Well that’s just great

| 12:01 pm EDT August 30, 2019
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The U.S. stock market is still in a terrible position compared to where it was when Donald Trump began escalating his failed tariffs. But Trump bought himself a bit of a reprieve with investors this week when he announced on Twitter that he’d had a pair of phone calls with the Chinese government about tamping down the trade war.

China immediately announced that no such phone calls took place, putting everyone in the awkward position of having to decide whether to believe the often dishonest Chinese government or the always dishonest Donald Trump. American investors decided to just shrug the whole thing off and push the market incrementally upward this week, which is what they prefer to do any time Trump isn’t screwing things up for them. But now it turns out it was all definitely a lie.

Donald Trump’s aides are now flat out admitting that the phone calls between Trump and China never took place, and that Trump simply made them up in the hope of stopping the stock market plunge, according to Vanity Fair. Considering Trump dishonestly manipulated the stock market, and that’s illegal when just about anyone else does it, this has to be a crime, right? And yet apparently no one ever thought to write a law forbidding the President of the United States from doing such a thing, because until this cartoon villain took office, we never had to worry about such things.

So that’s just great. The stock market is only up a bit this week because the President of the United States made up a phony pair of phone calls with the Chinese government. You can’t get much uglier than that. In any case, with overall economic indicators getting uglier by the day, it’s a matter of time before investors decide that the risk is too great, and begin pulling out of the stock market until Donald Trump is pulled out of the White House.