Warfighter Pete testified to the Senate Appropriations Committee yesterday, and from what I saw he was mostly being an asshole. He also appears to have way lowballed how much money has been spent on the Iran War even as he was asking for more money for the war. And he can’t say what “winning” would look like. But this isn’t really news to anybody.
The chair of the committee is Susan Collins. Yes, she’s head of the committee that will most likely vote to approve more money for the increasingly unpopular war. Even the MAGA Trump fan base is souring on it. Collins probably wishes she were a tad less visible on this issue. I understand Fox News wasn’t covering the hearings yesterday. Tells you something.
The iron law of midterms says that if people are pissed at the President, the President’s party will lose votes. And at this point even Republicans are admitting they’re doing worse under Trump’s economy.
It’s as if Trump is doing everything he can do to help the Democrats. Even his bomb of a speech on “election integrity” might possibly have discouraged his base from turning out in November. Why bother to vote if they think the elections are rigged by the Democrats? (See also David Frum, Trump Dooms His Own Party.)
It’s hard to know how much Trump himself is aware of this. I question how many working brain cells he has left. Trump keeps saying he doesn’t want to be the next Herbert Hoover. I say he’s worse than Hoover already. Poor Hoover was inaugurated POTUS in March 1929, a few short months before the infamous stock market crash of 1929. But the economic conditions that set up the crash and the Great Depression were all aligned during Calvin Coolidge’s administration. Hoover hadn’t done anything to change the direction of the economy. Trump’s economy is all Trump’s doing. And with the Iran War escalating I don’t see any possibility for it getting better before the midterms.
And speaking of the Great Depression, yesterday Paul Krugman wrote that Trump’s is actually citing a provision in the Trade Act of 1930, generally known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, for authority to slam more tariffs on Canada. Seriously.
Update: This is juicy. Malcolm Ferguson at The New Republic asks, What Did Trump Do With the Billions He Collected From Venezuelan Oil?
The Trump administration has raked in about $13 billion after taking over Venezuela’s oil exports in the wake of their kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, according to a Financial Times analysis. But six months later, and one month after two devastating earthquakes, that money is nowhere to be found.
Various claims have been made about what happened to the money, but reporting by the Financial Times says the claims have not checked out. But also, “In January Semafor reported that Trump would be keeping proceeds from the first $500 million sale of Venezuelan oil in an offshore bank account based in Qatar. It might be worth checking up on that account.”