No one should be surprised that every major thing Trump has cooked up has flipped like a griddle full of flapjacks. I started this article the day before to cover his biggest flips from this week alone, but one story—his outrageous flop on the Epstein files—begged for so much attention I couldn’t give the time merited to the other stories. So, I’ll be covering some major flippers highlighted in the previous day’s headlines and in the current day’s headlines. There have just been too many that are too big to cover in a single editorial.
The video presented by Trump’s DoJ as some sort of evidence that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself marked a new low in the administration’s willingness to believe it can get away with and sell any lie it wants to sell. However, if you lie and get away with it long enough, arrogance in believing there is nothing you cannot be excused for or get away with eventually brings you down.
We’re going to look at other principal positions Trump has flipped on—particularly tariffs and wars—to show what Trumpian lies they, too, have really been all along.
You should be tariffied
One of the biggest lies Team Trump has told all year is that tariffs do not cause inflation. To a person, the financial side of the team has all told us that even his exceptionally high tariffs will not cause inflation. Recent news proves what an immense lie that was.
One of his high tariffs was on copper, regardless of where it comes from. As a result of this tariff, the recent headline on the subject says that copper in the US has bolted to the highest price paid anywhere in the world! And that, the article says, should greatly concern you because copper goes into so many other things, ultimately forcing their prices up, too.
To show you how intensely tariffs can drive prices, the skyrocketing price of copper has happened before the announced tariff has even been applied. It’s scheduled, but its time hasn’t come. Yet, orders of copper to try to get in ahead of the tariff have shot the price of copper up by 50% in the US. Other nations, which have not imposed this misery upon themselves, saw only a 3% rise in the price of copper. Moreover, they’ll probably see a drop in their prices as tariffs do go into effect because there will be so much withdrawal of US demand from copper suppliers outside the US that it may create some lowering of prices in other nations.
US copper, on the other hand, is rising in price inside the US along with all the tariffed copper as it is being “protected” by the tariffs on all of its foreign competitors, causing US demand to shift to US copper. US manufacturers are already paying the tariffs in a big way. That means you’ll pay more for every copper product you buy, including any made from US copper, because you’ll get hit by the tariffs downstream as well as the huge increase in US copper prices due to this protectionism.
Copper was tariffed as an industrial sector, not by nation, so its tariff applies against copper from any nation. So was aluminum, and so eventually will be cars and drugs. So far, the same high tariff applies to any nation that isn’t the US in order to make sure that people in the US pay a lot more for everything they import than anyone else (verified for effectiveness by the 50% rise of the cost of copper in the US v. 3% rise on the global London exchange. If you’re operating or living in the US, you can’t get that London price because, when you buy the copper at the London price, the tariff gets added when your copper enters the country.
No wonder Trump is abolishing pennies. They are now way too expensive to be minted in the US. (They have long been worth less than their materials and manufacturing costs, but now far more so.)
As President Donald Trump’s tariffs against more than a dozen countries spark fresh concerns about looming country-specific trade measures, often overlooked are the levies on specific products and commodities that are already in place or could soon be coming.
These so-called Section 232 tariffs — already announced on cars, steel and aluminum, and floated for copper and other items — further constrain businesses and U.S. trading partners trying to navigate a constantly evolving trade environment.
They don’t constrain manufacturers outside the US. So, those guys are all free to compete for global trade with MUCH less expensive copper in their products. I don’t know if we’ve ever had a president who has tried this hard to hamstring our own industries. The lie he keeps selling is that other nations will pay for it. Well, if a 3% increase in what they pay for copper v. 50% for us is them paying for it, then I guess they are. They’re paying for 3% of it.
Trump said Tuesday that he would impose 50% tariffs on copper imports, double what he had previously floated for the valuable commodity. He also said he would soon announce tariffs “at a very high rate” on pharmaceuticals.
So, if you happen to be one of his supporters whose Medicaid or Medicare he’s stripped back, you’ll get to pay a lot more for your imported drugs, too. Oh, and that tariff announced for pharmaceuticals may, according to the president, go as high as 200%. Maybe you shouldn’t retire just yet because, even if you have drug insurance, it will certainly be going way up.
Remember, though, just as with copper, demand inside the US shifts toward untariffed US companies, but that allows them to raise their own prices. So, you get tariffied anyway. So long as US copper companies keep their price increases a little below the tariff level, they’ll take market share from foreign copper companies and reap much larger profits. (In the copper sector, the US copper mines and smelters will be making much larger profits, but every US producer buying US copper will be making lower profits, as they will be the ones paying the copper miners and smelters more for their metals. Same with bauxite miners and smelters who will make more off aluminum.)
