The Grift, the Flood, and the Raid

Trump’s trade chaos tanks markets, ICE storms L.A., Texas drowns while the EPA is gagged, and the spectacle rolls on

Good morning! While America tries to sleep, the grift rolls on. Donald Trump, who paused weapons shipments to Ukraine last week to prove how tough and “America First” he is, has now decided Ukraine can have the weapons after all. A reversal, yes, but what’s consistency when there’s a camera rolling? Ukraine is begging for air defenses while Russia pummels them with drone barrages, and Trump, ever the showman, says they “have to be able to defend themselves” even as his Pentagon tries to pivot to China and insists there’s a “framework” for deciding who gets what scraps of U.S. support. Another day, another contradiction, another nation caught in the chaos of a man who changes positions like other people change socks.

Speaking of chaos, Trump’s Truth Social, remember that digital ghost town with fewer users than Bluesky and the functionality of a ham radio, has managed to pump its share price through a $400 million stock buyback. How? As Max at UNFTR put it, it’s “a grift inside of a con inside of a shell game,” perfectly legal and perfectly hollow. Trump Media has “no revenue, losing hundreds of millions of dollars, built on horrible technology, and no plans to become a real business,” yet it can inflate its value because Reagan deregulated buybacks, Clinton tied executive pay to stock prices, and now everyone on Wall Street has figured out they can “get money to invest in it” even if it’s “a turd like Truth Social.” The entire system is rigged to “pump up stock prices and then personally cash out at those inflated prices,” as Max explains, enriching Trump while producing nothing of value, much like the man himself.

And as if the world needed more instability, Trump spent the past week firing off tariff threat letters like ransom notes to more than a dozen countries, including Japan and South Korea, unveiling steep tariffs (25–40%) set to hit on August 1. The market didn’t applaud: on Monday, the Dow dropped nearly 1% (about 422 points), the S&P fell 0.8%, and the Nasdaq slipped 0.9%, a clear sign that investors aren’t buying the circus this time. Futures are mixed today amid rumors of last‑minute negotiations, but the jitters are real: Trump promised “deals, deals, deals,” but delivered tariffs and uncertainty instead. Meanwhile, corporate America keeps propping up stock prices with buybacks and blind hope, even as global supply chains wobble and BRICS eclipses G7 in GDP. The emperor’s tantrums are costing us, and the markets are finally catching on.

In the real world, armored immigration agents on horseback stormed MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, turning the heart of immigrant L.A. into a campaign photo op for Trump’s reelection machine. Kids’ summer camps became backdrops for men with rifles and tactical gear while parents screamed and street vendors packed up their carts, the community terrorized for a day so the president could prove he’s “tough on immigration.” Mayor Bass demanded they leave, activists warned this was “just the beginning,” and ICE, emboldened by Trump’s new deportation budget, promised they’d be back. Los Angeles, the Ellis Island of the West, was chosen precisely because of who lives there, and what they represent. This is not immigration policy; it’s state-sponsored fear theater.

At the same time, nearly 100 people are dead in Texas, many of them children, after catastrophic flooding swept through the Hill Country over the Fourth of July holiday. A Christian girls’ camp on the Guadalupe was nearly washed away, entire families are still searching muddy riverbanks for missing loved ones, and now, as if to remind us how little borders matter in times of crisis, volunteer firefighters and search crews from Acuña, Mexico, have crossed into Texas to help recover victims and comb debris-choked waterways. Luckily for them, DHS isn’t prowling the banks with armored trucks, so they can self-deport back to Mexico when the work is done. The state is now promising a county-wide siren system by next summer, too late for the families who spent their holiday searching for bodies. Scientists warn these kinds of flash floods are no longer “acts of God” but acts of policy failure in a hotter, wetter, more violent world. And yet, as the climate crisis intensifies, our government is too busy firing its guards at the EPA, suspending 140 whistleblowers last week, to prepare for the next disaster. We are drowning while the regulators are gagged, the science is ignored, and the public is left to sink or swim.

And yet, a tiny glimmer of sanity broke through the noise yesterday when a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s latest attempt to defund Planned Parenthood under his “big, beautiful” budget bill. The administration tried to cut off Medicaid payments to clinics that provide abortions, never mind that federal law already bans federal abortion funding, because cruelty, not policy, is the point. Judge Indira Talwani stopped them, at least for now, before the government could even respond, giving Planned Parenthood a two-week reprieve while the court considers a longer block. A small victory, but a reminder that the courts, for now, can still occasionally be a firewall against cruelty dressed up as fiscal discipline.

So here we are. A president playing emperor with foreign wars while his grifts play out on Wall Street. Armored trucks rolling through immigrant neighborhoods for the cameras while families drown in floods worsened by deregulation and denial. Scientists silenced. Whistleblowers purged. A health system targeted for providing care. The spectacle is the pointand the chaos is the message. And while the stock market hits record highs propped up by buybacks and illusions, the real economy, the one with people, families, rivers, and fires, continues to break.

But the small wins matter. They remind us the fight isn’t over, even if the grift rolls on. Carpe Momentum!