The Trump Trifecta

Usually hitting a trifecta is a great thing.  Not so much for Trump yesterday.  And this is even putting aside the government shutdown (which is A LOT to put aside), which would make it the figure skating equivalent of "hitting the quad".

Short version:  it was a very bad Trump news yesterday.  The only good news was that no escalators broke down.

It started with Supreme Court issuing a ruing that actually went against Trump (yes, really -- that's how bad the day was).  The High Court said that Trump cannot fire Lisa Cook of the Fed, at least for now. (That's because if a president wants to fire someone on the independent Fed, he must show it was done for cause.  And the Court ruled Trump didn't show any cause when attempting to fire Ms. Cook in August.  He'll have the chance, though, to present oral arguments in January.  The added problem for Trump, however -- aside from recent documents having surfaced that show she did not commit mortgage fraud like Trump is trying to claim -- is that the Supreme Court won't even likely release its decision until next June!)

Also, Trump withdrew his nomination of E.J. Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- whose previous head was fired when Trump didn't like the numbers that had gotten released.  Which is sort of like firing the scorekeeper at a baseball game because you don't like that your team is losing.  Mr. Antoni was always considered an unqualified selection (or to put it more bluntly, who economist Justin Wolfers described this morning as "a partisan hack, a clown...someone who only knows how to misrepresent statistics"), but no reason was given for his name being dropped.  Although couldn't help notice that it was done shortly after Antoni deleted a TwiXter account he operated that featured posts from other with, as CNN reported, "sexually degrading attacks on Kamala Harris, derogatory remarks about gay people, conspiracy theories, and crude insults aimed at critics of President Donald Trump."  Somehow, Trump's ace "due diligence team" had missed this.

And third, if Trump was unhappy with how his previous jobs numbers were reported, he might have had apoplexy with the disastrous new job numbers. How bad were they? September was expected to have a paltry gain of just 50,000 of private sector jobs. Instead, though, it was a loss of 32,000 jobs.  Yes, that's truly horrible.  But the news was even worse -- that because August numbers were revised down from a poor gain of only 54,000.  And so, it's now a 3,000 loss. So, that makes two months in a row of jobs losses!

For perspective, over his four years in office, President Biden had 48 consecutive months of job gain. And averaged a gain of 350,000 jobs a month.

For those without an abacus handy, that's better than two months in a row of job loss.

And now of this even includes the devastating reaction to Trump's unhinged speech to all the gathered generals and admirals (following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's cringeworthy effort, lecturing them about being far, having beards and supposedly serving at the "pleasure of the president," when in fact they all know that the only oath they swear is to the U.S. Constitution), where -- among many other things -- Trump rambled on at length about how one shouldn't walk down stairs fast, that he thinks it's a "bright idea" to make Canada the 51st state, and maybe the military should use American cities for war training.

One can only imagine the reaction of America's generals and admirals thinking, "This is our commander-in-chief we're supposed to take orders from???"

The only order that anyone should take from Trump is, "And would you like fries to go with your Big Mac?"