Now,
Trump’s announcement sent copper prices soaring, and the metal posted its highest single-day gain since 1989. The copper futures contract for September closed Tuesday up 13%, at $5.6855 per pound.
That was just the gain from earlier in the day. All the talk of coming tariffs has pushed the metal up 50% since Trump took office. More to come! Joy, joy.
HOWEVER, we know the TACO king may flip once he is finally able to see the damage his policies have brought because he has flipped every time he sees the damage. I don’t think he understands in the slightest why the damage happens and why he cannot just command stores or copper mines not to raise prices, but he has certainly chickened out and flipped many times when the inevitable market damage happens, and that is where we come back to the theme from those headlines about how much Trump did just flip right on the deadline for his 90-day moratorium on higher tariffs.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on the deadline this morning that fourteen letters went out the day before, granting one-month extensions (he kinda didn’t phrase it that way), and that many more letters will go out later in the day and over the next 24 hours, setting tariff levels unilaterally because the countries have not come to an agreement with the US. However, Sputnik also averred that the president will be willing to lower those tariffs once again if the countries come to the table.
So, we have about thirty letters going out this week to nations that have not come to any agreement with the US, and Commerce Secretary Lunatic said these were our most important trading partners. After that, Lunatic said a letter will go out to all the rest establishing their unilateral rate. While the president originally indicated he believed we would have “ninety deals in ninety days,” as it stands on the day of that deadline, we have three, and all of those are just frameworks for deals. They are half-baked deals.
Asked how close to final the sector-based tariffs were for 50% on copper and 200% on Pharma, Lunatic replied,
Copper is finished….
(I’ll say!)
The president knows since we’ve studied the market for copper that he has the ability to set the tariff for copper. He announced it today at the cabinet meeting that he intends to go to fifty percent, which will be similar to steel and aluminum, which are both fifty percent … and the idea is to bring copper home … bring the ability to make copper back home to America.
It’s important to note that with these sector tariffs, there is no nation to negotiate with. How do you negotiate with copper? It’s a set tariff on copper coming from anywhere other than the US. As for the three set agreements Trump has achieved, Lunatic clarified (?) that everything is still in flux, so that he believes more trade negotiations with China will commence in August.
Right no,w tariffs on China range from 30%-55%, he said. So, nothing is settled even after it is settled because, so long as nations make changes, tariffs may change. On one level, that makes sense, but on another level, it means tariffs and prices will be in a constant dance of negotiations, making it hard for businesses to plan and invest.
Of course, this is a huge flip, which I pointed out a week ago, we could expect to see. I also said we would see that very few deals had been struck and that the new date for higher tariffs on August 1 allowed all kinds of room for continued dealing. That means it is really just an extension of the deadline to August 1 because no tariff changes go into effect until then, and now we hear that all of these announced August 1 rates may change if nations do step up to the table.
The sector-specific tariffs, however, because they are not being negotiated with individual nations, may go into effect in the next few days, according to Commerce Secretary Lunatic, as the documentation gets worked out. So, expect everything that has aluminum and copper in it to cost more as those products move from production that uses the more expensive metal, and finally make it to the shelves.
In other words, those prices on products may not change this month because there is a process they all go through before the higher costs of raw copper and aluminum finally get to the consumer. Depending on the size of the current product and copper inventories that were built up prior to those higher costs, that could play out over months.
Expect Team Trump to say, in the meantime, “See, no price increases.” Well, not unless you are a business that uses copper and aluminum. Your prices will go up in days, but it may take months for those products to hit store shelves where the rest of us see them.
Oh, but then also expect that some countries may earn themselves exemptions from the sector-specific tariffs. Because … why not?
And, of course, much of this is still being challenged in courts. What the Supreme Court recently ruled was not that the president has the authority to do any of this, but that he can do it until those court cases settle the matter. The situation, in other words, defaults to the president’s advantage, not the challenger’s. Plaintiffs must make their case successfully before they get any relief. Most of those cases relate to nation-based tariffs, and Trump has more legal authority over imposing sector tariffs, so he may just default to more of those if he loses his cases on the national tariffs. Expect a lot more chaos for a lot longer in the new year of chaos.
Trump has also already floated the possibility of imposing additional sector-specific tariffs on agricultural products, iPhones, trucks and other items, though no action has been reported yet.
