It’s Friday.
President Shitshow’s public schedule for…
They didn’t post his official schedule for today.
He said he’s holding peace talks today via “Lies Social”.
Economic News…
President Bully Attempter decided to spend his morning trying to strong-arm the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — you know, the one currently deciding whether his magical “I can tariff anything I want” powers under IEEPA actually exist. In his latest “it’s not me, it’s you” blame-shifting stunt, he preemptively pinned any future economic fallout from his own lousy decisions on the judges, warning that “It would be 1929 all over again, a GREAT DEPRESSION! If they were going to rule against the wealth, strength, and power of America, they should have done so LONG AGO, at the beginning of the case, where our entire Country, while never having a chance at this kind of GREATNESS again, would not have been put in 1929 style jeopardy.”
Translation: if the economy tanks, it’s because the judges were mean to him — not because he treated trade policy like a game of Monopoly with real countries.
What he’s really saying is that if the courts side against him—and the Supreme Court agrees—he might have to cough up a big chunk of the tariff cash they’ve already grabbed from businesses. It’s not a sure thing, but chances are those businesses will get some of that money back if the tariffs are ruled illegal.
Yesterday, President Only Accepts Positive News staged a last-minute “press conference” that lasted all of seven glorious minutes, featuring Heritage Foundation’s very own Stephen Moore waving around some “just released” charts like magic proof that President Bad for the Economy is actually a freaking economic wizard. Spoiler alert: it’s the same trick as always—spin bad news into a fairy tale and hope nobody notices.
Stephen Moore, by his own admission, used data from Trump 1.0 and unpublished Census numbers—which means we peasants can’t actually check or verify any of his claims, because why make things transparent when you can just toss out “bastard” stats? All this to claim the president was totally right to fire the poor data collector at the BLS—because obviously, it was the data collector who tanked the economy, not the president’s brilliant (read: dumpster fire) tariff policies. Classic scapegoating 101.
The YouTube transcript as transcribed by me and ChatGPT…
President I’m Good Data Bad: Well, thank you very much, everybody. We’re going to have just a quick session with Steve Moore. Everybody knows Steve Moore with the Heritage Foundation. Highly respected, one of the most highly respected economists and uh people that watch your money and know more about your money and your life than probably anybody I can think of. Uh and I want to thank Steve for being here. I saw this today. They came out. What he puts out gets a lot of coverage and I saw some of them and then he had a couple of others and I’d like to ask Steve maybe to discuss a few of these numbers that were just released. I mean literally just released. Then we’re going over and we’re going to do Purple Heart. Uh we have some incredible brave people that I look forward to. So we’re going to do that right after this. Uh Steve, could you say a few words about the various charts?
Steve Moore: Thank you, Mr. President. So, uh, I called the president because I had some very good news from some new data that we’ve been able to, uh, put together that no one has ever, uh, seen before. And I’ll just very quickly go through these. So, I was telling the president that he did the right thing in calling for a new head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, because this shows that over the last uh two years of the Biden administration, the BLS overestimated job creation by 1.5 million jobs. That’s a—Mr. President, that’s a gigantic error.
President I’m Good Data Bad: And uh I—I don’t know if she’s—I’m not—It might not have been an error. That’s the bad part. If it was an error, it would be one thing. I don’t think it’s an error. I think they did it purposely.
Steve Moore: Well, you may well be right. But even if it wasn’t purposefully, it’s incompetence. Right. Okay. So 1.5 million jobs overestimated. We have access to some data that no one else does on what has happened month by month with median household income. This is based on unpublished Census Bureau data. It will be released sometime in the next six months, but we get an advanced look at it. And so I was telling the president: in his first five months in office, starting in January through the end of June, the average median household income adjusted for inflation for the average family in America is already up $1,174.
President Economic I’m Data Bad: That’s a huge—Incredible number. Just came out.
Steve Moore: Just—just came out. So that’s a giant gain.
President Economic I’m Data Bad: And if I would have said this, nobody would have believed it. There’s your—There’s your number.
