The Witness Chronicles, 4/22/25

No deals, and the weeping of DefSec Hegseth

Photo by Koshu Kunii on Unsplash

Where Are the Deals, the Beautiful Deals?

There are none

“Part of the problem … is that there’s little sign of movement so far on the dozens of trade deals Trump promised to sign to alleviate the impact of his so-called “reciprocal” tariffs. It’s now been 11 days since White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told us it was perfectly possible to sign 90 different trade deals during the 90-day reciprocal tariff pause — and so far, there has not been a single one.”

~ from Politico Playbook, April, 22, 2025

Today, JD Vance is in India, primarily to make a deal on tariffs, a deal the Trump administration desperately needs to show progress on their Liberation Day plan to extort trade deals from any country that will bite. But so far only India is taking the bait and even that is not a given.

Remember, only a few weeks ago Trump claimed the phones were ringing off the hook with countries and business interests ‘begging’ for deals, yet we have not seen a single one. What we have seen is scary as hell.

Markets are wildly unstable and are racking up incredible losses since the advent of that Liberation Day baloney. We are in an all out trade war with China, our biggest trading partner, and they are doing a number on us as Trump waits for their call. That will never happen the way he wants it to, with Xi Jinping personally calling Trump to make a deal.

Xi has no reason to do that.

Trump has been shooting from the hip, changing tactics daily or even hourly in his desperation to show progress, but his unpredictability is just making things worse. The world doesn’t trust him and by extension, doesn’t trust the US. That distrust undoes a hundred years of us being the gold standard as a financial haven. And there is no sign of a reversal ahead.

This is a far bigger story than the deportation mess, but the Trump administration is very happy to keep it in the background, using the back and forth over illegal immigration and due process as cover to keep the economy from stealing the attention of the American people and the media.

Even the Hegseth scandals at the Pentagon serve to distract us from the damage coming our way as prices skyrocket and businesses, large and small, try to cope with the unknown future. You’ll note we are not hearing much about new domestic manufacturing plans from the White House. That’s because there are none of those either.

Excepting projects started during the Biden administration, like the $10 billion chip fab being built near my hometown in Western NY. But that has Biden stamped all over it and Biden is a curse word in today’s White House.

The deportation cases are working their way through the courts and the flaunting of the laws is a major worry to Americans of both parties, as they should be. They look like the beginning of a police state, especially when the President talks openly about deporting citizens to languish in foreign jails.

He can muse about that all he likes but the economy is right behind him and nothing he can do at this point can change that. He simply has no clue what he is doing and his advisors are squabbling amongst themselves with the loyalists like Navarro up against the actual finance guys like Treasury Secretary Bessent, who from the beginning has looked very uncomfortable defending the tariff ‘strategy’, if you can call this mess that.

What Trump and his cadre are learning is that once he has spread uncertainty everywhere, undoing that and the lack of trust is going to be nearly impossible. And, unlike deportations, money issues hit every single American every day from a hundred directions.

When was the last time you said, wow, when did this become so expensive? My guess is every day, because that’s the reality. And tariffs have barely clicked in. And every day more of us are going to stop believing Trump is competent to manage the economy and is, in fact, destroying it for years to come.

No deal is going to change that.

As is usual these days, the news is so full of government scandals and screwups that it is hard to keep up. So on top of the stuff I’ve already mentioned we have the mess in the Pentagon we call Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a knucklehead of the first degree.

The real first sign of incompetence is always blaming it on others, especially the media and that is exactly what Pete is doing, crying about fake news and throwing conservative colleagues he hired then fired under the bus. The problem here is that he likely has compromised our national security on a massive scale through arrogance and laziness, handing our enemies an open door to defense secrets by using his own phone and Signal and carelessly sharing top secret information with friends and relatives.

The fact that he still has a job is just a reflection of how out of the control the Trump White House is right now. They are getting hammered from every direction, and despite blaming the press and conspiracy theories, all of these problems are directly the result of their actions.

I don’t know about you but I have no respect for people who cannot admit their mistakes and always blame others. But that is the nature of this administration and always will be. It may fool some of us right now but that is changing and changing fast.

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Thank you,

Martin Edic