Lumber tariffs are due in November, but the sudden decision on two metals suggests lumber tariffs may come sooner. Most likely, Trump wanted to show he was actually starting some tariffs now on this deadline day for his moratorium to ease some focus on his major flips, given that he’s flopped to extending the application of all the national tariffs that remain to be negotiated to August.
“Today, we’re doing copper,” Trump said.
Yes. Stay tuned.
Here are the moves in the price of copper, starting from when Trump took office, so please don’t tell me that tariffs (even tariff TALK) do not cause inflation: (And, of course, the one big drop came when he backed tariffs way back down for the moratorium, making the connection with copper prices starkly clear, just like we saw recently when the moratorium for copper ended.)
Ah, but that’s the price of copper in America. Here is how much untariffed US copper has risen in price over London-Metals-Exchange copper because copper bought on the LME is subject to the tariff, allowing US prices lots of headroom to rise. Now you can see that dynamic that I’ve talked about for the past three months actually in action, as the price of US copper rises relative to what people will pay for the tariffed copper:
Oops! So much even for the idea that tariffs on foreign goods don’t cause a rise in the price of domestically produced goods. I’ve always said they will because they create lots of headroom for American prices to rise as the competition gets locked into a box with effectively higher prices in America due to tariffs. Having been at about $1,300 at the start of the week, that is a 138% rise in the cost of American copper futures. The “premium” that American copper producers are now getting over their foreign competition just shot up 138%.
By August, Benchmark said that U.S. consumers could be paying around $15,000 per metric ton for copper, while the rest of the world pays around $10,000, assuming the 50% tariff rate comes into effect at the start of the month.
You see, the full tariff is being paid by Americans buying American copper. They will pay that extra 50% on US copper (and are paying it in futures contracts now) because they are going to have to pay that much extra in tariffs on all other copper.
This huge discrepancy will start to have a major economic impact, Daan de Jonge, Benchmark’s lead analyst for copper demand and prices, told CNBC.
“On household spending, if you’re buying a new fridge, air conditioner, car, everything is going to get more expensive, and companies could reasonably be expected to pass that on,” he said. Depending on the final baseline tariff rates, U.S. consumers could opt to buy goods produced more cheaply abroad due to that impact.
In other words, tariffs on copper and aluminum at 50% may make it cheaper to buy finished products that are made with a lot of copper and aluminum from other nations that have a 25% tariff on their finished goods than it is to buy those products from American producers that are stuck with the high copper prices. The higher tariffs driving up the cost of copper for American producers could, ironically, drive more sales to imported goods that use a lot of copper.
“If we’re looking at public investment, U.S. debt has got more expensive, the dollar is declining, and now you’re getting a major raw material cost increase for infrastructure investments … I’d expect that to start showing employment effects.”
And there you have those employment impacts I said you could see as a domino effect from tariffs, too.
Yet, foolish stocks took it all in stride, believing in denial, la di da. As Trump gets educated on the economic realities of tariffs, away from his badly misguided belief (or his own lie?) that tariffs do not cause inflation, clearly, someone has to pay the tariff. So, either companies will pay in significantly reduced profits—eventually bringing a big hit against the US stock market, as I’ve been predicting, and as we already saw once this year, though it recovered for now—or consumers will pay. Probably some of both.
So far, we are seeing that, at least with sector-specific tariffs, foreign companies are not paying. Rather, Americans are paying a high premium for American copper or are buying foreign copper for just 3% more than their previous price on the LME and then paying the tariff when their copper gets here. American prices have, in other words, shot up by essentially the full amount of the tariff, no matter whom they buy from.
Meanwhile …
Obstacles to increasing domestic production include longstanding permitting delays for mining projects and the huge cost of opening new facilities, which would rely on current market dynamics persisting long into the future.
Flagging the flip-flops of war
Now let’s segue to another massive flip-flop Trump made this week, which was on the US decision to pause sending weapons to Ukraine. Suddenly, Trump has been schooled by Putin. Trump has now come to know what many of us already knew about Putin—that Putin is playing him. Surprisingly, he actually even admitted that:
…during a cabinet meeting Tuesday … Trump declared, “We get a lot of bull—- thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth. He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”
[Dana] Bash said that in the past month or two, we’ve “heard much tougher language from the president when it comes to Vladimir Putin than we did in the almost 10 years that he has been on the political scene….”
“It’s taken him 10 years to come to that point of view that a lot of…his predecessors and a lot of people in both parties, Republicans and Democrats, have had that view of Putin for a long time,” Stokols said.
