The Price of Everything, the Value of Nothing

Trump’s Oval Office spectacle, Milei’s stadium encore, and the auctioning of a nation

Good morning! There’s a through-line to every Trump news cycle now: the louder he boasts, the smaller the country becomes. Yesterday’s Oval Office spectacle offered the latest proof, a meandering press conference that began as a “historic victory” on drug prices and ended as a case study in delusion, corruption, and cognitive decay.

Trump, flanked by RFK Jr., Dr. Oz, and a corporate chorus from AstraZeneca (or “Astroenica,” as he repeatedly called it), announced what he described as the greatest reduction in prescription drug costs in human history, “100%, 400%, 600%, even a thousand percent,” he beamed. Math, like democracy, is optional in the Trump administration. The event reintroduced TrumpRx.gov, a supposedly government-run drug portal that just happens to bear his name. He swore he didn’t ask for the branding, which is exactly what he said about his name on half of Manhattan.

It was pure theater, a parade of loyalists promising miracles while the administration quietly decapitates the agencies that would normally implement such policies. The Department of Health and Human Services, the same one Trump cited as a beneficiary of his magical price cuts, is simultaneously laying off more than a thousand workers. The Office of Management and Budget is orchestrating thousands more firings across the federal government, with Trump boasting that the cuts are aimed at “Democrat-oriented” employees, a McCarthyite purge disguised as fiscal discipline.

These “reductions in force” are an act of vengeance. Trump and his budget director, Russ Vought, are weaponizing the funding lapse to cripple the civil service, dismantle the state, and declare victory over the wreckage. Federal employees are learning they’ve been fired via letters delivered by the Postal Service, a literal government eating itself while its leader livestreams his hallucinations of grandeur.

The House of Representatives is doing its best impression of a ghost ship. Speaker Mike Johnson sent lawmakers home three weeks ago after passing a partisan funding bill, and they haven’t returned since. This week he quietly canceled yet another session, ensuring that the House remains dark while the country’s lights flicker. The government has shut down, federal workers are being purged, and yet the nation’s legislative branch is literally out of office.

Johnson insists he’s “doing his job” and blames the Senate for “playing games,” a claim he repeats at his near-daily press conferences on the empty steps of the Capitol. The chamber’s newest member, Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva, can’t even be sworn in, Johnson refuses to seat her, conveniently preventing the last vote needed to force the release of the Epstein files. He says it’s unrelated. Sure it is.

The longer Johnson keeps the House away, the worse it gets. Even his own members are starting to mutiny. GOP moderates wander the empty halls filming TikToks of their own impotence, while Marjorie Taylor Greene complains that even she can’t get a floor vote on healthcare subsidies. The House is officially on vacation from democracy, a vacation that, like all things Trumpian, was billed as work.

And yet, while the administration claims it can’t afford its own workers, it somehow found $20 billion to prop up Argentina’s collapsing far-right government. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the hedge fund whisperer behind Trump’s latest financial sorcery, announced that the U.S. had “purchased Argentine pesos” and opened a massive currency swap with President Javier Milei’s central bank. Bessent insists it’s not a bailout, which is precisely how you know it is.

Milei, Trump’s self-declared “favorite president,” repaid the favor by donning a leather jacket and holding a full-scale rock concert in Buenos Aires to promote his new book The Construction of the Miracle. Picture it: 15,000 fans, 1980s anthems, and a libertarian head of state screaming into a microphone while inflation eats his country alive. It’s as if Ayn Rand and Spinal Tap had a child, and Trump wired him $20 billion in public funds. Even MAGA diehards are struggling to spin it, America First has turned into America for Sale, and the buyers are either petro-monarchs or guitar-slinging demagogues.

On the other side of the world, China decided it was done pretending to play nice. Beijing announced sweeping new export restrictions on rare earth materials, the metals that power everything from iPhones to fighter jets, in what experts are calling a deliberate act of economic warfare. The move effectively gives China veto power over vast swaths of global manufacturing. Trump, caught off guard, threatened 100% tariffs in return and hinted he might cancel his meeting with Xi Jinping. Translation: he doesn’t have a plan, and everyone knows it.

With his national security team hollowed out and his trade policy reduced to improvised rage, Trump’s “art of the deal” is looking more like the art of the tantrum. Even former staffers are whispering that Beijing is “playing 4-D chess while Washington plays checkers with missing pieces.” The markets took notice, the S&P dropped more than 2%, its worst day since April, as Trump mumbled about “oil under $2 a gallon” and congratulated himself for bringing peace to the Middle East.

Ah yes, the peace. Trump couldn’t resist revisiting his latest obsession: the Nobel Peace Prize. After the Norwegian committee awarded the 2025 prize to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, Trump erupted on Truth Social, claiming that Vladimir Putin himself said Trump should have won. (Yes, he’s quoting Putin as a character witness for world peace.)

The Nobel Committee described Machado as “an extraordinary example of civilian courage,” honoring her push for democracy under an authoritarian regime. Some readers forwarded me a dissenting opinion. A Common Dreams op-ed called the choice “a triumph of neoliberal theater,” painting Machado as a right-wing crusader aligned with U.S. sanctions and corporate privatization. The truth, as usual, sits somewhere between the applause and the outrage, she’s both a symbol of defiance and a lightning rod for division.

Trump’s response, however, requires no nuance. He’s furious that anyone other than himself is being celebrated. The man who spent the week selling federal jobs, auctioning air bases, bailing out foreign libertarians, and naming a drug website after himself still imagines he’s the planet’s peacemaker-in-chief. He even claimed the actual Nobel laureate “called to dedicate her award” to him. (She didn’t.)

Authoritarian decline looks like this. The fusion of vanity, vengeance, and absurdity. Trump’s America is a country that fires its scientists but funds rock concerts abroad, that hands out air bases to foreign princes and calls it sovereignty, that believes math is optional and truth is negotiable. It’s a nation where the president measures peace in tariffs and mercy in television airtime.

Somewhere in Buenos Aires, as Milei wails his last encore under a collapsing currency, Trump must feel right at home.