Philip Elliott
It’s been a week of searing reversals coming out of the White House, making it difficult to take anything it says at face value. The most conspicuous example of this was the nebulous state of President Donald Trump's tariffs with Canada and Mexico, which seesawed over a matter of days from being unequivocally on, to mostly off, and then maybe, sort of, on again. Amid all that, the President boasted of Elon Musk's free hand to fire thousands of government workers in a speech to Congress that was rife with obfuscations and fabrications. Two days later, after a hastily called Cabinet meeting, Trump announced some new restraints on his fellow billionaire.
But even in a truly head-spinning week in this new era in Washington, one Trump remark stands out in how utterly unbelievable it was. “I’m not even looking at the market,” the President said Thursday in a fib that left even his defenders with little response.
One top aide in Republican Leadership perhaps summed up all of D.C.’s reaction best when he messaged me back on an encrypted app with an eye-roll emoji. A second Republican who worked in Trump’s first administration suggested we had perhaps fallen into a parallel universe: “We are on Earth 10,000.”
This is, after all, a President who spent most of his first term using Wall Street as a proxy for not only the economy’s health, but his overall success as the nation’s leader. “That big Stock Market increase must be credited to me,” Trump insisted in what was then called a tweet in 2019. “If Hillary won - a Big Crash!”
No comments:
Post a Comment