The Witness Chronicles, 4/18/25
The crack up
Cracks and Crevasses Are Opening Up Everywhere This Week
Are we waking up and realizing what is going on?
It’s Friday, Good Friday for observers, and in my neck of the woods the cold has finally departed and we are seeing glimmers of green in the trees. The magnolias are blooming, always the earliest of the flowering trees. It’s that eternal time of rebirth and it is always miraculous.
The usual ridiculousness is going on. I just watched a network news show featuring how we can substitute potatoes for eggs so the kids get to decorate without breaking the bank. Good grief.
That stuff aside, that same news is filled with signs that true resistance to the Trump dictatorship is spreading and spreading rapidly. This morning the big story (aside from the horrendous Florida State mass shooting by a white suprematist student) is the photo op in El Salvador of Senator Van Holden, a Maryland Democrat, meeting with wrongly deported legal immigrant Abrego Garcia only hours after he was refused a meeting.
That represented a striking turnaround on the part of El Salvador’s President after he just sat in the White House and claimed he could do nothing to send Abrego Garcia back to the US. I guess all of a sudden he decided that he could set up a photo op and hedge his bets with the American public just in case this Trump thing goes south.
At least that is how it looks right now. Stephen Miller must be about to explode. He certainly has been primed to do so for weeks as the racist Trump thug in chief has resorted to blatantly lying and yelling at reporters, even relatively friendly ones like the Fox News mouthpieces.
That El Salvador photo op is certainly one of the crevasses opening up and my guess is it caught the Trump people by surprise this morning. We are also seeing a major slap down by a revered conservative judge of the Trump appeal request to block court orders regarding the deportations and due process.
This was not the wishy washy opinion we got last week from the Supreme Court that left the Trump lawyers room to interpret whatever the Court intended. Instead, yesterday’s response was unequivocal and basically ridiculed the Trump appeal request in language that indicated the judge was truly angry and fed up with their legal obfuscation.
This will go to the high court and they will get a chance to restore whatever dignity they have left as a body charged with enforcing the rule of law and the Constitution. No guarantees there though.
The Bernie and AOC Oligarch tour hit blood red state Montana this week and drew a sellout crowd inside a large arena with another 1500 people outside listening in on speakers. If I were a red state Republican facing re-election that would get my attention and not in a good way.
There are also signs in the House that Mike Johnson’s Screw The Medicaid Poor for tax cuts for the rich is going nowhere, with twelve Republican House members saying no way, no how. Johnson looks more and more nervous every time he appears in public, wondering what will happen if he can’t deliver Trump’s precious tax cuts.
Trump may be able to instill fear into politicians but he can’t do a damn thing about the Markets’ direction when there is investor money on the line and they don’t like what they are seeing. His attempts to threaten Fed Chair Powell into keeping his mouth shut and to get rate cuts are going nowhere, more hot air signifying nothing.
There’s a lot of hot air emanating from the White House these days and apparently there is a lot of infighting going on in there. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose face has taken on a permanent blank stare, apparently fired a MAGA thug who was wreaking havoc at what’s left of USAID. This set off the MAGA branch of the White House, just one example of how quickly these idiots are turning on each other as things get hot for them.
Meanwhile the Chinese are laughing at us, farmers are begging for handouts after they helped elect a ticket promising to cut government spending, Russia is getting ready to take over Ukraine, and Bibi Netanyahu is exercising ‘kill them all and let God sort them out’ warfare in Gaza.
Pretty good for three months worth of work, right? And this is just the tip of the iceberg. If things can get this bad in just one quarter of this administration, how bad will it be next January when we start thinking about midterms?
Frankly, it will get very bad. We have not seen what tariffs will do or even what they actually will be. Trump can say China wants a deal all he wants but it’s not making it true. Aside from the trade war stuff I wrote about yesterday, one of my readers rightly pointed out that China is the single largest holder of US debt in the form of Treasury Bonds and that gives them enormous leverage and Trump knows it.
It was bond prices that caused Trump’s unexpected reversal on tariffs only one day after announcing them, roiling markets even further. Apparently one of his financial geniuses whispered the truth in his ear for once.
Right now, the DC pundits are taking bets on which Cabinet member goes first but it’s a tight race. And the side bet is do they get forced out or do they leave in disgust?
Cracks and crevasses indeed.
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Martin Edic
Just learned that as of today there have been four IRS leaders since Trump took office in January. That is stability at its finest…
Excellent points as usual! Speaking of Trump's chaos in the market, CNBC has a story today "More Americans opening Swiss bank accounts" fearing U.S. risks as part of de Americanization of their portfolios. The story even suggests how to get your U.S bank to assist. If the high net worth folks are moving funds offshore, the smart money isn't sticking around in the hopes of course correction.