The Witness Chronicles, 4/8/25

Nothing makes any sense

Cutting Through the Clouds of Chaos?

Yeah, that’s not happening anytime soon

Well, it’s Tuesday, the fourth business day of post tariff utter confusion and the markets are doing what you might expect. Wildly swinging but mostly down, down, down. This morning I heard Trump’s response on Fox News to the massive protests across the country on Saturday and it was interesting.

He managed to spit out a rambling Trumpian sentence that was unique because it never referenced a subject. In other words, a non answer. The only subject he referenced was ‘it’ but we never learned what ‘it’ is. Apparently his idea of what people are mad about.

It couldn’t be the impending destruction of our democracy, right? Nah.

If I was objective and didn’t care, this all would be interesting in a sort of demented way. For example, Elon Musk met with Italy’s right wing leader, who is not loving the tariffs, and afterward made a public statement against the tariffs for the entire European Union. Say, what?

White House financial pundit and convicted felon Peter Navarro called Musk a car salesman in response. Boy, I bet that really hurt. But it is a sign that the Trumpians are starting to turn on each other.

As my readers know, I am lukewarm on protests at this point because I do not think Donald Trump really cares about them or even pays any attention. My observation is that there are two things Trump does pay attention to: his approval ratings, and the markets. Not exactly going his way right now.

But the real issue here is not tariffs, the stock market, immigration, or even inflation. The central issue is uncertainty. We simply have no idea what the future holds, not even next week. And when we don’t know what the hell is going on, we sit tight. We don’t buy, we don’t speculate, we don’t invest, and we don’t know what to do.

That’s called stagflation, a state of involuntary stasis. We are stuck. So we protest. But what if nothing changes? That appears to be the game plan in Trumpland. Just keep stirring things up, making outlandish claims that no one believes or even pays any attention to, and try to convince us that some outside force is responsible for the chaos we are in.

I have come to believe that the people in the White House are completely freaked out and find themselves backed into a corner of their own making with no way out. And they know the rest of us, including Trump voters, are realizing the same thing. They don’t know how to undo what they have done and instead seem to be doubling down.

Which brings me to the strange side tale of the last week, the reemergence of Laura Loomer, the total loon conspiracy theorist who briefly spent time at Trump’s side last year during the campaign. Somehow she made her way into the White House, met with Trump, and convinced him to fire several major cyber security officials critical to the national security of our government. Then she seemingly vanished and Trump went off for a long weekend of golf at Mar A Lago.

What was that? That sideshow barely made the news, eclipsed by the other stuff, like the crashing economy. An unknown, known crazy gets into the very highest center of power on the planet and convinces the President to abruptly fire vital people and we do not know why except that those people were apparently part of the Deep State and therefore disloyal to the President?

Also lost in those chaos clouds were the actions of the Attorney General who shut down her employee for spilling the beans that we had sent an innocent legal man to a horrible prison in El Salvador and sorry but we can’t do a damn thing about it. Telling the truth is now a crime in our Justice Department. But, never mind.

I noticed something interesting about those weekend protests. Near my hometown of Rochester in western New York, there is a small town called Batavia whose claim to fame is a harness racing track attached to a casino surrounded by rural poverty. That’s Trump country. They had a protest.

300 people showed up and at least half of them were Trump Republican voters, according to the organizer who claimed she had voted for Trump. That, if true, was not only a huge turnout for a small town, but something those idiots in the White House might want to pay attention to, if they pay attention to anything out here in reality.

There is no evidence they do. In other cloud chaos news, Senator Ted Cruz defied the President on the tariff launch, saying it was going to destroy the economy. Cruz, a right winger whose flag waves in whatever direction the wind is blowing, must have sensed an opportunity to profit from the blunders coming out of DC. May he not be the last (I know, I said something semi-nice about Ted Cruz. Yikes.)

And, by the way, the Senate leaves this week for a month-long break. So, I guess we are not really in some kind of major disaster, other than a stock market crash and a global trade war? In another by the way, Trump responded to China’s retaliatory tariffs by threatening to raise theirs to 130%.

I should point out that all of this has taken place in just the past six days. And we are only about 78 days into this thing. 78 days. How much worse can it get?

You, and I, don’t want to know. Seriously.

Addendum: Today, as markets are whiplashing up and down, Trump’s billionaires are turning on him using descriptions like ‘an economic nuclear winter’, with the chair of Blackrock declaring that we are already in a recession. Those quotes are just two of the many cries of alarm within the high finance world. These are men who are Trump mega donors.

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Martin Edic