Tariffs, Trillions, and Fairy Tales

Forty-two million hungry Americans, an $18 trillion hallucination, and the media’s endless encore.

Good morning! Donald Trump’s joint presser with Australia’s Anthony Albanese played like a mash-up of Home Shopping Network and a late-night infomercial for delusion. Between the 400-year-old mirror scare, the victory lap about “settling eight wars in eight months,” and the pledge that China is paying “55 percent in tariffs,” the president essentially tried to invoice reality for services not rendered.

The mirror story was the showstopper. “There was this mirror, four hundred years old, maybe older than that, a beautiful mirror,” he told reporters, gesturing toward the White House. “It almost fell and killed people. I saved it. We saved it. Nobody else could have saved it.” The fact that the White House is barely half that age didn’t slow him down. Trump’s mythology now comes pre-aged, complete with antique patina and fictional near-death experiences.

He also touted an “$8.5 billion pipeline” for rare earths and an “$18 trillion” AI investment year, as if the decimal points fled the room with the press pool. None of it was new. It was the same script he’s been performing for months, a recycling loop of impossible numbers, imaginary trade deals, and economic fairy tales that the press dutifully transcribes as if repetition makes them facts.

Every time a network cuts away without correcting the lie, it gives him permission to stretch the next one farther. The fantasies metastasize because the coverage treats them as pageantry instead of pathology. Meanwhile, Australia smiled politely, the Boeings stayed beautiful, and the rest of us tried to remember when diplomacy didn’t sound like a raffle.

Back on Earth, dinner is getting cancelled. Texas, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New York and others are warning that SNAP benefits could halt by November 1 if the shutdown drags on, forty-two million Americans, many of them kids, staring down an empty pantry while the White House congratulates itself on imaginary trade windfalls. Pennsylvania’s human-services site is already shouting in bold: because Republicans in Washington failed to pass a budget, November benefits can’t be paid.

WIC’s lifeline for seven million mothers and infants runs dry next week. We were promised tariff revenue would cover it, sadly, hungry toddlers don’t accept store credit from supply-chain theory. Trump even floated, again, the idea of sending out “tariff checks” to Americans because of all the “fantastic revenue” pouring in from Europe and Japan. It’s the same old con: pretend tariffs are foreign tribute instead of taxes on U.S. consumers, then dangle phantom rebates like a reality-show stimulus. If there’s so much extra cash, why not fund the government? Maybe because “feeding the people” doesn’t look as good on Truth Social as “paying the people.”

If hunger doesn’t get you, the premium notice might. With Congress playing chicken over extending the covid-era subsidies, ACA premiums are jumping hard, an average hike pushing into the worst marketplace sticker shock in a dozen years. In Georgia, families browsing plans this week are finding numbers that double or triple depending on income; a midrange plan that once felt barely doable now reads like a mortgage with a stethoscope. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene is suddenly discovering math, lamenting that her own adult kids’ premiums are set to spike. Democrats say no budget without the subsidies; Republicans say reopen first, negotiate later, which is a poetic way of promising to fix the parachute after the jump.

Voters have noticed. Trump’s approval is skidding: net –17 overall, and a jaw-dropping –39 among 18-to-29-year-olds, a 45-point swing since the glow-of-election days. His response? Stage an Oval Office tableau of CEOs, signed $60 “sticky Bibles,” and a straight-faced promise to “distribute” tariff money to the people, backed by claims he’s already hauled in $650 billion from the EU, $550 billion from Japan, and $350 billion from South Korea. The only thing those numbers power is the laugh track. There’s no such cash cascade, the deficits are ballooning, and if we had those funds lying around, SNAP wouldn’t be writing goodbye letters.

As if the conflict-of-interest meter weren’t already shrieking, Trump now says he “probably” is owed a lot of money by his own Department of Justice for investigating him in the past, roughly $230 million, per reporting, and that he might charitably use it to help with his White House makeover. The unprecedented spectacle of a sitting president pursuing a payout from the government he leads would be self-parody if it weren’t so on-brand.

The ground truth keeps getting uglier. After a deadly sniper attack at a Dallas ICE facility, the administration sprinted to pin it on “radical left terrorists,” even as early reports painted a messier, loner-style story with anti-ICE notes, not well-organized militancy. But that’s not the whole story — and Allison Gill, host of The Breakdown, is warning that the rot may go deeper. Court filings suggest ICE and DHS officials may be destroying exculpatory evidence, covering up assaults and falsifying records to manufacture a sense of chaos. In other words, the government isn’t just failing; it’s faking its failures to justify more force.

It fits the pattern: evidence withheld, cameras shut off, narratives reversed. The same playbook that bulldozes history at the White House is at work on the border, erase, rebuild, deny. Institutions feel brittle: detention centers under fire, food programs starved, a president who signs Bibles while threatening imaginary tariff tsunamis. The entire system creaks under the weight of its own contradictions, and every lie recycled on cable news becomes one more load-bearing wall in the architecture of decay.

Today brings another set piece: Trump’s meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. Expect the usual posture, boast about “peace,” dangle tariffs over allies, offer strategic ambiguity like it’s a party favor, while Rutte fishes for something resembling an Article 5 reassurance he can repeat in Brussels without bursting into flames. If there’s a communiqué at all, it will do gymnastics to mask the gap between U.S. rhetoric and U.S. reliability.

Then there’s the bulldozer in the room. The White House East Wing, chewed open like a foil-wrapped chocolate, is fast becoming the regime’s accidental self-portrait. We are told this is just renovation, new ballroom, don’t mind the rubble, and yet Treasury staff have reportedly been warned not to share photos, a tacit admission that the optics are a five-alarm fire. If it looked noble, they’d livestream it. The gag order is the confession.

Heather Cox Richardson, bless her historian’s spine, says dream big. She’s right. As obscene as the demolition feels, it’s a metaphor we can use. Sometimes the damage is so deep you stop sanding the rot and start drafting a new frame. If the old order can be bulldozed by a man with a crown meme and a merch table, maybe it wasn’t a temple; maybe it was a set. The work ahead isn’t restoration; it’s reinvention.

So let the dust hang in the spotlights a second. Take in the crater. Picture a government that invests in food before fables, in care before cosplay, in people before plutocrats. Picture a system where a president can’t bill his own DOJ, where health insurance doesn’t cost a year of college, where the safety net isn’t a bargaining chip but the floor. Democracy was never meant to be a museum of traditions, it was meant to evolve. The walls are coming down; the view just got bigger.