“What’s changed, I’m told, is that the president’s simply frustrated that Russia has shown no interest in his efforts to attempt to bring about negotiations to end the war.”
The unexpected opening of his eyes into the bright Siberian sun made Trump mad, so he flipped and is marching forward with more weapons to Ukraine. However, to also buy himself TACO coverage, he is claiming he has no idea who actually ordered the “pause” in weapons shipments in the first place. I guess there never was a pause, just like there never was a list. Trump and his teammates all had no idea that there was never a list in their possession of available names of the criminals on Epstein Island who used underage girls for sport. So, how could we expect the president to know about a pause in arms shipments that were so massive we were told they risked leaving the US under-armed? (Shaking head.)
(Side note, since it is on the previous day’s part of this flip-and-flop theme and fits our war theme now: AG Bondi was as certain she’d find the Epstein client list on her desk as George W. Bush was that he’d find WMD in Iraq. Now, apparently, the vast Dept of Justice does not have the personnel to create their own list based on thousands of documents they seized. Maybe the DOGE reductions make that impossible now. Can’t spare the team members to assemble their own list in order to help the abused girls get justice. Of course, they did say they wouldn’t share anything more in order to “help protect the girls.” That kind of lying by suing the girls as human shields makes me want to throw up!)
The president’s attempt at implausible deniability to cover the Ukraine pause has not caused as much stir as the total flop on Epstein, but it is creating a stir among political commentators who are asking how the Defense Department (potentially soon to be more aptly renamed the “War Department,” according to Trump who loves him a good military parade) could have ordered a pause in weapons shipments without the president knowing about it.
President Donald Trump is claiming he does not know who ordered last week’s halt in critical U.S. weapons shipments to Ukraine—a statement that immediately sparked backlash and renewed questions by critics over whether the commander-in-chief is in control of the U.S. military.
Or even in the mental control of himself.
Andriy Yermak, top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, applauded President Donald Trump’s order to reverse the pause of U.S. military aid to Kyiv and asserted that the two leaders are united in their quest to end the war with Russia….
Yermak told the Post he was listening in on Friday’s call between the leaders when Trump assured Zelenskyy he was not the one who ordered the interruption of military aid. Fast-forward to Tuesday, when Trump announced he had approved sending defensive weapons to Ukraine.
Just as everyone is finding it impossible to believe the government cannot assemble its own list of hundreds, if not thousands of people who used underage girls on Epstein Island, people are finding it really hard to believe the US Dept. of Defense would make such a massive, truly war-changing decision without consulting the president.
The fact that Trump doesn’t seem bothered at all by their having done that, given that he speaks about it very calmly in interviews, indicates to me that he certainly did know about it and that he reversed it because, as he has clearly shown, his perspective of Mad Vlad changed dramatically after his last phone call when he finally realized he is not going to be able to talk Vlad off the ledge—that Vlad has no intention of backing down and never did.
“Last week, the Pentagon paused some shipments of weapons to Ukraine,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins told President Trump (video below) after Tuesday’s White House Cabinet meeting. “Did you approve of that pause?”
The President, appearing to deflect or misunderstand the question, replied, “We wanted to put defensive weapons,” in Ukraine, “because Putin is not treating human beings right. He’s killing too many people. So we’re sending some defensive weapons to Ukraine and I’ve approved that.”
“So who ordered the pause last week?” Collins pressed.
“I don’t know,” Trump replied [very calmly in the video]. “Why don’t you tell me?”
Is that her job to figure out who it was that changed the whole freakin’ war plan? Are you kidding me? If Trump truly didn’t know anything about something this major, it seems the left hand keeps not knowing what the right hand is doing:
Trump’s “I don’t know” remark comes amid a separate controversy in which he has repeatedly insisted that farmers need reliable workers and that ICE would not raid agricultural sites. He suggested the administration was developing a program allowing farmers to effectively sponsor undocumented laborers—only to have multiple senior officials publicly contradict or appear to override his plan, as recently as just hours ago.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, also on Tuesday, told reporters there will be “no amnesty” for undocumented immigrants working on farms, and, “mass deportations continue….”
Critics are blasting the President for not knowing who paused the critical weapons shipment to Ukraine.
“When in charge, be in charge,” remarked veteran and veterans activist Paul Rieckhoff.
“This is absolutely mind blowing,” commented Jeanne Ava Plaumann, a journalist at the German newspaper Bild.
“I don’t know is always an alarming response when asked for accountability on major national security decisions,” noted Brett Bruen, president of a global public affairs agency.