Steve Moore: We’re doing well. So the next one compares—we finally have the 2024 data on what happened with real family income in the United States. And so what I did was I compared the record in Donald Trump’s first term with Joe Biden’s first term. And you can see that—by the way, these dotted lines here, Mr. President, that’s COVID. So, if it had not been for COVID, these numbers would have been substantially better. But even taking account of President Trump’s last year in 2020, we saw a $6,400 real after-inflation gain in income for the average family. And that compares with Joe Biden, which was a measly $551. So, Mr. President, you gained 10 times more income for the average family than Joe Biden. It’s because of your policies.
President Economic I’m Data Bad: And that’s taken into consideration COVID, which a lot of times you don’t have to do that—but I’m very glad you did. Over almost 8,000 until—Look at that number.
Steve Moore: Yeah. Okay. So, uh, then we looked at which families did the best, and we have data from the Census Bureau that shows by income percentage. So the 25th percentile is the lowest income, 75th percentile is the highest income. What I find fascinating about this, Mr. President, is every income group did better. The red is President Trump, the blue is President Biden. Every single income group did better under President Trump. But what’s really amazing is look what happened under Biden—the lowest income group lost income under Biden. We’re poorer four years after President Biden’s presidency. No gain virtually whatsoever for the middle class, and the rich were the only group that did better under Biden—which is ironic because Biden keeps saying he was trying to get rid of income inequality. He made income inequality worse, not better. It was President Trump that reduced income inequality. These numbers just came out, by the way.
President I’m Good Data Bad: Yeah.
Steve Moore: And then finally, these are the numbers just in—in dollar terms. So, even the lowest income, the 25th percentile, gained about $4,000 in income. That’s a lot for a lower-income family. $6,400 for the middle class, and almost $10,000 for the richest. So you can see every income group did better under Trump than Biden by a wide margin. That’s the story.
President I’m Good Data Bad: I think when you look at them, they’re all something. But this one chart really says it better than anything. If you look at this—this is great—but this chart is pretty amazing right here. All new numbers. Okay. So, we’re going to go now over to the East Room and we’re going to celebrate some very brave people with the Purple Hearts.
Reporter: Mr. President, just to follow up on the India tariffs—do you expect increased trade negotiations since you’ve announced the 50% tariff?
President I’m Good Data Bad: No, not until we get it.
Reporter: Mr. President, does your deadline for Vladimir Putin agreeing to a ceasefire still stand tomorrow, or is that fluid now that talks—
President I’m Good Data Bad: It’s going to be up to him, and we’re going to—we’re going to see what he has to say. It’s going to be up to him. Very disappointed.
Reporter: Does Putin have to meet with Zelensky before you and Putin meet?
President I’m Good Data Bad: No.
Reporter: Are you willing to—
President I’m Good Data Bad: They would like to meet with me and I’ll do whatever I can to stop the killing. Last month they lost 14,000 people killed. Every week it’s four or five thousand people. So I don’t like long waits. I think it’s a shame. They’re mostly soldiers—Ukrainian and Russian soldiers—and some people from the cities where missiles are lobbed in. You’ll lose 35–40 people a night, which is terrible. But no, mostly it’s soldiers. You’re talking about on average 20,000 a month. Twenty thousand people are dying a month—generally young people, soldiers. Speaking about soldiers, we’ll see you over for Purple. Thank you. Thank you.
To sum it up: Stephen Moore, cult member extraordinaire from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 dumpster fire, dusted off Trump 1.0’s ancient numbers—pre-COVID, of course—and tossed in some unpublished Census data that might maybe see the light of day in six months. All this just to assure the President that firing the poor “mean lady” at the BLS was totally deserved, and that he’s actually single-handedly performing miracles for the economy. Because nothing says economic genius like rewriting history with secret stats and scapegoats.
This is an open thread
PS.
It’s a lighter than normal post cause; it’s gonna be freakin’ hot here today 106 and the husband is off work today.
Happy Friday!
