Good morning! Ever the showman, Trump had Marine One come in low over Sparrows Point on Tuesday afternoon, circling the old Bethlehem Steel peninsula while “Thriller” played to a crowd of midshipmen below. Trump then took the stage to announce that “today we’re officially launching the construction of the largest new shipyard in the United States” since World War II.
Anduril Industries plans to spend $3.7 billion on a two-million-square-foot facility called Arsenal-2, backed by a Navy contract worth up to $2.9 billion. What it will build are pieces of submarines: torpedo tubes first, larger modules later, all shipped to Connecticut and Virginia for final assembly.
Permitting and site work come first. Construction follows regulatory approval. Anduril expects to begin hiring in 2029 and start operations in 2030.
Tuesday’s launch was a launch the way a groundbreaking photo is a building. That gap between announcement time and real-world time turned out to be the day’s organizing principle.
Reuters reports that Trump has taken to calling campaign-season announcements “goodies.” Tuesday’s bag was full.
At Sparrows Point he promised taxpayers a 40% stake in Arsenal-2, though the terms of that stake remain unexplained publicly. Earlier, he said his proposed $5,000 “Trump Dividend” for every adult citizen would “work out very easily,” pointing to last year’s $1,776 military payment as precedent, even though that money came from funds Congress had already appropriated.
There is also a $90 one-time payment now going to 20.8 million Medicare Part B enrollees, funded through the Medicare Improvement Fund, and $500 Obamacare refund checks going to nearly one million marketplace customers. Trump says those customers were “scammed by President Obama.” His own administration says the refunds arise from excess marketplace fees it attributes to Biden-era policy.
And the night before, in Nebraska, Trump signed an order temporarily allowing highway use of red-dyed diesel and deferring certain federal diesel-tax obligations shortly after admitting he did not “know what the hell” red-dye diesel was.
Taken together, the governing philosophy had begun to resemble a game-show prize table: $90 here, $500 there, $1,776 already delivered, $5,000 promised, and somewhere in the pile a 40% stake in a shipyard that does not yet exist.
Every goodie has a price tag somewhere, and the government keeps receipts.
The latest jobs report, released Friday, showed the economy added 29,000 jobs in September. Revisions erased another 60,000 from earlier months, turning July’s previously reported gain into a net loss, while unemployment edged up to 4.2%. Inflation, as of the latest CPI reading in August, stood at 3.4%, with gasoline up 27.4% from a year earlier. The September number arrives Oct. 14, one week after the goodies and three weeks before the election.
Diesel, the subject of Monday’s executive order, is averaging $6.32 a gallon.
The $21 trillion in investment Trump cited twice Tuesday is nearly double the “$11T+” his own White House currently claims, which is admittedly a difficult fact-checker to escape. Overall oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz remain roughly a third below their prewar level, even though crude exports alone have largely recovered. The taxpayer-funded “Patriotic Ads” have cost at least $11 million. Trump says MAGA Inc. will pay from here on. The White House says that promise does not include reimbursement for what taxpayers already spent.
With those receipts on the table, here is how the president summed up the economy at Sparrows Point:
“We’re doing the biggest numbers economically that we’ve ever done in the history of our country.”
There is another problem with “the biggest numbers in the history of our country.” America has more people than it did for most of its history, and a dollar buys less. Nominal GDP, investment, wages, stock prices and government revenues should routinely set records simply because the economy is larger and prices are higher. Economists adjust for inflation, population, or both when they want to know whether today’s performance is actually exceptional.
In the second quarter, for example, GDP grew at an 8% annual rate measured in current dollars. Adjusted for inflation, the growth rate was 1.5%.
Nominal Glory (Trumpometrics): The practice of declaring historic records using figures that naturally rise with population, inflation, or economic scale, while switching to adjusted measures only when the adjustment is more flattering. See also: Trumperbole.
