he seemed wrong or incompetent or manipulative, etc., it was the result of a deep and insidious conspiracy of the powers of evil.

But a fall-guy culprit was soon enough found. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer was a Biden Administration appointee. The star accused and found her guilty of releasing actual rigged job numbers “to make Republicans and [him] look bad”.

The Commerce Department BEA statistics, he informed his fans, were grossly rigged, prior to the 2024 election — in spite of the fact that FESAC was intact and reviewed them — in order to make Biden look good. Corrected for Biden's rigged jobs numbers, Trump averred, his were even higher than the figures given in the grossly inflated original May-June (and unvetted July) reports. Much higher. Then the Biden Administration destroyed the evidence so everything looks legitimate. “Everybody knows” it.

On Friday, August 2, the day after the Jobs Report was released, the star himself wrote a memorable scene for this episode, featuring a MAGA Reality-President Show expert, Stephen Moore, to read lines revealing new secret data.

“We have access to the... uh... some data that no one else does.... based on unpublished Census Bureau data that will be released in the next six months...” The numbers were unbelievably good in line with the writers' characterization of the “Greatest President in the History of All Time” star. Census Bureau data is not designed to serve as sole source for economic data nor is it tracked monthly. But it creates reality-show reality and that's the point.

Nor were these numbers “job numbers”. The audience would have been unable to suspend disbelief sufficiently to accept “new,” highly positive employment statistics. The markets would have been forced to accept that the United States economic numbers are fiction written by the Donald Trump Reality-President Show writers who simply present what they are told the star requires.

Instead, they were purported personal income numbers. Not only that but numbers presented on the level of a Dick-and-Jane primer for an audience having no ability to understand such matters and a presenter needing to preempt all fact-checking by those who do.

Such numbers vary widely depending upon method of calculation. No methodology or context at all was provided. They are not verifiable and wont be publicly released, the viewer is conveniently informed, until some six months will pass, when the viewers will not remember the presentation for anything more than its emotional impact if at all. Of course, they have not and will not be reviewed and signed off by FESAC who the Trump Administration no longer needs in order to guarantee its methods and its numbers. As we have observed is always the case on the Donald Trump Reality-President Show, they are “real” because — and solely because — the star says they are.

It seems highly unlikely that we will ever see numbers so infuriating to the “Greatest President in the History of All Time” star of the Reality-President Show again. Safeguards have surely been put in place, the responsible people defamed and written out of the script.



1  https://apps.bea.gov/fesac/




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