Math Crimes and Messiah Complexes

Trump conjures 1,300% discounts, Musk claims a shareholder vote decides the fate of the world, meanwhile, Americans are just trying to buy groceries.

Good morning! Coffee’s in hand, sanity is on back-order. Let’s take a brisk walk through America’s political carnival, where the barkers are incoherent, the rides are unsafe, and the prize at the end is usually an indictment.

Yesterday evening began with Donald Trump muttering on the White House driveway about being impeached twice and indicted five times, declaring that “justice must be served now” as though due process were just a stubborn waiter holding up his entrée. Then came the kicker: asked about Estonia and Russia, he shrugged, “I haven’t been briefed yet.” This just two days after he told the same press corps he’d be briefed on the crisis “in 30 minutes.” It’s the sort of thing you say about a late lunch order, not a NATO airspace violation that has allies activating Article 4. He capped it off by threatening Afghanistan, “give back the air base or you’ll find out what I’m going to do”, and rambling about TikTok board seats like a guest shark on Authoritarian Edition.

By nightfall, tuxedoed in Mount Vernon, he was in full sundown special. Under the glare of what he called “torture lights,” he promised to slash drug prices by “1,300 percent… think of this, 1,000 percent, 500 percent, 200 percent, whatever different”, a math crime that would mean pharmaceutical companies paying you to take your meds. He then reeled off a fantasy list of wars he supposedly ended with tariffs and hugs: “We stopped wars between India and Pakistan, Thailand and Cambodia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Rwanda and Congo”, as if U.S. trade policy doubled as a universal cease-fire.

The temporal confusion was equally rich. At one point he boasted, “I’ll be called a three-termer… it was consecutive, okay, if we want to be accurate” before circling back into grievance about the “second election” being “stolen” and claiming he “got it in the third.” If the gaggle was authoritarian Twitter-length, the gala was confabulation in long form, sprinkled with surprise medals for Ben Carson and imaginary investments worth “$17 trillion in eight months.”

All the while, NATO was dealing with an actual crisis Trump hasn’t been briefed on: Russian MiG-31s spent twelve minutes inside Estonian airspace. Tallinn triggered Article 4, Poland reported Russian fighters buzzing a Baltic platform, and Romania scrambled jets after a drone crossed its border. NATO’s defense ministers didn’t talk about Dow 50,000; they talked about readiness to use force against Russia if pushed. Trump may dismiss Estonia between golf swings, but for the rest of the alliance, this is existential, not a punchline.

Back home, the economy Trump insists is booming looks more like a K-shaped gallows. Max from UNFTR dismantled the rosy spin: inflation creeping up a tenth every month, food prices sprinting, wage growth dipping in August once you factor in groceries, and credit scores sliding for the bottom half while bankruptcies climb double digits. Oil prices are flat despite global conflict, because demand is cratering. Canadians are booking flights to literally anywhere but the U.S., and the Conference Board’s leading index is screaming “recession ahead” even as the stock market inflates a bubble with buybacks and foreign cash. It’s not recovery; it’s number-go-up fever for shareholders while everyone else gets a K-shaped boot in the ribs.

Trump’s own panic is visible in his online meltdowns. He spent the night posting a Knuckles meme, a grimy bathroom selfie of some stranger, a noir gunman, and then accidentally published what looked like a DM to Attorney General Pam Bondi: “Justice must be served now,” complete with marching orders to prosecute Adam Schiff, James Comey, and Letitia James. If that really was meant to be private, someone needs to FOIA his inbox before he deletes the receipts. Because what we glimpse when he hits “post” instead of “send” is the raw authoritarian instinct usually whispered behind closed doors.

Not content with meme coups, Trump rolled out immigration policy as extortion racket. The cost of an H-1B visa leapt overnight from $215 to $100,000. Yes, a hundred grand, payable to Uncle Don. Amazon, Google, and Meta can cover it or offshore jobs; startups and mid-sized firms will simply give up. Recent grads might cheer at first until they realize Canada and India just got the jobs instead. Legally, it’s vaporware: as the American Immigration Council notes, presidents don’t have the authority to impose arbitrary six-figure fees. But why bother with legality when you can slap a price tag on a green card like it’s QVC?

And for the millions already here, Trump’s July 8 detention memo turned life into roulette. ICE is now instructed to treat anyone without papers, whether they arrived yesterday or thirty years ago, as “applicants for admission” subject to mandatory detention. Judges across the country have shredded the logic, calling it “radical,” “arbitrary,” and a “violent distortion” of due process. Even a Trump-appointed judge rejected it. Yet ICE keeps using its “automatic stay” loophole to nullify bond rulings, locking people up for months despite winning their cases. The targets aren’t criminals; they’re fathers with kids in the Air Force, mothers nursing infants, workers with decades of community ties. The cruelty is the point: make detention so unbearable that people abandon valid claims and self-deport.

Elon Musk is busy reminding us that corporate power doesn’t just shape markets, it presumes to shape destiny. On X, he declared that Tesla’s upcoming shareholder vote “may affect the future of the world,” while the company’s official account begged investors to vote with the board “on all proposals” and cast Musk as civilization’s indispensable CEO. It’s a stunning mismatch: ordinary people are sweating over grocery bills and rent hikes, while billion-dollar corporations frame internal governance disputes as global salvation sagas. Trump is out here inventing 1,300% drug price cuts that would have Big Pharma paying you to swallow your meds; Musk is treating a proxy ballot like a referendum on the survival of the species. Different arenas, same delusion: the people holding the most power can’t stop auditioning for God while the rest of us just want to afford lunch.

It’s all of a piece: authoritarian tantrums on the driveway, confabulation under chandeliers, NATO crises ignored, the economy hollowed, immigration turned into cash grab and punishment machine. Trump sells platinum residency cards to oligarchs for $5 million while sweeping up line cooks at dawn. He rails against polls as “fake” while Fox’s own data shows him plunging into Carter territory. He can’t intimidate a grocery receipt, and he can’t meme his way out of NATO Article 4. What he can do is keep ranting until the bubble pops, the courts intervene, or both.

America woke up today to a president peddling imaginary math, meme threats, and detention roulette. The only thing “sundowning” faster than his speeches is his approval rating. Even Fox’s own numbers have him plunging into the high 30s, with voters pointing straight at grocery bills, rent hikes, and the credit-card trapdoor beneath them. For all the talk of “Dow 50,000” and “booming markets,” Americans don’t live in stock tickers, they live in checkout lines. And when eggs cost more than gas and bankruptcies are climbing while Trump brags about imaginary trillions, the public gets it: the man isn’t a steward of the economy, he’s a pyromaniac fiddling with the matches. Now drink your coffee and hold onto your receipts, because unlike Trump’s fantasy economy, those numbers don’t lie.

Marz and I took some personal time yesterday, visiting with family, but I am determined to finish my latest deep dive before the weekend’s end. Carpe Momentum!