No one is minding the store
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the most common measure of the American stock market, is down another three hundred points today. It’s down roughly fifteen hundred points in the past two weeks. It’s now lower than it was in the first week of the year. This is enough to be disconcerting, if not alarming, yet it’s barely even on the increasingly chaotic American radar. It’s part of a larger problem.
When the stock market is in trouble, when investors are this visibly nervous, the President of the United States usually tries to do – or at least say – something in the hope of calming everyone’s nerves. Maybe it’s just lip service, but it’s, you know, something. What has Donald Trump done to try to calm anyone down this week? Well, the one day the stock market did go up, he threw a fit on Twitter about how the media wasn’t praising him for it that day.
But we all know the economy is going to collapse. That was an inevitable given the minute Donald Trump seized control of the Oval Office. This is a guy with no clue about business or economics (six bankruptcies and a history of burning through other people’s money), and no interest in doing what’s best for the economy (one bad new trade deal after another, just so he can attach his name to it all and pretend he accomplished something). It’s not just about the economy.
The current regime in Saudi Arabia has never been the “good guys.” But they’ve generally kept themselves under just enough control, because they knew that if they took things too far – let’s say, murdering a Washington Post writer – the United States might cut them off economically at the knees. The minute Donald Trump seized power, cretins like the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia concluded that they’d be able to get away with anything they wanted, so long as they personally bought Trump off. Sure enough, here we are. No one is minding the store, at home or abroad. There is no President of the United States.