On Sunday, Iran’s president accepted the resignation of Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad and named the head of the national oil company as caretaker. State media said Paknejad had cited personal reasons. Other Iranian reports pointed to disagreements with the president, Paknejad’s interventions at the country’s largest petrochemical company, and a network of oil traders accused of failing to return more than $10 billion in export proceeds.
That afternoon, outside the White House, the story had acquired a script.
“Their oil minister just quit,” Trump told reporters. “He said, ‘We have no economy. We have no oil. We have nothing.’”
A few hours later, at Sparrows Point, the script had been rewritten.
“The man who left the other day said, ‘I’m leaving because our country is finished.’ That’s what he said.”
Then, in a rare moment of editorial caution, Trump added: “I don’t know.”
Neither quotation appears in the reporting on Paknejad’s resignation. Same departure, two different deathbed confessions, a few hours apart.
Iran’s inflation got the same treatment. In the afternoon it was “almost 300%.” By evening, Iran had “inflation like no other country anywhere in the world.” The real number is bad enough on its own: year-over-year inflation reached about 84% in July. Iran’s economy is in genuine trouble. It just isn’t in quite the trouble the president keeps describing.
The war’s purpose shifted too. At Sparrows Point, Trump said Iran’s nuclear program was “95% of the reason we did it, maybe 100%.” A few minutes earlier in the same speech, the war was about finally dealing with “the bully of the Middle East,” a job he said other presidents should have done decades ago.
Pick a rationale; there will be another along shortly.
Here is what wasn’t on the podium Tuesday. Midway through thanking the dignitaries at Sparrows Point, Trump turned to his budget director. “Russ Vought, who’s fantastic,” he said. “We have some big surprises coming up in another few weeks, right, Russ? He’s going to be one of the very important people in the history of our country.” Vought runs the Office of Management and Budget and wrote the executive-power chapter of Project 2025. A few weeks from Tuesday is the midterm election. What the surprises are, nobody outside the administration knows.
The day before, according to former Trump Justice Department official Ed Martin, Tina Peters was in the Oval Office discussing “election integrity” and “the plans.” Peters is the former Colorado county clerk convicted over a breach of her own county’s election equipment in 2021. An appeals court upheld her convictions in April; Colorado’s governor later commuted her sentence, and this was reportedly her second White House visit since her release. Martin offered a preview of the thinking: if Congress won’t pass the SAVE America Act, “then the president’s going to have to do what he’s going to do.”
Some of what the administration is doing is already on paper. In August, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin warned that Chinese-made components in voting machines pose security risks. His own letter conceded there was no evidence any vote had been compromised. More than $1 billion in federal homeland-security grants now comes with election-related conditions, including paper-ballot requirements and post-election audits.
Then there are the people who won’t be watching. For the first time since it began observing American federal elections in 2002, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe has not been invited to monitor the vote. The OSCE says the decision is not in line with commitments the United States made alongside other participating states.
Simon Marks of LBC called these collections of events “jiggery-pokery,” and for now that may be exactly the right word: enough maneuvering to warrant attention, not enough evidence to pretend we know where it ends.
Most of what’s in this essay is out of your hands: the war, the federal budget, whatever Russ Vought has in his drawer. Your ballot is not.
Oregon votes on paper, by mail, leaving an auditable record behind every ballot cast. Those safeguards work best when voters use them. Return your ballot early enough to fix any problem, check its status through the state’s My Vote tool at OregonVotes.gov, and if your county clerk contacts you about a signature issue, respond promptly.
Secretary of State Tobias Read and Coos County Clerk Julie Brecke recently held a town hall in North Bend urging voters to use official drop boxes, and Coos County is adding a new one in Charleston. There is a practical reason for the warning: in the May primary, 7,314 Oregon ballots were rejected for late postmarks, a 35% increase over 2022. The state recommends mailing ballots no later than Oct. 27; after that, an official drop box is the safer choice.
Douglas Frank, whose election-fraud claims helped set in motion the effort that eventually landed Tina Peters in a Colorado courtroom and a stint in prison, is making the rounds in Oregon again.
More on that soon.