Donald Trump, an All-Powerful President With No Power at AllWhen the rain falls, Trump wants credit. When the rain stops, Biden’s to blame.
Heading into any business meetings today? We hope you’ll have someone on hand to gas you up as effusively as Attorney General Pam Bondi did for Donald Trump in yesterday’s cabinet meeting. “President,” she said, eyes locked on her boss, “your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country. Ever. Ever. Never seen anything like it.” Bondi went on to claim that Trump’s efforts to crack down on fentanyl had already saved—“are you ready for this, media? 258 million lives.” There are roughly 340 million people in America. I mean, we could have been really screwed! Happy Thursday.
The All-Powerful God-Babyby Andrew Egger Donald Trump, the great man of history, stands astride America like a colossus. Pencil-pushers scuttle for cover as he stretches out his hand to sweep away the detritus of the moribund old bureaucratic ways; other nations tremble with fear as he burns the former global order to the ground to build something gleaming among the ashes. America’s golden age has begun, spoken into existence by the new god-king. Except when markets crash and people get mad. Then Trump is just a workaday guy trying to clean up a mess, and would you all please have a little patience, for crying out loud? These things take time! “This is Biden’s stock market, not Trump’s,” the president complained yesterday amid yet another flurry of economic bad news. “Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden ‘Overhang.’ This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!” There’s always been a sweetly childlike quality to Trump’s relationship with the stock market. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in the economy or the world—it doesn’t even matter who happens to actually be president. If markets are rising, Trump takes credit. If they’re falling, someone else is to blame.¹ But it isn’t just markets. This crown-on, crown-off posture has become a regular thing for Trump. One moment, he’s the master of the universe, demanding total prostration from world leaders and government officials and taking credit for all blessings that may rain on the lives of the people. The next moment, he’s a very smol bean working with limited knowledge and a limited toolset, and why are you bullying him by asking him whether the law requires him to give hearings to deportees? Yesterday, the master-of-the-universe routine was on display at Trump’s Politburo-esque cabinet meeting, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio, seated at Trump’s right hand, proudly proclaimed that questions about what the White House was doing to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia were off limits to both the public and the courts. “I’ll never tell you that, and you know who else I’ll never tell?” Rubio sneered. “A judge. Because the conduct of our foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States.” But just one day earlier, in his interview with ABC News, Trump was proclaiming no such powers. In fact, he was handing them off to his subordinates. Did Trump acknowledge that the law requires hearings before people can be deported? “I’ll have to ask the lawyers about that.” Shouldn’t migrants get due process? “They get whatever my lawyers say.” Trump’s interactions with Nayib Bukele of El Salvador have long had the same flavor. Sometimes Trump is the magisterial presence and Bukele is the eager subordinate: “We’re a small country, but we can help,” Bukele beamed in last month’s Oval Office meeting as Trump instructed him to build more detention centers to potentially hold deported Americans. Other times, Trump can’t believe you’d presume he can tell Bukele what to do: Don’t you know he’s the leader of his own “proud and sovereign nation”? The schtick is thin, and people aren’t buying it. On the matter of the economy, for instance: A CBS News poll last month asked whether Joe Biden’s policies or Trump’s were “more responsible for the state of the U.S. economy today.” Fifty-four percent said Trump, more than double the 21 percent who suggested we were still living the dream of Bidenomics. That’s the trouble with going around proclaiming yourself god-king. The god-kings of old had it pretty good in fat times—enjoying the credit for keeping things square with the (other) gods, ensuring good weather and bountiful harvests. When things went sour, though—when the rains dried up, the cows didn’t calve, a plague broke out—it didn’t do the king much good to try to tell the people he really had very little to do with any of that. He was probably ending up a ritual sacrifice either way. An (Imaginary) Trump Voter Rethinksby William Kristol Well, I voted for Trump because I knew he’d get the economy roaring again. So I was kind of worried to hear yesterday that the U.S. economy had shrunk -0.3 percent in the first quarter of 2025, down from a 2.4 percent growth rate in the quarter prior—you know, the last one under Joe Biden. I’d already noticed that since Trump became president, my stocks were off about 8 percent. I’d also read that, because of the tariffs, shipping volume at our ports is way down. And I’d seen a guy who runs an export trade group for farmers saying on CNBC that they’re in a “full-blown crisis,” with the prospect of “massive” financial losses. But President Trump said it’s going to be fine. And I believe President Trump. You saw what he posted on that sort-of-wacky website he likes yesterday: “Tariffs will soon start kicking in, and companies are starting to move into the USA in record numbers. Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden “Overhang.” This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!” Yep. You gotta be patient. I told this to my highfalutin’ neighbor with Trump Derangement Syndrome. He responded by quoting some obscure old Brit: “Patience is the virtue of an ass that trots beneath his burden, and is quiet.” Was he implying that I’m an ass? That attitude is one reason I voted for Trump! We just have to wait for Trump’s tariffs to kick in. After all, “Liberation Day” was April 2, less than a month ago. It’ll be fine by the end of the year. Speaking of the end of year, another thing I liked about Mr. Trump: He was against the Left’s War on Christmas. But now my annoying neighbor, who of course subscribes to the New York Times, says that liberal rag is claiming the president’s 145 percent China tariffs could mean that Christmas toys might not be in the stores or will be more expensive. He actually read aloud from the Times article: “Toy makers, children’s shops and specialty retailers are pausing orders for the winter holidays as the import taxes cascade through supply chains. . . . The alarm in the industry is palpable, with the companies predicting product shortages and higher prices.” And apparently the head of some group representing 850 toy manufacturers said that they had “a frozen supply chain that is putting Christmas at risk. If we don’t start production soon, there’s a high probability of a toy shortage this holiday season.” Geez. Even I can see that that’s bad. You gotta get your grandchildren toys for Christmas. Luckily, I never believe anything that’s in the Times. But then—and I gotta say, this did get me rattled—President Trump confirmed it at his cabinet meeting yesterday! He said, “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more.” A two-doll policy for children for Christmas!? No way. That is a war on Christmas. What happened? Did the wokesters get to President Trump? Next thing he’ll be wishing us all Happy Holidays. 🔒TONIGHT at 8:00 p.m. eastern for members only!
Have a burning question for the gang? Drop it here.AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick Hits“THE GRADUAL DISSOLUTION OF THE VACCINE INFRASTRUCTURE”: As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. redirects the Department of Health and Human Services away from infectious disease research and toward a supposed new focus on “chronic disease,” a pair of unsettling changes are underway. Yesterday, HHS told the Washington Post that companies trying to bring new vaccines to market would be required to undergo placebo testing on their shots—a “radical departure from past practices,” as an HHS spokesperson put it. You can say that again. In the past, vaccines have only faced placebo-controlled tests when they target a disease for which no vaccine previously existed. If a vaccine is potentially an improved version of a shot that already exists and has been shown to be safe, however, it is typically tested not against a placebo but against the existing vaccine. In such cases, medical experts argue that a placebo-controlled trial would actually be fundamentally unethical: How could you justify giving saline injections rather than an actual shot against a disease for which a working vaccine already exists? “You are watching the gradual dissolution of the vaccine infrastructure in this country,” Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told the Post. “The goal is to make vaccines less available and less affordable.” “THE SACRIFICE TO RESEARCH IS IMMENSE”: The other major HHS news of the day comes from Wired, which reports that “a research facility within the US National Institutes of Health that is tasked with studying Ebola and other deadly infectious diseases has been instructed by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services to stop research activities.” The piece goes on:
If you’re dying for more head-scratching RFK Jr. news, subscribe to Will Sommer’s newsletter False Flag. His issue today has an HHS Secretary doozy. YOU’RE SURE ALL THESE GUYS ARE CRIMINALS, RIGHT?: Some jaw-dropping new details just surfaced in the New York Times about the negotiations surrounding Donald Trump’s deputization to use El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele as his de-facto prison warden for hundreds of Venezuelan migrants. While Bukele has publicly postured as Trump’s cocky partner-in-illegal-detention, the Times reports that he was initially anxious that Trump was violating an agreement to send him only “convicted criminals”:
“Government officials hurried to assemble documents detailing who was sent to the prison and justify the deportations in court,” the Times goes on. “The process was so messy that eight women were among those flown to be incarcerated in the Salvadoran prison, an all-male facility, and had to be swiftly returned.” Had to be swiftly returned, huh? Isn’t that interesting—seems we’ve got the technology to fly planes both to and from El Salvador after all. Cheap Shots
1 Will Saletan and I went through the timeline of this on YouTube yesterday. During the 2022 post-COVID stock market sag and again during a few-day market blip last year, Trump went bananas about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for supposedly destroying the markets. Starting in mid-2023, however, Trump regularly took personal credit for market gains, arguing that investors were just predicting he would be reelected shortly. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber. We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here.
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Donald Trump, an All-Powerful President With No Power at All
May 01, 2025
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