Doubling Down, As Usual

So what if the Court said that the Constitution gives the power to Congress? He’s going to find whatever work-arounds he needs to keep doing it himself.

Meanwhile, his tariff scheme is a dismal failure and will continue to be one as he attempts to use it as a weapon and political took for his own, obscure purposes. Daniel Dale at CNN:

Two new pieces of economic data, one released Thursday and one released Friday, blew another hole in President Donald Trump’s triumphant narrative about the effects of his tariffs.

The figures released early Thursday showed Trump had wildly overstated the impact of the tariffs on the trade deficit. The figures released early Friday showed he also had wildly exaggerated economic growth in the fourth quarter of 2025.

[…]

Trump has for years highlighted the trade deficit – the difference between the value of US imports and exports – as a supposed example of how the US is being “ripped off” by other countries. (Many economists disagree with his characterization.) On Wednesday evening, he posted a celebratory message on social media.

“THE UNITED STATES TRADE DEFICIT HAS BEEN REDUCED BY 78% BECAUSE OF THE TARIFFS BEING CHARGED TO OTHER COMPANIES AND COUNTRIES,” the all-caps post began.

The next morning, though, the Bureau of Economic Analysis revealed the actual 2025 trade deficit in goods and services. It was nearly identical to the 2024 deficit, down just 0.2% — nowhere close to Trump’s professed “78%” decline. And the trade deficit in goods, the items subject to Trump’s sweeping global tariffs, was up 2.1% compared to 2024.

Th 78% number was for an anomaly for the one month of October, the result of some dramatic fluctuations in gold and pharmaceuticals. It’s a meaningless statistic. I would hope that businesses and Wall St. understand by now that his numbers are fantasies. And needless to say, the tariffs are not paid by foreign countries. They are paid by American companies and consumers.

Economic growth?

Trump told the World Economic Forum in late January that “fourth-quarter growth is projected to be 5.4%, far greater than anybody other than myself and a few others had predicted.” He specified in a Cabinet meeting and a Wall Street Journal op-ed later in January that he was referring to a projection for the fourth quarter of 2025 from a model run by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Then, in an early-February interview with NBC, he made it sound like 5.6% growth had already been achieved, saying, “I’m very proud of it: 5.6%. You know, we have a GDP of 5.6 despite a shutdown.”

By the time of the op-ed, the Cabinet meeting and the interview, though, the Atlanta Fed’s model was down to a projection of 4.2% fourth-quarter 2025 growth. Various other forecasts were even lower than that. And contrary to Trump’s comment to NBC, forecasts aren’t reality.

The figures released Friday show just how far from reality his “5.6%” claim was. The economy actually grew at an annualized rate of just 1.4% in the fourth quarter of 2025, much slower than the 4.4% growth in the third quarter of 2025.

Aaaand:

The US economy grew at just 2.2% in 2025, new full-year figures showed — lower than in every year of the Biden administration and every year of the first Trump administration other than 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

The economy was on the rebound when Biden was in office. Trump made it worse. That’s the bottom line. And he plans to continue doing so.