Trump, as he does with all things, had thought he could easily change the game between Russia and Ukraine (just like he assured us all that winning trade wars was “easy,” but here we are still fighting them more intensely than ever, some six years after he started them). The war in Ukraine would end in one day, he assured us all over and over in his normally vain (literally as in empty), braggadocios way.
Well, we are far beyond Day One, and President Putin just made the biggest missile and drone attack on Ukraine that he has made since the beginning of the war—apparently anxious to show Trump that he’s not about to be cowed into ending the war by a phone call that Trump described as one he was very unhappy with. So, that puts the exclamation point on that major Trump fail at what he bragged over and over, like a school boy, he could so easily and quickly do.
So, this week’s post-phone-call flip was …
“They have to be able to defend themselves,” Trump said Monday. “They’re getting hit very hard. … We’re gonna have to send more weapons.”
Yermak said that was “very well received in Ukraine, especially after very substantial phone conversation” on Friday, he told the Post, adding that Trump was “fully supportive of continuation of the aid to Ukraine.”
That is the side the peace president has flopped over to now as he fries on the sidewalk.
“Absolutely, [Trump and Zelenskyy] are united in this. These two leaders definitely want peace, and they are absolutely against the killing.”
Now it’s “peace through strength.” Not at all surprising, given the huge push in Big Beautiful Blob to massively increase debt-based funding of the MIC! It’s never looked better for those guys or for NATO. They are all very, very happy right now.
Yermak added that Trump is the “only leader here, in today’s world, who can influence” Russian President Vladimir Putin into “real negotiations” and an end to the war.
Umm, apparently not … as missiles and drones exceeded all prior levels.
And … If you think Trump always intended to do things via peaceful means if he could, well, you should listen to the recording published of Trump talking to major donors during his campaign about how he told Putin and Xi he would bomb Moscow and Beijing to smithereens if that is what it took to get them to behave. More Trumpian big talk to his supporters, where he says anything that comes to his mouth because he likely never told Putin and Xi any such thing; but, at least, they learned that he’s telling everyone else that he will blow them to bits if that is what it takes. The audio is available in one of the stories highlighted below for paying subscribers.
Pooty, as G. Bush called him, doesn’t care what Trump wants. Trump is not happy with that. He thought he and Potty could be buds just like Bush Lite did. Trumpy thought Pooty was scared of him. Pooty thinks otherwise. See Spot run.
No one should be surprised by this. Trump apparently was, and now he’s mad. He’s been schooled … at least, until Putin calls him back and says some ego-flattering things about him. As with the “ninety days to ninety deals,” we’re now at half a year past Trump’s own stated deadline for this war to be “over in a day” (“and it will be easy, so easy, just you wait and see”).
I wonder if “Make America Great Again” is real
You have to wonder who Trump is really trying to make great again. I wonder how many MAGAites actually thought all of this — the Gaza war support, the Ukraine war support, the Red Sea war, the Iran war on behalf of Israel, all in just six months—was what they were getting. Everything written about Trump in this editorial is what I was certain they were getting. I’ve been warning about it for a long time.
Apparently, it is not what Marjorie Taylor Greene thought she was getting! She told Tuckered Carlson this week that the situation where things stand right now among Republicans “disgusts” her, especially Trump’s decision to bomb Iran on behalf of Israel. She says she turned a corner this past weekend because, six months ago, she thought that, under Trump, there was literally nothing Republicans could not do. Now she says there is nothing Republicans can do. Apparently, the whole Epstein betrayal this weekend was finally a bridge too far, so now she says, “I’ve had it!”
[Ghislaine Maxwell] kept a book of the well-connected pair’s vast network of powerful and famous contacts, but a 2021 court deal kept it secret to avoid needlessly involving the names of unrelated people in the trial.
“What about her little black book?” Greene said in her X post. “The 97-page book contains the names and contact details of almost 2,000 people, including world leaders, celebrities, and businessmen.”
Here, as a recap, are some of the previous day’s headlines for everyone, which relate to the editorial above:
TACO Tuesday: Global stock markets are calling Trump’s bluff on tariffs
S&P 500 struggles for a second day as Trump says no extensions will be granted to the Aug. 1 trade deadline (Trump says one thing, then says the exact opposite on the same day.)
Fake News Tariffs?
—
180° Turn: Trump Now Says “Putin a Bad Guy; Have to Give Ukraine More Weapons”
Trump: ‘We have to send Ukraine more weapons
Trump Confirms Arms For Ukraine U-Turn Days After Pentagon Halts Delivery
Read the full article here